Exodus - Leon Uris [153]
“Well, Ari. How was your trip?”
“Fine.”
“I’ll unload the flour. You had better go right in and see your mother. She was worried for some reason or the other.”
By 1930 the riots had died down. Abu Yesha and Yad El stayed out of trouble altogether. The majority of villages out of the Mufti’s sphere of influence did not participate in the disturbances.
Ari Ben Canaan was not only built like his father but acted very like him too. He was deep within himself and he had Barak’s quiet, stubborn ways. He saw the value of learning about his Arab neighbors. Taha was always one of his closest friends and he treated all other Arabs with understanding and compassion.
Ari fell in love with a girl named Dafna whose family had a farm half a mile away. No one was quite sure when it had happened but everyone was quite sure that Ari and Dafna would marry someday, for they had eyes only for each other.
Little redheaded Jordana was a spirited and rebellious girl. In many ways Jordana typified the children being born to the settlers of Palestine. Their parents who had lived in ghettos and had known the fear and degradation of being Jews were determined to purge this horror from the new generation. They bent over backward to give the children freedom and to make them strong.
At the age of fifteen Ari was a member of Haganah, the secret Army of Self-Defense. At the age of thirteen, Dafina could handle half a dozen weapons. For if this was a new generation and a new type of Jew it was also a generation born with a mission even greater than the missions of the Second and Third Aliyah.
The Haganah had grown strong enough to be a restraining force on the Mufti-inspired disturbances, but they were unable to erase the cause of these riots—only the British could do that.
Again British commissions of inquiry came and again the Arabs were whitewashed!
British timidity caused the Mufti to grow bolder.
Shortly after the riots abated, Haj Amin el Husseini called a conference of Moslem leaders to Jerusalem. They arrived from all over the world. He formed a federation, with himself as head, and advertised his fight to save Islam from the British and Jews.
The early friendships, the fact that the Jews had raised the standard of living of the entire Arab community, and the fact that Palestine had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until the Jews rebuilt it was all forgotten in the face of the Mufti’s tirades. The destruction of the Jewish homeland was made a “holy” mission of Pan-Arabism.
The British were subjected to the next tirade. They had lied about granting independence to the Arabs. They supported the Jews against Arabs. And as the Arab demagogues ranted and raged the British took it all in silence.
In the year of 1933 another great calamity befell the Jews as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler moved first against the Jewish “professional” people. The wiser ones among them left Germany immediately and many sought sanctuary in Palestine.
Once again the need for a national home and for Zionism were confirmed. Jew baiting could flare up in any part of the world at any time. Herzl had known it and every Jew knew it.
The German Jews who fled Hitler were different from the ghetto and eastern European Jews. They were not devout Zionists but had largely been assimilated into German society. They were not pioneers and merchants but doctors and lawyers and scientists and artisans.
In 1933 the Arab leaders called a general strike of all Arabs to protest the new Jewish immigration. There was an attempt to stir up more rioting. But both efforts failed. Most Arabs who had done business with the Jews continued to do so for they were economically dependent on one another and many communities like Yad El and Abu Yesha lived in close harmony with each other. Furthermore, the Haganah stood ready to halt a repetition of the 1929 disturbances.
The British solution to the general strike was more talk and more commissions of inquiry. In outright appeasement of the Arab threats the British