Leon Uris (4 page)

G
IDEON ASCH HAD NOT
ridden into Tabah simply out of nowhere. He, too, was a long-standing partner in the history of modern Palestine.

Some Jews had been able to find their first taste of true equality by immigration to America; however, most Jews in nineteenth-century Europe remained locked into a repetitious cycle of anguish. They looked, as they always had, to a return to Palestine. This longing had never left their daily prayer and was reemphasized in the yearly Yom Kippur greeting, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’

Into the weary land of Palestine there came a sudden stir. By hook, by crook, and by bribery, religious Jews were entering Palestine in great numbers. For the most part they were poverty-stricken Hassidim fleeing centuries of terror and persecution at the hands of the Russians and Poles. In the mid-1800s they turned Jerusalem into a Jewish majority, which it has remained ever since. They settled in the other holy cities of Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias to study, pray, and await the Messiah, and lived off Jewish world charity.

These numbers were followed by ordinary Jews of a pioneering nature also taking flight from the horrors of Christian Europe. With the help of wealthy philanthropists this second wave established a number of farming villages. Their success was minimal, for to Jews, unable to own land in most countries, farming was a strange and unknown occupation.

The Ottoman court in Constantinople, later Istanbul, looked upon this new Jewish settlement of the Palestine district with favor, for it meant an infusion of money: more taxes to collect, more bribes to elicit. But the Jews brought some things with them that had been sorely lacking: tenacity, vitality, and a love and longing for the Promised Land. They came to this backwater Palestine district, which was neither fish nor fowl, neither Syrian nor Ottoman, neither Arab nor Jewish, but a no-man’s-land, hemorrhaging to death. The great return of the Jews represented a last thin thread of hope for them as well as for Palestine itself.

In the year 1882 Sarah and Samuel Asch emigrated from Romania with a group of other young people under the auspices of a foundation established by the Rothschild family. They went north into the Galilee and took over a settlement, Rosh Pinna, that had been abandoned by Hassidim who had been forced out by the Bedouin.

By using Arab guards and a great deal of Arab labor, Rosh Pinna held on but never fully prospered. The settlement teetered, hitting and missing with experimental crops, suffering from isolation and constant marauding. Baron Edmond de Rothschild sent experts from his French farms, but they failed because of an ill-conceived attempt to transplant a European type of peasantry.

In 1884 Sarah and Samuel had a son, one of the first Jewish children born in that part of the Galilee since ancient times. From the moment of his birth, Gideon Asch was to become the future.

After the turn of the century, on the heels of terrible and massive Russian and Polish pogroms, a new breed of Jews began finding their way to Palestine. They came out of the ghettos in organized groups, intensely bound to the ideal that only through personal sacrifice and Jewish labor could Palestine be redeemed.

Absentee Arab landowners were only too happy to dump useless acreage on them for outrageous prices. In the Valley of Jezreel, in the Galilee, on the Plains of Sharon, in the Valley of Ayalon, and on that ancient coastal route of the Via Maris dozens of collective Jewish settlements called kibbutzim took on the chore, and the sweet voice of springtime was once again heard in Palestine. The desolate, desperate land, whose fields had been raped, feudalized, and abandoned by Ottoman and Arab, were now being brought back to life. Festering malarial swamp, unmerciful rock, desert, and denuded earth gave way to carpets of green, and the energy of building was heard and millions of trees grew where none had grown for centuries. A blossoming of culture and progress erupted from Jerusalem. North of the ancient port of Jaffa a new Jewish city sprang out of the sand dunes: Tel Aviv, the Hill of Spring.

Their cleavage from the past brought on all kinds of changes for the Jews. An entire new social concept emerged from the kibbutz, where one came as close to complete communal living as could be humanly conceived. One of these changes was the concept that the Jews be able to defend themselves. In the beginning a small corps of Jewish horsemen roamed from settlement to settlement, putting down trouble. These were the watchmen, the Shomer. They took on the language, knew the habits, and often looked like Arabs themselves.

By 1900, when Gideon Asch was sixteen, he had become caught up in the new Jewish idealism and was among the Shomer protecting kibbutzim and other types of settlements in the Galilee.

