Leon Uris (6 page)

‘We gave them a lesson they’ll never forget!’

‘I killed at least three of them!’

‘I cut a tongue out with this,’ another said, brandishing his dagger.

Ibrahim turned at his door. ‘You were very fierce, all of you,’ he said. ‘It was a complete victory, spoiled only by the fact that those Jewish cowards brought illegal British help ... otherwise ... well ... don’t ever forget the British did this.’ They cheered again and he went into the house and let the legend take its own course as he collapsed on a bed of weariness.

I
BRAHIM WENT TO THE
knoll atop the village day after day and brooded alone; it was a rather pleasant place to brood. Like most Arab villages, Tabah had a tomb where a saint or a prophet had allegedly preached, lived, or died. Tabah’s tomb, a tiny whitewashed, domed structure, sat at the highest point of the hill beneath the village’s solitary tree, a withered oak. Legend had it that the saint, an obscure soldier who had fought the battle with Joshua, established the village afterward as a fortified position against the Philistines and later, as a guardpost to Jerusalem. Mohammed had leaped to Jerusalem from there as well.

Ibrahim erected a small, one-pole Bedouin tent of strips of woven goat and sheep wool to protect him against the midday sun. He permitted only two persons to enter his solitude: Hagar, his wife, to bring him food and drink; and Farouk, to discuss village business.

He brooded about both of them. He had always detested Farouk for his weakness. Farouk was his older brother, and had he been a man of any courage he would have seized the position of muktar. Farouk’s cowardice in the attack on Shemesh Kibbutz put a capstone on Ibrahim’s loathing. He felt that Farouk had always taken advantage of his ability to read and write and he suspected his brother cheated him. He swore that when he had a son he would send him to school so Farouk would not have that mystical hold of literacy over him.

Ibrahim brooded about not having a son. Hagar had failed him with two daughters. She was with child again and the gossips seemed to be hoping to pin the ignoble title on him permanently. He had already told Hagar that if she did not give him a son he would call off their marriage.

Ibrahim brooded about the ‘victory’ over the Jews, which, down at the café, grew more fanciful each day. His men had fought like females. He knew they would never be able to dislodge the Jews. Yet as the days passed, tales of courage in the attack on Shemesh became wilder. To prove their disdain for the lowly Jews, men would leave the café every day, climb to a high spot overlooking the Jewish fields, and fire off a few rounds from a safe distance of several hundred yards. Although they were out of range and never hit anything, it added fuel to the day’s conversation.

Ibrahim brooded as the realization sunk in that the Jews were going to make a successful settlement of Shemesh. He watched them through the Turkish field glasses as they went about preparing the swamp. Within the week, stone walls had been erected as a new perimeter and these were anchored by high watchtowers. A generator not only lit floodlights to allow them to work through the night but made a future attack all but impossible.

The sound of their building never stopped. The original tent city gave way to communal buildings of stone. There was a hospital tent; he kept count of the Jews who were stricken with malaria. Sometimes half of them were down at the same time. It did not stop them. Parties of other Jews came several times a week to help with other aspects of the work.

The Jewish land was mainly a few thousand dunams of swamp and marshlands, a vicious place inhabited by snakes, mosquitoes, and other slimy creatures. Ibrahim wondered how anyone could make anything grow there. Much of their work was a mysterious digging of two large canals at points where the land tilted downward toward the coast. These canals were dug on either side of the swamp, then dammed up. There was a crisscross of smaller ditches that worked their way toward the larger canals.

The second section of the Jewish lands was a hill that ran right up against Tabah’s olive orchards to a common boundary. It was filled with ancient derelict terracing of the kind that the Hebrews had constructed thousands of years before. This was like a miniature of the mammoth terraces in the Bab el Wad and those of biblical fame in Judaea.

Stones were a constant commodity in the fields. The Jews collected and carried them by oxcart to the base of the terrace. From there they were taken by hand, much like the Hebrew slaves had done in building the Egyptian pyramids. They were carried to places where time, flood, sun, earthquake, and natural erosion had broken down the terrace walls. The restoration took on the look of the steps of a giant staircase. Each step held back a small plot of earth large enough to plant orchards, vines, or even grain. The new walls were intended to keep the topsoil from being washed away and utilize land that was otherwise useless. Tabah also had terracing, but a good part of it had been broken down for decades and had never really been restored.

