Leon Uris (69 page)

Six schools were erected, two of them for girls.

A variety of sorely needed medical facilities were built, clinics, a malaria control unit, a chlorination plant, a rehydration building, supplemental feeding centers concentrating on infants and the young who had undergone a terrible mortality rate.

Mosques, a ritual slaughterhouse, stores, a police station, food warehouses, distribution centers, and transportation yards sprang up along the highway.

The activity amounted to nudging us from our deep-seated lethargy, signs that life was replacing death. With Per Olsen using Father as a liaison to the sheiks and muktars, things began smoothly.

One evening, six months after Olsen had arrived, Father and I were in his office, the three of us smoking away on Schimmelpennincks, when he opened his desk drawer with a twinkle in his eye.

‘Here it is,’ Olsen said. ‘The authorization to create a development plan. Factories, mines, industry, agriculture. A pilot scheme that can pave the way for similar plans all over the West Bank.’

‘But won’t that be very costly?’ Father asked.

‘It is primed to pay for itself in five years.’

‘Five years?’

‘You said yourself to go slowly.’

‘Yes, go slowly because life here at the bottom of the world is slow. Slowly, because we cannot absorb too much from the outside that is different. But you say it will take five years to pay off something permanent. Acceptance of permanency here crosses a political boundary. We are not looking to stay in Jericho forever.’

‘However long you stay, you must find self-esteem,’ Per Olsen said. ‘If life is decent, some will remain. If the facility is here, others will come here to work when you leave.’

Ibrahim was disturbed. ‘It might be difficult to sell, Per.’

‘Do you reject the idea yourself?’

‘I lived side by side with the Jews for many years. We could not comprehend what they were doing. We must remain simple and stay with things we know. Oh, perhaps the Saudis believe they can purchase a modern society ... I don’t know, Per, I don’t know.’

‘Stay with me, Haj Ibrahim. If we succeed, we can make things better for a lot of people in many places in the world.’

The Jericho Project was announced with great bravado. A number of world experts made their way to Aqbat Jabar to develop the scheme. Father suddenly found himself a wise man constantly being consulted by scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers. His native wisdom and practical knowledge of the way our world worked made him invaluable.

For the moment he forgot past defeats. Perhaps he also forgot reality. It was a magnificent time for me, reading papers for him, translating in important meetings, being the first son of the great Haj Ibrahim.

‘We are going too fast, Per.’

‘It won’t wait.’

The plan? Oh, by the Prophet’s beard, what a plan!

There were large tracts of barren acreage along the Jordan rift and Dead Sea that had never been farmed because of the lack of rain and below-marginal soil conditions. A huge parcel of land was staked out and destined to become an experimental farm to be irrigated directly from the river. Studies would be undertaken to determine what kinds of crops might succeed and what existing crops might be improved.

Grasslands of tough, proven desert seeds would be sown for sheep and cattle. Orchards would be planted with the hardiest varieties of olives, oranges, bananas, dates, and fields of cotton, peanuts, and strains of desert wheat that had fared well in arid soil.

Glasshouses covering many acres would concentrate on vegetables, while an experimental farm would constantly seek out and introduce crops from low-yield soils.

The agricultural part of the Jericho Project would consist of twenty thousand dunams and employ a thousand people and twice that number during the harvests.

Now to exploit the Dead Sea, known to be rich in potash and other minerals. The Jordan River had flowed into the sea for millennia; but the sea had no outlet and acted as a natural catch basin. The Jews were already working their side of the sea in the south. Blueprints were drawn up to build a mining operation in the vicinity of Qumran that would initially employ three hundred workers.

The third phase of the plan dealt with industry and called for an ambitious factory complex. Food from the farm would be processed, packaged, and canned. Dead Sea minerals would be refined and shipped through Jordan’s single port in Aqaba. That meant the building of a major new road as well as other support roads.

Light industry within the capabilities of the refugees would be installed, and a training school for boys would be built to develop needed skills. Small factories would make rugs, building tools, cloth and clothing, utensils, building materials. A stone quarry would make blocks, and the sand and gravel pits would provide the materials for a glass factory.

