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I told him that Deir Yassin, now a part of Israeli Jerusalem called Givat Shaul, had become the site of a mental hospital.
‘Very appropriate,’ he said. ‘I remember an argument between my father and my uncle. My father was in the Arab Higher Council. My uncle wanted to tell the story completely. My father said they should play it down, because it would cause a panic. My uncle won.’ The Palestinian Arabs lost. Arab leaders advertised the massacre to show the Western world that they, not the Zionists, were the victims. The world did not care. Zionist leaders, especially Menachem Begin of the Irgun underground movement, used the events at Deir Yassin to inspire other Arabs to leave their homes. Begin wrote in his memoir, The Revolt, ‘Out of evil, however, good came … This Arab propaganda spread a legend of terror amongst Arabs and Arab troops, who were seized with panic at the mention of Irgun soldiers. The legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel.’ He said that Deir Yassin helped in ‘the conquest of Haifa’: ‘all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting: “Deir Yassin!” ’
I asked Usama whether the massacre at Deir Yassin had inspired him to fight.
‘There weren’t enough weapons to give even to adults,’ he answered, smiling to dismiss any notion of him as a warrior. Shooting between the two sides often kept him awake, but no one in his neighbourhood fired at the neighbouring agricultural school run by ‘Madame Ben Zvi’. Mr Ben Zvi, a colleague of David Ben-Gurion, became Israel’s second president. The Khalidys were evicted, not by the Israelis, but by the Red Cross. ‘The Red Cross asked us to leave so they could make the house a refuge for displaced persons from both sides,’ he said. Israeli forces occupied the area and announced that no Arabs, even those who had complied with a humanitarian request from the Red Cross, were allowed to return.
Usama went to Beirut, where he earned his bachelors and masters degrees in biochemistry, and then to Michigan for his doctorate. He returned to the American University of Beirut’s hospital to teach for twenty-five years. In 1967, on a year’s sabbatical, he taught in the children’s department of Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital. The Augusta Victoria, a late German Gothic stone edifice, dominated the eastern half of Jerusalem from a hilltop that Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion had held in 1948. In 1967, Israel and the Arab states fought another war. ‘When the war started, Dr Najib Abu Haidar’ – Abu Haidar was a highly regarded physician I had known in Lebanon, a contemporary of Usama’s – ‘and I went up to the hospital. I was put in charge of the blood bank. We never got any blood.’ The bloodless blood bank fitted the Arab logistical profile in 1967: Jordanian troops defending East Jerusalem did not receive ammunition or other supplies. Israeli artillery next to a Jewish hospital, Hadassah, shelled the Augusta Victoria. ‘They fired mortar shells and napalm shells. The top of the hospital caught fire. We stayed for three days in the basement with our patients. It was very frightening, especially with the roof on fire. I kept working there, until the Israelis came to occupy the hospital. They held us for three or four days, then let us go.’
When Usama emerged from the hospital, he saw the bodies. They lay, like abandoned cars, unburied and unmourned, on either side of the road. They were all Arabs, like him, Palestinian civilians and Jordanian soldiers. They would not be buried until the Israeli army granted permission. Usama did not speak of the war as an act of injustice. He did not, as many Palestinians did, list the villages the Israeli army demolished in 1967. Nor did he bemoan the destruction of the Moroccan Quarter in the old city to clear the ground for a Disneyesque viewing platform beside the Jewish Western, or Wailing, Wall. A scientist, Usama told me what he saw – no more, perhaps much less. As with 1948 – the year the Palestinians refer to as their national nakhba, catastrophe – he left it to me to supply words like tragedy, pity, injustice. His languid posture, his monotone, his frequent and paced drags on his cigarette spoke of resignation. Events were like chemical reactions observed under a microscope. If a mix of substances exploded, that too was an event. He would not explode with them.
What did he do after he walked down the hill from the Augusta Victoria?
He went to his family’s old house near the Bab az-Zahir and waited. ‘We were going to leave anyway at that time,’ he said. His sabbatical from the American University Hospital was over. ‘I went over the bridge and never went back.’
Jerusalem had been ‘reunited’, according to the joyful Israelis who danced on the new plaza where Arab houses had stood the day before. It had been ‘conquered’ and ‘occupied’, in the words of United Nations resolutions and of the Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem after June 1967. The Khalidys had lived there for a thousand years, an offshoot of the tribe of Beni Khalid – sons of Khalid – who had migrated with the seasons between Syria and the Persian Gulf. For five hundred years at least they had been Jerusalem’s judges, teachers, diplomats. They had earned respect by remaining aloof from the tribal battles that blooded Jerusalem’s older feudal Arab families, the Nashashibis and the Husseinis. The Khalidys had collected manuscripts, written books and kept records of the Arab presence – Christian and Muslim – in Palestine. It was no accident that one of the best volumes of documents on the Palestinian conflict, From Haven to Conquest, had been edited by a Khalidy, Usama’s brother Walid.
For a man like Usama to say ‘I went over the bridge and never went back’ was to conceal thoughts and emotions that could not have died. He did not elaborate, although I asked him to. Five centuries of scholarship? The beautiful stone houses, the fountains in verdant courtyards, the libraries? The cousins and aunts and uncles left behind?
He lit another cigarette, offered me more Turkish coffee and related the third act in his saga of Israeli occupation. He had resumed teaching at the American University Hospital in Beirut, experimenting with a method of instruction through problem solving that had been developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. By the early 1970s, when I was living in Lebanon, the Palestinians had come to dominate West Beirut, culturally, politically, militarily. Young Palestinians were fighting for their independence – from Israel, from the Arab states, from Western domination. Usama, perhaps in accord with familial tradition, did not join any of the movements with their abundance of alphabetical acronyms, PFLP, PDFLP, PFLP-GC, PLF et al. Commandos who launched raids across the border from Lebanon were usually killed. They often attacked civilians on beaches or in buses. When captured, they were tortured. Many of their sympathizers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were also taken to the interrogation centres and the prisons. Others – in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – also went to the cells and the torture chambers. The disparate, tribal, sometimes juvenile, brave and desperate Palestinian organizations inspired a defeated people – not only Palestinians, but many other Arabs. They did not end Israel’s occupation, impede its confiscation of land or prevent the construction of all-Jewish colonies that were displacing Palestinians from the territories that Israel conquered in 1967. But the Palestinian commandos would not let the world – especially the Arab world – forget the injustice done to them. They made trouble, in Israel, in Jordan and, then, in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon.
