The Haj - Leon Uris [170]
Haj Ibrahim, with his constituency of several thousand ‘strays,’ had become one of the leaders in Aqbat Jabar. He and four or five of the other old muktars tried desperately to instill some semblance of dignity into our people.
We had artisans among us. We had woodworkers, copper workers, shoemakers, cloth weavers. We had a few teachers and merchants. Yet we did nothing. We did not plant a tree. We did not plant a flower. We did not open a school. We did not police ourselves. We did not seek land to farm. We made no attempt to create industry. We did not even collect and remove our own garbage.
We rotted and complained. We blamed the Jews. We became overpowered with self-pity. We waited for a guilty world, which we thought owed us everything, to come and save us, for we were incapable of saving ourselves.
My father sat in meeting after meeting most of the days and half of the nights. Every attempt he and his few allies made to organize the camp and govern it responsibly broke down into heated fights over tribal rights. The main argument was that if we did something for ourselves the Jews and the world outside would mistake it as believing that we accepted the exile. So long as we did nothing, we could continue to weep to the world and the Arab leaders could continue to harangue the Jewish state.
Ibrahim came into our hovel a hundred times, cursing and filled with despair over our lethargy and lack of dignity. When some camps were moved close to the border, he realized it had been done so the displaced could look over to their stolen land day and night and build a storehouse of hatred.
One evening after a particularly bitter meeting with the other sheiks and muktars, Father and I walked together near the foot of Mount Temptation, where we could look down on the crush of mud hovels.
‘Ishmael,’ he whispered, ‘we are betrayed. We are prisoners in our own land. Deliberately created prisoners. Do you know who will eventually take over these camps? The strongest assassins. Allah only knows what kind of a breed we are creating here and Allah only knows what kind of disasters they are going to lead us to. Our hatred for the Jews will blind us to any attempt to become decent human beings again.’
He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Ishmael, you and I will go into Jericho every day. We will listen and we will look. Somewhere in that town, someone is in contact with the Jews and knows how to reach Gideon. Let us see if there is some way I can deal with the Jews and return to Tabah. Or else we will be left to die in this horrible place.’
2
JERICHO, I HAVE LEARNED, is as old as any city in the world—nearly ten thousand years. The walled city itself dates back almost nine thousand years. Jericho was almost always an Arab city. In those ancient days, we were called Canaanites. The entire land of Canaan was stolen from us for the first time when Joshua conquered it over three thousand years ago.
I am grateful that Mohammed and the Koran corrected all the early misinformation the Jews gave about Jericho when they wrote their so-called Bible, a proven forgery. King David, whom the Jews turned on because they did not believe him, wrote his famous ‘Psalm 23’ about the Wadi of Jericho, calling it ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ David became a Moslem saint and prophet. With the gift of prophecy, he must have had visions of Aqbat Jabar and the other camps around Jericho and that’s why he called it by such a name.
Mark Antony gave Jericho to Cleopatra as a present. Jesus knew the area well, for he wandered around in the nearby wilderness. He also walked in the very streets of Jericho, where he gave a blind beggar his sight back.
Herod, a pure Arab king who ruled the Jews, had a weekend palace and hot pools in Jericho where he drowned several relatives who threatened his throne.
It was a very famous town,