The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East Charles Glass A powerful and insightful narrative of a journey – once violently interrupted and here resumed – through one of the most compelling regions on earth.From Aqaba to Jerusalem and on into Palestine, veteran commentator on the Middle East, Charles Glass writes a thoughtful, inquisitive and dispassionate book on the politics and peoples of the region. He has traversed the Jordanian desert to the Iraqi border with Bedouin guides, explored modern Israel and revisited the scene of his captivity, confronting the men who kidnapped him.Written with elegance, flair and a wonderfully acute eye for the idiosyncrasies of the places through which he passes, this is a travel book full of enemies and friends both old and new: Arabs and Jews, soldiers and shopkeepers, Syrians and Israelis, the cowed and the vengeful, affording us an unprecedented and intimate portrait of these bruised and troubled lands. CHARLES GLASS The Tribes Triumphant RETURN JOURNEY TO THE MIDDLE EAST ‘When the government is unable to provide for their safety, they will band themselves into tribes.’ SIR JOHN BAGOT GLUBB, Britain and the Arabs: A Study of Fifty Years, 1908–1950 DEDICATION (#ulink_56a272b4-d16c-58b5-b80f-6c8b0a1bac9c) The author dedicates this book to his friend Noam Chomsky and to the memory of another friend, Edward Sa?d. EPIGRAPH (#ulink_0dac2173-b487-5c62-b93a-62fab56b6e20) ‘Between the Arabian Desert and the eastern coast of the Levant there stretches – along almost the full extent of the latter, or for nearly 400 miles – a tract of fertile land varying from 70 to 100 miles in breadth. This is so broken up by mountain range and valley that it has never all been brought under one native government; yet its well-defined boundaries – the sea on the west, Mount Taurus on the north, and the desert to east and south – give it unity, and separate it from the rest of the world. It has rightly, therefore, been covered by one name, Syria.’ REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894) CONTENTS COVER (#uc20ac224-3b51-5361-9eea-ecb6acc392b8) TITLE PAGE (#u524d200d-6fcc-50c0-b812-93838d6a4c2f) DEDICATION (#ueb1c427b-8686-5b04-88e0-0466d8678bc8) EPIGRAPH (#u987ba933-f59d-5a32-9986-394eacc7ee72) MAP (#ubba3dca3-72dc-597a-86b8-3e731ac2189c) 1 Imperial Wars (#u7d709123-9be1-5f9d-ac29-ddbdd67ca061) 2 Aqaba, Fourteen Years Late (#u27174b7b-bdf3-5a06-bad9-e66acab8304a) 3 Royal Cities (#u9450b700-e0c9-578d-a09d-c86b2eba2a8d) 4 Over Jordan (#u478c440a-6b12-5edf-8ff4-86ec6ce2017b) 5 O, No, Jerusalem! (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Gaza (#litres_trial_promo) 7 Jerusalem, from the West (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Return to Gaza (#litres_trial_promo) 9 The Desert (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Jaffa and Suburbs (#litres_trial_promo) 11 The North (#litres_trial_promo) 12 Damascus Is Burning (#litres_trial_promo) SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo) INDEX (#litres_trial_promo) ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo) ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo) COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo) ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo) MAP (#ulink_45bbcaa8-fd67-5c2e-9c90-ac85d800252e) ONE (#ulink_97eb4b35-ca42-5129-9f7b-339a32ae9916) Imperial Wars (#ulink_97eb4b35-ca42-5129-9f7b-339a32ae9916) ‘It is the atmosphere in which seers, martyrs, and fanatics are bred.’ REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894) 11 September 2001 IT WAS NOT ENOUGH to sail or drive to Aqaba. I had to take it by force, galloping with Arab tribal warriors to the gates of its ancient fortress, storming the citadel and raising the colours above the battlements. The Ottoman Red Sea garrison would surrender, as it had to Captain T. E. Lawrence in the summer of 1917, or my sword would taste the defender’s flesh. All Syria – its sandy plains and snowy summits, oases and castles, nomad camps and ancient cities, fractious and competing believers in the One God – would lie open to my advance. Years later, of course, I might regret it. Lawrence of Arabia certainly did. Was Johnny Turk any worse to the Levant than his successors – Britain, France, America and the advocates of Zionist colonization? A region that had remained united for four centuries within the Ottoman Empire – and for many more Hellenized centuries before that – was divided, abused and rendered impotent. Lawrence himself acknowledged his betrayal of the Arabs, as America’s Lawrences later confessed their treachery to the brave Afghan tribesmen who had beaten back the Soviet empire. Foreign adventurers promising freedom to the earth’s wretched – among them the Arabs of 1917 and the Afghans of the 1980s – knew in their souls that what they offered the native warrior was so much dust. Empires employed the indigenes to destroy rival empires: the British vanquished the Ottomans, as America did the Soviets, with local trackers, guides and killers. I was halfway from London to Aqaba, by train and ship, when massacres of my countrymen in the United States altered the nature of a journey I had been contemplating for fourteen years. My intention was to complete a Levantine adventure. In 1987, while on my way from Alexandretta in southern Turkey to Aqaba in Jordan, politics stopped me dead. In Beirut, a Shiite Muslim militia, the Hizballah, cast me into chains. After my escape, I returned home to my family in London rather than resume the journey south. The Hizballah had kidnapped many other foreigners for political ends; and it had nurtured the suicide bomber, that mysterious and sometimes anonymous figure who expelled the US Marine Corps and the Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon. The tactic of the human delivery mechanism reached its horrible fruition in the wilful murder of thousands of innocent human beings in New York, Washington and western Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. I was in Florence when it happened. After watching the World Trade Center’s towers collapse on Italian television, I called friends in New York’s downtown. The telephone lines were down. It did not occur to me that the mass murders in the United States would affect my plans, until Julia, my sixteen-year-old daughter, called from England. Seeing the destruction of a solid structure from which we had enjoyed the Manhattan vista the previous summer shocked her. Making a connection that I had not, she feared that the events we had witnessed via our televisions would have an impact in the Middle East. American administrations had bombed Muslim countries for less, and Julia worried that people in the Arab world would attack American citizens in revenge for American vengeance. I promised her that, if I anticipated any threat to myself, I would come home. I had already reserved a wagon-lit that night to Brindisi on Italy’s east coast and berths on ships from Brindisi to Greece and Greece to Port Said. That would leave time to cancel if an outraged Arab world reacted by killing or kidnapping the Americans in its midst. Julia’s entreaties had the effect of making real to me the horrors that I had yet to absorb in the preceding hours. Her life had perhaps made her more sensitive to political danger than most children in the complacent West. Political-religious revolutionaries in Lebanon had abducted her father when she was two. The father of two of her close friends, British military attach? Colonel Stephen Saunders, had been assassinated in Athens by the notorious November 17th group two years earlier. As she worried for me, I thought of my older son, George, in Turkey. Although no harm was likely to reach him there, I called him, as Julia had me. I asked him to return to Rhodes, where my ship was stopping. We could sail on together from there. Thus, under threat, we seek refuge among our own tribes – in this instance, among fellow Christians in Greece – lest we offer targets to the other side. Rhodes, itself a haven to Knights Hospitaller driven from the Holy Land in 1309, lay close to the Turkish shore on the frontiers where Islam brushed against Christendom. No harm came to any Westerners in Turkey. On that September day, I was in the Florentine house of friends, Adam and Chloe Alvarez, set within the walls of a garden so vast that it is best described as a wilderness. Weighing on me were Julia’s fears, New York in chaos, the impossibility of telephoning friends there, the reports of more and more deaths and the brutality of the attacks. In the Alvarezes’ sitting room, Britons and Italians alike worried for New York friends while watching, again and again, the collapse of the Twin Towers. Unable to endure another replay, I walked out to a cypress grove at one end of the garden. In the Mediterranean, cypresses grow in graveyards to point the soul’s way to heaven. People in my native land were dying and in agony and in fear. It would not be long before American anger would manifest itself in the deaths of Muslims. I must have been about to weep, when someone called from the house to say the television had more news. That was before we knew how many had died, who had done it and why. An Italian woman I had loved years before called me at the Alvarezes’. The deaths in New York, where she had once lived, left her too distraught to see me off, as planned, at Santa Maria Novella Station. We had said enough sad goodbyes when we were in love. I left without a farewell, boarding the train alone like a spy skulking into the night and not as a soldier dispatched to the front with farewell kisses. Later, snug in my bunk reading about nineteenth-century Palestine, I answered my cellphone. My younger son, Edward, was calling from England. What were my plans? Would I be safe? He was seven when Hizballah captured me. The next day, on an empty beach near Brindisi, I wrote, ‘What am I to do? I’m commissioned to write a book in the Middle East, and I have to go. But I don’t want to cause hurt to my children, as I had in 1987. I’ll see when I get to Rhodes.’ In 1987, I embarked on a journey through all of geographic Syria to write Tribes with Flags. Beginning in Alexandretta, the Syrian Mediterranean port that the French ceded to Turkey in 1938, in the spring, I had intended to reach Aqaba on the Red Sea – after exploring Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan – in time for the seventieth anniversary of Lawrence’s victory in July. But, by July, I had already been a captive of the Shiite Muslim Hizballah movement for a month in Beirut. After my escape on 19 August, I did not complete the journey. Finishing something that I started fourteen years before was no excuse for making my family suffer again. I would go, but I would avoid risk Boarding the Maria G. of Valletta that evening in Brindisi harbour brought me back to the Levant. An old woman, who looked as if she had not left the farm once during her sixty-odd years, stepped ahead of me. In a rough cotton dress, the tops of her dark stockings rolled at the knees and a scarf knotted around her white hair, she could have been a peasant from any Mediterranean village. Faced with a moving escalator, she stared as if at a ravenous sea monster. A Greek crewman took her arm. She fell, and the sailor righted her with a quick shove. She trembled while the metal stairs carried her towards the landing. At the top, she refused to budge. I stepped back to avoid crashing into her, but to no avail. The woman stepped on my big toe, from which a chiropodist had only recently removed an in-growing toenail. Passengers bashed into me from behind, and we were all tumbling over one another. The crewman pulled the woman out of our way. She waited, petrified, unwilling to risk the second ascent to A deck. The sailor forced her up to the top, where several other sailors shifted her like luggage. On A deck, she stepped on my toe again. How could this Italian matron have lived for more than sixty years without confronting an escalator? That evening, while the sun descended on Brindisi harbour, I sat on the aft deck with a book and a drink. The old woman, restored to safety, stopped at the rail with her husband. They were speaking Italian. ‘These Greeks,’ she said in disgust of her fellow passengers, ‘are primitivi.’ The sun went down, and Brindisi’s lights went up. An aeroplane took off in the north. It ascended slowly and seemed to hold still in the sky. Who on that day, seeing an aircraft on the wing, did not imagine for an instant what he would do to save himself if it flew straight for him? The Maria G. of Valletta, its flag flying the Maltese Cross that once terrorized the infidels of the East, sailed six minutes early at 7.54 in the evening. On the eight o’clock news of the BBC World Service – a small transistor radio has accompanied me for thirty years – a newsreader predicted, ‘Life for Americans will never be the same.’ I did not want to believe him. Slow Boat to the Levant As the ship approached Patras the next morning, the BBC World Service reported that Israel’s prime minister, General Ariel Sharon, had sent Israeli forces to attack Jericho, a Palestinian city in the Jordan Valley. Sharon, a lifelong Arab fighter, appeared to be making use of the American declaration of war on terrorism. No longer would General Sharon be attacking Arabs to kill them, to prolong Israeli occupation of the West Bank, to plant more settlers to displace more Arabs and to eliminate resistance to illegal military occupation. From then on, he would be fighting terror arm in arm with America. At nine in the morning, winches lowered guide ropes to tie the Maria G. to the quay in Patras harbour. The bar in which I’d had a cold espresso was emptying, as passengers lost themselves in the exit queues. Only the canned jazz remained. This was Patras, Greek Patras, my first Levantine port. The town of squat apartment blocks and storage sheds was uglier and more functional than the colourful, tourist-friendly seaports to the west, St Tropez, Portofino, Porto Ercole. The East had abandoned beauty for high returns – minimum investment for maximum return. The new world of the East was more hideous than it had been on my 1987 tour, but it was more convenient: mobile telephones, cash dispensers, the end of exchange controls and more relaxed customs regimes. Ashore in Patras, I withdrew drachmas from a cash machine, took a taxi to the central bus station and boarded the bus to Athens. If the Levant began at Patras, the Third World opened its doors at Piraeus, Athens’ ancient port. Perhaps because Greece was then building a new airport for the Olympics, it had left its harbour to rot. Signs indicating separate windows for EU and non-EU citizens meant nothing. I waited behind a Jordanian, a Dane and an Israeli in the EU queue. Most of us took more than an hour to clear passport control, then wandered the dock without anyone telling us how to find the ship. Some of us went right, others left. It took time and ingenuity to find the Nissos Kypros. My father with his years at sea would have called her a rust bucket. Praying she would not sink, I boarded and made for the bar. There, an Egyptian barman told me that the millions of drachmas I’d withdrawn at the bank machine in Patras were useless on the Nissos Kypros. The ship, he explained, accepted only Cypriot pounds. I drank beer on deck. The BBC World Service reported that the US was preparing to attack Afghanistan. Friends called from the United States and Tuscany to question the wisdom of my journey. My only agony so far was caused by the bad muzak (is there such a thing as good muzak?) of the Nissos Kypros bar. A couple whom I had met in the passport queue joined me. Anne Marie Sorensen, and Juwal, pronounced Yuval, Levy were, I guessed, in their late twenties. A Dane, she had a degree in Arabic and Hebrew. Juwal was born in Switzerland to Israeli parents and had completed high school and military service in Israel. He was hoping to go to university, probably in Denmark. They were motorcycling from Denmark, where they lived, to his family in Israel’s Negev Desert. After visiting his family, they would fly to New Zealand and Australia. He planned to return alone to Israel to ride the motorcycle back to Denmark and join his wife there. They were among those lucky – or blessed – married couples who go well together, relaxed, listening to each other, interested in what the other said. We talked about – what should we have called them, bombs? – the hijacked aeroplanes and mass murders in America. Every few hours the radio raised the death count. By then, it was thought to be about three thousand. We talked about Israel. The people whom Juwal seemed to detest were not the Arabs so much as fanatically religious Jews. They did not recognize his marriage to his Danish wife and accused him of, in his words, polluting the blood. Anne Marie and Juwal had Bedouin friends who sounded more sophisticated – with university degrees – than more traditional nomads I had known in the deserts of Jordan and Syria. Some were academics who had, like Juwal, married Danish women. In the morning, the radio raised the body count in America, speculated about possible culprits and predicted global economic calamity. The Nissos Kypros docked at the island of Patmos, where I had a breakfast of cheese, olives and what the Greeks call ‘Greek’ coffee. From there, we cruised beside the Turkish shore towards Rhodes. When we arrived, I went looking for my son George. He was waiting, as promised, in an old hotel beside a forlorn, disused mosque in the centre of the Crusaders’ fortress. Twenty-three, healthy and sunburned from a week’s sailing, he took me to dinner in a tiny place he knew. The restaurant, with no name posted anywhere, lay hidden in a tight passage amid crumbling houses. Its plump and maternal proprietress had already adopted him. She was about my age and had lived in England. My son, she said, did not eat enough. She put us at a large table that more or less blocked the alley and covered it with cold beer, lots of mezze and a bountiful platter of mixed grilled meats. George was on his summer break from studying Middle East history at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Like me, he speculated on the impact of the attacks in America. Like his sister Julia, he had misgivings about my proposed trip. We would stop in Cyprus for a few days. If the hangings of Westerners started in the Middle East, I’d fly with him back to London and postpone my trip to Aqaba a second time. After lunch, we toured Rhodes’ old town, where Ralph Bunche, America’s United Nations mediator, negotiated the 1949 truce that interrupted the war between Israel and Egypt and led to Israel’s subsequent truces with Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The accords he signed at the H?tel des Roses left 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, three-quarters of Palestine’s Arab majority, permanent refugees. Under Bunche’s agreements, the UN recognized the Israeli army’s conquests of 1948 and 1949. UN Security Council Resolution 181 of 1947 had partitioned Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state with Jerusalem as an international city. The proposed Jewish state was 55 per cent of Palestine, but Israeli victories awarded the Jewish state 78 per cent. The Rhodes and subsequent agreements left the West Bank in the hands of King Abdallah of Jordan and allowed Egypt’s King Farouk to keep the strip around Gaza City next to Sinai. The Palestinian Arabs got nothing. With the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan and Egypt inherited hundreds of thousands of refugees cleansed from what had become the Jewish state. The Palestinian Arabs, then as subsequently, were not consulted. Israel, the Arab states, the United Nations and the United States were content to leave most