At the time, Usama and his wife were living in an apartment building that also housed the Palestine Research Centre. Just above Rue Hamra, with its Café de Paris, cinemas and dress shops, the Research Centre was far from the Palestinians’ military structure in and near the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Borj al-Barajneh. It should have been left alone, but it wasn’t. Between 1979 and 1983 it was bombed five times, by a Syrian-run commando faction called As-Saiqa, by Christian Lebanese and by Israel. In 1982, after a three-month Israeli siege, the Palestinian commandos evacuated Beirut by sea. Under the terms of an agreement guaranteed by the United States, Israel was to remain outside the western half of the city. It violated the agreement, sending tanks and infantry across the Green Line from the Christian, eastern side. Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon invited Christian militiamen to eliminate ‘terrorists’ in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although all armed Palestinians had gone, the Christians butchered hundreds of women, children and old men while Israeli troops guarded the camps’ entrances. When Israeli soldiers reached the Palestine Research Centre, they loaded all of its archives, its books, precious documents, computers and its internal files onto trucks that took them to Israel. (Scholars who wished to consult its documents on Palestinian history could do so, with security clearance, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)
‘We were at home until the Israelis got close,’ Usama said. ‘Then a car bomb destroyed most of our house.’ The Israelis later admitted they had used car bombs in Beirut to assassinate Palestinian leaders. Sharon said later that his only regret about Lebanon was that he had not ‘liquidated’ the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, when he had the opportunity.
After the car bomb, Usama moved into a friend’s apartment. While the Israeli army looted the Research Centre on the first floor, soldiers broke into all of the flats above. ‘They walked into our house,’ Usama said. ‘They shat on things. One had to appreciate their ability to shit on top of a refrigerator. They tore a lot of books. It was more vandalism than theft.’
Usama’s outrage was nowhere evident in the telling. His conclusion: ‘I don’t think it was fun, to put it mildly.’ He had left West Jerusalem in 1967. In 1982, he stayed in Beirut. Eventually, after the Lebanese suicide bombings, the Israelis were the ones to leave. Usama restored his flat, replaced his books and continued to teach. In 1983, the largest car bomb of all demolished his building. Twenty-two people died, including the wife of the Research Centre’s director, Sabry Jiryis. Jiryis had grown up in Israel, spoke and wrote Hebrew and had been in Israeli prisons for non-violent political activity. A fine writer and scholar, he was among the few Palestinians to urge his people to understand the Israelis, to compromise, to reconcile. After his wife’s funeral, he left Lebanon for another exile.
The bombing wounded Usama and his wife. Six months later, when they recovered, they moved to Jordan. Their flat on the ground floor of a new stone building could have been in Jerusalem, so much had its walls and floors and shelves been covered in Khalidy memorabilia. ‘This was the grandfather of my grandfather’s father,’ Usama indicated a reproduction of an old painting of an old man attired in the style of his Sultan – a dark robe, a turban, a beard. ‘Mohammed Ali [Khalidy] was the deputy judge of Jerusalem. The chief justice was a Turk, who never came to Jerusalem. So, Mohammed Ali was in effect the chief judge. He died in 1862.’ To be a jurist in the Ottoman Empire was to be a scholar, and a Muslim judge adhered to one or another of the schools of legal philosophy that defined the nature of one’s belief in Sunni Islam. The law had been as significant in the consciousness of an Ottoman Sunni Muslim, whether Turk, Kurd or Arab, as it remained for strict Orthodox Jewish rabbis. The law and the devout study of law – law giving, law making, legal interpretation, the source and legitimacy of legal precepts – involved not only jurisprudence, but philosophy, history and theology. The law made the Khalidys into scholars, and the tradition persisted among the latest generations – academics, but not a lawyer among them.
Usama Khalidy did not subscribe to the Islamic school that proscribed and condemned visual representation of the human form. He lived surrounded by family portraits of long-dead Khalidys in Ottoman robes of office and of his two modern and wildly beautiful daughters. I asked about a black and white drawing propped against the books behind him. I’d been looking at it for some time: six men on their feet, four seated in front, all eyes fixed on the artist. ‘This is one of the oldest pictures in the Middle East of my ancestors,’ Usama said.
The ten, who looked like a difficult jury to impress, divided into two phases of Ottoman history. The elders, frail in white turbans atop snow-white beards, had grown up in the last years of a Sultanate that had not absorbed the cultural lessons of its military defeats by the once-insignificant Christian kingdoms of Europe: in Greece, in the northern Balkans, in much of North Africa. The younger men, all fresh and trendy in sporty tarboush and twirling moustaches, were coming of age when the Sultan understood that weakness required concessions to the foreigner and new arrangements with the more dissatisfied natives. In the mid-nineteenth century, those Khalidys in the fezzes were the new men of reform, of progress, of enlightenment. The Sultan would govern under the new men, reorganize the empire, invite the hated Europeans to train his army and buy the new steel cannon of Krupp and the Maxim gun. Soon, the Sultan’s subjects would be wearing trousers and conspiring to depose him.
‘This is our ancestor, Yusuf Dia Khalidy,’ Usama spoke with a certain pride of this man, one of the oldest in the picture. ‘Yusuf Dia was sent as a judge to Kurdistan. He wrote the first dictionary of the Kurdish language.’ The dictionary was in Kurdish and Arabic, languages that flourished under the Ottomans, but which had been banned – except for prayers in Arabic – in the modern Turkey that Moustafa Kemal Atatürk created after the First World War. Usama said I should buy a copy of the dictionary, still in print from the Librairie du Liban, when I reached Beirut.
