The Haj - Leon Uris [38]
With the British tied down with riots and answering a false alarm, the target area of Tabah would be clear. Gideon worked slowly with Ibn Yussuf to ascertain the number of troops, map coordinates, times, and places. Kaukji would be using up to three hundred men, an enormous operation. The importance of Tabah’s demise was obviously the priority of the rebellion.
When Ibn Yussuf left, Wingate came out of the shadows and flopped on the hard wooden bedframe of a bygone monk. He stared long and blankly at the cob-webbed ceiling as Gideon looked through the slit of a window and watched Ibn Yussuf mount his donkey.
Whenever Wingate steeped himself in concentrated thought, he unconsciously withdrew a toothbrush from his trouser pocket and rubbed it softly over the hairs of his chest. He jerked himself to a sitting position suddenly. ‘How far do you trust that one?’
‘I understand what you’re trying to say, Wingate. They don’t all lie and cheat.’
‘Oh sure, they’ll do business with you for years, but when the crunch comes they’ll sell you for tuppence.’
‘But they sell their own people for tuppence, as well,’ Gideon said. ‘If we expect to remain in Palestine, we’re going to have to work out an accommodation.’
‘Ibn Yussuf and every last Arab is a total prisoner of his society. The Jews will eventually have to face up to what you’re dealing with here. The Arabs will never love you for what good you’ve brought them. They don’t know how to really love. But hate! Oh God, can they hate! And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you have jolted them from their delusions of grandeur and shown them for what they are—a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition ... except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep. You are dealing with a mad society and you’d better learn how to control it.’
‘It is so terribly against our nature,’ Gideon said sadly.
Wingate changed the subject abruptly. ‘The whole plan is too sophisticated for Kaukji,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ Gideon agreed. ‘I am tempted to alert your command.’
‘Didn’t you hear a damned word I said?’ Wingate shouted.
‘You’re not giving a pep talk to one of the boys in the Special Night Squad.’
‘I’m telling you that since you Jews returned to Palestine you’ve never stopped hiding in your stockades. Now that we have the independence to act, you’re becoming very tense. To hell with the British Army. Let them go chasing all over Judaea. Good Lord, man, can’t you smell the dirty hand of some British officer plotting this operation for Kaukji?’ He sprang to his feet and paced, stopped before Gideon, and pointed his toothbrush under Gideon’s nose. ‘Realize their thinking. Kaukji and this British officer ... they’re saying—are they not?—the Haganah won’t budge out of Shemesh Kibbutz. The Jews think solely in defensive terms. Once the area is cleared of British troops, there is nothing to stop the attack on Tabah. The Haganah won’t interfere. They’re positive, utterly, utterly positive of it.’
Gideon Asch was a man of fifty-three who still had the stamina to go tracking in the wilds with the youngest, hardest soldiers of the Jews. He had walked a lifetime through that labyrinth of the Arab mind, seeking accommodation, friendship, and peace. It had all eluded him. His first exhilaration with the Special Night Squads had been slowly overtaken by a sense of tragedy. The illusion of brotherhood with the Arabs was also overtaken by the reality that if the dream of Zion were to come to pass, the Jews must go on an offensive repugnant to their souls.
The cell became as quiet as though the bygone monk were meditating in it.
Gideon sighed ponderously. All right, they’d take the fight to the Arabs now because the Arabs would never stop persecuting them if they didn’t. But how long, how terribly long would it go on? And during that time would the basic decency of the Jewish people be corrupted along the way? The road seemed incurably endless,