Gideon first impressed the Bedouin by his ability as a horseman and enhanced his reputation by regularly beating the Bedouin champions in races and competitions.

He left the relative comforts of Rosh Pinna to live on the move. In the early years of the new century, Gideon commanded a roving unit of a dozen Shomer who went out with the pioneers as they established settlements, often in remote and isolated places and often in the midst of hostile Arab and Bedouin populations. The Shomer were there on that first crucial night to beat off the inevitable Arab attack and Gideon stayed on to establish defenses. He moved fearlessly among the Arabs in an attempt to befriend them. When one settlement was secure, he moved to the next.

Although he was in an adversary position, the respect grew between Gideon and the Arabs, particularly the Bedouin. He saw them as a continuation of the People of the Book. Often as he rode alone through the Galilee, it was three thousand years ago and he might have been one of Solomon’s captains coming upon a Canaanite village. Sensing that he had no fear of them, many Arabs developed a strange loyalty toward him. Whether in a muktar’s village home or in the tent of a sheik, the blue-eyed horseman was entirely at home.

Gideon knew many Arab women. Of course this was dangerous for him, but he was young and reckless and, above all, entirely discreet. While no Arab man ever knew or suspected, Gideon had a fairly large contingent of well-wishers among the women all over the Galilee.

How could such a thing happen? Well, it is a known truth that jails were built for men, and few Arab villages of any size did not have two or three of their members serving a sentence, generally for stealing, smuggling, or a knifing. As often as not, they left a wife a few months pregnant. There were others, widows and poor souls unable to bear children. These were safe.

Every village had a nearby cave or hiding place where Gideon would go out to rest and soon be ‘found,’ frequently a half a dozen times a day. He had the strength of youth. They were very natural with him and for the moment seemed released from the eternal shadow of shame. He seldom failed to ride off content and they seldom failed to giggle and to smile inwardly as they watched out of the corner of an eye as Gideon galloped away.

By the onset of the First World War, Britain and France were casting an envious eye on Turkish-held territories in the Middle East. The two emerging international imperial powers saw the region as a crossroads. Key to that power was the securing of the Suez Canal. British control stopped at Egypt and at the Canal itself. Turkish control began on the opposite bank in the Sinai and Palestine. That the Sinai was to become a battlefield was predestined.

In Turkish-held Palestine, Jewish aspirations for a national homeland had been growing rapidly and had gained the support of world Jewry and the attention of the world’s capitals. Although it was perilous for the Jews of Palestine to stand against the Turks, they did so en masse, by enlisting in the British Army. In order to lock world Jewry into the Allied cause, the British foreign secretary issued the Balfour Declaration, favoring the establishment of the homeland in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was later canonized into international law and recognized by the entire world, save the Arabs. By the eve of the First World War, the Arabs had formulated a nationalism of their own, to commence when the yoke of the Ottomans could be shaken.

British Intelligence agents slipped into Palestine to set up espionage networks in advance of their armies and to find men to engage in highly specialized work.

Gideon Asch was secretly commissioned as a lieutenant in the British Army; his mission was to go into the Negev and Sinai deserts to chart the wadis, the water holes, the sparse patches of shade, the sheer passes—all for the coming battle against the Turks. Asch was born a desert rat, able to disappear among the Bedouin and sink deeply into the vast brooding reaches of the wilderness of Zin and Paran, where Moses and the Hebrew Tribes had wandered for forty biblical years. He followed those routes of the Bible through the parched dry beds, piecing bits and clues together of how one can survive and travel in such a landscape. His blue eyes would turn to slits under the blinding glare and his fair skin would become sand-pocked and leathery.

He became a friend of the Wahhabi tribe and its sheik, Walid Azziz, and he roamed for weeks with their legendary tracker, Nabil.

One day, toward evening, Nabil and Gideon came upon a small clump of scrub oak in an otherwise bleak desert terrain. A lone Bedouin sat by the scrub, making a covering tent over his head with his robes. Alongside the Bedouin was a clay pitcher of water and some stale bread.

