The Haj - Leon Uris [14]
In order to temper the Arab thirst for nationalism, the British threw them a couple of bones. Faisal, the deposed King of Syria, was made a puppet King of Iraq, ruling under British direction.
As for their new colony of Trans-Jordan, the British reached down into the Hejaz once again and plucked up Abdullah, another of the sharif’s sons, and declared him Emir of Trans-Jordan. As Hashemites from the Arabian Peninsula, both Abdullah and Faisal were strangers in the lands they now ruled under British direction.
As for the Sharif of Mecca, who had envisioned himself ruler of a nation that stretched from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and included Iraq, Syria, Palestine, the Sinai, Lebanon, and the Arabian Peninsula ... he ended up with nothing and fled into exile when the conquering Saudi family ran him out of the Hejaz.
The British, who had lied to Arab, Jew, and their own French allies and who had created a phony kingdom in Trans-Jordan, now moved into the Palestine Mandate. Palestine had suffered terribly during the First World War. Twenty thousand in Jerusalem alone had died of hunger and disease. At first the freedom from Turkish corruption came like a breath of pure air under British administration. That was not to last.
The future of the mandate was spelled out early. A new force arose, the Heusseini Clan, an old and powerful Palestine family. They were led by Haj Amin al Heusseini, a Moslem fanatic. Riots broke out in the early 1920s against further Jewish immigration. So vile was the bigotry behind the riots and so obvious was Haj Amin’s attempt to take over Palestine that the British forced him to flee and sentenced him to fifteen years in absentia.
For Gideon Asch, a decorated British officer, a new era had come. The problems of protection had increased manyfold in the wake of the Arab riots. The Shomer were no longer of sufficient strength to control the situation. In Jerusalem a Jewish Agency governed its own population in Palestine and quietly went about the business of creating a defense force. Based on the principle that every settlement should be able to defend itself—the Haganah, a semilegal, semiunderground army emerged in the early 1920s.
Gideon was called up to Jerusalem and asked to take over the building of the Haganah force in the Valley of Ayalon. For three decades he had been a wanderer on horseback. Now was the time to settle. He agreed to the assignment and chose to join a new kibbutz as a permanent member. The kibbutz was to be called Shemesh, which meant ‘sun,’ for this was the place where Joshua had beseeched the Lord to make the sun stand still. Shemesh also means ‘Samson,’ the name of the ancient Jewish judge. Shemesh was to be located ten miles up the road from Ramle opposite an Arab village named Tabah.
Gideon Asch returned from his visit to Tabah to the spot where his three dozen people rushed to lay down a square perimeter of barbed wire before nightfall. They questioned him excitedly about his visit to the Arab village. He related his stormy meeting with the muktar named Ibrahim.
They’ll attack tonight,’ he said. ‘We’ve not time to get reinforcements. Dig in with all you have.’
5
1924
WHEN GIDEON ASCH MADE his departure from Tabah, the village flamed to life with a sense of exhilaration. This was an unexpected great moment. It was the core of being for an Arab man to prove his courage. A gift from Allah! Rifles of a dozen vintages and models came from hiding places. There were Boer War rifles and Turkish and German rifles from the world war. There were British Enfields and American Springfields. There were bandoliers of ammunition hidden in crates deep in the fields and orchards. Daggers were pulled from the cottage walls and polished until they glinted.
Throughout the day men from the outlying villages drifted into Tabah and made for the café, where the young muktar, Ibrahim, embraced them. Each held up his weapon with a quivering fist, declared his loyalty, and assured