of them as wards of the UN. The UN established two temporary agencies – the UN Troop Supervisory Organization that monitored the disengagement lines and the UN Relief and Works Agency that fed, housed and educated Palestinian Arab refugees. Both have been in the Middle East ever since. The UN’s pro forma Resolution 194 of 1948, renewed annually, required that Palestinian Arab ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date’. No one enforced it, and the 700,000 refugees became, with their descendants and those expelled in the 1967 war, more than three million. Ralph Bunche, setting a precedent, accepted a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiations that produced – not peace – but more punishing wars. Back on the deck of the Nissos Kypros, where the muzak blended with the engine’s rumbling, Juwal, Anne Marie, George and I discussed the Middle East to which we were sailing. Juwal told us a story about his father, Udi Levy. Udi Levy had demanded that the word ‘Jew’ be removed from his national identity card. In Israel, nationality did not mean citizenship. It meant racial origin. Udi Levy was proud to be a Jew, but he did not accept being defined as one by the state, especially when the state gave its Jewish citizens privileges it denied to Arabs. He fought through the courts and won. Juwal had inherited some of his father’s dissidence, refusing to serve in the army of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. As with many other refuseniks, the military found a way to avoid prosecuting him. They let him serve in the navy. The sea was not occupied. Where Juwal came from, kids made tougher decisions than ours had to. Some joined the army. Some ran away to other countries. Some went to prison rather than shoot Palestinian children, demolish houses and enforce a military occupation in which they did not believe. On the Palestinian side, youngsters threw rocks at tanks, ambushed settlers or committed suicide in order to kill other kids they believed were their enemies. Some Palestinian boys worked for the Israelis, as labourers in settlements or as police collaborators; others languished in Israeli interrogation rooms or prison cells. Dreams on Maps When the Nissos Kypros reached Cyprus, my friend Colin Smith met us at Limassol port. Colin lived in Nicosia. When we met first in Jerusalem, he was the Observer’s roving correspondent and I was working for ABC News in Lebanon. A few months later, we covered the independence war in Eritrea together with the photographer Don McCullin and Phil Caputo of the Chicago Tribune. A couple of weeks of hell in the desert with guerrillas who got us lost, denied us water and nearly left us for dead started our long friendship. Caputo went on to write novels, and Colin had collaborated with the journalist John Bierman on books about Orde Wingate, the British officer who more or less created the Israeli army, and on the battle of El Alamein. That night, Colin, his wife Sylvia and their grown-up daughter Helena took us on foot to a Greek restaurant in an old house near the Green Line between Turkish and Greek Nicosia. The Aegean’s owner was a Greek Cypriot political fanatic named Vasso. Vasso, with a beard as long and black as an Orthodox archbishop’s, could have given lessons in political intransigence to Israeli settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers. His cause was Enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece. The d?cor of his courtyard hostelry gave his politics away. Pride of place went to a huge wall map that showed Cyprus as part of Greece – not just politically, but physically, a few hundred miles closer than it is on the earth. The eastern Mediterranean was the region of creative map making. Syrian maps included Turkish Alexandretta in Syria and left a blank for Israel, a void that Syrian politicians called ‘the Zionist entity’. Many Israeli maps included Judaea, Samaria and Gaza in ‘Greater Israel’. Some Arab nationalists’ maps, based on those of the eighth century, showed an Arab state from Morocco to Iraq. A Kurdish map delineated Greater Kurdistan from the Mediterranean to Armenia and Iran. When Colin introduced me as his American friend, Vasso said, ‘I am strongly anti-American … policy.’ The delayed ‘policy’ seemed to come out of consideration for the thousands who had died a few days before. It was clear he did not normally add it. He confessed that, despite his politics, he sympathized with Americans over the massacres. Perhaps the struggle between Christendom and Islam took precedence over his hatred of Henry Kissinger, who, as secretary of state in 1974, had supported Turkey’s invasion of the Cypriot Republic. Turkey was reacting to a coup attempt by the Greek Cypriot National Guard, whose leader, Nikos Sampson, had championed Vasso’s dream of Enosis. Since then the island had been sliced into Turkish and Greek halves. Vasso ran a good restaurant in a stone house whose style anyone but Vasso would have called Ottoman. The wine was rough, the food deliciously grilled. We stayed late, arguing politics with a band of Greek actors at another table and, as usual with Colin for almost thirty years, drinking too much. We walked home along the Green Line. Colin nearly led us into a Turkish checkpoint. That detour would be harmless in the morning, but at night a Turkish conscript might shoot. During our week in Cyprus, while the US assembled its forces around Afghanistan, George played tennis in the mornings with Colin and I made calls to Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. The US was not bombing any Arab countries, and no harm had come to Americans in the Arab world. I could leave Cyprus for Aqaba, having kept my promise to my daughter. George flew back to London and his final year of history at SOAS. I read some Somerset Maugham short stories and came across the dictum ‘The wise traveller travels only in imagination’. I should have heeded him on my first journey through Greater Syria in 1987. If not for Britain’s invasion and division of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces, I might not have made this journey or the one that was curtailed in 1987. T. E. Lawrence and his masters had created the conditions for the wars that I had come again and again as a journalist to report: not only the many between Israel’s Jewish colonists and the Arab natives, but between Arabs and Kurds, Christians and Muslims, Iranians and Iraqis. The empires brought border wars, where there had been no borders; tribal wars, where tribes had always lived; anti-colonial wars, where empires had always ruled over colonies. I was a dual citizen: of the vibrant American empire and of its British predecessor, now a mere kingdom of northern Europe. Two passports and many allegiances. My ancestors had originated from subject peoples in Ireland long before its independence and from Mount Lebanon under the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Both families were Catholic, one of their many legacies to me and another claim on my loyalty. Part native, part double imperialist, I would enter Aqaba from the Red Sea. Lawrence’s route had been, like the man himself, more circumspect. He had led a detachment of Arab irregulars from the Hejaz north through the desert to Wadi Roum, the rosy-rocked Greeks’ Valley in what became Jordan. Disabling Turkish batteries along the way, they struck south to surprise the Ottomans from the rear. I could have gone that way, but that was not where the real war was fought, not where decisions were made. Lawrence’s five-hundred-mile march and the capture of Aqaba were episodes in the Arab myth of self-liberation. Reality was the British army, preparing to assault Gaza from Egypt. Reality was the Royal Navy, cutting Turkey’s communications between Aqaba and the Ottoman troops concentrated in the holy city of Medina. The naval guns of Great Britain had reduced the seaward walls of Aqaba’s Mamluke fortress, where a few hundred Turkish imperial troops sheltered for safety. Lawrence wrote of Aqaba in 1917: ‘Through the swirling dust we perceived that Aqaba was all a ruin. Repeated bombardments by French and British warships had degraded the place to its original rubbish. The poor houses stood about in a litter, dirty and contemptible, lacking entirely that dignity which the durability of their time-challenging bones conferred on ancient remains.’ By the time Lawrence reached Aqaba, it was as a walkover. The capture of Aqaba transformed Britain’s eastern war. Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote, in his biography Colonel Lawrence: The Man Behind the Legend, ‘Strategically, the capture of Aqaba removed all danger of a Turkish raid through Sinai against the Suez Canal or the communications of the British army in Palestine.’ In Hart’s words, it also inserted an ‘Arab ulcer’ in the Turkish flank. Aqaba perched at the crux of two thighs – African Sinai in the west and Asian Arabia to the east. The penetration of Aqaba from above by Lawrence and below by the Royal Navy created the breach that would subordinate the Arab world to Great Britain and its French ally. The Ottoman loss of Aqaba presaged the novel division of Turkey’s Syrian Arab provinces into what became Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and, until 1948, Palestine, thereafter Israel. Another British campaign against Turkey in Mesopotamia would forge Arabs and Kurds against their will into a new country the British would call Iraq. The region has had no peace since. I chose the way of the warships – the gods of the story, the powers that granted Lawrence and the Arab tribes the illusion of independent action. By the time of my journey, the United States Navy had succeeded Britain’s fleet in the Red Sea and just about every other wet region of the globe. America’s warplanes would soon send thunder and lightning from the heavens over Afghanistan to give heart to Afghan warriors assaulting their tribal enemies. Alliances with some of the natives had the same rationale in Arabia as in Afghanistan: to reduce the dangers to imperial forces. If giving guns to the Arabs saved British lives in 1917 and 1918, using Afghan against Afghan would achieve the same for Americans nearly a century later. It was the cheapest way to fight an imperial war. TWO (#ulink_f56c61fb-b443-59b8-b73a-68bd27d4b374) Aqaba, Fourteen Years Late (#ulink_f56c61fb-b443-59b8-b73a-68bd27d4b374) ‘From time immemorial it has served as both the ingress and egress between sea and land, between Arabia and the highlands of Sinai and Palestine, “The Gateway of Arabia”.’ REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894) Port of Entry THE AFTERNOON SHIP from Sinai carried four tourists: an old Australian woman, her grown son, a Japanese man with a red backpack and me. The rest of the passengers were Egyptian workers, a few with wives and children, bound for Jordan, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. They were the Arab world’s gleaners, who collected the leavings of oil potentates, gun sellers and concrete spreaders. They washed Saudi dishes, painted monuments to dictators and provided the muscle to erect alien forms on Oriental landscapes. After a few years, or a lifetime, working in the Arabian sun, they returned home to Egypt with enough Iraqi dinars or Saudi riyals to open a shop selling Coca-Cola beside the Nile. They smelled of happiness, these moneyless but smiling young men. They waited hours without complaint for the ship to embark. Before that, they had stood in long queues at embassies for work permits and visas. In the dingy embarkation hall, a warehouse with a coffee stall and some broken benches, Egyptian policemen made them wait before taking their passports, stamping them and, at the quay, returning them in confusion. Aboard a bus that carried us from the departure building to the dock, the workers jumped up to offer their seats to the Australian matron. Neither the heat nor the prospect of near-slavery in the desert suppressed their laughter. The Egyptian fellaheen, the peasants, had laughed at Pharaoh. They built his pyramids to quell his terror of death, and they got the joke that he did not. Two things mocked Pharaoh’s dogma of eternal life: real, undeniable death without end, without immortal soul, without reincarnation; and the fellaheen’s laughter. When Pharaoh’s mummified corpse lay dormant within gilded chambers, they robbed his grave and laughed. They laughed at Egypt’s conquerors – Alexander the Great, the Vandals, the Caliphs and the British – and still they laughed at its modern dictator, Hosni Mubarak. They called him, for his resemblance to a processed cheese logo, ‘la vache qui rit’. They laughed even more at fat Saudi princes whose vanity required them to waste their countries’ fortunes on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, palaces and physicians to deny their mortality. If the fellaheen had known why I sailed with them to Aqaba, they would have laughed at me too. Our ship cruised out of Egypt’s Nuweiba harbour past vacant beach chairs, umbrellas and thatched bars. This would be another year without tourists. North of the luxury beaches that Israel had occupied in 1967 and tried to keep until 1988 lay the apartment blocks, many-storeyed and unlike anything an Egyptian had ever conceived or wanted. The six- and seven-storey boxes might have blended into an American federal housing project in a cold urban ghetto, but they defaced the Egyptian shore. Architects misunderstood Egypt and its soil, its most eminent contemporary architect Hassan Fathy wrote fifty years before. They needed to design in the vernacular with bricks made of Egypt’s mud-rich earth. Egypt’s architects, however, mostly studied in the West or worked for Western firms. Contractors made money with cement and nothing from mud-brick. The last structures I saw in Egypt were cement monuments to American immortality. The ship moved north-north-east, Africa to Asia. Arabia’s ochre hills sliced into the water to form half of an invisible chasm that emerged in the north as the Jordan and Bekaa Valleys and in the south as the Great Rift. The sun was casting Africa’s half of the valley into shadow, while the desolate, treeless slopes of the Arabian side shone against the coming darkness. A cartoon in white rock on the Saudi slope pointed our way. It was an open book perched atop a scimitar as large as England’s prehistoric chalk horses and overendowed men. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it could have been only one book, the book, the Koran. The sword of religion, Saef ed-Din, protected, as in the past it had delivered, the Word of God. From the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea, I could almost touch four countries – Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. To my left were Taba in Egypt and Eilat in Israel. To my right, only a stroll away, was the Saudi desert. And ahead, in the middle, was the town with the fortress that had been my destination when I set out from Turkey fourteen years before. When Captain T. E. Lawrence invaded in 1917, there were no Eilat, no Taba, no Saudi Kingdom. Apart from the invisible demarcation between British-occupied Egypt and the Ottoman Empire that the Bedouin ignored, borders were unknown. ‘For months,’ Lawrence wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘Aqaba had been the horizon of our minds, the goal: we had had no thought, we had refused thought, of anything beside.’ Modern Aqaba lacked any characteristic to make it anyone’s horizon. It was, like Eilat next door, a minor beach resort with large, empty hotels and palm trees dropped in for decoration. Yet it had obsessed Lawrence, and it had eluded me in 1987. I had attempted and failed to reach it that July for the seventieth anniversary of Lawrence’s triumph. Halfway between Alexandretta in southern Turkey and Aqaba, my Beirut oubliette was as much a legacy of Lawrence’s military campaign as the mini states born of the myth of his Arab Revolt. Out of the 1917 fall of Aqaba came flag-swinging little Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, whose squabbling and land grabs had led to the wars and mayhem and kidnappings that blocked my way in 1987 – an inconvenience compared to the tragedies imposed upon the natives. The last words I read before disembarking at Aqaba, painted in black on the wheelhouse of the cargo ship Al Houda, were ‘Safety First’. A Jordanian officer – Jordan’s police and soldiers are the best dressed in the Middle East with their starched tunics and regimental headgear – took our passports and instructed us to board an old bus. On the quayside, Jordanian flags dropped from dark masts, the red – green – white – black motif replicated like an Andy Warhol portrait series, the shade of each depending on the way it caught the sun, how weathered it was or how it dangled from its lanyard. In Jordan, as in Egypt, flags were outnumbered by only one other artefact: pictures of the leader. When we set sail from Sinai, I was relieved that a giant effigy in Nuweiba port of President Hosni Mubarak, the air force officer whose luck had made him Egypt’s vice president when soldiers assassinated his predecessor in 1981, would be the last for a while. In Jordan, young King Abdallah’s visage proved as ubiquitous. It greeted me at the dock, welcomed me on the bus, invited me into the immigration hall, watched with unaffected lack of interest while an official stamped my passport, looked up at me from the ten-dinar banknote that I used to buy a Jordanian visa with his family coat of arms upon it and smiled as I walked through several interior checkpoints where soldiers of different units examined my documents. Outside, the young king hovered over our long taxi queue. An old Toyota taxi took me half a mile to the next portrait of the king at what turned out to be the real taxi stand for cars going to Aqaba town. Here, we admired more images of the monarch in costumes that signified his many roles: father, soldier, tribal chief, descendant of the Prophet, bridge builder, peacemaker, Bedouin warrior, businessman, friend of the people. Like Mubarak and every other Arab leader, Abdallah was Ram ad-Dar, head of the house. In all traditional Arab houses and shops, the head’s picture – usually retouched in black and white, of an old man framed under glass on a wall above door height – dominated the most important room. President Mubarak, King Abdallah, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria and King Fahd in Saudi Arabia translated to the public sphere the senior male’s leadership of the family. I would see them in Israel, the modern society that created itself to cast off the old ways of the ghetto and of subservience at foreign courts: the same patriarchal portraits in the same positions, alone, high on a wall, old, wise and revered, a father, a grandfather or a rabbi – the Lubavitcher rebbe, a long-dead Talmudic scholar or, in some settlements in occupied territory, the American killer rabbis Moshe Levinger and Meier Kahane. Photographs of prime ministers, who came and went, sometimes in disgrace to return later, were to be seen only in government offices. No one blamed the father, the king, the president for mistreatment by his minions. If the leader knew what was done under his portraits, he would bring to justice all sergeants, bureaucrats or ministers of state who abused the leader’s trust. My First Evening I turned on the television in my luxury hotel suite. The state channel played Jordanian music videos in homage to King Abdallah. Montages of a young man wailing in Arabic dissolved into the object of his worship, ‘Ya Malik, ya Malik’ – O King, O King. Ten minutes later, while I unpacked and washed for dinner, the news began. The lead story was neither war in Afghanistan nor murder in the West Bank. It was King Abdallah’s courtesy call on a school. This