The Haj - Leon Uris [239]
I watched the Haj become despondent as his meetings grew uglier in tone.
‘No, Ibrahim,’ his sheiks cried, ‘we will not draw a drop of water from the Jordan River, for that means making an agreement with the Jews. We will die of thirst before we share it with them.’
‘Listen, Haj. If we build factories in Jericho, will the Jews not get a message that we have accepted our exile?’
When UNRWA’s beautification plan to plant trees and gardens, build playgrounds, and install streetlights was under way, they were all ripped up by angry mobs.
‘Death to UNRWA!’
‘Death to the agents of imperialism!’
THE RATION CARD, THE ALMIGHTY PRECIOUS RATION CARD!
Cheating UNRWA became a way of life. When a child was born, the mother registered the infant for a ration card. The next day another female from the same family would register the same baby and was issued a second card. Babies in a given clan were often registered under a half-dozen names.
No one with income reported it. Deaths were never reported, in order to keep the ration card valid. Any family able to leave Aqbat Jabar kept an address in the camp and the ration cards that went with it. Bedouin who drifted home to their borderless world kept their addresses and drifted back to collect rations every month.
Some had hit it rich through racketeering and now lived in East Jerusalem and Nablus. They came to the camp, often in new automobiles, to collect their rations.
Impoverished peasants in Jordan and on the West Bank squeezed into the camps and claimed to be refugees. A raging black market came into existence for surplus ration cards.
When building materials were offered to improve our hovels, few bothered to claim them. ‘We don’t want to let the Jews think we are building permanent homes.’
Conversely, the new wealthy among the black marketeers erected small villas right in the middle of Aqbat Jabar’s squalor.
The refugee numbers game exploded. In the beginning of the war it was established that a half-million Arabs had fled their homes. Their numbers had been inflated to over a million and were still growing. An accurate census became impossible as Arab administrators in the UNRWA turned a blind eye to the abuses.
I do not know the exact moment or what triggered the most violent wave of demonstrations, but what does it matter. We were always a short spark away from a riot. Most of the riots were initiated in the schools. The teachers had become more important than our parents and completely controlled the children’s minds. The target was usually the UNRWA headquarters, and once a demonstration got under way there was no telling how it might end.
The ‘plight’ and the ‘day of the disaster’ and the ‘exile’ were always suitable reasons to demonstrate. The rest of it was fear, fear of ration cuts, fear of epidemic, fear when the water tankers were late. If a clinic shortened its hours because of a lack of personnel, a demonstration soon followed.
On the night the rioters set fire to a clinic, Haj Ibrahim was denounced as a tool of the Zionists. The clinic had been burned because an emergency shipment of vaccine had been accepted from Israel to stem an outbreak of cholera.
The next day we went to Per Olsen, who was barricaded, and under the protection of the Arab Legion. His letter of resignation sat on his desk.
‘It is over, Haj. The Jericho Project is officially dead,’ he said.
‘If you want the riots to stop,’ my father said, ‘just start pulling ration cards. It will stop.’
‘I cannot keep track of all the games being played here,’ Olsen said shakily and angrily. ‘It is beyond human reason or any man’s ability to bear. I am leaving.’
‘I am sorry for what you must think of us, Per. You will condemn us, won’t you?’
‘No, my friend, that is not the way the system works. UNRWA does not want any wrenches thrown into its machinery.