Authors: Shlomo Kalo
THRILLER: The Galilee Plot: (International Biological Terror, The Mossad, and... A Self-contended Couple)
THRILLER*
:
The
Galilee Plot
By
Shlomo Kalo
_________________
*
Fiction, the product of
creative imagination, for the diversion and entertainment, in times of leisure
or insomnia, of reader and author alike.
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Original Hebrew title:
THRILLER
English translation by Philip Simpson
First Kindle edition 2016
Cover: The author and his wife
Cover design: *********. Image:*******
ISBN: 978-965-7028-63-6
THRILLER's print editions are available in English and in Hebrew
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Do not come praising
friendship to me
Do not come praising
harmony
Come praising
independence
Praise human dignity
To Rivka
my wife
I salute
you
It was a particularly
pleasant summer this year – a summer which was to degenerate into anger and
upheavals, and natural disasters – and as every year, I spent it with my wife in
a quiet and comfortable hotel, well known and not inexpensive, in Switzerland.
In the very same room in which my recent books have been written, including
this one. For the benefit of patrons not conversant with German, the management
of the hotel provided an English newspaper, the “Herald Tribune” which we read
avidly, even rising early to be sure of seeing it. The number of copies was
limited, and the first into the dining room in the morning would get the paper.
We sat beside the teapots
and the bowls of cereal. My wife was leafing through the paper. Suddenly she
stopped leafing as her eyes focussed on something, presumably important and
relevant, so I supposed, to our home country. And my supposition proved to be
correct, as she handed the paper to me, pointing to an item on the front page,
in the lower left-hand corner. A short item headlined:
Mystery disease
erupts in the mixed village of Hasda, in Galilee
. I read the article, or
more precisely, I devoured every word, every letter. The paper reported that
Hasda, the only settlement of its kind, with Jewish and Arab families living
side by side, founded not long ago with the aid of a generous grant from the
Saudis, had been struck by a mysterious and as yet undiagnosed disease:
symptoms included high temperature, prolonged and debilitating fever – but it
was definitely not any form of malaria. Some twenty families had been affected,
half of them Jewish and half of them Arab. Within two weeks, ten patients had
died. And the astonishing thing – the paper reported with no small degree of
smug satisfaction, proud of the achievement of its intrepid correspondent, in
finding the story had an “astonishing” element – was that all ten were, without
exception, Jews and Jews exclusively.
Two young families of
Jewish idealists, who came to break down the barriers of hatred, fear and
prejudice, had perished, parents and children alike. The authorities were
investigating. As previously noted, the disease itself was yet to be diagnosed.
“Do you remember that
story of yours,” my wife asked me, “about some way of infecting only Jews with
some virus or other? There was a young Arab – you studied together, or rather
you did your postgraduate studies together in the U.S.A – and he came up with
this crazy idea, and you tried to convince me that in principle it was
possible…”
I smiled a forced smile.
“It looks as if he’s done
it,” I replied, rereading the succinct report in the prestigious journal and in
the process asking myself repeatedly – had the thing really been done, taken
out of the realm of theory and laboratory exploration, and put into practice,
on the ground?
Amin Abu Halil I had met
at Columbia University, a distinguished institution of higher education with a
worldwide reputation, especially for its faculty of natural sciences. We were
both up for the degree of Ph.D.; he got his and I remained an M.Sc. I wasn’t
too disappointed. The whole Ph.D. thing had a hefty portion of snobbery about
it, without the slightest trace of sincerity or any interest in genuine research
– all the excuses and justifications of those infected by banal-intellectualist
laziness. I expressed my opinion to Amin; despite the tradition of mutual
hostility that had grown up and still existed in our disputed homeland, or
perhaps because of it, we often talked and relations between us were decidedly
friendly. He didn’t accept my opinion, nor did he reject it out of hand. He
justified his studies by reminding me he had been sent here at the expense of
some Arab educational fund, and he had absolutely no intention of disappointing
his sponsors, especially since the administrators of the fund, it transpired,
expected great and glorious things of him. Amin proved himself and was duly
awarded his Ph.D. for a thesis focussing in particular on Rickettsias, as
distinct from my more modest endeavours, studying the micro-organisms
responsible for plagues and in particular P.Pestis which created havoc, so it
seems, in the Middle Ages, with a number of outbreaks in the world of the
developing nations, not correctly diagnosed as such. I often talked with Amin
about our research and about other subjects. Our conversations were
characterised by open-heartedness and flawless sincerity.