Usama’s two daughters, Mouna and Ramla, lived in Beirut with their husbands and children. Ramla, Usama said, was an old Arab name, so rare that I’d not heard it except as the name of an Arab town in Palestine. More Christians than Muslims, he said, gave their children the ancient names. The Christians were more tribal, following the traditional pattern of marriage within their Jund. Jund, classical Arabic for army, was also a division of land: great west – east stretches between the Mediterranean and the desert, self-sufficient and parallel regions of fish and commerce beside the sea, fruit and timber in the coastal mountain range, wheat and vegetables in the fertile plain, and, at the desert’s edges, the Bedouins’ meat, milk, yoghurt and cheese. Jund Dimashk went from Beirut over Mount Lebanon to Damascus and the Syrian Desert. To its south were Jund al-Urdun and Jund al-Falastin. There would be more family ties hundreds of miles across the Jund, from Hebron over the Jordan to Kerak or from Jerusalem to Salt in Jordan, than between towns a few miles north and south of one another in different Junds. The Christians, few as they were, preserved tradition. Usama said that they were the last in Jordan to perform a ritual operation on their babies to remove the uvula from inside their mouths. ‘They say it improves their speech,’ Usama explained. ‘I was told there is a Yemeni tribe who do that as well. It’s similar to circumcision.’
Usama had retired, but for him retirement was a mission. ‘Traditionally, when people became my age, sixty-nine, they had the job of deciding who married whom,’ he said, implying that it was not a role for him. ‘Of course, they hardly ever became my age.’ Rather than play patriarch, he studied the flora and fauna of the desert. The Jordanian government had set aside 12,000 square kilometres for the Badia Research Project to document aspects of desert life. ‘I’m interested a bit in plants,’ he said, ‘for example, to find out how to grow black iris out of seed. I’ve developed a method for extracting the smell of some desert plants. Wait a minute.’ He left the room. I examined his books. Most were science, biology or chemistry, but there were also Arabic – English dictionaries, a book on Ottoman architecture, Tony Clifton’s God Cried, about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Jonathan Randal’s Going All the Way on Lebanon’s civil war, and a book of old photographs of Palestine, Before their Diaspora, edited by Usama’s brother Walid. I was looking at the last when Usama returned with a vial of black liquid that looked like molasses.
‘Put your finger in,’ he ordered, delighted to be teaching. ‘This is the essence of a desert plant, from near the Iraq – Syria border.’ In Arabic its name was shih. Usama leafed through a botanical index. ‘Here it is in English, it’s artemisia. Herba alba. It’s a kind of wormwood.’ My hand would smell of wormwood for a week.
Usama had become a calligrapher, not in the traditional Arabic fashion of ink on parchment, but in three dimensions. He took me to his workshop, a small room off the corridor. Here I saw the tools – arrayed in neat rows on the wall – with which he chiselled, scraped and sculpted Arabic letters into vibrant shapes in wood, iron and brass. A simple word like hua, he, looked like the statue of a man, its contours unconfined to the flat page. The most beautiful, as in traditional Arabic calligraphy, was Allah, God, whose image can never be painted or carved by a good Muslim, any more than a devout Jew can speak his name.
‘At about the age of forty,’ Usama said, ‘I decided that Arabs don’t know how to retire.’ Arab presidents and kings fitted the general pattern. ‘I went to Iraq al-Amir, where there is an old, eighth-century palace or fort. The Jordanians have crafts industries there. I went down to teach them how to make paper.’ He gave me some dark paper, thin but sturdy and as absorbent as an egg box.
I felt the paper and looked at Arabic words come to life. Why was Usama Khalidy content to leave the medical school to the next generation of instructors and to allow his daughters to choose their husbands and not to tyrannize his family or those exiled Jerusalem Muslims who might look to a Khalidy for leadership? What made tribal chiefs, family patriarchs, kings, policemen and dictators cling to power until death? What drove out or suppressed the most interesting, the most creative and the most original within the Arab family? Why did the Arab world fight against its best self?
Did Usama, who felt these questions in a more profound way than a visitor like myself, despair? He thought for a few seconds and said, ‘No.’ Why not? ‘We’re passing through a funny phase. At the same time, one has to remark that the Arabs are probably the world’s oldest living tradition. A child can read something written in Arabic fifteen hundred years ago and enjoy it. You cannot do that in English, for example. A child today cannot understand Chaucer and would have problems with Shakespeare. Our tradition is there. It has survived. It will survive. It’s getting much poorer, of course.’
Usama, amid his bottles of desert scent, his bold script statues, his library, his relics of old Jerusalem and his ancestral pictures, did not mention the West. He did not blame Britain and France for drawing lines all over the map that erased the harmony of the Jund and brought European Jews to displace him and put compliant dictators in charge of the oil that could, perhaps should, have propelled Arab civilization into the vanguard of intellectual and artistic discovery. The dictators kept the Arabs in servitude and, for the most part, misery. For this failure of leadership and of society, his gaze turned – not in anger at the United Nations or Great Britain or the United States – but in regret at the tribes.
‘Our main problem is education.’ He said that Arab education prepared the young only for examinations, the tawjihi. Pass the tawjihi, and you continue to university. Fail, and you stay in the village or the slum. The tawjihi system produced students who memorized set answers to set questions, not those who thought or questioned or looked at things in an original way. ‘Reforming the education system will help, but it needs a revolution. We take the best students. They have to study medicine or engineering. The worst go on to schools of education. Worse than that, they go to schools of theology. The worst are in charge of our brains, the best in charge of our muscles.’
In the 1930s and 1940s the Palestinians were led by the obstinate and self-destructive Haj Amin Husseini. Then came Yasser Arafat. Neither was known for intellect or wisdom. Had the leaders improved in half a century? ‘Not very much. The Palestinians deserve better leadership. The whole Arab world deserves better.’
Before I left him to the study of plants and the manufacture of words, I asked him about identity. Was he an Arab, a Palestinian, a Jordanian, a Muslim? The concoction of tribalism, faith and nationalism bedevilled Israelis and Palestinians alike. Who is a Jew? What is an Arab? Juwal Levy’s father had gone to court to take the word Jew off his identity card. Some Arabs believed in the Arab nation, divided into states that could never be nations. Some were Lebanese or Egyptians first, Arabs second or not at all.
‘Arabs don’t know the word huwiya,’ he said. Huwiya meant identity, and it was also the identity card that policemen in Israel and the Arab world demanded from Arabs. ‘It’s a very new word. We don’t think of identity. We think of loyalties. Unlike identity, which is exclusive, loyalties are multiple. You can be loyal to your family, your religion, your state and so on. It depends on the situation. If my child is sick, that is my first loyalty.’
When loyalties conflict, does identity dissolve?