Nabil called to him, then approached the Bedouin, who was in a semitrance from the glaring heat. They spoke, and he returned to Gideon.

‘Who is he, Nabil?’ Gideon asked.

‘His name is Mustafa. He is of the Sulikan tribe.’

‘Why does he just sit there?’

‘He says he is waiting for a friend. He said his friend told him he would be coming through this way.’

‘How long has he been sitting?’

‘Several times around the sun.’

‘Doesn’t he know when his friend will come?’

‘He said sooner or later.’

‘Do you mean he just sits, day after day, not knowing?’

‘He knows his friend will come. When his friend comes is not important. He has nothing else to do.’

Just before eventide, Nabil sniffed out a camel caravan. He rode his mount in circles with seeming aimlessness until he picked up tracks. Nabil dismounted and placed his nose and his lips on the ground in the tracks.

They passed here not too long a time ago,’ Nabil said.

‘How long?’

‘Not long.’

‘A few hours?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Many hours?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Three, four, five hours?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Enough time for the sun to come up and down?’

‘No, not that long a time.’

‘How many camels do you make out?’

‘Several.’

‘Five?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Fifty?’

‘Perhaps. The tracks are deep. They are heavily loaded.’

‘Where will they be going?’

Nabil squinted around the horizon. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘A water hole belonging to the Sulikans. They must be Sulikans or allies of the Sulikans.’

Gideon studied his map for a nearby water hole. It showed none.

‘How far away is the water?’

‘Not far.’

‘One day? Two days?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘How many miles?’

‘Miles? Oh miles.’ Nabil tugged at his ear. ‘Four hundred miles.’

‘No, dammit. It can’t be. How many times for the sun to come up and down before we reach it?’

‘When the sun rises here until it crosses to there,’ Nabil said, sweeping his hand in a heavenward arc.

As the fire died, Nabil recited poetry while Gideon lay concentrating on the sky and the darting specks of comets. It was this kind of moment that made the desert real. Gideon was all of them from the beginning of time. He was Moses and Abraham looking up to the same sky, pondering man’s earliest mysteries and begging for answers to the puzzlement of the universe.

‘I was the jackal who could prey at the edge of the camp.

I was a great horse who raced Mohammed’s mighty mount.

I was a camel, the first in a line of many.

1 was all who looked at the stupid two-legged beast called man and saw him as stupid.

I lived like a king in my own wild ways, and they struggled.’

Nabil stopped short and cocked his head. ‘Listen,’ he said.

‘I hear nothing.’

It took several moments for the breeze to carry the sounds to him. ‘How far are they,’ Gideon asked, ‘and how many?’

‘Why must you always ask things for which there are no answers, Gideon?’

‘Well, suppose they were an enemy. If I knew how many of them there were and how far away they were, I would know how to get ready.’

‘What difference how far?’ the Bedouin said. ‘In the desert you must always be ready and how many will be, will be. You can’t change their numbers.’ He listened and reckoned there were many camels and that they had reached the water hole.

‘When the sun comes up we will reach the water hole,’ Nabil said. ‘Do not go and drink from it. We move toward it slowly. Then we sit on the edge and hold the horses so they do not drink. They will be watching us from afar, and if we drink without permission they will shoot. After a time they will appear. They will tolerate me as a Wahhabi, but they will like you very much because of the strange color of your hair and eyes. Then, they will invite us to drink.’

Three days later they retraced their tracks and the Bedouin named Mustafa was still sitting under the shade of his robe waiting for his friend.

After four hundred years of Ottoman misrule the feeling of the Arabs toward the Turks was one of oppressed to oppressor despite the fact that they were fellow Moslems. Clandestine Arab movements were afoot against the Turks as the war entered the region.

The key personality among Arab dissidents was Sharif Husain, head of the Hashemite clan from the Hejaz sector of the Arabian Peninsula. The Hejaz held a coastline of nearly a thousand miles along the Red Sea that connected to the vital British lifeline of the Suez Canal. The Hashemites, who were direct descendants of Mohammed, had been accorded the honorary position of ‘keeper of the holy places’ of Medina and of Mecca, with Islam’s most sacred shrine, the Ka’aba.