blockbuster, hard to surpass for news value, led on to further exclusives: King Abdallah at a cabinet session, King Abdallah pouring cement on something and, the coup de gr?ce, the king and his queen, a beautiful Palestinian named Rania, touring another school. I liked the way the producers began and ended their broadcast on the same theme and wondered what other risks they took to keep the populace informed. I went outside to the new Aqaba. It was a dull, quiet place at Easter 1973, when I’d hitchhiked down from Beirut and slept on the beach. Aqaba had since matured into a mini Miami of gaudy hotels and private beaches. But it was still dull and quiet. The seafront Corniche looped east and south from the Israeli border and boasted scores of modern hotels, restaurants, pharmacies and caf?s where young men watched television at outdoor tables. In 1973, Aqaba and I were poorer, making do with simple fare: grilled chicken at open-air rotisseries under dried palm branches on wooden frames. There were only two big hotels. A long stretch of sand separated Aqaba and the border fence, then closed, with Eilat. On this, my first visit in twenty-nine years, the border fence had opened to turn Eilat and Aqaba into one city. Once, Aqaba had been distinctly Arab with overgrown parks, neglected beaches, wedding-cake minarets and a few camels; Eilat was defiantly Euro-Israeli, concrete slabs, grey socialist-realist architecture, bars and women in bikinis. Now, they looked the same – the same hotels, shopping centres and other investments in concrete. Despite the open fence, Aq-elat, or Eil-aba, was as segregated by race, religion and language as most other cities. The transnational corporations, which gambled on prosperity in Jordan after its 1994 treaty with Israel, were losing. The Palestinians rose against Israeli military occupation in September 2000, and the result in Aqaba was that the Radisson, the Movenpick and the rest had fewer customers than staff. I walked along the Corniche to the Movenpick, Aqaba’s largest hotel, for dinner. The Movenpick was said to be the new hotel in a town where hotels were under construction on every spare plot. Its vast edifice straddled, via a bridge, both sides of the Corniche. It occupied acres of seafront and its own man-made hill. Its vaguely Greco-Roman columns and mosaics were ornamented with modern versions of mushrabieh, lattices and lathed woodwork that protected windows, as in old Jeddah and Yemen, from the sun and strangers’ eyes. Despite the traditional balconies clinging like spiders to flat marble walls, the Movenpick looked more MGM-Las Vegas, sans casino, than Arabian Nights. I was the only diner. The waiter, though cordial, spent most of his time in the kitchen. Like most solitary travellers, I had for companions a book, my thoughts and whatever I happened to see. I watched the lobby. A Filipina nanny came in with a flock of fat children in American clothes. She tried to persuade them to get into a lift. The children – loud, spoiled, rich – ignored her and ran through the restaurant. They rushed past my table, upset chairs and headed towards the swimming pool. When the empty lift closed behind the nanny, I thought she would cry. The children were learning young what their parents discovered after they earned money: they could abuse servants, at least servants whose families were too far away to take revenge. New money had taken them far from their Arab traditions, which required them to treat their household, including those paid to care for children, as family. The walk back along the Corniche put me in melancholy mood. Only in the gaps between the new and half-completed hotels could I see the water. In patches that the developers had yet to fill, old Arab men played backgammon and smoked their glass-bowled water pipes. The brighter neon of Eilat, no longer hostile and no longer out of reach, was the model for Aqaba’s honorary entry to the modern, Western world. A few young Jordanians smoked narghiles – water pipes – like old men. The narghile was becoming fashionable again in the Arab world. The boys sucking plastic- and wood-tipped tubes were wearing, not the keffiyehs of proud desert warriors, but baseball caps. And they drank Coca-Cola. A Ramble with Staff Sergeant Amrin In 1973, I had spent the best part of a day searching for the fortress that Lawrence had conquered in 1917. Everyone I asked then had an original notion of its whereabouts – in the hills, on the King’s Highway, somewhere near the Saudi frontier. When I found it on the beach near the old town, I slashed through a jungle that had grown in and over it. Forcing a path along the ramparts, I was rewarded with the Turkish commander’s perspective of the Red Sea when the pillars of his empire were falling. Below the ramparts were storerooms and the yard where deserters and rebels had been hanged. Later, I asked to meet old people who might have remembered Lawrence from fifty-six years earlier. Some helpful Jordanians took me to a caf? to meet a man who could not have been more than forty. Much discussion ensued, until I asked how a man as young as he could have known Lawrence. He sorted through papers in a beefy leather wallet and produced a photograph of himself in black desert robes with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence in David Lean’s film. Indicating the fair-skinned actor, he asked, ‘What do you want to know about him?’ Early on my first morning back in Aqaba, Ahmed Amrin came to my hotel. At five foot six, he was taller than the man he most admired, the late King Hussein. His get-up was pure California, as if he’d shown up for work as assistant director on a Hollywood set: big Wild Foot boots, Nike baseball cap, grey Levis and a V-necked sweater over a grey T-shirt. His dark goatee was trimmed like a sail, and his left hand sported a wedding ring and a Timex watch. He spoke English as a British soldier would, and he knew his job. He was a guide. Mr Amrin had taken his degree in English at the University of Amman. His favourite playwrights were Shakespeare and Marlowe, fellow partisans of royalty. He enlisted in the Jordanian army, serving three years in England at Catterick Barracks, near Darlington, North Yorkshire, studying electronics. When he returned to Kerak, his home town between Amman and Aqaba, he married. Jordan and Israel signed a treaty of peace in 1994, and former Staff Sergeant Amrin moved to Aqaba to claim the promised riches of peacetime tourism. He studied his country’s archaeology, history, even its geology, flora and fauna. He became a first-class tour guide in a land without tourists. ‘In the tenth century BC,’ he informed me, marching over a seaside dig next to the Movenpick, ‘this was a Solomonic port. It served the Nabataeans and the “Ptolemites” ’. Mr Amrin was a rare figure for the Middle East, an honest interpreter of history. Some Arab guides omitted the connection between the land and the ancient Israelites, as most Israeli archaeologists and tour companies avoided references to the Arab, his culture and his history. To Mr Amrin, who was once Staff Sergeant Amrin of the Royal Jordanian army’s engineering corps, the story was incomplete without Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Turks and the British. The ‘Ptolemites’, descendants of Alexander the Great’s General Ptolemy, had ruled Egypt from Alexander’s death until the Roman conquest. Mr Amrin explained how the other side of the Gulf came to be called Eilat: ‘In the Muslim era, this was called Ela or Wela, which means “palm tree”.’ The ruins were so far beneath our feet that all I could see were brick-lined trenches. The archaeologists had a way to go, but they had forced the government to preserve the ancient Nabataean – Ptolemaic remains from burial under a hotel. It may have been an economic calculation: Aqaba had plenty of hotels but not much history. Walls two millennia old gave it an edge over Eilat, whose oldest structure dated to 1949. The earthworks that Mr Amrin showed me were a small portion of the Roman achievement, a link in the empire’s land – sea communications between the fertile hills of Felix Arabia, now Yemen, and garrisons in Egypt and Palestine. The rest of it was under either the Movenpick Hotel, where no one would see it, or the Red Sea, where anyone with goggles and flippers could have a look. Aqaba as it came to exist was the creation of Islam’s third Caliph, successor to the Prophet Mohammed, Othman. Mr Amrin’s tale jumped from the pious Othman, one of the four ‘rightly-guided’ Caliphs, to modern Jordan. He said the Emirate of Transjordan was born of the Meccan Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s struggle during the First World War. Without prompting from me, he said, ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course.’ On our way to the Turkish fortress, our shoes collected the dust of Roman and early Muslim digs. We passed beaches where Jordanians above the age of twelve wore enough clothing for an English winter and children were stripped down to bathing suits. Mr Amrin said this was the ‘free beach’, one of the last that had not been sold to developers to serve the foreign tourists who no longer flew to Jordan or anywhere else in the Levant. Beside the shore, tiny plots of garden, bordered by squares of raised earth, sprouted green vegetables and spiky herbs. Mr Amrin was, like most other native Jordanians, a monarchist. It was not the system he admired so much as the man, or the men. He talked about the dynasty that had given its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. His story began with the patriarch, Hussein bin Ali, already an old man when the British encouraged him to lead a tribal – in Lawrence’s fantasy, national – revolt against the Ottoman Empire. His sons, Abdallah, Feisal, Ali and Zeid, harassed the Turks in the east, while Britain advanced from the west. Hussein, meanwhile, practised politics, conspiracy and diplomacy in Mecca. The Arabs were more successful at fighting than Hussein was at politics. The old man subsequently lost Mecca itself to another of Britain’s Arab supplicants, the Al-Sauds from the inland desert of Nejd. Britain’s favourite among the Hashemite sons, Feisal, became King of Syria. His throne in Damascus lasted almost a year, until France took its share of the Ottoman Arab spoils and expelled him. In compensation and for its own purposes, Britain awarded him a richer prize, Iraq with its fecund earth and its oil. The British killed at least ten thousand Iraqis to impose Feisal upon them; and his dynasty lasted until a year after the British left and a mob got its hands on his grandson, Feisal II, in 1958. Another of old Hussein’s sons, Abdallah, founded Jordan – ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course’ – in the desert between Iraq and Palestine. Jordan was the booby prize. Until Abdallah, it was nothing more than the desert waste that kept Iraq and Palestine apart, the Crusaders’ Outre-Jourdain. But it was the only one of the four Hashemite crowns – Jordan, Syria, Iraq and the Hejaz – that survived. Abdallah’s successors were his son Talal, Talal’s son Hussein and Hussein’s son Abdallah, whose picture gazed upon the ruins. ‘I can say the late king was the creator of modern Jordan,’ Mr Amrin informed me, referring to Hussein. ‘He was humble. He listened to the radio to hear the people’s complaints. He created a sense of love among the people.’ And the son? ‘I believe the same is happening with Abdallah.’ The land around the citadel had been cleared since my 1973 visit, and there was no longer any need to scratch my way through the brush. We stopped outside the walls, as Lawrence did before the Turks surrendered. Above the vast, open Mamluke gate were two metal flags, painted by hand. ‘People think that is the Palestinian flag,’ Mr Amrin was pointing at one. ‘It isn’t. It’s the flag of the Great Arab Revolt.’ A British officer had designed the red – white – green – black standard of Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s Arab army in 1917, and most Arab flags were variants of it. The Lebanese with its green cedar between red stripes was the exception. The Palestinians – the last standard-bearers of Arab nationalism – adopted the Sherifian flag without alteration. With that flag came lies: that the Arabs were an independent nation, albeit temporarily separated into states with their own flags; that the Arabs would liberate Palestine; that Arab warriors had somehow defeated the Turkish, French and British empires; and that, one day, they would expel the American empire’s pampered child, Israel, from their midst. An old gatekeeper asked us to pay a fee. When Mr Amrin explained my purpose, the man invited us in as his guests and sat down again in the shade of the massive iron gates. Mr Amrin pointed to some writing, carved into the wall, in beautiful Kufic Arabic script, a lavish calligraphic style that originated in Kufa, Iraq: ‘This inscription honours Kalsum al-Ghuri, one of the leaders who fought the Portuguese from 1505 to 1520.’ Portuguese raiders in the sixteenth century were discovering and claiming the more vulnerable parts of Arabia, India, Africa and the Americas. Kalsum al-Ghuri appeared to have saved Aqaba, and thus Syria, from the massacres of Muslims, Jews and heterodox Christians that accompanied Portugal’s Renaissance conquests further east. Mr Amrin showed me, between the testament to the Mamluke chief al-Ghuri and a carved verse, or sura, from the Koran, ‘a secret passage to leave the place in wartime’. I looked deep inside the walls, where a tight corridor disappeared into darkness. We didn’t go in. Next came the courtyard, a stone parade ground protected by four high walls. ‘It’s very different, if you were here in ’73,’ he said. The difference was that I could see it. Then, weeds hid the well, the storerooms and the stairs below the ramparts. Now, it seemed like the Alamo, a barren shrine to a mythic struggle. On the stones where Ottoman levies had once borne aloft their Sultan-Caliph’s flag and guarded the southern approach of empire, Turkish officers chose surrender over siege and annihilation in 1917. If they had fought to the death, and if the Turkish governors to the north had not antagonized the Arabs of the cities by hanging their leaders, might their deaths have inspired their comrades to rally and repulse the British? Would the cry ‘Remember Aqaba!’ have saved the Ottoman Empire from destruction? Turkey still held the holy cities of Medina and Jerusalem in 1917, and many thousands of Turks would die before their armies retreated for ever from Arabia and Syria into Anatolia. If the Turks, like the British, had bribed and made false promises to the Arabs, they might have made the conquest of Syria too costly for the British to carry on. Like the American empire of the twenty-first century, Turkey took Arab acquiescence as a constant in all their calculations. It was a mistake. We marched across the quad, up and down the circling staircases, and along the ramparts. We saw where the Turkish soldiers had slept, where they ate and the vast chambers in which they received their imperial commands from the Prophet’s successor on earth, the Sultan-Caliph, in Istanbul. The dates of the inscriptions accorded to the Muslim lunar calendar. ‘We are in the year 1422,’ Mr Amrin informed me. ‘That is 5762 or 63 in the Jewish calendar.’ The Muslim Year One was AD 622, the time of Hejira, Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina. What fascinated me was Mr Amrin’s interpretation of history. No two people, no two books, related the fables in the same way. The teller might be an Arab, an Armenian, a Turk or an Israeli. Each saw the world from the vantage of his religion, his sect, his school of philosophy and of law, his village, his tribe, his family. Mr Amrin was born in Kerak, known in Jordan for a beautiful Crusader castle and its Bedouin hospitality. ‘The first place the Muslims got to,’ he said, referring to Islam’s earliest forays outside the Arabian peninsula, ‘was Kerak. It was called Mu’ata, and it had a famous university. There, they had their first clash with the Christians.’ They lost. Two thousand Muslim horsemen needed more than belief to vanquish a force of 200,000 Byzantine regulars. ‘The Muslims had to withdraw,’ Mr Amrin said. ‘Three of their leaders were killed in that battle, and they elected Khalid bin Walid in the field.’ That was in AD 690. Seven years later, Khalid bin Walid led the Muslims to victory against Byzantium’s forces at Yarmouk. As the British and Arabs would dispatch a weakened Ottoman Empire north to its Anatolian heartland in 1917 and 1918, the Muslims of Arabia drove the Greeks from Syria to their defences beyond the Beilan Pass in Asia Minor. If the Byzantines had held at Yarmouk, if the Turks had stopped Lawrence at Aqaba, if … Empires always get it wrong, something my country was learning, and denying, in the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent. The Ottomans, however nostalgic I may have been for the splendour of their court and the tolerance of their pre-First World War governors, also failed. ‘You know Kerak?’ Mr Amrin asked. I did. The Bedouin there had invited me to a huge mensef – a feast of boiled mutton and rice served on a communal platter that we ate without knives, forks or bread – twenty years before. Its Crusader castle had fascinated me. Its markets overflowed, its women were the most beautiful, its lambs the tastiest … I rhapsodized like an Arab court poet. Mr Amrin was not interested in my memories of Kerak. He had his own: ‘In 1910, Kerak had a famous revolt. The Ottomans sent people to the top of the tower and threw them down. Sixty-five people. They had refused to work in the army. This created anger against the Turks. After that, it was easy for Sherif Hussein bin Ali. The people were ready.’ An ingenious system of rain gutters and cisterns had kept the Turkish garrison in Aqaba supplied with water for men, animals and crops. A giant granite millstone had ground the wheat for their bread. Indicating the rust-red hills above Aqaba, Mr Amrin said the granite for the millstone and to construct the walls had come, like Lawrence’s surprise invasion, from there. When he said the rocks were from the pre-Cambrian period, I nodded as if I knew when that was. ‘This castle,’ Mr Amrin added, bringing the story forward several millennia, ‘was used as a khan for pilgrims from Egypt.’ The land route to Mecca passed through Aqaba, until Israel occupied the Negev and Eilat in 1949. Pilgrims, at least those who did not take the sea route from Suez to Jeddah, would have found within Aqaba’s caravanserai the water, the camel forage and the imperial protection they needed to continue south through the desert to Mecca and Medina. Those with more time or fervour added Jerusalem, where their father Abraham had attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar of stone that had, since the seventh century, been sheltered within a golden-domed mosque. This citadel belonged in Aqaba, while the town’s steel and cement hotels and offices might have been in Marbella or Atlanta. New high-rise projects for Aqaba’s poor used gas heating in winter and electric air conditioners in summer, wasteful and unreliable. The Mamluke architect Khair Bey al Ala’ai knew what he was doing in the sixteenth century. He erected a fortress of clay roofs, arched and open to the breezes, with ramparts of stone mixed with clay. And it held until the twentieth century. ‘This is perfect for the climate,’ Mr Amrin said. ‘It’s cool in the sun, then warm in winter. It’s not like it is if you live in cement.’ Mr Amrin, since he had moved with his family from Kerak, lived in cement. We ascended the staircase, following a Russian couple and their young daughter, to walk the ramparts. From the walls, Mr Amrin showed me his adopted city. ‘You see the buses?’ An array of camel-beige coaches glided through the town. ‘Aqaba is not just a tourist centre. It does business. Those buses are taking people to jobs.’ In the south-east, ships were waiting to dock. Mr Amrin said four ports made Aqaba a commercial hub: one harbour each for cement, phosphates, cargo and passengers. The caravan-like stream of buses carried workers back and forth to ports that worked around the clock. The sea trade meant that Aqaba could survive without tourists. Not all that well, if the squalor of its old city indicated anything, but well enough. There seemed to be two losers amidst the mirage of Aqaba’s prosperity: big hotel owners and Iraqi refugees. The hotel’s shareholders – who lived in America, Japan and Europe – could sell or wait or close down. The Iraqis starved. ‘You see those women in black?’ Mr Amrin asked me. This was later in the afternoon, when I was hotter and thirsty. We had left the fortress and were walking in the town’s commercial heart. All I wanted was a cup of coffee, but Mr Amrin, leading me with casual indifference past beckoning caf?s and the fragrance of coffee boiling with cardamom, had a favourite place that seemed to lie miles away. ‘You see those ladies?’ he repeated. I saw them, squatting on the pavement, their backs against concrete walls, veils shading their foreheads. They were handsome-looking women, who, despite opening their palms to receive coins from strangers, retained more dignity than many who had grown up as beggars. ‘They are from Iraq. They were very rich people.’ I had seen women like them in Baghdad, once the most prosperous and modern city in the Arab world. In the first years after the war over Kuwait and under an international boycott, they sold their jewellery. Next came the silverware, the old books and the Irish linen that foreigners like myself could buy from outdoor stalls downtown in what Baghdadis called the ‘thieves’ market’. I was never sure whether the thieves were the sellers or the buyers. In time, the paintings went, then the extra furniture, the kitchen appliances, the better clothes. Finally, some of the women – and these had been among Iraq’s proudest and best-educated – sold themselves. A British television cameraman in Baghdad had told me he had sex with an upperclass Iraqi woman while her husband waited alone in a bare living room for them to finish. The cameraman then had coffee with them both, as if he had been an invited guest, before leaving a discreet gift of one hundred dollars. The American embargo starved and bled Iraq for twelve years, until the American invasion of 2003 made life there even more precarious. The two Iraqi women in black had, nestling in the folds of their cotton cloaks, about three Jordanian dinars between them. With that, they could have bought a sandwich each at any of the caf?s I longed to stop at. At the Movenpick, which was the sort of place they had once been accustomed to, they might have shared one cup of tea. An Oriental Garden After a long walk and many stories of Moses, of Moabites, of Edomites and of Nabataeans, and then bumping into Mrs Amrin with their young son Qais, we had our coffee in a shaded park. Tall, thorny and mangled trees that the Arabs called sidr provided shade. Young men provided the coffee, tea and sandwiches in a green Pepsi-logo’d hut. Mr Amrin knew the owner, Bassam Abu Samhadana. Both were from Kerak. Mr Abu Samhadana would sit with us every few minutes between spells of overseeing his waiters. Most of the white plastic tables hosted large families. The mothers, fathers, grandparents and uncles talked. Children ran amok among the sidr trees. In a corner of the garden – itself a triangle of open land surrounded by city streets, restaurants and business buildings – was a lone table where three women smoked narghiles, sucking hard on the long tubes to make the water bubble and the smoke fly. Their laughter, their girth, their hair piled high in colours that might have come from tubs of ice cream, their skirts cut miles above plump knees, their jewels casting sunbeams through the sidrs’ shadows, their shoes tight and black, everything about them, said: we are not from here. They might have hung ‘For Rent’ signs around their necks. ‘Sharameet,’ Mr Amrin explained. Prostitutes. The picture cried out for Delacroix and the caption, ‘Hookers with hookahs’ or ‘Oodles of odalisques’. Mr Amrin admitted they were Jordanian, but they were not from Aqaba. They were most assuredly not, he said when I asked, from Kerak. Was Mr Amrin a Bedouin? He was, but a few generations back. ‘You can say 99.99 per cent of the original Jordanians,’ by which he meant the half of Jordan’s population who were not refugees from Palestine, ‘are Bedouin.’ Most had settled in cities, towns and villages. ‘Bedouin are peaceful people. They are very straight. If they like you, they say they like you. If not …’ Was it, I wondered, a good idea for him to have left Kerak for tourism in Aqaba? In Kerak, he had been an army-trained electrical engineer. His wife had had a job there. She came from a prominent Jordanian family, the Mejallis, who had given the country politicians, lawyers and a prime minister. In Kerak, Mr Amrin had a house and a father, mother and siblings. In Aqaba, he said, he had seen the president of the United States. It was in 1994. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, King Hussein and Bill Clinton were opening the border between Israel and Jordan. ‘They were crying,’ he said. ‘The newspapers said it was because of the treaty’ – the Israel – Jordan peace – ‘but it wasn’t. It was the dust.’ The royal family kept a palace in Aqaba, and he had often seen the young princes. He had met many foreigners. Aqaba showed him more than Kerak. On 11 September 2001, he was driving American tourists in Wadi Roum, the desert through which Lawrence had marched to Aqaba in 1917. ‘One guy’s mobile rang in the back seat. He woke up and jumped. “What? The World Trade Center is destroyed?” He was very upset. His brother was on the eighty-second floor, but he was worried about another man in the building who owed him money.’ Maybe it was just as well the Americans no longer visited Aqaba. Mr Amrin did not understand them. He said he was not a businessman. I could see that when he refused payment for my day’s tour of Aqaba, its ancient citadel, its souks and Bassam Abu Samhadana’s coffee garden. Bassam Abu Samhadana poked in and out of our conversation, administered affairs in the caf? and gave us lunch he’d made himself at home. We feasted on a large pan of kafta, minced and spiced lamb in yoghurt, that we ate communally. Each of us grabbed bites from the flattened circle of meat with our silver spoons or pieces of Arabic bread and took billows of white rice from a bowl. While we ate and drank tea, Bassam Abu Samhadana told us Aqaba’s gossip in a manner so relaxed he might have been stretched on a divan smoking a narghile and musing on visions rising from its smoke. He motioned to me to eat more kafta, then said that England’s Prince Edward had once visited Kerak. Bassam, as royalist as his Kerak compatriot, had tracked down the youngest son of England’s queen to present him with a Persian carpet. Did Edward like it? Mr Abu Samhadana was not sure. He smiled to make me follow his eyes to the far table, where the three professional women were receiving a Saudi gentleman. A young Jordanian in a black leather jacket hovered behind. Ahmed and Bassam, as they instructed me to address them, blamed the Saudis for attracting prostitutes to Aqaba. Saudi millionaires brought their money and sexual frustration a few miles over their border to a conservative Arab town that, compared to any city in their kingdom, was Gomorrah-on-Sea. Ahmed and Bassam did not rate the three Jordanian prostitutes. ‘The prettier ones are the gypsies,’ Bassam said. ‘And the high-class women come from Iraq.’ The Saudi gentleman, however corpulent he was under his dark cotton gown and whatever price he was then negotiating with the leather-jacketed procurer, gave the impression of a man on a budget. He and the jacket reached an agreement. The Saudi paid for the women’s narghiles and colourful cocktails and accompanied them across the street to a Lebanese restaurant, the Ali Baba. How, I wondered, would he manage three such well-proportioned women after a large lunch? In the evening, I walked alone along the beach, read the newspapers, ate a Lebanese dinner at the Ali Baba and returned to Bassam’s outdoor caf?. The day’s heat had settled, leaving Bassam’s garden cool and silent. Long necklaces of fairy lights, every other one out like a blind eye, dangled among the branches. My first day in Aqaba: was it a success? A few hours earlier, I had watched children swim at Aqaba’s last free beach – a dirt shore where women coddled babies and let the sea brush the hems of their long dresses. Boys, no more than eight or nine years old, charged by on lithe and small Arab mares, plumes and spangled bridles ablaze in the sunset. Blankets and rugs hugged dry earth nearest the water, where men and women, not one of them immodest enough to strip down to a swimming costume, wrapped the remains of picnics and called their young in from the waves. Away from the shore, boys in jeans or shorts kicked footballs, while others bought ice cream and popcorn from a two-wheeled stall. Wet children wrapped themselves in large towels, crouched with their backs to the wind and shivered. The wind rose, from the north-west, like Lawrence’s Arabs, hurling desert sand and pebbles at the dying day. When someone travels to write about a place, he looks for what makes it different from other places. That evening in Aqaba, I could have been anywhere. The beach, apart from the modesty of the adults, resembled the quiet sea at Brindisi or the Santa Monica sands in California where I had grown up. Aqaba’s particularity lay hidden in its history, those rare occasions when some emperor or general captured it and left mud-brick remains like the Nabataean – Ptolemaic harbour or the Mamluke citadel that the Turks surrendered to a young British officer and his few hundred Arab irregulars. If not for its past, Aqaba might not have been worth the visit. Out of the darkness of the garden caf?, between my chair and the kiosk, where the staff prepared coffee and food, Bassam approached wearing a red-check keffiyeh around his neck. He unwound the fluffy headscarf and handed it to me. ‘My mother made this,’ he said. ‘It’s wool.’ Stretched out, it was a yard of white cotton into which his mother had sewn dyed wool in elaborate patterns. People used to tell me that red-check keffiyehs like that were for the Bedouin. Peasants, the fellaheen, wore black and white. Bassam told a waiter to bring me tea and a narghile. The waiter dropped the water pipe and a box of hot coals to keep us warm beside the table. ‘You want more coal?’ Bassam asked. I was warm enough. The waiter ran back to the hut for a smaller coal carrier with chips of charred wood, fahm in Arabic, for the pipe. He placed the embers on a mound of wet tobacco at the summit of the silver stem above a glass vase of water. The ceremony proceeded: he tested the tobacco, blew on the coals and inserted a plastic mouthpiece into the wood tip of an accordion cord. The sweet smoke, filtered through clear water, let me dream like a Turkish pasha. Bassam, rubbing his hands close to the fire, asked if I liked the tobacco. Pleased, he said, ‘It’s apple.’ He flavoured his tobacco with other fruits, but apple was his favourite. He told me the story of his business. He had come to Aqaba as an inland tourist a year after Jordan ended its official state of war with Israel. He saw a disused plot of trees and shrubs and weeds between a traffic roundabout and some restaurants and asked the town’s government for a permit to sell coffee on it. It was agreed that, if he cleaned the site and the public liked his coffee, he could stay. ‘I opened with a half kilo of coffee, two kilos of sugar, two kilos of bananas, and two kilos of oranges.’ He spent what little money he had in the bank on clearing the weeds and rubbish and building the kiosk. With his profits from sales of tea, coffee and fresh juice, he bought more coffee, more sugar, more fruit. ‘I cannot drink juice here any more,’ he said. ‘I see it too much. But if I go to Syria, I drink orange juice every day.’ The business prospered. Pepsi put a canopy on his kiosk and provided a cooler for its bottles. Bassam was joining the world economy. Israelis came to his caf?, usually on day trips from Eilat, and Bassam welcomed them. An Israeli guide named Menachem brought group tours to rest and drink tea under the sidr trees. I assumed Bassam had to pay him something in return. There were problems with the Israelis. What? Stealing, he said. What did they steal? Glasses. Glasses? ‘We cleared the tables,’ Bassam recalled. ‘Twenty glasses were missing. I asked Menachem to get them back. Menachem said they were taking them to drink later. I told him we had plastic cups for that.’ Despite the thefts, Bassam served the Israeli day-trippers and counted glasses before they left. When the Palestinian uprising against military occupation began at the end of September 2000, the Israelis stayed in Eilat. Western tourists, apart from a few hearty pilgrims, avoided the entire region. The source of Bassam’s suffering was neither the Israelis who stole glasses nor the foreigners who feared visiting Jordan, but the Jordanian bureaucracy. One conscientious bureaucrat almost cost him his business, his investment and his livelihood. This officer of local government took it upon himself to enforce the law with an efficiency that many Western financial consultants believe the Arab world needs if it is to assume its place in the scheme of transnational, universal, utopian capitalism. This functionary was new to Aqaba, a man who knew the regulations, a man to help forge a land of laws and not of men, an arbiter of right and wrong, the kind of man whose rightful home might have been in the FBI, an ‘I’m-all-right-Jack’ British trade union of the 1950s, or middle management at an American corporation. He did not belong in Aqaba. Having been posted to the town from Jordan’s more austere north, the official visited Bassam’s caf?. He tasted the coffee and must have observed that Bassam’s clean kitchen conformed to the rules of health and safety. He noted that previous local officials had issued Bassam the papers necessary to maintain the green kiosk, its cooker, its juice squeezers and its refrigerators. The kiosk-caf? had a valid permit. The plastic tables and chairs, scattered among trees for the relaxation of families and occasional tourists, did not. And the observant bureaucrat saw tables where the law did not allow tables. He saw people sitting in chairs that the law did not sanction. He must have seen glasses of tea and cups of coffee on those permitless tables. Perhaps he heard a bit of laughter in the shade and observed children running round the prohibited tables on the earthen paths that Bassam had cleaned and swept amid grass that he had cut. The bureaucrat, this northerner, did his job. He had come to Aqaba to enforce the law, and he enforced it by sending men to seize every table and every chair and lock them in a government warehouse. Patrons who had come to enjoy Bassam’s garden and to muse over Persian tobacco smoke and Turkish coffee went elsewhere. Aqaba’s citizens were not Italians to stand at a counter for a quick espresso before rushing to an office or shop. They had time for the rituals of the day, to wait for coffee to brew with cardamom seeds in a brass pot, to watch a young man light the coals and pack the tobacco into a hookah, to observe from a chair the universe revolving around them. Bassam lost them to other caf?s, none so congenial as his had been, but where they might feel a chair beneath them and bang a table when the argument suited. His business declined, and the little garden resumed its empty, forlorn state. Bassam stopped sending money to his two sisters at university. Helping his father in Kerak, a filial duty, became difficult. Bassam Abu Samhadana did what any good Jordanian whose prosperity was threatened by bureaucracy would have done: he wrote to the king. A new monarch had ascended the throne, a young man who had not been tested. The old king, as Bassam and many others among his subjects abjured, would have dealt with the legal threat to Bassam’s survival swiftly and justly. Young Abdallah, however, was a modern man. His mother was English, and his education came from the Western world where law and by-laws and regulations and rules were said to prevail. Such a modern king might leave the enforcers of law to do their work without royal interference. Abdallah’s training – his English was more fluent than his Arabic – should have inclined him to let Bassam’s remaining clients drink on their feet or drink elsewhere. Writing to such a king – unlike to his father, who had behaved like the true father of all his subjects – held perils. What if King Abdallah read the letter and rebuked Bassam for going over the head of a government official, accused him of demanding favours, prosecuted him for asking the king himself to violate the law? Bassam was a man of Kerak, and the men of Kerak were not afraid. He sent the letter, and he waited. A week is a long wait when your business is dying and your sisters and father depend on you. Bassam waited many weeks, then many months. He survived in part courtesy of loyal customers like Ahmed Amrin, who were willing to stand rather than seek another caf?. King Abdallah’s letter arrived, and Bassam rejoiced. The king had read the petition, weighed the facts of the case and concluded that the Governorate of Aqaba must restore to Bassam’s caf? all its chairs and tables. Bassam took the letter to the government office building and showed it to the bureaucrat who had seized his property. Despite what amounted to a royal proclamation, the bureaucrat did not relent. While conceding that the king had written the letter, the man said it had no legal force. Instructions to release confiscated property had to be processed through channels. There were not only regulations – and the official had demonstrated his devotion to those – there were also procedures. And to the procedures, he was just as loyal. To enforce his decision in the case, the king would have to instruct a minister, who would pass the order down to the regional governor, who would send it from one office to another, where it would be signed and stamped by the appropriate officials, until it reached the desk of the bureaucrat in Aqaba. The chairs and the tables remained locked in the warehouse. Bassam had an acquaintance, also from Kerak, who knew the king. The Kerak man was a soldier, who had trained the then Prince Abdallah years before in some aspect or another of military practice. Bassam contacted the soldier – by telephone or letter, I was not sure which – and asked him to tell the king what happened to royal decisions in Aqaba. The king had to be informed that, despite his ruling to the contrary, the tables and chairs remained locked away and Aqaba’s finest garden caf? was empty. The soldier promised to bring the matter to King Abdallah’s attention. Further days, then weeks, passed without action from the palace or a call from the soldier. With business suffering, Bassam called Amman, the capital and home of the officer who had been a mentor to the young prince before he became the king, to impress upon his Kerak compatriot the urgency of the case. If his tables and chairs were not restored soon, the caf? would close and Bassam would return to Kerak a failed man. His disgrace would not fail to dishonour King Abdallah, whose writ would be seen not to run as far as Aqaba, as well as the officer from Kerak. While I listened