‘You noticed after 1948, as the Arabs lost faith in Arabism, they ended up going to religion – either the religion of communism or real religion. It happened after ’48. It’s happening now.’ With communism dead, Islam remained.
Allegiance, loyalty, identity. Race, sect, tribe. The Zionists came to the right address. Every question the Zionists asked had its equivalent among the natives. Who is a Jew, a question debated in Israel’s civil and religious courts, translated as, who is an Arab? Was it blood or language or geography? There was no Platonic ideal of Arab or Jew, and everyone refined his identity: Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jew, Arab of the Mashrak, the East, or the Maghreb, the West in North Africa. There were Arabs in Syria who had no Arab blood of the tribes from the Arabian peninsula. In Russia, millions of Jews traced their ancestry to the Gentile Khazar people and not to any of ancient Israel’s Twelve Tribes. No one had found the Arab or the Jewish gene. Usama Khalidy believed only a racist would try.
A History Lesson
Kamal Salibi, whom I knew when he taught history at the American University of Beirut, had moved to Amman. Like most other Eastern Christians whose forebears had become Protestant, Salibi was de-tribalized. Protestant Arabs were the first to read the Bible in Arabic and take degrees from Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College. The most famous, and brilliant, of the Protestants’ offspring was Edward Said, who taught at Columbia in New York and wrote, among other books, Orientalism. The College became the American University, where I first met both Salibi and Said. During the Lebanese civil war, Salibi used to tell me the Palestinians were making the fatal error of becoming another Lebanese tribe.
He stayed to teach throughout the civil war, the Israeli invasion and the years of anarchy under West Beirut’s Muslim militias. Fanatic Shiite fundamentalists threatened him, and Christian friends were kidnapped. Already author of a history of Jordan, he had a friend in King Hussein’s brother, Prince Hassan. In 1997, when Lebanon was again at peace, then-Crown Prince Hassan invited him to head Jordan’s Inter-Faith Institute. Salibi had lived in Amman since then, although a few years later he would return to Beirut.
His new house was, he said, ‘near the Fifth Circle’. The city’s neighbourhoods were often named for the number of the nearest roundabout. Shepherd’s Hotel was near the First. Salibi’s modern flat did its best to recreate the Ottoman charm of his old Beirut apartment with Persian carpets and mother-of-pearl furniture. As in Beirut, he smoked cigarillos. Also as in Beirut, he offered me whisky. If Usama Khalidy’s house was Palestine, Salibi’s was old Beirut. If Usama had his doubts about Palestinian politicians, Salibi was ashamed of Lebanon’s. He condemned Lebanon for its mistreatment of the Palestinian refugees. From the time the PLO retreated in 1982, Palestinians had been massacred by Christian militias with Israeli support and by the Shiite Muslim Amal militia with Syrian connivance. The Lebanese government excluded them from most employment and denied them state-funded medical care. Lebanon’s establishment, Christian and Muslim, blamed the Palestinians, rather than themselves, for a war that lasted from 1975 to 1991. Salibi was angry that the Lebanese contrived more ways to punish the Palestinians, twenty years after they lost all power in Lebanon. ‘They are now making laws that any Palestinian refugee who owns a house or land in Lebanon cannot pass it on when he dies,’ Salibi said. ‘The bloody Lebanese parliament passed it almost unanimously.’
What should Lebanon do?
‘I think that, in Lebanon, the Palestinians ought to be acknowledged as Lebanese citizens with all social and political rights. Once they become Lebanese, they will do what all Lebanese do and emigrate.’ Lebanon had always refused to make the refugees, who had lived there since 1948, citizens. The only state that had granted citizenship to the refugees was Jordan. With almost 400,000 refugees registered with the United Nations, the Palestinians made up 10 per cent of Lebanon’s population. In Lebanon, Christians feared turning so many Muslims into citizens, and the Shiites resisted being outnumbered by the Sunnis. There were no Palestinian Shiites and not many Palestinian Christians in Lebanon.
‘The idea of Zionism is tribal,’ Salibi said. ‘The idea that something binds you together around the world, that it is more important than any other allegiance and you have to be all together in one place, this is tribal.’
Tribal or not, Israel was a fact. If most Arabs did not accept Israel’s moral right to displace most Palestinian Arabs and put others under military occupation, they recognized its strength. Salibi was one of the few people I knew in the Arab world who did not disparage the Palestinian leadership.
‘What surprises me,’ he said, ‘is the maturity of the Palestinian leadership. There is no more of that “throw the Jews into the sea” nonsense. They are asking to live only on what they have.’ They had the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barely 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine, and they were losing much of that to Israeli settlers. ‘Palestine since my infancy has been socially divided between effendis and peasants. The effendis always despised the peasants and still do. If they hate Arafat, it’s because he’s not from their class. I tell them Palestine is no longer yours. It belongs to those who fought or who tilled the soil. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.’
The 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had allowed the Palestinian leaders to return home and govern under the Israelis. Since then, Israel had doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. Salibi was one of the few who did not see the Oslo accords as a disaster.
‘What’s wrong with the Oslo agreement?’ he asked. ‘For the first time, it gave the Palestinians something.’ Having been to the West Bank and Gaza many times since the accord, I disagreed. Oslo had given the Israelis something: a Palestinian administration that policed the occupied territories while the settlers took more Palestinian land. Salibi believed Oslo was less the problem than Israeli refusal to implement all its provisions on schedule. ‘The Israelis are behaving like savages. They are going to be the losers in the end. They are going to have to accept a settlement, even if it means a Palestinian state on a few metres. It will puncture the Zionist balloon. Zionism is a package deal. It’s Eretz Israel, the Bible land, heritage. They want to get all the Jews from all the world and cram them there. The whole thing is a package deal conceived in a seminar room. The least puncture and the speed with which it will deflate will amaze you.’
He thought the Israelis were ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ over making peace with the Palestinians. The wiser course was to make peace. ‘The more generous they are, the better it is for them,’ Salibi concluded, even if it meant punching a hole in – or setting a limit to – Zionism’s dream.