He did not hide his
opinion that the greatest plague of humanity, casting down into Hell its pride
and all its noble aspirations, is caused by no micro-organism but rather by a
parasitical macro-organism, walking on two legs, belonging to the restricted
and exclusive and loathsome strain of the Jewish community, whose much vaunted
culture is decidedly anti-cultural. National chauvinism, unbridled pursuit of
profit, arrogance and cunning, arousing in the most direct, simple and natural
way, murderous hatred to say the least, and more precisely – aversion. And all
the nations that call themselves enlightened, have cast them out from within
their borders and installed them in the desert, on the understanding that there
they enjoy, according to the ancient writings, certain rights. And this
“desert”, as it turned out, had been inhabited since time immemorial by
“fools”, law-abiding people and respecters of tradition, whose hard lives allow
no parasitical creatures to share the desert with them. Here he would preach an
impassioned sermon about attempts to tackle this morbid evil, Jews and Judaism,
starting with the Roman Empire, through the Middle Ages, the statement of
Erasmus: “If it is a Christian virtue to hate the Jews, then we are all good
Christians”, the Nazis in the more recent past and the Arabs today. The debate
was heated and like any debate, it was futile from its foundations to its lofty
pinnacles. I brought up all the atrocities committed by the Roman Empire, the
dark days of the Middle Ages, the Hell of Nazi ideology, and the devilish,
magnified reflection of these three elements in the present day, in Arab
terrorism, the heroes of which are methodical murderers, devoid of conscience
and devoid of heart, whose sole aspiration is murder for murder’s sake. In
spite of this, we continued to hold conversations, only in English, naturally
enough. Amin resolutely refused even to curse in Hebrew. Amin Abu Halil knew
the language perfectly well, and his Hebrew was as fluent as mine, but he
insisted he had sworn a vow not to speak it, read it or write it, since it was
the language of the conqueror of his land and the oppressor of his people. I
was not bothered either way, so we spoke in English, the language which we
shared, and it may be that in the course of our intense efforts to express
ourselves to each other, the standard of our spoken English improved, something
we could both be grateful for.
The great and the glorious
times of the Arabs, Amin Abu Halil was not well informed about, and when the
gaps in his knowledge were shown to him, the result was helpless fury. He
was particularly enraged when I pointed out to him that during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the principal livelihood of the western
“Maghrebi” Arabs, the inhabitants, that is, of present-day Libya, Morocco,
Tunisia and Algeria, was based on prostitution and piracy. I even found a
dubious point of light on this dark page of Arab history, when America, a young
country in those days, negotiated with the above-mentioned nations and offered
a generous ransom, on condition that ships flying the American flag would not
be attacked by Arab pirates, and the agreement was made and implemented…
Amin Abu Halil smiled and
then burst into loud laughter, making his whole body shake:
“My ancestors,” he said
emphatically, “did something for the good of humanity, removing the democratic
mask from the faces of those devoid of honour and faith. And what about the
Europeans?” he asked – “Weren’t they included in the agreement? After all, they
are no less female than those Americans, in fact they are their legal and illegal
ancestors; you can be sure that among those who came up with the idea and did
the negotiating, there were a fair number of Jews…”
“That’s possible,” I
answered him, “I don’t know the details. As far as Europe is concerned, Britain
and France took on the pirates and beat them.”
“The Arabs have a
mission”, he declared in a tone of firm conviction.
“And that is?”
“To cleanse the world from
spiritual whoredom and I’m talking about the so-called ‘progressive’
American-European nations, which are polluting the holy land of God.”
I offered him a ceasefire:
“Did you know, you’re quoting Osama Bin Laden?”
“That was my intention,”
he explained and added: “And what, in your opinion, should be suggested to
these cultural nations, that call themselves ‘progressive’…
It seemed that a ceasefire
was in force. I clung to it:
“To stop polluting the
holy land of God.”
“Your answers are
typically Jewish.”
“And what do you suggest?”
“To accept what you say.”
“Accept the answer of a
Jew?”
“Accept it and implement
it!” my interlocutor declared, with an enthusiasm that could not be described
as other than quintessentially Mediterranean, based, if it has a base, on
impulsiveness, which beyond any shadow of a doubt is not to be trusted at all,
like any form of impulsiveness.
And this was clear to both
of us. The question remained to be answered, how to make progress in this
impulsive Middle East, so that it may learn something from something, from what
is the opposite of impulsiveness.
“The only true and
accurate answer is: it’s impossible to achieve this.”
“We shall all know before
too long,” he commented simply.
On this there was full
agreement – Mediterranean agreement.
