Leon Uris (49 page)

Other disasters mounted, but one dominant factor told us it was time to leave. We were becoming hungry. A major concern was what to do with our invaluable arms cache. Guns were always a prime item of trade and if we got into serious money problems we could sell off a rifle here, a pistol there. On the other hand, a man like Haj Ibrahim does not give up his weapons readily.

I was assigned the mission of finding a suitable dump for the arms someplace closer to Jericho. Tent cities were sprouting up all over the barren hillsides around the town. Inland from Jericho, there rose a sudden string of steep cliffs much like the area of our cave.

Atop one of these cliffs, only a few miles removed from the town, stood a Greek Christian monastery called St. George. Nobody could hide from the world better than Greek monks. The main trail to the monastery came off the Jerusalem road and was scarcely negotiable by foot. From the Jericho side, the monastery was buried from view. I felt that if I could scale the cliffs under the monastery, I could find a foolproof hiding place.

It was impossible to dig a trench or hole to bury the cache, for most of the desert soil was so hard that in most cases the dead were not even buried but covered with stone cairns. If I attempted to dig in the earth, it could be detected immediately by the Bedouin.

It boiled down to finding a niche or small cave, hidden from all view, that our donkey Absalom could reach. I could not handle the task alone, so Father and I discussed who else would be the most trustworthy. I personally wanted Nada, but dared not bring up the subject. Sabri was the obvious choice, but we never fully trusted him. We settled on Jamil.

For the next several days, Jamil and I left Qumran in the middle of the night so we could pass through Jericho and the camps during the darkness and position ourselves up in the cliffs below St. George by daybreak.

I was disheartened to learn that the monastery was on a clifftop called Mount Temptation. This is where the Christians believed that Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness combating Satan. I was quite certain that our cave near Qumran was the true cave of Jesus and David. The Christians and Jews were wrong about many historic locations, particularly the tombs of saints and prophets. They did not really know where Moses and Samuel were buried until Mohammed received the word from Allah and revealed the true locations. So Christian pilgrims had been going to many wrong places for centuries.

We had to climb the cliffs carefully, for there were many observation points around the monastery. Our months at Qumran had taught us much about following wadi beds and tiny canyons. Jamil and I used that skill to slither about unseen like a pair of rock-colored lizards. On the fourth day, Jamil called me over to a crevice, an opening of perhaps two feet in height. It looked promising. No path or trail ran near it, it could not be seen from the monastery above, and we could coax our donkey Absalom up to it. We wiggled our way inside. The opening was too small to hold all our arms, but a fissure formed a narrow tunnel eighteen to twenty inches wide. It led us back to a second crevice, an opening of several square feet. We examined it for possible rain leaks but found none.

That night we loaded Absalom for the first of four trips it would take to move the arsenal. Again we worked our way into position before daylight, then struggled for many hours, crawling back and forth to the second crevice with only inches to spare.

When the cache was secured, we emptied the cave at Qumran of anything that still had value. Most of the supplies were carried on the backs of the men or wrapped in large bundles and balanced on the heads of the women. Even Fatima, who had a two-year-old baby in her arms and was six months pregnant, took a load.

Absalom was lightly loaded to make room for my father to ride. He did not appear quite so noble as he had aboard el-Buraq. The rest of us, trailing behind him, formed a threadbare, pathetic line of spiritually dehydrated human beings. Our shoe soles were stuffed with newspapers. Omar and Kamal had to wrap their feet in rags. After a mile, all our feet, except Father’s, were bleeding. I marveled at Fatima, who was as strong as the men, despite her condition, and at Nada, who actually walked as tall and regal as a queen as we straggled toward Jericho. Actually, it was more of a crawl than a walk. Hagar had lost most of her plumpness to a sagging skin and was very weak. After the second time she fainted, my father mercifully allowed her to ride for short periods on Absalom.

There were two main tent cities forming about Jericho. At the northern tip of the town were the ruins of ancient Jericho and a spring called Ein es-Sultan, whose flow made the oasis that allowed Jericho to come into existence nearly ten thousand years earlier. The spring now supplied water for thousands of displaced persons. Two more camps were rising a bit farther north on the highway.