Did he imagine that the Arabs would accept Israel? Not as a tactic, but as a long-term proposition?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The minute there is a settlement, you cannot imagine what will happen. The Arabs are very forgiving. Think of Lebanon. Twenty years of fighting and the minute the fighting stopped, East Beirut and Jounieh filled with Muslims. The Christians flocked to West Beirut. There were Eid al-Fitr tents in Jounieh.’ East Beirut and the seaside resort of Jounieh were Christian ghettoes, and Eid al-Fitr was the Muslim feast to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. ‘Arab society is very forgiving. Grudges are not borne for long – except by one family against another. The hatred does not last.’ Salibi was from Bhamdoun, a Christian village in the Shouf hills of Mount Lebanon. In 1983, when Israel withdrew its army from the Shouf, the Druze massacred Christians and sent most of them north in an act that Yugoslavia’s wars would later give the term ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘I don’t bear a grudge against the Druze,’ Salibi said. ‘People are going back.’ He thought that Europeans took longer to forget. ‘I was in England in the 1950s. The Dutch students refused to listen to German music.’ During the bloodiest days of Lebanon’s war, Christians swooned to the voice of a Muslim diva, Oum Kalsoum, and Muslims never lost their love of the Christian singer Feyrouz. But the end of the war did not end the Lebanese animosity to the Palestinians. What was Israel to make of that?
Salibi went on, ‘Jordan made peace with Israel. Not one Israeli visitor was hurt. Palestinian refugees over the age of fifty who had shops refused to sell to them, but everywhere else they were accepted. They object to their stealing – not to their being Israelis.’ The only people who objected in principle to Israel, he believed, were the Islamists. But in Jordan, unlike in Egypt, they did nothing to harm Israelis.
‘Listen,’ he urged me. ‘The Jordanian army is on cordial terms with the Israeli Defence Forces. The Palestinian Authority was the same. If there is an agreement, then the whole hatred of the West in the Arab world will vanish. Abracadabra!’
Abracadabra?
‘It’s originally an Aramaic word that means, “vanish like a word”. The wind will be out of the sails of the Islamic movement in the Arab world.’
I reminded him that, in Lebanon many years before, he had told me Syria would never make peace with Israel. Its existence and strength depended upon keeping Israel isolated from the rest of the region. He had told me to think of the map. With Israel excluded from the region, all east – west Arab trade had to pass through Syria. There was no other land route between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. If Israel were accepted, trucks could collect goods at Haifa port and drive them to Iraq and Saudi Arabia through Israel and Jordan. Pipelines and railways would leave Syria out. Acceptance of Israel would deny Syria its leverage and render it insignificant. Having an Israeli enemy also justified Syria’s military dictatorship and police repression, he had said then. Now he believed peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would change that. ‘Syria will lose her blackmail position. It will sign a deal only after the Palestine question closes and only then.’
Problems lingered, I said. I had imagined that, once Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizballah would end its war against Israeli occupation. Yet Hizballah fought on – for a small area called the Shaba Farms that Israel did not leave. Hizballah said it was Lebanese territory and Syria agreed. Years before, however, Damascus claimed Shaba was part of Syria.
‘Shaba is a small mountain town,’ he explained. ‘It’s Sunni Muslim. In 1967, Israel occupied that area when it took the Golan Heights.’ Until 2000, Syria had claimed Shaba for itself. ‘Israel pulled out of Lebanon to the last bit, because Syria and Iran told them to.’
The real battle was not at Shaba, a containable sideshow. The struggle for Israel, for Palestine, was under way in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Things have changed since 1948,’ Salibi said. ‘If there were a few shots then, many people fled. This time, the Israelis destroy whole cities and only a few people leave. They’ve been hardened. Israel is turning the Palestinians into lions. The Israelis don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know what they have done. They have, how many Sharons? Three or four? How many Palestinians will be suicide bombers?’
Kamal Salibi was born in 1928, when France was occupying Lebanon and Syria and the British held Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. His parents, his teachers and all the elders of Bhamdoun had been Ottoman subjects. The era of independence had done more to disrupt their lives by moving large numbers of people – Tolstoy’s definition of history – than had the Ottoman centuries. History was being made in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli settlers were moving in to force Palestinian Arabs out.
Salibi gave me some books to read, as he used to in Beirut. His houseboy went out to find me a taxi. That evening, he was having dinner at Usama Khalidy’s house. For them, Amman was a little like Beirut. In my taxi, between Salibi’s house and Shepherd’s, I looked at the vast hotels, Kentucky Fried Chicken shops and elegant stone houses. Amman was an unexciting city, but it had not surrendered to the vulgar brutality of Beirut and other Arab capitals. Houses had to be built of native stone, as in Jerusalem over the river. Streets were swept and washed. The cars were mostly new.
I dropped the books at the hotel and went for a walk. In the all-male cafés, men played cards and backgammon. There was no real souq, no central bazaar as in Istanbul or the other old Ottoman cities. Beirut’s souq had been a proud centre, until the civil war and the property developers reduced it to powder. Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Nicosia had kept their ancient marketplaces. Amman had never had a real souq, not having been a city since the days when the Romans called it Philadelphia. It had retained the culture and appearance of a large Arab – Circassian village in the Cotswolds, all quaint stone and ordered life. It was a town for driving in rather than walking. ‘In Jordan,’ Salibi had said, perhaps explaining his choice of Amman over Beirut, ‘they did not repudiate what the British taught them. If they build a road, it’s a good road. Look at the Pan-Arab Highway. The Jordanian part is beautiful. The bumps start in Syria.’ That much was true. But, as good as Jordan’s highways were, they were neither as vast nor as smooth as those next door in Iraq and in Israel.
Amman’s surrender to British and then to American culture made a kind of sense. Amman did not have much to cling to. Most of its people came from elsewhere. Its rulers were Hejazis from the Holy City of Mecca in what became Saudi Arabia. Their subjects had come there from other parts of Jordan, attracted by the royal court, administrative jobs, the army and business. Other Arabs had moved there from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to marry or to enjoy its relative political stability. Half the city had escaped there from Palestine in the cataclysms of 1948 and 1967, unwillingly driven from towns and villages to which they believed they – or their children or their children’s children – would return. It had no claim on their loyalty.
