The Haj - Leon Uris [200]
‘Death to our brothers!’
‘I am not through, because we still must speak about the worst of the lot. We live in paradise by comparison to the camps in the Gaza Strip under the control of the almighty Egyptians. Do you know what it is like for a refugee to get a travel permit from Gaza to Egypt? First you must bribe a half-dozen officials for papers. Then, at the border, you must pay exorbitant customs duties or leave all your belongings to the Egyptians. Our boys have been pulled out of the camps in the middle of the night and forced to serve in the Egyptian Army, trained in abominable conditions and thrown into battle totally unprepared. We cannot even imagine the number of our people who have been pushed into prisons and tortured to death. Each day there are over a hundred new deaths from tuberculosis and dysentery and typhoid and cholera. When we tried to organize in Gaza, what happened? The Mufti of Jerusalem, under Egyptian orders, sent in his assassins. When a man is jailed, his wife and daughters and sisters and his mother can expect a visit from Egyptian soldiers who will rape and desecrate them!’
‘Charles Maan lies!’
‘Death to Charles Maan!’
The seats, barely bolted in place, were being ripped up and hurled toward the stage. ‘Aha! Here come Abdullah’s dogs, right on cue!’
The Avenging Leopards closed in with homemade batons coming from under their clothing, but pandemonium had been created and there was the start of a mass charge for the exits.
At that moment, my father, the immortal Haj Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi, pulled Charles Maan away from the rostrum, stepped up to it, took out a huge pistol, and fired into the air right before the microphone. It sounded like no fewer than a dozen cannons erupting, and the echoes off the stone walls all but shattered our ears. Everyone dived for cover, cowering.
‘Kindly remove the traitors and we shall go on,’ he said in a calming voice. His orders were not carried out until he fired several more times. ‘Please, my brothers, we are not finished with our work. This is a democratic convention. You will return to your seats.’ The final pistol shot sent everyone scurrying back to his place and order was restored.
‘We have sinned!’ my father cried. ‘After fourteen centuries of hatred we finally deliberately and with calculation and arrogance picked a war we thought we could not lose. We did not defend our land!
‘... None of us have been exactly blinded by the bright sunlight of hospitality from the Arab leaders, and that goes double for our own Palestinian brothers on the West Bank.
‘Kaif,’ my father said, changing this tone to softness. ‘It is a word of profound significance to us. It means do nothing, say nothing, think nothing. We deceive ourselves by saying the kaif is the perfect form of patience, but in truth kaif is a philosophy of deliberate idleness, of being half-awake without leaving the world of private fantasy. We go into kaif, a state of semiconsciousness, to alleviate the reality of our suffering. We are men locked in boxes inside our own minds. Here the keys are being placed before you. We failed in our other test in the war—but dare we fail again? It has been said that it is not necessary to instruct our children, for life will teach them. Can you see what life is teaching our children?’
Haj Ibrahim had captured silence and held it in his hands. I had never heard him speak like this. It must have come from many hundreds of hours of meditation, and the audience looked up to the stage as though they were listening to a prophet.
‘In our dream world we