A second area south of Jericho, Aqbat Jabar, stepped up the sloping barren hills toward the base of Mount Temptation. The camp forming here was much closer to our arms cache, so we settled for it.

No one was in charge and nothing was organized. Tens of thousands of people simply milled about aimlessly. There were no toilets, kitchens, or clinics. Red Crescent trucks arrived from Amman sporadically. Those in charge of distributing tents, food, blankets, and medicine had created an impossible bureaucracy that was already dominated by black marketeers. Food was flung at us as though we were a flock of chickens. Getting water meant standing in line most of the day awaiting a water truck that often never arrived and often ran dry with half the line still waiting. For the first fortnight, we slept on the ground and had to endure two heavy downpours.

At last a convoy filled with supplies arrived from Damascus. We were forced to line the streets and cheer as they drove through while a film crew recorded the arrival. Before anything was doled out, we had to listen to three hours of speeches about how the Zionists had brought us to this and how our Arab brothers were rushing to our rescue. Children were placed around the food trucks and when the cameraman signaled we all had to hold up our hands and scream like beggars.

We managed to get sleeping mats and two six-man army tents and discovered that none of the cargo came from an Arab country but were gifts from the world through the International Red Cross.

Now came our real problem. Most of the displaced were people who had fled together in a body—an entire village or tribe or clan. The most desirable ground at Aqbat Jabar was that closest to Jericho. Since there was no authority, a territorial argument raged. The larger groups with the most men had the strength to claim the best areas. We were a small family, cut off from our clans. Allah willing, they were someplace in Lebanon. There were other ‘stray’ families similar to ours and Haj Ibrahim quickly went about locating them and banding them together under his leadership. My father’s personal stature drew in several hundred families. They had known of him as the Muktar of Tabah and now his legend grew as our flight to the cave at Qumran became known. He staked a claim on behalf of his new followers. Our area was called Tabah, just as the other tribes named their sections for their former villages.

At first we tried to build mud-brick dwellings, but the rains did not give the chance for them to dry out properly and each time it rained our hovels were melted. We went under canvas.

Haj Ibrahim slept in one tent with Hagar and Ramiza. The other six-man tent was divided into three parts by cloth curtains. Omar, Jamil, Sabri, and I had one section; Fatima, Kamal, and their daughter had the second; and Nada had a tiny space to herself. When all the mats were laid down at night, there was no room to walk, except over the top of one another.

The Bedouin tent is made of animal skins and furs and can withstand the fiercest weather. Our tents were from Italy and of thin canvas, unfit for their task. They leaked so badly we might as well have been in the middle of a running wadi bed. When the rains ceased, dust storms riddled them like shotgun pellets and, with summer, the sun rotted out what was left.

In that first year, no one escaped severe dysentery. Cholera and typhoid swathed through Aqbat Jabar like the ghost of death wielding his scythe. Many children went up to Allah, including Kamal and Fatima’s little girl, who died of the cough. There was only one doctor from Jericho and one who had fled from Jaffa, along with a half-dozen nurses, to cope with the epidemics. They had to contend with over fifty thousand people in the five camps around the town. There was some vaccine but not nearly enough for all of us and it came down to the strongest clans and those offering the largest bribes who received inoculations.

When summer came, the heat dominated all other miseries. It was rarely under ninety degrees and often soared close to one hundred and thirty when the hamsin winds blew in from the desert. If one counted the flies in Aqbat Jabar, we had a population of billions. Open sores and open sewers were their meat of life, making a misery matched only by huge bloodthirsty mosquitoes. We constructed a mud-brick hovel that afforded us a bit more space than the tents, but no one had an iota of privacy. Not a tree grew at Aqbat Jabar and the only playgrounds were the wide paths of sewage that ran through the camp down to the Dead Sea.

Many visions of hell have been written about in the Koran. If they were all put together, surely hell would have resembled Aqbat Jabar.