The Jews brought in strange trees, and Ibrahim made Farouk come up and count them. Farouk said there were hundreds, then thousands, and his mind soared, so that he saw millions, perhaps even billions.

‘What do they think they can do with those trees?’ Ibrahim muttered. ‘Drink up the swamp?’

‘That is what they are saying happened in the Valley of Jezreel,’ Farouk answered.

‘They cannot change what Allah has willed. It can never work. They are idiots.’

‘I heard in the market at Ramle,’ Farouk said, ‘that the trees have come all the way from Australia and they are always thirsty.’

‘Australia? Don’t they have savages in Australia?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Someplace past India. As far east as the earth goes east before it turns into being west.’

‘I do not understand this,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Do they really believe those trees will grow here. Look around, Farouk, do you see any trees in this valley other than this poor oak who lives only for our patron saint?’

‘No,’ Farouk agreed. But Farouk always agreed with his brother.

Six months after the Jews arrived an amazing event occurred. The Jews broke the earthen dams that separated the canals from the swamp. Ibrahim’s eyes opened like saucers as the connecting ditches sent the putrid waters oozing into the canals. Soon the canals were bulging and running downhill and before his very eyes the level of swamp began to drop. Within days he could almost see the Australian trees grow fat with the fetid juices of the swamp. As the swamp dried under the hot valley sun, incredibly black, rich topsoil appeared. A great deal of it was carried up to the terracing while the rest was reditched and turned over to drain off every last vestige of the swamp.

The canals had emptied into a lower marshland. Ibrahim wondered why they did not let it run down to the sea and ordered Farouk to find out.

‘It is some kind of sheer madness,’ Farouk said when he had learned the answer. ‘They are leaving it as a resting place for migrating birds.’

It enraged Ibrahim that the Jews sang and danced every night. It enraged him that they were able to sing and dance after the energy they had put into their daily work. When he compared it with the slow way of life and lethargy of Tabah he realized that two strange worlds were heading into a conflict.

What the Jews had done had greatly discouraged the villagers.

‘We will never get vengeance,’ Farouk whimpered one day.

‘We shall get our vengeance,’ Ibrahim retorted angrily. ‘The Jews can perform all their little tricks. They have endless money, while we have none. They can hide by night in their stockade because they are cowards. But sooner or later they must come out of hiding and plant crops and the crops must be harvested. Then they shall learn the code of the Bedouin. Wait ... patience moves mountains.’

What Ibrahim brooded about most was the frightening pattern of land sales. At first swampland and eroded fields were being dumped on the Jews. That was all right in the beginning because he and every sheik, muktar, and fellah did not believe the Jews’ soil was tillable. Sooner or later the Jews would give up and leave. It did not happen.

All over the region eviction notices were being given to entire Arab villages by the agents of absentee landowners. Some of the villages had been there for generations, even centuries. The peasants were given a few weeks to simply pack up and leave. Some went quietly, others forcibly. They went with no place to go and nothing to go to. Even the chance for marginal existence had been cut out from under them by their Arab brethren. In a matter of a few months after an area had been abandoned the land was invariably sold to the Jewish Land Fund at outrageous prices. A land boom was on because an unexpected vein of gold had been discovered by greedy men. It took no mental giant to figure out that a dunam of land sold to the Jews would bring more profit than if it were sharecropped for fifty years by the fellahin.

Ibrahim watched with mounting tension as his own landowner, Fawzi Kabir, sold off parcel after parcel in the Ayalon Valley until all that was left was Tabah and a few outlying villages.

Suddenly the land sales stopped. Tabah had been spared. Why, Ibrahim wondered? Tabah’s fields were the richest in the valley and would certainly bring a king’s ransom. Fawzi Kabir did not do it out of kindness.

