The Haj - Leon Uris [169]
Now came our real problem. Most of the displaced were people who had fled together in a body—an entire village or tribe or clan. The most desirable ground at Aqbat Jabar was that closest to Jericho. Since there was no authority, a territorial argument raged. The larger groups with the most men had the strength to claim the best areas. We were a small family, cut off from our clans. Allah willing, they were someplace in Lebanon. There were other ‘stray’ families similar to ours and Haj Ibrahim quickly went about locating them and banding them together under his leadership. My father’s personal stature drew in several hundred families. They had known of him as the Muktar of Tabah and now his legend grew as our flight to the cave at Qumran became known. He staked a claim on behalf of his new followers. Our area was called Tabah, just as the other tribes named their sections for their former villages.
At first we tried to build mud-brick dwellings, but the rains did not give the chance for them to dry out properly and each time it rained our hovels were melted. We went under canvas.
Haj Ibrahim slept in one tent with Hagar and Ramiza. The other six-man tent was divided into three parts by cloth curtains. Omar, Jamil, Sabri, and I had one section; Fatima, Kamal, and their daughter had the second; and Nada had a tiny space to herself. When all the mats were laid down at night, there was no room to walk, except over the top of one another.
The Bedouin tent is made of animal skins and furs and can withstand the fiercest weather. Our tents were from Italy and of thin canvas, unfit for their task. They leaked so badly we might as well have been in the middle of a running wadi bed. When the rains ceased, dust storms riddled them like shotgun pellets and, with summer, the sun rotted out what was left.
In that first year, no one escaped severe dysentery. Cholera and typhoid swathed through Aqbat Jabar like the ghost of death wielding his scythe. Many children went up to Allah, including Kamal and Fatima’s little girl, who died of the cough. There was only one doctor from Jericho and one who had fled from Jaffa, along with a half-dozen nurses, to cope with the epidemics. They had to contend with over fifty thousand people in the five camps around the town. There was some vaccine but not nearly enough for all of us and it came down to the strongest clans and those offering the largest bribes who received inoculations.
When summer came, the heat dominated all other miseries. It was rarely under ninety degrees and often soared close to one hundred and thirty when the hamsin winds blew in from the desert. If one counted the flies in Aqbat Jabar, we had a population of billions. Open sores and open sewers were their meat of life, making a misery matched only by huge bloodthirsty mosquitoes. We constructed a mud-brick hovel that afforded us a bit more space than the tents, but no one had an iota of privacy. Not a tree grew at Aqbat Jabar and the only playgrounds were the wide paths of sewage that ran through the camp down to the Dead Sea.
Many visions of hell have been written about in the Koran. If they were all put together, surely hell would have resembled Aqbat Jabar.
What shattered me was the way most of the people reacted to this hell. We were told that, as good Moslems, we must accept our fate as Allah’s will. The lack of desire to do anything about our own plight made Aqbat Jabar a camp of the living dead. My father had led, my father had fought, my father had pride. By Allah’s holy name, most of us were simply dogs.
Oh, they complained all right. From morning to night, there was little spoken of except the injustice of the exile and a foggy notion of the return—and talk of the return was filled with childish fantasy. The war was done and we learned that conditions in the camps around Amman were no better than at Aqbat Jabar. Little help came to us from the outside and what did come rarely originated in Arab countries.
It was the realization of a nightmare. The most horrible aspect