What shattered me was the way most of the people reacted to this hell. We were told that, as good Moslems, we must accept our fate as Allah’s will. The lack of desire to do anything about our own plight made Aqbat Jabar a camp of the living dead. My father had led, my father had fought, my father had pride. By Allah’s holy name, most of us were simply dogs.

Oh, they complained all right. From morning to night, there was little spoken of except the injustice of the exile and a foggy notion of the return—and talk of the return was filled with childish fantasy. The war was done and we learned that conditions in the camps around Amman were no better than at Aqbat Jabar. Little help came to us from the outside and what did come rarely originated in Arab countries.

It was the realization of a nightmare. The most horrible aspect of that nightmare was that there were tens of dozens of camps all over the West Bank of Palestine. We were Palestinians in Palestine, but our own people didn’t lift a finger on our behalf. Instead, they treated us like lepers.

Haj Ibrahim, with his constituency of several thousand ‘strays,’ had become one of the leaders in Aqbat Jabar. He and four or five of the other old muktars tried desperately to instill some semblance of dignity into our people.

We had artisans among us. We had woodworkers, copper workers, shoemakers, cloth weavers. We had a few teachers and merchants. Yet we did nothing. We did not plant a tree. We did not plant a flower. We did not open a school. We did not police ourselves. We did not seek land to farm. We made no attempt to create industry. We did not even collect and remove our own garbage.

We rotted and complained. We blamed the Jews. We became overpowered with self-pity. We waited for a guilty world, which we thought owed us everything, to come and save us, for we were incapable of saving ourselves.

My father sat in meeting after meeting most of the days and half of the nights. Every attempt he and his few allies made to organize the camp and govern it responsibly broke down into heated fights over tribal rights. The main argument was that if we did something for ourselves the Jews and the world outside would mistake it as believing that we accepted the exile. So long as we did nothing, we could continue to weep to the world and the Arab leaders could continue to harangue the Jewish state.

Ibrahim came into our hovel a hundred times, cursing and filled with despair over our lethargy and lack of dignity. When some camps were moved close to the border, he realized it had been done so the displaced could look over to their stolen land day and night and build a storehouse of hatred.

One evening after a particularly bitter meeting with the other sheiks and muktars, Father and I walked together near the foot of Mount Temptation, where we could look down on the crush of mud hovels.

‘Ishmael,’ he whispered, ‘we are betrayed. We are prisoners in our own land. Deliberately created prisoners. Do you know who will eventually take over these camps? The strongest assassins. Allah only knows what kind of a breed we are creating here and Allah only knows what kind of disasters they are going to lead us to. Our hatred for the Jews will blind us to any attempt to become decent human beings again.’

He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Ishmael, you and I will go into Jericho every day. We will listen and we will look. Somewhere in that town, someone is in contact with the Jews and knows how to reach Gideon. Let us see if there is some way I can deal with the Jews and return to Tabah. Or else we will be left to die in this horrible place.’

J
ERICHO,
I
HAVE LEARNED
, is as old as any city in the world—nearly ten thousand years. The walled city itself dates back almost nine thousand years. Jericho was almost always an Arab city. In those ancient days, we were called Canaanites. The entire land of Canaan was stolen from us for the first time when Joshua conquered it over three thousand years ago.

I am grateful that Mohammed and the Koran corrected all the early misinformation the Jews gave about Jericho when they wrote their so-called Bible, a proven forgery. King David, whom the Jews turned on because they did not believe him, wrote his famous ‘Psalm 23’ about the Wadi of Jericho, calling it ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ David became a Moslem saint and prophet. With the gift of prophecy, he must have had visions of Aqbat Jabar and the other camps around Jericho and that’s why he called it by such a name.

Mark Antony gave Jericho to Cleopatra as a present. Jesus knew the area well, for he wandered around in the nearby wilderness. He also walked in the very streets of Jericho, where he gave a blind beggar his sight back.

Herod, a pure Arab king who ruled the Jews, had a weekend palace and hot pools in Jericho where he drowned several relatives who threatened his throne.