The Haj - Leon Uris [8]
The Bedouin owed no taxes, paid no landlord, recognized no borders. The Arabian Peninsula, from which he sprang, had remained remote and beyond the grasp of the early conquests of Egypt and Rome. In the punishing desert a cruel culture evolved that matched the brutal dictates of nature. While the world of progress passed him by, the Bedouin survived largely by plundering the vulnerable. Strong sheiks with no more compassion than the blistering sun showed little mercy to the weak. A system of absolute social order emerged, so that each man had a specific place in the tribe into which he was locked from birth to death. The only way to rise was to destroy the man above and dominate the men below. The demands of survival left no room for convocations of Bedouin to debate democratic principles, for the law of the desert was absolute.
The Bedouin was thief, assassin, and raider, and hard labor was immoral. Despite his raggedness and destitution, the Bedouin remained the Arab ideal, for he was the man with stars for a roof. The city Arab was considered of a lower order and the fellah who tilled the soil in the villages was the lowest of them all.
It was small wonder that when a strong sheik of the Soukori clan moved to the Village of Tabah, a fifty-year feud with the main Wahhabi tribe ensued. After five decades of intermittent bloodshed, the rift healed when other clans of the Wahhabi moved into Ayalon villages, opting for a less nomadic existence. If the scars of desert feuds never entirely heal, they were made more palatable by intertribal marriages and periodic reuniting to fight the threat of another tribe or the infidel.
The sheiks of the Soukori clan had succeeded one another as the muktars of Tabah for well over a hundred years.
1924
NO SOONER HAD IBRAHIM ensconced himself at the café for the daily ritual of holding court, than his brother Farouk came in screaming.
‘The Jews are coming!’ he cried.
In a moment the village street was flooded with running, chattering people who all followed Ibrahim up to the high point of the knoll, from which they could look down the highway.
Ibrahim was handed a pair of field glasses belonging to one of the villagers who had fought in the Turkish Army. What he saw on the road was a line of huge flatbed trucks filled with materials such as barbed wire, shovels, fence posts, sacks of dried foods, and farming equipment. He had Farouk count them. There were twenty men and six women. The men were dressed in the blue of Jewish collective farmers. The women’s legs were naked to the thighs, a disgusting sight.
Another dozen men, whom Ibrahim had seen roaming through on occasion, were with them. These were on horseback and had rifles and crossed bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders. They wore pale green uniforms, but several had Arab headdresses. Ibrahim knew them to be Shomer, the Jewish watchmen.
Then the convoy turned off the highway away from Tabah into an area that was swamp and marshland. One of the Jews had a megaphone and directed the others. In moments Jews with surveying instruments were staking out a square on some of the drier land. They were obviously in haste to lay out a defense perimeter of barbed wire.
Ibrahim handed the field glasses to Farouk and walked away. ‘Have the elders come to the café,’ he said softly. In a matter of moments they had been gleaned from the fields and their places of rest.
‘What do you think it means?’
‘What do you see? That’s what it means, you fool. The Jews are intending to build a settlement across the road.’
‘In the swamp?’
‘But it is worthless land, Ibrahim.’
‘Do you think they have purchased the land?’
‘Yes,’ Ibrahim answered, ‘they always do everything legally. But if we do not stop them here, there won’t be an Arab village left in this valley. Effendi Kabir will sell them everything. We must give them a reception tonight.’
There was unanimous agreement. A young boy pushed his way through the wall of gathered villagers and made his way excitedly to the muktar’s