The Grand Vizier
Everyone told me to see Zayd Rifai, former prime minister, former ambassador and now chief of the Senate. ‘He’s a great raconteur,’ the Syrian-born artist Ali Jabari said. A young woman at the Foreign Ministry told me, ‘He’s brilliant. He’s well read. When I met him, I just listened.’ (The young woman, Raya Qadi, was so beautiful that when we met I just listened.) Prince Talal bin Mohammed, a first cousin of King Abdallah, said that Rifai was a champion story-teller whose stories were sometimes true. True or not, they were good.
The first thing I noticed about Rifai was not the dark suit, possibly from a tailor in Savile Row, or the cigar, from Havana, but the blue eyes. Everything else in his Senate office spoke of Arabia. We were served Bedouin coffee – boiled cardamom – from a brass pot by a man in immaculate robes and keffiyeh. There were Persian carpets and tribal décor, a ceremonial sword and photographs of Jordan’s four kings. Rifai had the tanned skin of the desert and looked like a shrewd Arab politician. But the eyes spoke of the Ottoman Empire, whose Turks, Circassians, Bosnians, Kurds and Chechens mingled with the tribes of Arabia and Syria. Rifai, it seemed, numbered Circassians and Turks among his ancestors.
‘The family is originally from the Hejaz,’ he said. ‘One of our grandfathers went to Iraq, where he created the Rifai school of thought in Iraq in the eleventh century.’ The Rifai school was a sect of Sufis, Muslim mystics. ‘A lot of followers of the sect took on the name. There are now about twenty million Rifais in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The family were civil servants in the Ottoman administration. They moved from one city to another. My grandfather was born in a village of southern Syria, in the Hauran. He met my grandmother in Marjayoun and married her. My father was born there.’ Marjayoun, a large town in south Lebanon, was mostly Greek Orthodox. The Israelis had made it their military headquarters and base for their mercenary South Lebanon army from 1978 to 2000.
‘My uncles were born in Tyre and Sidon,’ Rifai said. ‘My grandfather retired to Safad.’ Safad, a mixed Arab – Jewish city in the Galilee, was just south of Lebanon’s Marjayoun. ‘My father grew up in Safad, and he worked for the British Mandate administration in Palestine. He was seconded in 1921 to Transjordan to establish the new administration. I was born here in 1936.’
Rifai said his father, who had served as prime minister to Jordan’s first three kings, advised him to avoid politics. ‘He said I should choose engineering or medicine. He really wanted me to be a doctor.’ He became a diplomat instead. His education at the Bishop’s School in Amman and Victoria College in Egypt, where Edward Said would also study, was pure British colonial. Then he made the transition, as the Arab world would, from the British to the American system. He went to Harvard. Did he study medicine? ‘Political science,’ he said. ‘I graduated in 1956. Then I did international law and relations at Columbia. I still go back and give lectures.’
In 1956, King Hussein had dismissed the British general John Bagot Glubb – Glubb Pasha – as commander of the Arab Legion. Reacting to anti-colonial criticism from Nasser’s Egyptian press, the young king had to prove his Arab nationalist credentials by putting his armed forces under an Arab. I wondered whether Rifai had known Glubb Pasha.
‘He was a wonderful man,’ Rifai recalled. ‘He became more Jordanian Arab than British. A lot of injustice was done to him. My father had to tell Glubb to leave.’ His father found the duty distasteful. Glubb had given his professional life to Jordan within the context of his loyalty to the British Empire. I had known Glubb’s son, Fares, in Beirut in the early 1970s. Short and thin like his father, he looked like photographs of Glubb Pasha as a young man. Fares spoke flawless Bedouin Arabic, had converted to Islam and was close to the Marxists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1970 had attempted to destroy the Hashemite crown that his father had sworn to defend for thirty-five years.
‘I went as ambassador to London for a few months,’ Rifai remembered. ‘Glubb Pasha used to call on me. He always referred to King Hussein as His Majesty, or our lord – sayedna. He had contributed enormously to the establishment of the army, to administration and order in this society.’ The discipline, the starched uniforms and the army band’s bagpipes owed something to Glubb Pasha.
Back in Amman with his Harvard and Columbia degrees, Rifai went on to represent Jordan in Cairo, Beirut and London, as well as at the United Nations. In 1971, he started work in the royal palace. ‘I thought I’d have a change after all we had been through.’ What Jordan had been through included the June 1967 war, when Israel captured Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank from what had been Glubb Pasha’s army; the Arab – Israeli War of Attrition that followed; and the 1970 Black September war between Palestinian commandos and Jordan’s army.
‘The most dangerous time was the period after the ’67 war,’ Rifai said. ‘For Jordan, it wasn’t a six-day war. It was a four-year war. There was the battle of Karameh in 1968. There were daily bombardments and air raids by the Israelis. There was anarchy with the presence of Palestinian commandos. We had fifty-two commando organizations, including the Red Brigades, Baader – Meinhof and Carlos the Jackal. We had no idea they were all here until September 1970.’ He described a time of chaos, when Palestinian commandos briefly held the Western press corps hostage in the InterContinental Hotel.
‘The borders were open. We had Iraqi troops in the country. We had no idea the Palestinians were so well dug in. They planted land mines and had rocket-propelled grenades. They took control of this city. Our army was on the front lines with Israel. The Palestinian commandos put up checkpoints. They stole cars. They took donations to the cause by force. They kidnapped. They had their own newspapers. Remember their slogan, that they would liberate Jerusalem by liberating Amman. The army almost revolted. When soldiers came to spend weekends with their families in Amman, the commandos would kidnap, kill and mutilate them. Battalions in the Jordan Valley would hear what happened to fellow soldiers. The units would come up here on their own. I would go with His Majesty and Zayd Bin Shaker’ – Bin Shaker, King Hussein’s uncle, was the army commander – ‘to stop them. There was a decision by His Majesty. We waited and waited.’
On 15 September 1970, King Hussein appointed a military government to force the commandos out of Amman. The Jordanian parliament sent a delegation to ask Yasser Arafat to evacuate without a fight. Rifai’s version of Arafat’s reaction was, ‘He told them, “The situation has run out of my hands. The best I can do for you is to give King Hussein twenty-four hours to leave the country.” ’
Hussein stayed. After two weeks of intensive fighting, during which Jordan’s Bedouin troops massacred Palestinians and bombarded their camps, it was Arafat who left. Negotiations between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat in Cairo may have caused the heart attack that killed Gamal Abdel Nasser the night after the two Arab chiefs left. With Nasser’s death, Arab nationalism retreated and left the field to the steady advance of political Islam.