As the experts began furnishing their thick booklets of data and projections, it fell to Haj Ibrahim to sell the Jericho Project to our people. I went with him to meeting after meeting, watching him extol the scheme.

‘We will beat the Jews at their own game!’ he bragged. ‘We will turn Aqbat Jabar from a place of despair into a proud, self-sustaining city. Our families will work and earn salaries. This is our great opportunity to take off our rags and build decent homes. We have lived too long in uniforms of striped pajamas.’

Do not think the Haj a fool. Even as he sold hard, I knew that rivers of doubts were overrunning their banks within him. Had our people gone too long without work or hope? Had they become content to continue on as the world’s charity wards? Would they respond?

Oh Allah, the bitterness of the disenchanted!

It started when UNRWA sent out a call for several hundred construction jobs. Only a third of them were filled by Aqbat Jabar residents.

Despite my father’s prodding and threatening and downright pleading we finally had to go to outside contractors and labor had to be shipped in. The same happened when road building and farm jobs became open.

School enrollment scarcely filled half the classroom seats, and most of those attended did so on an irregular basis.

Tribal avarice moved in and the grandiose scheme died aborning. Every man of some kind of clan authority staked out a claim for a supervisory or executive position, and along with him brought an entourage of employees from his own people. The fight for positions was truly a fight for authority. Endless haggling led to endless haggling. Fists flew and guns were pulled at planning meetings. The losers sulked. The winners extended their power on the principle that a one-man job could be better handled by five members of the same family.

When building materials began to arrive, pilfering became rampant. Construction went on at a nearly motionless pace. There was a lack of labor, a lack of competent supervision, a lack of planning. Confusion and lethargy surrounded the scheme.

In our world, when five men do the work of one, four justify themselves through obstruction. Cruel games were played by an army of rubber stamp wielders. Permits and inspections were held up endlessly. People with no expertise made a farce of trying to figure out complicated installations. It could take a week to requisition a bag of nails.

In came the fedayeen gangs, who organized the theft of materials, then set up a security service to prevent further thefts. The fedayeen also demanded of Father and the other Arab leaders that they set up a clandestine factory to make arms and munitions.

The imams from the mosques got into it. Priests demanded large outright bribes, threatening to impede work by delivering sermons against the plan from their pulpits.

Chaos begat chaos.

What was pounded into the minds of our people was that UNRWA was their new government, a mystical father to care for them. Yet they wanted no responsibility toward it or for bettering the lives of their families. UNRWA would provide. Did they not deserve that for the loss of their lands?

Although the heartbeats of life were provided by UNRWA, it was deeply resented. Should not the United Nations be dedicated to the struggle of returning them to their villages? Should not the world throw the Jews out of Palestine? Was not UNRWA really just another of those invasions of foreigners making decisions over their lives?

I watched the Haj become despondent as his meetings grew uglier in tone.

‘No, Ibrahim,’ his sheiks cried, ‘we will not draw a drop of water from the Jordan River, for that means making an agreement with the Jews. We will die of thirst before we share it with them.’

‘Listen, Haj. If we build factories in Jericho, will the Jews not get a message that we have accepted our exile?’

When UNRWA’s beautification plan to plant trees and gardens, build playgrounds, and install streetlights was under way, they were all ripped up by angry mobs.

‘Death to UNRWA!’

‘Death to the agents of imperialism!’

THE RATION CARD, THE ALMIGHTY PRECIOUS RATION CARD!

Cheating UNRWA became a way of life. When a child was born, the mother registered the infant for a ration card. The next day another female from the same family would register the same baby and was issued a second card. Babies in a given clan were often registered under a half-dozen names.

No one with income reported it. Deaths were never reported, in order to keep the ration card valid. Any family able to leave Aqbat Jabar kept an address in the camp and the ration cards that went with it. Bedouin who drifted home to their borderless world kept their addresses and drifted back to collect rations every month.

