The Haj - Leon Uris [184]
Abdullah’s agents and supporters infiltrated West Bank towns and refugee camps, coercing, bribing, and promising political payoffs to those who joined his cause.
The refugee camps on the Jordan side, spaced like satellites around Amman, easily fell under his control. He removed opposition from these camps by quiet imprisonments and assassinations.
On the West Bank he initiated numerous conferences and smaller meetings to fortify his position. At last he felt strong enough to unify Jordan with the West Bank and called for a great convention in Amman for the unstated purpose of offering him the crown of Greater Palestine, the first giant step on the way to Greater Syria.
My father watched these maneuverings carefully. He attended meetings, large and small, remaining low-key. He was in constant communication with Professor Doctor Nuri Mudhil. When the great Amman Conference was called, he knew he had to attend and put his beliefs on the line, even though it targeted him for imprisonment or death.
7
Early 1950
THE ROMANS CALLED IT Philadelphia. Amman, capital of the biblical Ammonites, was that place where David the King sent his captain, Uriah, to certain death in battle in order to steal the man’s wife, the magnificent Bath-sheba. Like ancient Sodom, Amman had a reputation for unabashed hedonism and evil ways that made it incur the wrath of the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. Their forecasts of Amman’s destruction were only partly fulfilled. Amman was never destroyed. It simply was never anything. It just lay there, stretched out on the proverbial seven hills, a forgotten way station along the King’s Highway, the trading route between the Red Sea and Damascus. It stayed thus, weary under the sun, for nearly two thousand years, with little inkling of the world beyond.
Then came Abdullah and his ambitions and the British unifying of the Bedouin into the Arab Legion. Amman lifted its windy, dust-encrusted head and went from being the capital of nothing to a new center of Arab intrigue.
Can you imagine how thrilled and honored I was when my father told me that I was to accompany him to the Great Democratic Unity Conference in Amman! The Arab world seems to gallop from conference to conference, but I had never been to one, much less a democratic conference.
For weeks Aqbat Jabar and the four other camps around Jericho were ablaze with lively discussion.
Jordanian agents inundated us with literature and persuasion. There were to be over a thousand delegates, half from the West bank and half from among the Palestinians now living in Jordan.
If one could count, one could see that Abdullah had 50 percent of the conference locked up before he even began seeking out delegates in the West Bank. Those affluent Palestinians living in Amman and the others living in some fifty camps over the river were in Abdullah’s pocket, and no one had any doubt about how they would vote.
Every day new delegates were announced from among the West Bank mayors, muktars, sheiks, clergy, and prominent Palestinians. These, too, were overwhelmingly Abdullah’s people. A carefully screened, small, and controllable opposition was permitted, to ‘prove’ to the world that the conference was to be democratic to the core.
Haj Ibrahim was among the opposition and set out to attend with a block of delegates from Aqbat Jabar and the other camps around Jericho. Although these compounds held over fifty thousand people, they were assigned a paltry twenty delegates.
Nonetheless, the scramble for seats was voracious. At first there was an attempt to hold elections, but no one knew how to conduct one or trusted that system. Selection of delegates came down to a traditional power struggle, with the strongest tribal leaders and those able to make the best alliances gaining the seats.