Ibrahim brooded about this as he had never brooded in his life. Slowly it began to occur to him. Kabir was in constant strife with other great Palestinian families for financial and political control of the country. Tabah sat in a preeminent strategic position. Any takeover by one of the dominant Arab families would require a consolidation from Jerusalem to the key Arab towns of Ramle and Lydda. Tabah blocked that ambition. In order to control Palestine itself, someone would have to make a deal with Fawzi Kabir.

One day Farouk came up to the knoll to remind his brother that Fawzi Kabir would soon be making his annual trip to Jaffa to collect his rents. Farouk looked forward to the trip as the highlight of the year, for it meant a week in the fleshpots of Jaffa.

‘Go to Jaffa,’ Ibrahim told his brother, ‘and see Kabir. Tell him that if he wants to collect his rents he is to come to Tabah for them.’

‘You are telling the mountain to come to Mohammed! He will sell everything out from under us, if he doesn’t have us slaughtered first.’

Ibrahim smiled sweetly. ‘He will come,’ he said.

F
AWZI
K
ABIR WAS AN
Ottoman remnant who still carried the old Turkish title of Effendi. For well over a century the Kabirs had been one of the most powerful families in the Palestine district. Their loyal service to the sultans in Istanbul had been generously rewarded. The Kabir clan had been granted, or otherwise acquired, over a million dunams of land in various parcels from Gaza in the south to the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.

The Kabirs had made Damascus, administrative capital of the province, their home and headquarters since the beginning of the century. In Damascus there was always room for one more Kabir in a lucrative government post, and sons, cousins, and other relatives were deeply integrated into the Establishment. When the Turks were forced out of the region, the Kabir fortunes declined.

The French were now in Damascus and could be dealt with. They knew the oblique art of giving and getting favors and ‘how the world worked.’ While the Kabirs continued to fare well under French control in Syria and Lebanon, the Palestine district was another matter. British civil servants, for the most part, kept business aboveboard and free of bribery.

Since the British had taken control of the mandate, Fawzi Kabir had been receiving bills for taxes and petitions from his villagers for things like better roads, schools, and farming methods. A couple of Christian Arab villages asked for clinics and one had the temerity to inquire about electricity.

Fawzi Kabir had paid virtually no taxes under the Turks and, in turn, the Turks had given virtually no services to a peasantry that walked a tightrope over a chasm of destitution.

Kabir had political troubles in Palestine as well. His archrival for power, Haj Amin al Heusseini, who had fled to escape a fifteen-year prison sentence, returned. The British not only exonerated him, they appointed him the Mufti of Jerusalem, the highest Islamic post in the mandate.

Another political enemy popped up in the form of Abdullah, who had been brought from the Arabian Peninsula by the British and crowned Emir of the newly formed state of Trans-Jordan. Abdullah harbored ambitions of annexing Palestine to his kingdom.

With his agricultural income shrinking, a British demand for taxes, demands of the villagers for schools and roads, and serious political enemies, Fawzi Kabir went into a reevaluation.

It was the Jews who salvaged his Palestine situation. After the world war, Jewish immigration increased dramatically and world Jewry was supporting the settlers with mammoth investments and donations.

Under the Turks tenant farming had been good business. Under the British it was fast reaching a point of diminishing returns. Fawzi Kabir sold off all his lands in Palestine save his orange groves in Jaffa and acreage in the Valley of Ayalon, which were of strategic value.

The Jews were developing the country at an astonishing rate and investment opportunities abounded. Tens of thousands of Arabs began to drift into Palestine from all around the Syrian province as work became available, and the centuries-old face of stagnation was lifted. The bulk of the Palestinian Arab population immigrated to the country on the heels of Jewish immigration.

Fawzi Kabir’s investments changed from land to such enterprises as the new port development in Haifa, where there was talk of an oil pipeline terminal from Iraq, and a refinery. He invested with some Egyptians in a great new hotel to be built, the King David Hotel, where the wealthy and famous would be guests on their pilgrimages. In the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv he was involved in a bank with a Hebrew name. As an Arab, his investments had to be kept secret from Arab and Jew alike.