Did Arafat, who made several attempts on Hussein’s life, reconcile with the king? ‘Oh, yes,’ Rifai said. ‘They made up. Arafat often came here. He was received as a head of state. With politics in the Middle East, you can’t afford to have a long memory. You won’t be able to talk to anyone.’
After the war, Arafat’s commandos assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tel outside the Hilton Hotel in Cairo. Someone also tried to kill Rifai, when he was ambassador in London. ‘We were in a narrow road coming from Regent’s Park,’ he said. ‘The driver was making a right turn. They were standing on a little traffic island and started shooting point-blank. I was reading the paper. The car was a big Daimler. It was The Times, I remember. I was crouching like this.’ Rifai bent forward. ‘The first bullets hit my hand and ear. I reacted quickly. I threw myself to the floor. They found forty bullets, and the fire was concentrated on the back seat. A Scotland Yard inspector said he didn’t believe a canary would survive.’ Rifai blamed the clandestine arm of Yasser Arafat’s Al Fateh, Black September, for the attack.
The Jordanians responded in kind, assassinating PLO officials in their post-Amman headquarters, Beirut.
That evening, an old friend of Rifai’s met me for a drink. I told him the story about the attempt on his life. ‘Black September?’ the friend asked. ‘Maybe. We always thought they were London gangsters trying to collect gambling debts.’
Farewell to Amman
I saw old friends in Amman, among them Riad and Zein Khoury, Prince Talal and his beautiful Lebanese wife, Princess Ghida, and the children of both couples. All of them worried, not about Jordan, but about the neighbours. They hated the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and what it was doing to the Palestinians. They hated the economic embargo of Iraq on their eastern border and the cost in lives of Iraqi children. It was a rare Jordanian who had no relations or friends west of the River Jordan or east of the great desert in Iraq. They did not love Yasser Arafat, who they said was a useless leader, or Saddam Hussein, a vicious tyrant. The United States sustained the wretchedness of Palestinians and Iraqis. America paid for Israel’s illegal settlements on illegally occupied land, and America enforced the boycott that deprived Iraq’s children of medicines and treated water. It would soon invade Iraq, making life there even worse. Yet none of my Jordanian friends dared to suggest a public gesture – boycotting American goods, severing diplomatic relations or closing an American hotel – to affect Washington’s policies.
The bullet holes I saw on my first visit here in 1973 had been erased. Monster buildings had transformed the terrain of battle between the brave fedayeen and the hardy Bedouin into a zone of combat for market share, for the greater triumph of AT&T and Sheraton and for the acquisition of newer cars and cellphones. Amman sustained the dullness from which its Hashemite monarchs, the British and several wars had not redeemed it. Its sleepy hills, in which a few thousand Circassians had lived in their huts of rock, did not welcome disturbance. It was not a land of flooding rivers or icy precipices or earthquakes. Amman perched on gentle hills, and its inhabitants closed their doors on excitement. It had been the wrong stage for the Palestinians to enact their revolutionary drama. I did not linger in Amman.
The car journey from Amman to Jerusalem should take an hour and a half. But it does not take an hour and a half. It takes many hours. If you are a Palestinian, it can take for ever. For me, it was five hours in several taxis and one bus, most of that time absorbed, not on the highway observing the wildlife, but waiting at the border.
If I curse Britain and France, despite having lived in and loved them both, it is for these borders. Travelling from Beirut to Damascus, or Damascus to Amman, or Amman to Jerusalem – all simple trips along good roads with no insuperable natural obstacles – constituted an ordeal for all travellers. So mutually suspicious were the mini-states of Greater Syria that they mistreated all who entered or left. All showed Europeans and Americans less discourtesy, and the Jordanians were more polite to Israelis. The Syrians and Lebanese would not admit Israelis or anyone with an Israeli visa in his passport. Every border policeman – Israeli, Jordanian, Syrian or Lebanese – made a point of humiliating any Arab who came his way.
On the way to the River Jordan, the road sticks to the earth’s contours, flowing like water through the easiest downward passages. The Jordan Valley was the hot land, where the wool cloaks of mountain shepherds yielded to the peasant’s light cotton robe. Here were sandy wastes, lush meadows, small farms and greenhouses dressed in plastic sheets. In December 1917, when the British captured Jerusalem, Allenby’s forces fought to link their army near here with the Hashemites who were advancing north on a parallel march. But the linking was not to be. The British were repulsed by Turkish forces north of the town of Salt, and Lawrence was unable to take Ma’an in the east. In the event, each army made its separate way up to Damascus. By then, each understood that its interests and objectives diverged from the other’s. The Arabs, Lawrence knew, were fighting for independence in all of Greater Syria. The British planned to divide the land into European colonies with one corner, western Palestine, set aside as a reserve for Europe’s Jews. Palestine’s Arabs would be sacrificed to pay for European anti-Semitism. The Arabs reached Damascus, but Britain prevailed.
Signs indicated the Dead Sea to the south and, later, the King Hussein Bridge straight ahead. A little stand at the side of the road sold boxes of oranges, as on the pre-freeway California highways of my childhood. You could buy the oranges by the box or the kilo, or a man in a straw hat would slice them in two and squeeze them into a pint glass. Nearby, other farmers stacked celery stalks and lettuces on barrel tops to sell to the few passing drivers. We came to a village where I’d have romanticized the unchanging life of donkey carts, camels and its graceful mosque but for the neon and paint logos of the Arab Bank, Sharp, Coca-Cola, the Internet Café and the Green Saloon. At the largest and dustiest roundabout, a cement frame larger than a movie screen surrounded a portrait of the late King Hussein in Prince of Mecca garb: white robes and white keffiyeh, the keffiyeh held by a black egal tied around his head, the robes offset by a belt with a curved dagger in a golden sheath. It was not a poster. Someone had painted the fresco onto wet cement. King Hussein had not been dead long. A complicated man, he had saved his throne from overthrow by socialists, nationalists, communists, Palestinians and Muslim fundamentalists. Like a true Bedouin chief, he had never severed contact with his enemies – whether Nasserite, Israeli or Palestinian – and was wary of his friends – the other Arab monarchs and the Americans. He had outlived the dictators of Syria and Egypt, who had once sworn to replace all the Arab kingdoms with republics like their own. The republican dictators instead adopted regal succession, appointing their sons to replace them when they died. Could it have been otherwise? The Ram ad-Dar, the head of the household, did not leave the fate of the tribe to the masses, as if they could choose a leader with wisdom and strength to lead them. That decision was his, and the only one he could train to confront the world’s cunning and evil ways was his son.
