The Haj - Leon Uris [7]
And Richard the Lion-Heart encamped here before his disastrous march to Jerusalem that ended his Crusade in a shambles.
The knoll of Tabah witnessed the British legions fighting their way to Jerusalem in the First World War.
Between those times, millions of pairs of feet of devout Jews, Christians, and Moslems passed here on their pilgrimage. Insofar as the pageant of history goes, the Village of Tabah rested on a hill that was.
The most recent of the captains of conquest were the Ottomans, who stormed out of Turkey to devour the Middle East in the sixteenth century and drew a curtain of darkness over the region for four hundred years.
Under the Ottomans, the Holy Land lay gasping, the rocks of her fields protruding like the baked bones of a monolithic mastodon, or from mucky, diseased swamp. As a minor backwater district of the Syrian province, Palestine had been devalued to bastardy and orphanhood. It had no status except dim echoes of its past. And Jerusalem, wrote the travelers of the day, was reduced to sackcloth and ashes.
Total cruelty, total corruption, and pernicious feudalism spelled out the infamous rule of the Turks. A few influential Palestinian Arab families did the dirty business for the Ottomans. One of these was the Kabir family, which was rewarded for its collaboration by large land grants in the Palestine district. One of its holdings covered a good part of the Valley of Ayalon.
In the eighteenth century the Kabirs took over several farming villages and peopled them with illiterate, impoverished, land-hungry Arab peasants, then proceeded to suck them dry. Tabah was the central village, with smaller ones scattered about the valley. The Kabirs had long abandoned permanent residence in the desolation of Palestine for Damascus, from which the Syrian province was governed. As landed gentry, they wintered in Spain and summered in London. They were known at the roulette tables of Europe and were frequent guests of the sultans of Istanbul.
Neither the Ottomans nor the Kabirs put anything into the land for centuries. Neither schools nor roads, neither hospitals nor new farming methods. Under the burden of a classic serf-landowner formulation, revenues began to dry up as villages collapsed in defeat. The stone-poor fellahin who worked the land were fleeced by day by the Turks, marauded by the Bedouin by night, and cheated by owners.
By 1800 the Kabir holdings in the Valley of Ayalon were severely in trouble. Villagers were constantly fleeing their own birth-to-death debts and the debts of their fathers. Drought, pestilence, and disease added to a misery that had brought the entire Holy Land to the brink of collapse.
Tabah had been a particular feasting ground for the Bedouin. The principal raiders were of the Wahhabis, who roamed away from their normal pasturages and fields around Gaza. They came in at the harvest time, looted the fields, prowled the snake road, the Bab el Wad, and robbed the pilgrims.
The Kabir family determined that the Soukori clan, of the Wahhabis, were the chief offenders. Around 1800 the head of the Kabir family sought out the sheik of the Soukori Bedouin and made him an offer that would change his stature from privation to position. If the Soukoris agreed to occupy Tabah, their sheik would become the land agent for all the Kabir properties in the valley. It was a none too subtle bribe that would supply the human fodder to work the land. A strong sheik could keep his people in place and assure the Kabirs their rents. Moreover, it would ensure that no further Bedouin raids would terrorize the valley.
The offer brought a major disruption to the Wahhabi tribe. For a clan of Bedouin to give up their nomadic ways was akin to giving up their freedom. The Bedouin had always considered himself the elite of the Arabs, the true Arab. The Bedouin had been the original driving force behind Islam, for it was their men who had filled the ranks of Mohammed