Some had hit it rich through racketeering and now lived in East Jerusalem and Nablus. They came to the camp, often in new automobiles, to collect their rations.

Impoverished peasants in Jordan and on the West Bank squeezed into the camps and claimed to be refugees. A raging black market came into existence for surplus ration cards.

When building materials were offered to improve our hovels, few bothered to claim them. ‘We don’t want to let the Jews think we are building permanent homes.’

Conversely, the new wealthy among the black marketeers erected small villas right in the middle of Aqbat Jabar’s squalor.

The refugee numbers game exploded. In the beginning of the war it was established that a half-million Arabs had fled their homes. Their numbers had been inflated to over a million and were still growing. An accurate census became impossible as Arab administrators in the UNRWA turned a blind eye to the abuses.

I do not know the exact moment or what triggered the most violent wave of demonstrations, but what does it matter. We were always a short spark away from a riot. Most of the riots were initiated in the schools. The teachers had become more important than our parents and completely controlled the children’s minds. The target was usually the UNRWA headquarters, and once a demonstration got under way there was no telling how it might end.

The ‘plight’ and the ‘day of the disaster’ and the ‘exile’ were always suitable reasons to demonstrate. The rest of it was fear, fear of ration cuts, fear of epidemic, fear when the water tankers were late. If a clinic shortened its hours because of a lack of personnel, a demonstration soon followed.

On the night the rioters set fire to a clinic, Haj Ibrahim was denounced as a tool of the Zionists. The clinic had been burned because an emergency shipment of vaccine had been accepted from Israel to stem an outbreak of cholera.

The next day we went to Per Olsen, who was barricaded, and under the protection of the Arab Legion. His letter of resignation sat on his desk.

‘It is over, Haj. The Jericho Project is officially dead,’ he said.

‘If you want the riots to stop,’ my father said, ‘just start pulling ration cards. It will stop.’

‘I cannot keep track of all the games being played here,’ Olsen said shakily and angrily. ‘It is beyond human reason or any man’s ability to bear. I am leaving.’

‘I am sorry for what you must think of us, Per. You will condemn us, won’t you?’

‘No, my friend, that is not the way the system works. UNRWA does not want any wrenches thrown into its machinery. Too many bureaucrats would have to look for honest work. It will be smoothed over. Don’t you know, it will end up being blamed on the Jews. The United Nations is becoming quite good at that. You tried, Haj Ibrahim, but you knew all along what was going to happen.’

‘I am afraid so,’ my father whispered.

‘So, I leave you a legacy. Four cases of Schimmelpennincks. That should hold you for a while.’

We walked home from UNRWA headquarters filled with pain. At that very moment I saw the Haj begin to grow old. He stopped and looked around. A few stakes in a rocky field denoted the outlines of the great experimental farm that never yielded a crop. A few decaying concrete foundations with poking fingers of steel rods were what was left of factories that never produced a single bolt of cloth.

‘Why, Father?’

‘It required teamwork. Teamwork requires trust. There is no trust among us. We pride ourselves on our potency. In truth, we are impotent.’

‘There are impounded building materials,’ Father said bitterly. ‘We shall take them and build a decent home closer to the highway. One that befits an UNRWA bureaucrat.’

M
Y EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY WAS
entirely memorable, for what young man can ever forget his passage into manhood!

Widow ladies without the protection of an extended family or clan were quite vulnerable to sexual annoyance or assault. But not those under the protection of Haj Ibrahim. We had several in our section of camp and they were entirely safe from harm. Only one man dared challenge my father, and he lost his tongue for his efforts.

Hilwa was an older woman, perhaps as old as twenty-six. Her husband had been dead for over a year. He was killed when a bus to Jerusalem he was riding on overturned, and she was left with four young children. Hilwa was one of those who had become separated from her people during the war and settled in the Tabah section of Aqbat Jabar. When her husband died, she appealed to the Haj for protection, which he readily afforded. As I have stated, my father’s word was law in our part of the camp, and Hilwa was never in further danger.