Monarchy went against my beliefs. I knew about Jordan’s prisons. The best that could be said of them was that they were probably not as bad as those in Syria, Iraq, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. People were repressed, but less so than elsewhere in the region. Palestinians in Jordan had a difficult time, but no one stole their homes and threatened to expel them en masse as in Israel and the territories it occupied. No state official prevented them from taking jobs, as in Lebanon. They were not denied passports, as in Syria and Lebanon. The crown that Hussein had passed to his son left Jordan more peaceful than its neighbours.
Beyond the valley’s villages were the Bedouin tents, rows of them in white, beside white sheep and a tethered white donkey. About five miles short of the river was Jordan’s lazy border post. Within its walls, a triangular yard was bounded by an arrival hall, a departure hall and a café. A rusting bus waited in the middle to deliver the day’s last shipment of travellers to the other side. I made the mistake of walking into the departure building, whose offices were locked and whose windows for three different categories of traveller – Arab, Jordanian, non-Arab – were shut. A policeman in starched khaki guided me to the arrivals building. Since the intifadah began in September 2000, one room served both purposes. I filled in forms and a polite official stamped my passport. I paid the five Jordanian dinar departure tax and boarded the unlit bus with a driver and three other passengers: an old man in a white keffiyeh; his wife in a white scarf and a beautiful olive dress embroidered in scarlet eagles’ wings and pink rosebuds; and a younger man in a lightweight business suit. He called the old man ‘Haj’, a title of respect for someone who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Christians who had gone to Jerusalem were also called ‘Haj’.
At five o’clock, the driver pulled the door shut. After a few warm-ups, the engine started. As the bus turned to leave the post, we saw the last royal portrait, of the two kings, father and son, Hussein and Abdallah. A gold crown hovered in a fair blue sky above them, a trinity whose spirit might pass from head to head but was eternal in its protection of the people, of the family, of the tribe.
I was thinking of something Prince Talal had said to me the night before. Talal, like his uncle, the late king, and his first cousin, King Abdallah, had received his formal education abroad. His school was Harrow, and his undergraduate and graduate degrees were from Georgetown. He rode motorcycles and liked Western music. He was a crack shot and a good horseman. He said that Western politicians who met people like himself thought of them as ‘good Arabs’. I paraphrase what he said, because I did not write it down. It went something like this: ‘I dress like them. So they think I am not really an Arab. It’s like being an honorary white. But I am as much an Arab as any Bedouin who has never left the desert. And, if I have to choose, I choose to be an Arab.’
He had just told me that Jordan had arrested some of the Islamic fundamentalists of Osama bin Laden, who had tried to blow up a Jordanian phosphate plant. The Jordanians were passing information about threats to Americans in the US and the Middle East to Washington. They wanted to help, especially when the fanatics were as opposed to the Hashemite throne as to the American government. But they could not go all the way, as President George Bush demanded with his ‘You’re either with us or against us’ speech. Nor could Jordan support General Sharon’s self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’ that was a war on Palestinians under military occupation. Jordan could not, however much it disapproved of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, favour the sanctions that deprived Iraq’s people of medicine and of equipment for the restoration of sewage treatment and other basic services. To Talal, there were no good and no bad Arabs, measured on a scale of Americanization. There were good and bad people based on their humanity.
The sky in the king’s fresco was a clearer blue than the one towards which our bus rumbled across the deserted plain. We came to sets of metal gates and a long runway, as if we would fly into the darkening horizon over the River Jordan and into Canaan in our sweet chariot. This was no-man’s-land, the nether-world that separated each state of Greater Syria from the other. No one lived here. No one governed the tribal buffer. No farmers farmed, no livestock grazed and no trees cast shadows to obstruct the view from either side of the other. Concrete pillars – dragon’s teeth, in American military parlance – stood sentry at intervals of ten yards on both sides of the highway. I don’t know if the land was mined against infiltrators, but nothing grew out of that cement-powder soil. Two miles of protected desolation brought the bus at last to the ‘Police Security Directorship – Bridge Security’. Metal screamed on metal, as the ancient brakes of our border shuttle stopped us crashing into the gates. A Jordanian policeman boarded and collected vouchers that confirmed we had paid the departure tax. The driver slammed the doors, fired up the engine again and released the brake. We rolled past a sign, the last I would see in Jordan. It wished us all ‘Bon Voyage’.
The first Israeli fence was a little further. We stopped. We waited. We waited a long time. The old man sitting in front of me, who had been patient for a quarter of an hour, was the first to speak. ‘Why are we waiting?’ ‘Who knows?’ the driver answered. His daily route between the two border stations had accustomed him to waiting. This was his last trip of the day, and he would return empty. The old Haj repeated his question: ‘Why do they make us wait so long?’ The other passenger, the man in the suit, told him, ‘Be patient, Haj.’ The Haj looked at his wife, who smiled at him, and shrugged. The driver got out and opened all the luggage compartments for inspection by two Israeli soldiers. He drove on to a second gate, where a sign said, ‘Welcome to the Allenby Bridge Crossing Point’. We were still on the East Bank, waiting to cross a tiny suspension bridge that the Israelis, following the British, named for General Allenby and the Jordanians called the King Hussein Bridge.
Impatient, the driver took the bus up to the gate and said to a woman soldier inside the guard post, ‘This is the last bus.’ She told him to reverse to where he had been. He backed up to our original position twenty yards away, with the perilous grinding of old gears and brakes. The moment he stopped, the woman soldier waved to him to come forward again. At last, we were going through.
FOUR (#ulink_48ceeb8e-266b-5f1e-b5bf-79b0644db8e8)
Over Jordan (#ulink_48ceeb8e-266b-5f1e-b5bf-79b0644db8e8)
‘Palestine, formed and surrounded as it is, is a land of
tribes. That it can ever belong to one nation, even
though this were the Jews, is contrary to Nature
and Scripture.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
