The Haj - Leon Uris [77]
When he had pondered the question fully, my father reached a decision. He told me one night that the genocide had really taken place. ‘Now we Moslems will have to pay for the sins of the Christians. The Christians are very guilty about their behavior, even the Allies, who kept the secret. They want to wash their hands of their sins and they will do so by dumping the survivors in an Arab land. It is a black day for us, Ishmael.’
I didn’t think it was a black day because I didn’t quite understand him. I had planned the day very carefully. I ‘discovered’ two new parcels of land not paying rents and I had read very well in both English and Arabic. Despite his bad mood, I decided to confront him.
‘Father,’ I said, ‘my backside grows very sore on the bench while I am reading to you. I would like to sit in the other big chair.’
Well, he knew what was up. None of my brothers and certainly no women were allowed the privilege of that second chair, which had been reserved for honored guests. What I had asked of him had far-reaching implications. He thought about it for what seemed like an hour.
‘Very well, Ishmael,’ he said at last, ‘you may sit next to me, but only when you read.’
2
GIDEON ASCH’S WAR ENDED abruptly with the British conquest of Iraq. He had lost his left hand in an Iraqi prison after trying to defend the Baghdad ghetto. He was bitter because British troops had reached the scene of the Arab massacre and did nothing to stop it, nor anything to investigate it afterward.
Gideon scarcely had time to recover from one war before he was plunged into another: a dark war of illegal immigrant runners, underground fighting, political struggle, arms smuggling. A war of polished conference tables and clandestine meetings in dark seamy harbor-side hotels.
Gideon was made an aide without portfolio to David Ben-Gurion, who headed the Jewish Agency of Palestine, their quasi-government. He was to be involved in many kinds of operations in many places at many times.
Gideon’s first task was to attempt to capitalize on the contribution Palestine’s Jews had made during the war. Upward of thirty-five thousand men and women had worn the British uniform and by the war’s end had carried their own banner into battle in Italy.
He quickly tried to point out that the overwhelming majority of the Arab nations had not lifted a finger on behalf of the Allied victory and had no right to scream for the political spoils. It was the Jews who had fought the Nazis without reservation.
Gideon was a native Palestinian who was more at home in a Bedouin tent than in a Left Bank café. Christian Europe was sometimes a distant notion. He greeted the news of the Holocaust with disbelief at first, then sank into a terrible depression.
The stench of the human slaughterhouses permeated Europe as the lid was lifted on the cesspools of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen and Majdanek and Treblinka and dozens of other death camps.
Europeans were civilized, Gideon had always been taught. Christians were certainly nowhere as cruel as Arabs and Moslems. For Gideon and the rest of the Jews, the illusion had been shattered. What an advanced, civilized Western culture had done to an innocent, defenseless people was without precedent in human annals.
A pitiful handful of survivors, a few hundred thousand out of over six million, climbed out of man’s foulest pit. Even as the victorious Allied captains and kings and their armies departed the fields of battle, the gates of mercy were slammed in the faces of the living-dead remnants of European Jewry. In their ranks had been thousands of great and near great and noble names who had made an incredible contribution to the world; a race of people that had done as much for the betterment of the human race as any people of their size.
There was little time to