to Bassam’s tale, told in a tranquil voice without rancour, and puffed my narghile, I imagined the dilemma of the officer in Amman. As at all royal courts, the man would have to await the right moment – perhaps when the monarch and his courtiers were talking about Aqaba or the people of Kerak or coffee or even tables and chairs. Such moments do not present themselves every day, yet his fellow son of Kerak was calling every day from Aqaba to demand justice. A man had to be careful when making requests of a king, but the same man had to protect his reputation among the people of Kerak. Months later, when Bassam had to consider bankruptcy and admitting to all in Kerak that his king and his Kerak intercessor had both failed him, King Abdallah was made aware of the insubordination of the assiduous bureaucrat in Aqaba. The fresh decision and its implementation were immediate, and, in Bassam’s view, just: the bureaucrat was transferred to a desolate corner of the northern desert and eight tables and thirty-two chairs were delivered from the state warehouse to Bassam’s garden. He was back in business. The tobacco was burning down and the coals had turned to ash. Several empty coffee cups and tea glasses had collected on the table. Bassam told the waiter to bring a last tea before he went home. I tried to pay him for the coffee, the tea and the narghile, but he would not accept anything. All he allowed me to do, when the table was cleared and the kiosk locked, was tip the waiter. It was after midnight when I walked along the shore to the hotel. The Red Sea, as still as the open eye of a corpse, caught the lights of four countries within a compass of forty miles. The map lines made no impression on the night. Aqaba was the reason for the lines, the frontiers, the divisions. Aqaba had been the goal of a revolt against an empire on behalf, not of the rebels themselves, but of more distant empires. The fall of Aqaba was a romantic, cynical saga, that had bequeathed a century of separation, of exodus, of bloodshed. The Turks could not hold Aqaba and, with it, the rest of what had been Greater Syria. Those who conquered it, occupied and divided it, had yet to destroy and remake it wholly in their image. Bassam did not take my money for the coffee and tobacco, and he sent what he had to his father in Kerak. This was no way to run a Starbuck’s. When the Arabs realized that France, Britain and Zionism were claiming sovereignty over them after 1918, they resisted, longer perhaps than any other colonized population. And they were still holding out. In small ways, their lives could not conform to the standards set for them by the empires – first Britain’s and France’s, then America’s – because they ate with their hands from a shared bowl, because they took time to brew coffee and prepare their tobacco, because desert traditions of hospitality and vengeance survived in their city houses, because they believed in angels. The Western world had destroyed the mass forms of their protest – their nationalism, their socialism – and was even then bombing its latest manifestation: fundamentalist, violent Islam. Standing on ruins the Greeks had left more than two millennia before, I looked at the shores of Egypt and what are now called Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. This land was indigestible. Its history was too long, its cultures too strong, its faiths too pervasive. The cost of their stubbornness has been high, but they go on paying. They have absorbed the good and the bad of civilizations that have passed here, but they have not been absorbed. They are the world’s spoilers. Imperial histories chronicle expedition after expedition – by Pharaoh, by Titus, by the Shahs of Persia, by the legions of Byzantium, by Sultans in Cairo and Istanbul, by the British army and the American armed forces – to suppress their rebellions, contain their passions and possess their wealth. Perhaps that was why I had returned, not out of pity, but in admiration. THREE (#ulink_7cedba6b-c84c-59af-93c2-e6aebc240732) Royal Cities (#ulink_7cedba6b-c84c-59af-93c2-e6aebc240732) ‘Here is a land blessed more than most with health and fertility, but its health has been paralysed by its danger, its fertility checked and blasted by the floods and barbarism to which it lies exposed.’ REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894) Seeking the Nabataeans LAWRENCE’S FORCES rode north from Aqaba to disrupt Turkey’s railway communications and to guard Allenby’s right as his Egyptian Expeditionary Force advanced from Gaza. Eighty-four years later, I followed the Arabs’ route in an old Toyota taxi through canyon and desert. In the gorges above Aqaba, not a plant grew in the granite. Fertility lay miles north, where Lawrence feared the peasants would resist his Arab national army as they would a Bedouin raiding party. Centuries of Bedouin raids – sheep theft was as common as on the Scottish – English borders – had made the fellaheen wary. Some attacked their liberators. A half-hour out of Aqaba, a customs officer stopped us at an anti-smuggling roadblock. When the driver told him I was a foreigner, he let us pass the Jordanians whose cars were searched. One by one, sprigs of life exposed themselves beside the road: sage, an acacia, a donkey. The first work of man was a stone monument, left for centuries in the wind to revert to bare stone. Then, evidence of civilization: a cemetery within walls of grey rock housed a regiment of marble markers. Next to it, a village of newly painted old mud and new cement breeze-block houses, all but a few single-storey, sheltered a population half that of the graveyard. On the right, parallel to the road, a railway line accompanied us north. The track had, until Lawrence, carried pilgrims, soldiers and supplies from Istanbul all the way to Mecca. Perhaps the peasants had been right to oppose Lawrence’s desert Arabs. Thanks to Lawrence, the Hejaz railway never ran again. In Damascus, there remained a beautiful Ottoman Hejaz Railway Station and a modern Hejaz Railway Commission whose members – Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia – distrusted one another so much that not one mile of the track blown by Lawrence’s sappers had been repaired. Like Arab unity, rebuilding the railway was relegated to the realm of millinerian expectation. The modern era’s power pylons, telephone poles and water pipes defaced the landscape. At noon, we reached a sign that read ‘Amman, 275 Kilometres’. Another sign advertised ‘The Farm for Sale’. The car stopped, and I looked from a ridge across the sands for the farm. Nothing grew for a hundred miles. I understood why the farmer wanted to sell, but where would he find a buyer? The drought that parched his land could not be blamed on global warming. It began at the end of the Ice Age. We turned off the main Aqaba road at the King’s Highway to Wadi Musa and Petra. In the shade of a ridge, a lonely pool of snow resisted the change of season. Beyond were villages with abundant cypress, pine and olive trees on the slopes. A two-lane asphalt road floated along the hilltops into Rajif, a large village of flat-roofed houses, a white schoolhouse, a playground and as many vegetable shops as houses. We had to wait for old men in red keffiyehs to squeeze past us in the tightening streets. More open road took us into Taibit, splashed across the slopes of many jagged hills. There were two Taibits, the new town that had grown closer and closer to the windy summits, and Old Taibit – Taibit Zamen – near the base of a wadi. The old town’s earthen hovels with lovely arched entryways had occasional mounds on their level roofs and tiny gardens in open central courtyards. Old Taibit, nearer the water that coursed down the hills, stored rainfall in cisterns that fed their trees and crops. It was a place of stone, clay and mud. Above it loomed the new cement town, itself dwarfed by a new mosque. In the streets, old men paraded everywhere in cotton robes and keffiyehs or trousers and shirts. When I asked the driver why there were no children, he rubbed his thumb against his index finger and said, ‘No money.’ To reach Petra, the ancient Nabataean capital that the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burkhardt rediscovered in 1812, we had to pass through New Petra. Here were the Movenpick, Petra Panorama, Marriott, Nabataean Castle and Grand View hotels, freshly built and doomed to bankruptcy. In 1973, this town with its shops, restaurants and amusement centres did not exist. Nor did the Visitors’ Centre, bookshop, souvenir kiosk and ticket office. Then, I had slept outside in a place called Nazal’s Camp, where I saw in the night sky every star that man had ever counted. And, counting them, I had fallen asleep. If I fell in love with Petra as a graduate student on an Easter excursion, love went cold now. It was like revisiting an old mistress, her beauty diminished by cosmetic surgery rather than age. Petra then, six years after the June 1967 war and barely three years after the Black September civil war between Palestinian commandos and the Jordanian army, was an enchanted city of empty tombs and palaces, discovered but not desecrated. It was like no other city of antiquity – no fortifications, no encircling walls, no natural water source and no cramped streets. It was larger than other ancient cities, about 65,000 acres spread over rocky ravines, desert plain and mountains. The Nabataeans had lived in elaborate caves and freestanding palaces. They funnelled rainwater from the hills – a great natural flow collected at Petra’s base – and cut channels to carry water from Ain Musa, the Spring of Moses, to their commercial metropole. They relied on the narrow valleys, the towers of natural sandstone and their own mobile defences to protect them from marauders and invaders. In 1973, Bedouin lived in a few of Petra’s higher caves. I met some of them and, like any other tourist, took pictures. They gave me coffee and talked politics. The only visitors disturbing their tranquillity, apart from me, were Jordanian schoolchildren on a day trip. The only people who demanded money were the young men who hired horses. They had told me – what did I know aged twenty-two? – that I was required to enter Petra on horseback. So it was that I had my first glimpse of Al-Khazaneh – the so-called Pharaoh’s Treasury – at the end of a long gorge called the Siq, on horseback. Burkhardt entered on a noble Bedouin steed, but mine was a nag who looked so hungry I should have carried her. Jordan had used the interval of nearly thirty years between my two visits to effect ‘improvements’. At the Visitors’ Centre near the Bab Al Siq a ticket seller charged ten Jordanian dinars for entry. At a tollgate, I showed my ticket, as if in a cinema, and walked in. The horse hirers were still there, but government officials watched to guarantee they did not cheat the few foreign visitors. This time, I walked. The route was the same but the path had been paved and provided with little waste-baskets bearing the logo ‘Edico’. Workers in Edico uniforms swept the path, and signs in English explained everything. ‘Al Siq,’ the first read, ‘is 1207 metres long and 3 to 16 metres wide. It is a natural gorge of spectacular geological formation, which the Nabataeans widened in parts by carving out the rock …’ No one needed a sign to tell him the gorge was spectacular. It was like reading in the Louvre ‘Beautiful painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile by the Italian Leonardo da Vinci’. I overtook a family that I assumed were Americans from the Midwest. The father carried a baby on his chest and wore a ‘J + B Scotch’ T-shirt, Nike trainers and a baseball cap. His wife and daughter licked ice creams and wore blue jeans. But they were speaking Arabic. In 1973, Jordanian men did not wear baseball caps or carry babies. Jordanian women – when in Jordan – wore long dresses. Petra and its indigenous visitors were adapting or assimilating to the new global empire as the Nabataeans had to Greece and Rome. I rushed ahead of them lest anything come between me and my first sight through the narrow cleft at the end of Al Siq. The gorge opened and up shot a magnificent tomb, mountain-high, that said, ‘Stranger, beat this.’ Invaders coming to Petra by this route would have entered single file, there to be cut down one at a time by Nabataean archers on the plaza of their king’s mausoleum. It was a good place to die, overwhelming in its beauty and surprise. I did not die but the new Coca-Cola kiosk and souvenir stands were killing me. Tour guides were explaining, perhaps for the thousandth time, that the treasury, Al-Khazaneh, was never a storehouse of gold and jewels but the burial place of a king. They did not explain why Jordan had permitted the desecration of this once-solitary shrine. I sat on a bench, listening to guides and tourists, and looked at the tomb. A headless eagle – defaced, no doubt, by iconoclasts of one monotheism or another – sat poised to soar from the perch on which Nabataean sculptors had placed him a century before the Crucifixion. Then I wandered among Petra’s palaces and tombs and theatres. In 1973, when I had slept out at Nazal’s Camp, Bedouin lived all over Petra. Like Nazal’s Camp, the Bedouin had been removed. No longer in their caves along the ridges, they lived miles away and sent their children into the ruins to beg from tourists. Some of them sold coloured rocks. ‘No, thank you,’ an American woman with legs larger than her trousers said to a little Bedouin girl. ‘I think the rocks should stay in this place.’ She also thought her money should stay in her handbag. The children approached me. When I gave a dinar to one of the boys, his sister said I had to give another one to her. Six or seven years old, they were determined entrepreneurs. Another child, who said her name was Rima and looked about ten, gave me a stone of the same rosy stripes as the Treasury. In English, she asked if I preferred to see the Monastery or the Bedouin camp where her family lived. We came to a tea shop, whose proprietor tried to sell me silver jewellery. When I declined, he said, ‘For your wife.’ No wife. ‘For your secretary?’ He chased Rima away, perhaps resenting the competition, and gave me a glass of tea. An American family on camels trotted behind a camel herder. Some Russians – father, mother, daughter – asked the tea vendor for directions to the Monastery. I walked on to an amphitheatre. A goat grazed near the stage on which the Nabataeans had thrilled to the tragedies of Greece. Other tourists, people like me, shooed the goat aside and took pictures of themselves. Rima and the other children tried to make them buy stones. I should not have come back. The driver, asleep in his car near the Bab Al Siq, woke and drove me to an indifferent lunch at a restaurant near the Turkish bath. He asked if I had enjoyed Petra. I didn’t answer. The best book in English on the Nabataeans – the book that made me appreciate their achievement – was The Lost Civilisation of Petra by an Israeli who had fought in court to erase the classification ‘Jew’ from his identity card. He was the father of Juwal Levy, the young man my son and I had met aboard the Nissos Kypros. Udi Levy was, although he did not know it, waiting at home in the Negev to show me the rest of the Nabataean empire. Ancient Philadelphia Amman was dark by the time we reached its outskirts. Thrown like a Bedouin blanket over a batch of hilltops, the city had outgrown the Circassian village where Prince Abdallah of the Hejaz pitched camp in March 1921. Abdallah had embarked on a quixotic mission to restore his brother Feisal’s throne in Damascus after France had massacred Feisal’s Arab army at the Maysaloun Pass and robbed the Arabs of their independent state. Abdallah’s adventure, if allowed to proceed, threatened war between Britain and France. Winston Churchill, by then colonial secretary, persuaded Abdallah to accept a principality to be called Transjordan with its capital in Amman. This involved compromises for Abdallah, who must have known the French would annihilate his Bedouin troops; for the Arabs of Greater Syria, a vast majority of whom had told the American King – Crane Commission of their desire for independence and unity; and for the Zionists, whose territorial ambitions included both banks of the Jordan. Until then, Britain and its Zionist prot?g?s had called the country Eastern Palestine. Britain revised its League of Nations Mandate in 1922 to exclude the East Bank from the Balfour Declaration’s proposed ‘Jewish home’. It assumed responsibility for Prince Abdallah’s foreign policy and, under the able direction of General John Bagot Glubb, organized his army into the Arab Legion. Zionists who rejected the revision of the Mandate and insisted the future Israel comprise both banks of the River Jordan came to be called the Revisionists. Its leaders would be Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Yitzak Stern, Yitzak Shamir and, later, Ariel Sharon. Jordan, removed from the Palestine Mandate, did not escape the Palestine problem. Half of the lighted hilltops of night-time Amman belonged to Palestinians, whose refugee camps were as much a part of the city, albeit poorer, as the East Bankers’ neighbourhoods. Jordan had fought three wars over Palestine. In 1948, Abdallah – who became king of independent Jordan in 1946 – captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In 1967, his grandson, King Hussein, lost Abdallah’s 1948 conquests. In both wars, Jordan absorbed refugees whom the Israeli army had expelled. Then came the third war. The refugees, led by Yasser Arafat, and the native Jordanians under King Hussein waged ferocious battles in 1970 and 1971. The Palestinians lost, and the Hashemite throne survived. The city we entered had grown to include a million people on the hills where Abdallah had found about three thousand Circassian settlers and a few hundred Arabs. At one of Amman’s many traffic roundabouts, twenty young men were dancing in a large plaza. Clasping one another’s shoulders, they formed a line and kicked their legs out to the beat of the tambour, the Arab drum, and the clapping and singing of boys and girls. They were having great fun. Dance festivals had evolved over millennia: pagan feasts absorbed by Christian holidays, Christianity giving way to Islam, sacred holidays secularized by the nation. And in all of Syria, there was the dabke, a communal dance like a Scottish reel. There were the chababi, a pipe, and the tambour, and clapping, and the mixing of sexes, ages, classes. I used to see this dancing at the great mahrajans in Mount Lebanon, at regional festivals in Jebel Alawi in northern Syria, among the Druze and in the towns of the West Bank. They might celebrate a birth, a wedding, a harvest, a saint’s day. These boys, girls, men and women danced in the forecourt of Amman’s telecommunications centre, under blazing floodlights. Above them loomed a quadruple-life-size, Hollywood-style portrait of King Abdallah holding a cellphone to his ear. Amman had a new mobile telephone network! An ancient ritual that had been paganized, Christianized, Islamized and Arabized was now commercialized. How else to herald the new era? Welcome to Amman Penury and loyalty dictated my choice of hotel, the Shepherd’s in Jebel Amman. The old place was far less costly than the modern chains, the InterContinental, Marriott, Hilton, Radisson et al. I was not on expenses, as I had been as a journalist. My publishers’ advance was so meagre that I could not have survived on it all year if I’d slept in a tent. The Shepherd’s belonged to the Shalhoub family, whose daughter Norma had been at the American University of Beirut when I was studying philosophy there. I was twenty-one then, and she was a year or two younger. We had not gone out together, despite my repeated attempts to woo her. On my student travels, I had stayed at her family’s hotel. Then, it was managed by her father, a gregarious and well-known Amman character named George Shalhoub. For a time, he had – persuaded by his son Nader that it would be good for business – opened a British pub on the roof. George Shalhoub had died, and Nader was in charge. The pub had closed, but Shepherd’s retained the fading charm of George Shalhoub’s times. There were only one or two other guests, like a seafront hotel in winter, and the service was nothing if not personal. I received a call as soon as I reached my room. Norma Shalhoub was inviting me to lunch the next day. How did she know I was there? Amman was a village, and Shepherd’s was a village hotel. This was the wrong place for me to bring a Jordanian maiden for the night, not that I knew any. ‘The West Bank is killing Jordan,’ Norma Shalhoub said at lunch. She was not discussing attacks by Palestinians or the arrival of West Bankers in search of work. She was talking about perception. ‘I’ve been to trade fairs in Japan three times.’ The Shalhoubs had opened a travel agency to complement their hotel business. ‘The first time, the Japanese asked if we could hear the bombs in the Iran – Iraq war. The second time, could we hear the bombs in Lebanon? And the last time, did we hear the explosions from the West Bank? They think it’s all the same.’ Amman had been tranquil since 1970. We were at her mother’s house. Norma lived next door on one side, her brother and his family on the other. Norma’s mother gave us rice, vegetable stew and chicken grilled in the Lebanese way with lemon and garlic. Although they were patriotic Jordanians, the Shalhoubs’ ancestors had migrated to Amman from Lebanon – from the same Christian mountain village that my great-grandmother had left for France and Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century. Her food was like my grandmother’s. As a gesture to me, Norma had gone out to buy cans of beer. Like most other people in Jordan, where alcohol was legal, the Shalhoubs did not drink. When the Israeli border opened in 1994, they built the Palace Hotel in Petra. Mrs Shalhoub remembered Udi, an Israeli tour operator, coming to the house for lunch. He was pleasant and polite, and they looked forward to working with him. But he warned them: ‘This is just the beginning, but wait. I promise you that after a year of doing business with Israelis, you’ll be anti-Semitic.’ The anticipated profits from the Palace Hotel in Petra did not materialize. Most Americans toured the Middle East on Israeli package holidays. Only the more adventurous – and such people are few – came to Jordan on their own. ‘The day tourists,’ Norma said, ‘would bring their own food – even their own water – from Israel.’ Israeli tour operators bussed the tourists to Petra for a few hours, stopped by the Palace or some other hotel to buy postcards and bussed them back over the border. It was to make them pay something, Mrs Shalhoub told me, that the government introduced the ten-dinar entry fee. Again there were stories of Israeli tourists stealing glasses. But Udi the tour operator failed as a prophet. The Shalhoubs were spared anti-Semitism by the kindness of Jewish families in America. When Mrs Shalhoub’s younger daughter, Lena, moved with her American husband to Pittsburgh, she stayed home all day with two small children in a foreign country while he worked. In Jordan, her mother, sister, aunts and cousins would have been with her. In Pittsburgh, she became isolated and unwell. Mrs Shalhoub said, ‘The only people who offered to help were Jewish.’ Norma drove me on a tour of Amman’s newer quarter, Abdoan, and its shopping centre – a mall I thought I had seen under another name in the San Fernando Valley. The logos of American suburbia beckoned: Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream, Planet Hollywood, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s. An American atmosphere pervaded Abdoan, kids in fresh-washed cars, boys and girls eyeing one another through the black lenses of reflecting sunglasses, families at outdoor tables eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola. Did I want to see the new American Embassy? The previous embassy had been a modest stone office building whose front door opened onto the street opposite the main journalist hotel, the InterContinental. It dated from the days when anyone could walk into a US Embassy without being searched, scanned and security checked. It took a few bullets during the Black September 1970 battles but it was otherwise unharmed. The new embassy, not far from the mall, was a citadel of the American world order. It lay within a perimeter of walls that an Olympic pole vaulter could not scale. Jordanian army tanks surrounded the compound, guns pointed outwards. The embassy itself was a gargantuan block of stone, trimmed in satellite dishes, television and radio aerials and, higher than them all, a flagpole. Norma told me the embassy was self-sufficient. Its PX sold cornflakes and peanut butter so the staff would not have to buy Arab food outside. It could have been a French Foreign Legion fort in old Africa, awaiting the inevitable and futile assault by the natives. At dinner that night, in an Italian restaurant called Romano’s, I ate alone with a book of conversations with Middle East historians – Approaches to the History of the Middle East by Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher. The author’s first interview was with Albert Hourani, whose History of the Arabs remained the standard fifteen years after its original publication. ‘Between the powerful and the powerless,’ Albert said, ‘there cannot be an easy relationship of friendship. Having power is quite different from being under someone else’s power, which is a far deeper experience, just as victory is a much less profound experience than defeat.’ Albert was one of two historians – the great Mediterranean and Crusades’ scholar Sir Steven Runciman was the other – who had advised me on Tribes with Flags. Both had since died, and I missed their counsel. Reading Albert’s reflections was like having lunch with him, as we used to in London at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. In the most diplomatic manner, he would tell me that I had misinterpreted the histories of Islam, the Crusades or the Ottoman Empire. Sitting in Amman with my book, I saw couples – well-dressed men and women – at other candle-lit tables. I thought about Albert Hourani and Steven Runciman, two of Britain’s grandest old men of letters. Ageing was sadder for the loss of your mentors. Solitary travel too was becoming a trial, when you ate alone and all the pretty women in the restaurant were with other men. Notables in Exile ‘We’re not very numerous,’ Usama Khalidy said of his family. ‘We’re probably not more than three or four hundred.’ The Khalidys had for five centuries contributed generation after generation of scholars to the Muslim world. Their longevity as nobles of Jerusalem had prompted Usama’s younger brother, the historian Tareef Khalidy, to respond to the accusation that the Khalidys were decadent with: ‘Decadent? Three hundred years ago, we were decadent.’ Usama was the middle of three accomplished brothers. The oldest was Walid, another academic who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tareef, the baby, taught history at Cambridge, the one in England. Before Cambridge, he taught at the American University of Beirut. Throughout Lebanon’s long war, he resisted the deadening effect of military occupations by Syria and Israel, massacres and the anti-intellectual bias of Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian sectarian barbarians. The three Khalidy brothers – Walid, Usama and Tareef – grew up in Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Their family owned beautiful houses and a library of rare and ancient Islamic manuscripts within the stone walls of Jerusalem’s old city. Like many other Arabs and Jews, they had built villas away from the squalor of the old city – whose rain-fed cisterns sometimes bred unhealthy bacteria – on the open hills to the west. In 1948, when the Arab inhabitants were expelled or fled the violence, West Jerusalem became Jewish Jerusalem. Usama’s father, a teacher and scholar like most of his family, had written some of the first textbooks in Arabic. ‘He did an experiment with me,’ Usama said. ‘I did not go to school until I was nine. I knew every cave in the area. I knew where to catch scorpions. I knew every plant. I knew every shepherd. I did not know how to read and write.’ Illiteracy did not impede his progress through academe. A tutor taught him enough one summer for him to pass his exams for the third-form elementary. He was nine. By the time he celebrated his nineteenth birthday, he had a degree in biochemistry. By then, he lived in Beirut. By then, there were no Khalidys in West Jerusalem. ‘I am one of the few who has had the honour of being occupied by the Israelis three times,’ Usama said, proud of his record. He spoke without anger. The way he sat, almost as if his body had fallen into a restful sleep, said he would be at home wherever he escaped. Usama Khalidy’s apparent indifference to his treatment by Israel’s armed forces was inexplicable in a man who, again and again, had been on the losing side. His first Israeli occupation took place in April 1948, when he was sixteen. The Khalidys – mother, father, three boys and two girls – remained at home south-west of Jerusalem’s old city. ‘I was coming back from school by the Jaffa Gate,’ Usama said. It was his last term at the Rashidieh School. ‘I saw the people who had been captured in Deir Yassin and been left in the sun for three days,’ he said of the most famous massacre of Palestinian Arabs, about three hundred of whom were killed by Menachem Begin’s Irgun with assistance from the Haganah over the night of 9/10 April 1948. ‘They were dropped at the Jaffa Gate. It created panic.’ Before dropping them at the Jaffa Gate, the Irgunists had put Deir Yassin’s survivors in cages and paraded them through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighbourhoods. ‘No less disgusting [than the massacre],’ the Labour Zionist historian Jon Kimche wrote in his 1950 book, Seven Fallen Pillars, ‘was the subsequent publicity parade by the Irgun of a number of poor Arab prisoners through the streets of Jerusalem.’ Was it, I asked, when they had been displayed in cages? ‘It was after they had been in the cages,’ he answered. ‘There were twenty or forty, I don’t know. They were mainly women.’ I told him that Deir Yassin, now a part of Israeli Jerusalem called Givat Shaul, had become the site of a mental hospital. ‘Very appropriate,’ he said. ‘I remember an argument between my father and my uncle. My father was in the Arab Higher Council. My uncle wanted to tell the story completely. My father said they should play it down, because it would cause a panic. My uncle won.’ The Palestinian Arabs lost. Arab leaders advertised the massacre to show the Western world that they, not the Zionists, were the victims. The world did not care. Zionist leaders, especially Menachem Begin of the Irgun underground movement, used the events at Deir Yassin to inspire other Arabs to leave their homes. Begin wrote in his memoir, The Revolt, ‘Out of evil, however, good came … This Arab propaganda spread a legend of terror amongst Arabs and Arab troops, who were seized with panic at the mention of Irgun soldiers. The legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel.’ He said that Deir Yassin helped in ‘the conquest of Haifa’: ‘all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting: “Deir Yassin!” ’ I asked Usama whether the massacre at Deir Yassin had inspired him to fight. ‘There weren’t enough weapons to give even to adults,’ he answered, smiling to dismiss any notion of him as a warrior. Shooting between the two sides often kept him awake, but no one in his neighbourhood fired at the neighbouring agricultural school run by ‘Madame Ben Zvi’. Mr Ben Zvi, a colleague of David Ben-Gurion, became Israel’s second president. The Khalidys were evicted, not by the Israelis, but by the Red Cross. ‘The Red Cross asked us to leave so they could make the house a refuge for displaced persons from both sides,’ he said. Israeli forces occupied the area and announced that no Arabs, even those who had complied with a humanitarian request from the Red Cross, were allowed to return. Usama went to Beirut, where he earned his bachelors and masters degrees in biochemistry, and then to Michigan for his doctorate. He returned to the American University of Beirut’s hospital to teach for twenty-five years. In 1967, on a year’s sabbatical, he taught in the children’s department of Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital. The Augusta Victoria, a late German Gothic stone edifice, dominated the eastern half of Jerusalem from a hilltop that Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion had held in 1948. In 1967, Israel and the Arab states fought another war. ‘When the war started, Dr Najib Abu Haidar’ – Abu Haidar was a highly regarded physician I had known in Lebanon, a contemporary of Usama’s – ‘and I went up to the hospital. I was put in charge of the blood bank. We never got any blood.’ The bloodless blood bank fitted the Arab logistical profile in 1967: Jordanian troops defending East Jerusalem did not receive ammunition or other supplies. Israeli artillery next to a Jewish hospital, Hadassah, shelled the Augusta Victoria. ‘They fired mortar shells and napalm shells. The top of the hospital caught fire. We stayed for three days in the basement with our patients. It was very frightening, especially with the roof on fire. I kept working there, until the Israelis came to occupy the hospital. They held us for three or four days, then let us go.’ When Usama emerged from the hospital, he saw the bodies. They lay, like abandoned cars, unburied and unmourned, on either side of the road. They were all Arabs, like him, Palestinian civilians and Jordanian soldiers. They would not be buried until the Israeli army granted permission. Usama did not speak of the war as an act of injustice. He did not, as many Palestinians did, list the villages the Israeli army demolished in 1967. Nor did he bemoan the destruction of the Moroccan Quarter in the old city to clear the ground for a Disneyesque viewing platform beside the Jewish Western, or Wailing, Wall. A scientist, Usama told me what he saw – no more, perhaps much less. As with 1948 – the year the Palestinians refer to as their national nakhba, catastrophe – he left it to me to supply words like tragedy, pity, injustice. His languid posture, his monotone, his frequent and paced drags on his cigarette spoke of resignation. Events were like chemical reactions observed under a microscope. If a mix of substances exploded, that too was an event. He would not explode with them. What did he do after he walked down the hill from the Augusta Victoria? He went to his family’s old house near the Bab az-Zahir and waited. ‘We were going to leave anyway at that time,’ he said. His sabbatical from the American University Hospital was over. ‘I went over the bridge and never went back.’ Jerusalem had been ‘reunited’, according to the joyful Israelis who danced on the new plaza where Arab houses had stood the day before. It had been ‘conquered’ and ‘occupied’, in the words of United Nations resolutions and of the Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem after June 1967. The Khalidys had lived there for a thousand years, an offshoot of the tribe of Beni Khalid – sons of Khalid – who had migrated with the seasons between Syria and the Persian Gulf. For five hundred years at least they had been Jerusalem’s judges, teachers, diplomats. They had earned respect by remaining aloof from the tribal battles that blooded Jerusalem’s older feudal Arab families, the Nashashibis and the Husseinis. The Khalidys had collected manuscripts, written books and kept records of the Arab presence – Christian and Muslim – in Palestine. It was no accident that one of the best volumes of documents on the Palestinian conflict, From Haven to Conquest, had been edited by a Khalidy, Usama’s brother Walid. For a man like Usama to say ‘I went over the bridge and never went back’ was to conceal thoughts and emotions that could not have died. He did not elaborate, although I asked him to. Five centuries of scholarship? The beautiful stone houses, the fountains in verdant courtyards, the libraries? The cousins and aunts and uncles left behind? He lit another cigarette, offered me more Turkish coffee and related the third act in his saga of Israeli occupation. He had resumed teaching at the American University Hospital in Beirut, experimenting with a method of instruction through problem solving that had been developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. By the early 1970s, when I was living in Lebanon, the Palestinians had come to dominate West Beirut, culturally, politically, militarily. Young Palestinians were fighting for their independence – from Israel, from the Arab states, from Western domination. Usama, perhaps in accord with familial tradition, did not join any of the movements with their abundance of alphabetical acronyms, PFLP, PDFLP, PFLP-GC, PLF et al. Commandos who launched raids across the border from Lebanon were usually killed. They often attacked civilians on beaches or in buses. When captured, they were tortured. Many of their sympathizers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were also taken to the interrogation centres and the prisons. Others – in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – also went to the cells and the torture chambers. The disparate, tribal, sometimes juvenile, brave and desperate Palestinian organizations inspired a defeated people – not only Palestinians, but many other Arabs. They did not end Israel’s occupation, impede its confiscation of land or prevent the construction of all-Jewish colonies that were displacing Palestinians from the territories that Israel conquered in 1967. But the Palestinian commandos would not let the world – especially the Arab world – forget the injustice done to them. They made trouble, in Israel, in Jordan and, then, in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. At the time, Usama and his wife were living in an apartment building that also housed the Palestine Research Centre. Just above Rue Hamra, with its Caf? de Paris, cinemas and dress shops, the Research Centre was far from the Palestinians’ military structure in and near the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Borj al-Barajneh. It should have been left alone, but it wasn’t. Between 1979 and 1983 it was bombed five times, by a Syrian-run commando faction called As-Saiqa, by Christian Lebanese and by Israel. In 1982, after a three-month Israeli siege, the Palestinian commandos evacuated Beirut by sea. Under the terms of an agreement guaranteed by the United States, Israel was to remain outside the western half of the city. It violated the agreement, sending tanks and infantry across the Green Line from the Christian, eastern side. Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon invited Christian militiamen to eliminate ‘terrorists’ in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although all armed Palestinians had gone, the Christians butchered hundreds of women, children and old men while Israeli troops guarded the camps’ entrances. When Israeli soldiers reached the Palestine Research Centre, they loaded all of its archives, its books, precious documents, computers and its internal files onto trucks that took them to Israel. (Scholars who wished to consult its documents on Palestinian history could do so, with security clearance, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.) ‘We were at home until the Israelis got close,’ Usama said. ‘Then a car bomb destroyed most of our house.’ The Israelis later admitted they had used car bombs in Beirut to assassinate Palestinian leaders. Sharon said later that his only regret about Lebanon was that he had not ‘liquidated’ the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, when he had the opportunity. After the car bomb, Usama moved into a friend’s apartment. While the Israeli army looted the Research Centre on the first floor, soldiers broke into all of the flats above. ‘They walked into our house,’ Usama said. ‘They shat on things. One had to appreciate their ability to shit on top of a refrigerator. They tore a lot of books. It was more vandalism than theft.’ Usama’s outrage was nowhere evident in the telling. His conclusion: ‘I don’t think it was fun, to put it mildly.’ He had left West Jerusalem in 1967. In 1982, he stayed in Beirut. Eventually, after the Lebanese suicide bombings, the Israelis were the ones to leave. Usama restored his flat, replaced his books and continued to teach. In 1983, the largest car bomb of all demolished his building. Twenty-two people died, including the wife of the Research Centre’s director, Sabry Jiryis. Jiryis had grown up in Israel, spoke and wrote Hebrew and had been in Israeli prisons for non-violent political activity. A fine writer and scholar, he was among the few Palestinians to urge his people to understand the Israelis, to compromise, to reconcile. After his wife’s funeral, he left Lebanon for another exile. The bombing wounded Usama and his wife. Six months later, when they recovered, they moved to Jordan. Their flat on the ground floor of a new stone building could have been in Jerusalem, so much had its walls and floors and shelves been covered in Khalidy memorabilia. ‘This was the grandfather of my grandfather’s father,’ Usama indicated a reproduction of an old painting of an old man attired in the style of his Sultan – a dark robe, a turban, a beard. ‘Mohammed Ali [Khalidy] was the deputy judge of Jerusalem. The chief justice was a Turk, who never came to Jerusalem. So, Mohammed Ali was in effect the chief judge. He died in 1862.’ To be a jurist in the Ottoman Empire was to be a scholar, and a Muslim judge adhered to one or another of the schools of legal philosophy that defined the nature of one’s belief in Sunni Islam. The law had been as significant in the consciousness of an Ottoman Sunni Muslim, whether Turk, Kurd or Arab, as it remained for strict Orthodox Jewish rabbis. The law and the devout study of law – law giving, law making, legal interpretation, the source and legitimacy of legal precepts – involved not only jurisprudence, but philosophy, history and theology. The law made the Khalidys into scholars, and the tradition persisted among the latest generations – academics, but not a lawyer among them. Usama Khalidy did not subscribe to the Islamic school that proscribed and condemned visual representation of the human form. He lived surrounded by family portraits of long-dead Khalidys in Ottoman robes of office and of his two modern and wildly beautiful daughters. I asked about a black and white drawing propped against the books behind him. I’d been looking at it for some time: six men on their feet, four seated in front, all eyes fixed on the artist. ‘This is one of the oldest pictures in the Middle East of my ancestors,’ Usama said. The ten, who looked like a difficult jury to impress, divided into two phases of Ottoman history. The elders, frail in white turbans atop snow-white beards, had grown up in the last years of a Sultanate that had not absorbed the cultural lessons of its military defeats by the once-insignificant Christian kingdoms of Europe: in Greece, in the northern Balkans, in much of North Africa. The younger men, all fresh and trendy in sporty tarboush and twirling moustaches, were coming of age when the Sultan understood that weakness required concessions to the foreigner and new arrangements with the more dissatisfied natives. In the mid-nineteenth century, those Khalidys in the fezzes were the new men of reform, of progress, of enlightenment. The Sultan would govern under the new men, reorganize the empire, invite the hated Europeans to train his army and buy the new steel cannon of Krupp and the Maxim gun. Soon, the Sultan’s subjects would be wearing trousers and conspiring to depose him. ‘This is our ancestor, Yusuf Dia Khalidy,’ Usama spoke with a certain pride of this man, one of the oldest in the picture. ‘Yusuf Dia was sent as a judge to Kurdistan. He wrote the first dictionary of the Kurdish language.’ The dictionary was in Kurdish and Arabic, languages that flourished under the Ottomans, but which had been banned – except for prayers in Arabic – in the modern Turkey that Moustafa Kemal Atat?rk created after the First World War. Usama said I should buy a copy of the dictionary, still in print from the Librairie du Liban, when I reached Beirut. Usama’s two daughters, Mouna and Ramla, lived in Beirut with their husbands and children. Ramla, Usama said, was an old Arab name, so rare that I’d not heard it except as the name of an Arab town in Palestine. More Christians than Muslims, he said, gave their children the ancient names. The Christians were more tribal, following the traditional pattern of marriage within their Jund. Jund, classical Arabic for army, was also a division of land: great west – east stretches between the Mediterranean and the desert, self-sufficient and parallel regions of fish and commerce beside the sea, fruit and timber in the coastal mountain range, wheat and vegetables in the fertile plain, and, at the desert’s edges, the Bedouins’ meat, milk, yoghurt and cheese. Jund Dimashk went from Beirut over Mount Lebanon to Damascus and the Syrian Desert. To its south were Jund al-Urdun and Jund al-Falastin. There would be more family ties hundreds of miles across the Jund, from Hebron over the Jordan to Kerak or from Jerusalem to Salt in Jordan, than between towns a few miles north and south of one another in different Junds. The Christians, few as they were, preserved tradition. Usama said that they were the last in Jordan to perform a ritual operation on their babies to remove the uvula from inside their mouths. ‘They say it improves their speech,’ Usama explained. ‘I was told there is a Yemeni tribe who do that as well. It’s similar to circumcision.’ Usama had retired, but for him retirement was a mission. ‘Traditionally, when people became my age, sixty-nine, they had the job of deciding who married whom,’ he said, implying that it was not a role for him. ‘Of course, they hardly ever became my age.’ Rather than play patriarch, he studied the flora and fauna of the desert. The Jordanian government had set aside 12,000 square kilometres for the Badia Research Project to document aspects of desert life. ‘I’m interested a bit in plants,’ he said, ‘for example, to find out how to grow black iris out of seed. I’ve developed a method for extracting the smell of some desert plants. Wait a minute.’ He left the room. I examined his books. Most were science, biology or chemistry, but there were also Arabic – English dictionaries, a book on Ottoman architecture, Tony Clifton’s God Cried, about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Jonathan Randal’s Going All the Way on Lebanon’s civil war, and a book of old photographs of Palestine, Before their Diaspora, edited by Usama’s brother Walid. I was looking at the last when Usama returned with a vial of black liquid that looked like molasses. ‘Put your finger in,’ he ordered, delighted to be teaching. ‘This is the essence of a desert plant, from near the Iraq – Syria border.’ In Arabic its name was shih. Usama leafed through a botanical index. ‘Here it is in English, it’s artemisia. Herba alba. It’s a kind of wormwood.’ My hand would smell of wormwood for a week. Usama had become a calligrapher, not in the traditional Arabic fashion of ink on parchment, but in three dimensions. He took me to his workshop, a small room off the corridor. Here I saw the tools – arrayed in neat rows on the wall – with which he chiselled, scraped and sculpted Arabic letters into vibrant shapes in wood, iron and brass. A simple word like hua, he, looked like the statue of a man, its contours unconfined to the flat page. The most beautiful, as in traditional Arabic calligraphy, was Allah, God, whose image can never be painted or carved by a good Muslim, any more than a devout Jew can speak his name. ‘At about the age of forty,’ Usama said, ‘I decided that Arabs don’t know how to retire.’ Arab presidents and kings fitted the general pattern. ‘I went to Iraq al-Amir, where there is an old, eighth-century palace or fort. The Jordanians have crafts industries there. I went down to teach them how to make paper.’ He gave me some dark paper, thin but sturdy and as absorbent as an egg box. I felt the paper and looked at Arabic words come to life. Why was Usama Khalidy content to leave the medical school to the next generation of instructors and to allow his daughters to choose their husbands and not to tyrannize his family or those exiled Jerusalem Muslims who might look to a Khalidy for leadership? What made tribal chiefs, family patriarchs, kings, policemen and dictators cling to power until death? What drove out or suppressed the most interesting, the most creative and the most original within the Arab family? Why did the Arab world fight against its best self? Did Usama, who felt these questions in a more profound way than a visitor like myself, despair? He thought for a few seconds and said, ‘No.’ Why not? ‘We’re passing through a funny phase. At the same time, one has to remark that the Arabs are probably the world’s oldest living tradition. A child can read something written in Arabic fifteen hundred years ago and enjoy it. You cannot do that in English, for example. A child today cannot understand Chaucer and would have problems with Shakespeare. Our tradition is there. It has survived. It will survive. It’s getting much poorer, of course.’ Usama, amid his bottles of desert scent, his bold script statues, his library, his relics of old Jerusalem and his ancestral pictures, did not mention the West. He did not blame Britain and France for drawing lines all over the map that erased the harmony of the Jund and brought European Jews to displace him and put compliant dictators in charge of the oil that could, perhaps should, have propelled Arab civilization into the vanguard of intellectual and artistic discovery. The dictators kept the Arabs in servitude and, for the most part, misery. For this failure of leadership and of society, his gaze turned – not in anger at the United Nations or Great Britain or the United States – but in regret at the tribes. ‘Our main problem is education.’ He said that Arab education prepared the young only for examinations, the tawjihi. Pass the tawjihi, and you continue to university. Fail, and you stay in the village or the slum. The tawjihi system produced students who memorized set answers to set questions, not those who thought or questioned or looked at things in an original way. ‘Reforming the education system will help, but it needs a revolution. We take the best students. They have to study medicine or engineering. The worst go on to schools of education. Worse than that, they go to schools of theology. The worst are in charge of our brains, the best in charge of our muscles.’ In the 1930s and 1940s the Palestinians were led by the obstinate and self-destructive Haj Amin Husseini. Then came Yasser Arafat. Neither was known for intellect or wisdom. Had the leaders improved in half a century? ‘Not very much. The Palestinians deserve better leadership. The whole Arab world deserves better.’ Before I left him to the study of plants and the manufacture of words, I asked him about identity. Was he an Arab, a Palestinian, a Jordanian, a Muslim? The concoction of tribalism, faith and nationalism bedevilled Israelis and Palestinians alike. Who is a Jew? What is an Arab? Juwal Levy’s father had gone to court to take the word Jew off his identity card. Some Arabs believed in the Arab nation, divided into states that could never be nations. Some were Lebanese or Egyptians first, Arabs second or not at all. ‘Arabs don’t know the word huwiya,’ he said. Huwiya meant identity, and it was also the identity card that policemen in Israel and the Arab world demanded from Arabs. ‘It’s a very new word. We don’t think of identity. We think of loyalties. Unlike identity, which is exclusive, loyalties are multiple. You can be loyal to your family, your religion, your state and so on. It depends on the situation. If my child is sick, that is my first loyalty.’ When loyalties conflict, does identity dissolve? ‘You noticed after 1948, as the Arabs lost faith in Arabism, they ended up going to religion – either the religion of communism or real religion. It happened after ’48. It’s happening now.’ With communism dead, Islam remained. Allegiance, loyalty, identity. Race, sect, tribe. The Zionists came to the right address. Every question the Zionists asked had its equivalent among the natives. Who is a Jew, a question debated in Israel’s civil and religious courts, translated as, who is an Arab? Was it blood or language or geography? There was no Platonic ideal of Arab or Jew, and everyone refined his identity: Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jew, Arab of the Mashrak, the East, or the Maghreb, the West in North Africa. There were Arabs in Syria who had no Arab blood of the tribes from the Arabian peninsula. In Russia, millions of Jews traced their ancestry to the Gentile Khazar people and not to any of ancient Israel’s Twelve Tribes. No one had found the Arab or the Jewish gene. Usama Khalidy believed only a racist would try. A History Lesson Kamal Salibi, whom I knew when he taught history at the American University of Beirut, had moved to Amman. Like most other Eastern Christians whose forebears had become Protestant, Salibi was de-tribalized. Protestant Arabs were the first to read the Bible in Arabic and take degrees from Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College. The most famous, and brilliant, of the Protestants’ offspring was Edward Said, who taught at Columbia in New York and wrote, among other books, Orientalism. The College became the American University, where I first met both Salibi and Said. During the Lebanese civil war, Salibi used to tell me the Palestinians were making the fatal error of becoming another Lebanese tribe. He stayed to teach throughout the civil war, the Israeli invasion and the years of anarchy under West Beirut’s Muslim militias. Fanatic Shiite fundamentalists threatened him, and Christian friends were kidnapped. Already author of a history of Jordan, he had a friend in King Hussein’s brother, Prince Hassan. In 1997, when Lebanon was again at peace, then-Crown Prince Hassan invited him to head Jordan’s Inter-Faith Institute. Salibi had lived in Amman since then, although a few years later he would return to Beirut. His new house was, he said, ‘near the Fifth Circle’. The city’s neighbourhoods were often named for the number of the nearest roundabout. Shepherd’s Hotel was near the First. Salibi’s modern flat did its best to recreate the Ottoman charm of his old Beirut apartment with Persian carpets and mother-of-pearl furniture. As in Beirut, he smoked cigarillos. Also as in Beirut, he offered me whisky. If Usama Khalidy’s house was Palestine, Salibi’s was old Beirut. If Usama had his doubts about Palestinian politicians, Salibi was ashamed of Lebanon’s. He condemned Lebanon for its mistreatment of the Palestinian refugees. From the time the PLO retreated in 1982, Palestinians had been massacred by Christian militias with Israeli support and by the Shiite Muslim Amal militia with Syrian connivance. The Lebanese government excluded them from most employment and denied them state-funded medical care. Lebanon’s establishment, Christian and Muslim, blamed the Palestinians, rather than themselves, for a war that lasted from 1975 to 1991. Salibi was angry that the Lebanese contrived more ways to punish the Palestinians, twenty years after they lost all power in Lebanon. ‘They are now making laws that any Palestinian refugee who owns a house or land in Lebanon cannot pass it on when he dies,’ Salibi said. ‘The bloody Lebanese parliament passed it almost unanimously.’ What should Lebanon do? ‘I think that, in Lebanon, the Palestinians ought to be acknowledged as Lebanese citizens with all social and political rights. Once they become Lebanese, they will do what all Lebanese do and emigrate.’ Lebanon had always refused to make the refugees, who had lived there since 1948, citizens. The only state that had granted citizenship to the refugees was Jordan. With almost 400,000 refugees registered with the United Nations, the Palestinians made up 10 per cent of Lebanon’s population. In Lebanon, Christians feared turning so many Muslims into citizens, and the Shiites resisted being outnumbered by the Sunnis. There were no Palestinian Shiites and not many Palestinian Christians in Lebanon. ‘The idea of Zionism is tribal,’ Salibi said. ‘The idea that something binds you together around the world, that it is more important than any other allegiance and you have to be all together in one place, this is tribal.’ Tribal or not, Israel was a fact. If most Arabs did not accept Israel’s moral right to displace most Palestinian Arabs and put others under military occupation, they recognized its strength. Salibi was one of the few people I knew in the Arab world who did not disparage the Palestinian leadership. ‘What surprises me,’ he said, ‘is the maturity of the Palestinian leadership. There is no more of that “throw the Jews into the sea” nonsense. They are asking to live only on what they have.’ They had the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barely 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine, and they were losing much of that to Israeli settlers. ‘Palestine since my infancy has been socially divided between effendis and peasants. The effendis always despised the peasants and still do. If they hate Arafat, it’s because he’s not from their class. I tell them Palestine is no longer yours. It belongs to those who fought or who tilled the soil. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing.’ The 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had allowed the Palestinian leaders to return home and govern under the Israelis. Since then, Israel had doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. Salibi was one of the few who did not see the Oslo accords as a disaster. ‘What’s wrong with the Oslo agreement?’ he asked. ‘For the first time, it gave the Palestinians something.’ Having been to the West Bank and Gaza many times since the accord, I disagreed. Oslo had given the Israelis something: a Palestinian administration that policed the occupied territories while the settlers took more Palestinian land. Salibi believed Oslo was less the problem than Israeli refusal to implement all its provisions on schedule. ‘The Israelis are behaving like savages. They are going to be the losers in the end. They are going to have to accept a settlement, even if it means a Palestinian state on a few metres. It will puncture the Zionist balloon. Zionism is a package deal. It’s Eretz Israel, the Bible land, heritage. They want to get all the Jews from all the world and cram them there. The whole thing is a package deal conceived in a seminar room. The least puncture and the speed with which it will deflate will amaze you.’ He thought the Israelis were ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ over making peace with the Palestinians. The wiser course was to make peace. ‘The more generous they are, the better it is for them,’ Salibi concluded, even if it meant punching a hole in – or setting a limit to – Zionism’s dream. Did he imagine that the Arabs would accept Israel? Not as a tactic, but as a long-term proposition? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The minute there is a settlement, you cannot imagine what will happen. The Arabs are very forgiving. Think of Lebanon. Twenty years of fighting and the minute the fighting stopped, East Beirut and Jounieh filled with Muslims. The Christians flocked to West Beirut. There were Eid al-Fitr tents in Jounieh.’ East Beirut and the seaside resort of Jounieh were Christian ghettoes, and Eid al-Fitr was the Muslim feast to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. ‘Arab society is very forgiving. Grudges are not borne for long – except by one family against another. The hatred does not last.’ Salibi was from Bhamdoun, a Christian village in the Shouf hills of Mount Lebanon. In 1983, when Israel withdrew its army from the Shouf, the Druze massacred Christians and sent most of them north in an act that Yugoslavia’s wars would later give the term ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘I don’t bear a grudge against the Druze,’ Salibi said. ‘People are going back.’ He thought that Europeans took longer to forget. ‘I was in England in the 1950s. The Dutch students refused to listen to German music.’ During the bloodiest days of Lebanon’s war, Christians swooned to the voice of a Muslim diva, Oum Kalsoum, and Muslims never lost their love of the Christian singer Feyrouz. But the end of the war did not end the Lebanese animosity to the Palestinians. What was Israel to make of that? Salibi went on, ‘Jordan made peace with Israel. Not one Israeli visitor was hurt. Palestinian refugees over the age of fifty who had shops refused to sell to them, but everywhere else they were accepted. They object to their stealing – not to their being Israelis.’ The only people who objected in principle to Israel, he believed, were the Islamists. But in Jordan, unlike in Egypt, they did nothing to harm Israelis. ‘Listen,’ he urged me. ‘The Jordanian army is on cordial terms with the Israeli Defence Forces. The Palestinian Authority was the same. If there is an agreement, then the whole hatred of the West in the Arab world will vanish. Abracadabra!’ Abracadabra? ‘It’s originally an Aramaic word that means, “vanish like a word”. The wind will be out of the sails of the Islamic movement in the Arab world.’ I reminded him that, in Lebanon many years before, he had told me Syria would never make peace with Israel. Its existence and strength depended upon keeping Israel isolated from the rest of the region. He had told me to think of the map. With Israel excluded from the region, all east – west Arab trade had to pass through Syria. There was no other land route between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. If Israel were accepted, trucks could collect goods at Haifa port and drive them to Iraq and Saudi Arabia through Israel and Jordan. Pipelines and railways would leave Syria out. Acceptance of Israel would deny Syria its leverage and render it insignificant. Having an Israeli enemy also justified Syria’s military dictatorship and police repression, he had said then. Now he believed peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would change that. ‘Syria will lose her blackmail position. It will sign a deal only after the Palestine question closes and only then.’ Problems lingered, I said. I had imagined that, once Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizballah would end its war against Israeli occupation. Yet Hizballah fought on – for a small area called the Shaba Farms that Israel did not leave. Hizballah said it was Lebanese territory and Syria agreed. Years before, however, Damascus claimed Shaba was part of Syria. ‘Shaba is a small mountain town,’ he explained. ‘It’s Sunni Muslim. In 1967, Israel occupied that area when it took the Golan Heights.’ Until 2000, Syria had claimed Shaba for itself. ‘Israel pulled out of Lebanon to the last bit, because Syria and Iran told them to.’ The real battle was not at Shaba, a containable sideshow. The struggle for Israel, for Palestine, was under way in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Things have changed since 1948,’ Salibi said. ‘If there were a few shots then, many people fled. This time, the Israelis destroy whole cities and only a few people leave. They’ve been hardened. Israel is turning the Palestinians into lions. The Israelis don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know what they have done. They have, how many Sharons? Three or four? How many Palestinians will be suicide bombers?’ Kamal Salibi was born in 1928, when France was occupying Lebanon and Syria and the British held Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. His parents, his teachers and all the elders of Bhamdoun had been Ottoman subjects. The era of independence had done more to disrupt their lives by moving large numbers of people – Tolstoy’s definition of history – than had the Ottoman centuries. History was being made in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli settlers were moving in to force Palestinian Arabs out. Salibi gave me some books to read, as he used to in Beirut. His houseboy went out to find me a taxi. That evening, he was having dinner at Usama Khalidy’s house. For them, Amman was a little like Beirut. In my taxi, between Salibi’s house and Shepherd’s, I looked at the vast hotels, Kentucky Fried Chicken shops and elegant stone houses. Amman was an unexciting city, but it had not surrendered to the vulgar brutality of Beirut and other Arab capitals. Houses had to be built of native stone, as in Jerusalem over the river. Streets were swept and washed. The cars were mostly new. I dropped the books at the hotel and went for a walk. In the all-male caf?s, men played cards and backgammon. There was no real souq, no central bazaar as in Istanbul or the other old Ottoman cities. Beirut’s souq had been a proud centre, until the civil war and the property developers reduced it to powder. Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Nicosia had kept their ancient marketplaces. Amman had never had a real souq, not having been a city since the days when the Romans called it Philadelphia. It had retained the culture and appearance of a large Arab – Circassian village in the Cotswolds, all quaint stone and ordered life. It was a town for driving in rather than walking. ‘In Jordan,’ Salibi had said, perhaps explaining his choice of Amman over Beirut, ‘they did not repudiate what the British taught them. If they build a road, it’s a good road. Look at the Pan-Arab Highway. The Jordanian part is beautiful. The bumps start in Syria.’ That much was true. But, as good as Jordan’s highways were, they were neither as vast nor as smooth as those next door in Iraq and in Israel. Amman’s surrender to British and then to American culture made a kind of sense. Amman did not have much to cling to. Most of its people came from elsewhere. Its rulers were Hejazis from the Holy City of Mecca in what became Saudi Arabia. Their subjects had come there from other parts of Jordan, attracted by the royal court, administrative jobs, the army and business. Other Arabs had moved there from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to marry or to enjoy its relative political stability. Half the city had escaped there from Palestine in the cataclysms of 1948 and 1967, unwillingly driven from towns and villages to which they believed they – or their children or their children’s children – would return. It had no claim on their loyalty. The Grand Vizier Everyone told me to see Zayd Rifai, former prime minister, former ambassador and now chief of the Senate. ‘He’s a great raconteur,’ the Syrian-born artist Ali Jabari said. A young woman at the Foreign Ministry told me, ‘He’s brilliant. He’s well read. When I met him, I just listened.’ (The young woman, Raya Qadi, was so beautiful that when we met I just listened.) Prince Talal bin Mohammed, a first cousin of King Abdallah, said that Rifai was a champion story-teller whose stories were sometimes true. True or not, they were good. The first thing I noticed about Rifai was not the dark suit, possibly from a tailor in Savile Row, or the cigar, from Havana, but the blue eyes. Everything else in his Senate office spoke of Arabia. We were served Bedouin coffee – boiled cardamom – from a brass pot by a man in immaculate robes and keffiyeh. There were Persian carpets and tribal d?cor, a ceremonial sword and photographs of Jordan’s four kings. Rifai had the tanned skin of the desert and looked like a shrewd Arab politician. But the eyes spoke of the Ottoman Empire, whose Turks, Circassians, Bosnians, Kurds and Chechens mingled with the tribes of Arabia and Syria. Rifai, it seemed, numbered Circassians and Turks among his ancestors. ‘The family is originally from the Hejaz,’ he said. ‘One of our grandfathers went to Iraq, where he created the Rifai school of thought in Iraq in the eleventh century.’ The Rifai school was a sect of Sufis, Muslim mystics. ‘A lot of followers of the sect took on the name. There are now about twenty million Rifais in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The family were civil servants in the Ottoman administration. They moved from one city to another. My grandfather was born in a village of southern Syria, in the Hauran. He met my grandmother in Marjayoun and married her. My father was born there.’ Marjayoun, a large town in south Lebanon, was mostly Greek Orthodox. The Israelis had made it their military headquarters and base for their mercenary South Lebanon army from 1978 to 2000. ‘My uncles were born in Tyre and Sidon,’ Rifai said. ‘My grandfather retired to Safad.’ Safad, a mixed Arab – Jewish city in the Galilee, was just south of Lebanon’s Marjayoun. ‘My father grew up in Safad, and he worked for the British Mandate administration in Palestine. He was seconded in 1921 to Transjordan to establish the new administration. I was born here in 1936.’ Rifai said his father, who had served as prime minister to Jordan’s first three kings, advised him to avoid politics. ‘He said I should choose engineering or medicine. He really wanted me to be a doctor.’ He became a diplomat instead. His education at the Bishop’s School in Amman and Victoria College in Egypt, where Edward Said would also study, was pure British colonial. Then he made the transition, as the Arab world would, from the British to the American system. He went to Harvard. Did he study medicine? ‘Political science,’ he said. ‘I graduated in 1956. Then I did international law and relations at Columbia. I still go back and give lectures.’ In 1956, King Hussein had dismissed the British general John Bagot Glubb – Glubb Pasha – as commander of the Arab Legion. Reacting to anti-colonial criticism from Nasser’s Egyptian press, the young king had to prove his Arab nationalist credentials by putting his armed forces under an Arab. I wondered whether Rifai had known Glubb Pasha. ‘He was a wonderful man,’ Rifai recalled. ‘He became more Jordanian Arab than British. A lot of injustice was done to him. My father had to tell Glubb to leave.’ His father found the duty distasteful. Glubb had given his professional life to Jordan within the context of his loyalty to the British Empire. I had known Glubb’s son, Fares, in Beirut in the early 1970s. Short and thin like his father, he looked like photographs of Glubb Pasha as a young man. Fares spoke flawless Bedouin Arabic, had converted to Islam and was close to the Marxists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1970 had attempted to destroy the Hashemite crown that his father had sworn to defend for thirty-five years. ‘I went as ambassador to London for a few months,’ Rifai remembered. ‘Glubb Pasha used to call on me. He always referred to King Hussein as His Majesty, or our lord – sayedna. He had contributed enormously to the establishment of the army, to administration and order in this society.’ The discipline, the starched uniforms and the army band’s bagpipes owed something to Glubb Pasha. Back in Amman with his Harvard and Columbia degrees, Rifai went on to represent Jordan in Cairo, Beirut and London, as well as at the United Nations. In 1971, he started work in the royal palace. ‘I thought I’d have a change after all we had been through.’ What Jordan had been through included the June 1967 war, when Israel captured Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank from what had been Glubb Pasha’s army; the Arab – Israeli War of Attrition that followed; and the 1970 Black September war between Palestinian commandos and Jordan’s army. ‘The most dangerous time was the period after the ’67 war,’ Rifai said. ‘For Jordan, it wasn’t a six-day war. It was a four-year war. There was the battle of Karameh in 1968. There were daily bombardments and air raids by the Israelis. There was anarchy with the presence of Palestinian commandos. We had fifty-two commando organizations, including the Red Brigades, Baader – Meinhof and Carlos the Jackal. We had no idea they were all here until September 1970.’ He described a time of chaos, when Palestinian commandos briefly held the Western press corps hostage in the InterContinental Hotel. ‘The borders were open. We had Iraqi troops in the country. We had no idea the Palestinians were so well dug in. They planted land mines and had rocket-propelled grenades. They took control of this city. Our army was on the front lines with Israel. The Palestinian commandos put up checkpoints. They stole cars. They took donations to the cause by force. They kidnapped. They had their own newspapers. Remember their slogan, that they would liberate Jerusalem by liberating Amman. The army almost revolted. When soldiers came to spend weekends with their families in Amman, the commandos would kidnap, kill and mutilate them. Battalions in the Jordan Valley would hear what happened to fellow soldiers. The units would come up here on their own. I would go with His Majesty and Zayd Bin Shaker’ – Bin Shaker, King Hussein’s uncle, was the army commander – ‘to stop them. There was a decision by His Majesty. We waited and waited.’ On 15 September 1970, King Hussein appointed a military government to force the commandos out of Amman. The Jordanian parliament sent a delegation to ask Yasser Arafat to evacuate without a fight. Rifai’s version of Arafat’s reaction was, ‘He told them, “The situation has run out of my hands. The best I can do for you is to give King Hussein twenty-four hours to leave the country.” ’ Hussein stayed. After two weeks of intensive fighting, during which Jordan’s Bedouin troops massacred Palestinians and bombarded their camps, it was Arafat who left. Negotiations between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat in Cairo may have caused the heart attack that killed Gamal Abdel Nasser the night after the two Arab chiefs left. With Nasser’s death, Arab nationalism retreated and left the field to the steady advance of political Islam. Did Arafat, who made several attempts on Hussein’s life, reconcile with the king? ‘Oh, yes,’ Rifai said. ‘They made up. Arafat often came here. He was received as a head of state. With politics in the Middle East, you can’t afford to have a long memory. You won’t be able to talk to anyone.’ After the war, Arafat’s commandos assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tel outside the Hilton Hotel in Cairo. Someone also tried to kill Rifai, when he was ambassador in London. ‘We were in a narrow road coming from Regent’s Park,’ he said. ‘The driver was making a right turn. They were standing on a little traffic island and started shooting point-blank. I was reading the paper. The car was a big Daimler. It was The Times, I remember. I was crouching like this.’ Rifai bent forward. ‘The first bullets hit my hand and ear. I reacted quickly. I threw myself to the floor. They found forty bullets, and the fire was concentrated on the back seat. A Scotland Yard inspector said he didn’t believe a canary would survive.’ Rifai blamed the clandestine arm of Yasser Arafat’s Al Fateh, Black September, for the attack. The Jordanians responded in kind, assassinating PLO officials in their post-Amman headquarters, Beirut. That evening, an old friend of Rifai’s met me for a drink. I told him the story about the attempt on his life. ‘Black September?’ the friend asked. ‘Maybe. We always thought they were London gangsters trying to collect gambling debts.’ Farewell to Amman I saw old friends in Amman, among them Riad and Zein Khoury, Prince Talal and his beautiful Lebanese wife, Princess Ghida, and the children of both couples. All of them worried, not about Jordan, but about the neighbours. They hated the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and what it was doing to the Palestinians. They hated the economic embargo of Iraq on their eastern border and the cost in lives of Iraqi children. It was a rare Jordanian who had no relations or friends west of the River Jordan or east of the great desert in Iraq. They did not love Yasser Arafat, who they said was a useless leader, or Saddam Hussein, a vicious tyrant. The United States sustained the wretchedness of Palestinians and Iraqis. America paid for Israel’s illegal settlements on illegally occupied land, and America enforced the boycott that deprived Iraq’s children of medicines and treated water. It would soon invade Iraq, making life there even worse. Yet none of my Jordanian friends dared to suggest a public gesture – boycotting American goods, severing diplomatic relations or closing an American hotel – to affect Washington’s policies. The bullet holes I saw on my first visit here in 1973 had been erased. Monster buildings had transformed the terrain of battle between the brave fedayeen and the hardy Bedouin into a zone of combat for market share, for the greater triumph of AT&T and Sheraton and for the acquisition of newer cars and cellphones. Amman sustained the dullness from which its Hashemite monarchs, the British and several wars had not redeemed it. Its sleepy hills, in which a few thousand Circassians had lived in their huts of rock, did not welcome disturbance. It was not a land of flooding rivers or icy precipices or earthquakes. Amman perched on gentle hills, and its inhabitants closed their doors on excitement. It had been the wrong stage for the Palestinians to enact their revolutionary drama. I did not linger in Amman. The car journey from Amman to Jerusalem should take an hour and a half. But it does not take an hour and a half. It takes many hours. If you are a Palestinian, it can take for ever. For me, it was five hours in several taxis and one bus, most of that time absorbed, not on the highway observing the wildlife, but waiting at the border. If I curse Britain and France, despite having lived in and loved them both, it is for these borders. Travelling from Beirut to Damascus, or Damascus to Amman, or Amman to Jerusalem – all simple trips along good roads with no insuperable natural obstacles – constituted an ordeal for all travellers. So mutually suspicious were the mini-states of Greater Syria that they mistreated all who entered or left. All showed Europeans and Americans less discourtesy, and the Jordanians were more polite to Israelis. The Syrians and Lebanese would not admit Israelis or anyone with an Israeli visa in his passport. Every border policeman – Israeli, Jordanian, Syrian or Lebanese – made a point of humiliating any Arab who came his way. On the way to the River Jordan, the road sticks to the earth’s contours, flowing like water through the easiest downward passages. The Jordan Valley was the hot land, where the wool cloaks of mountain shepherds yielded to the peasant’s light cotton robe. Here were sandy wastes, lush meadows, small farms and greenhouses dressed in plastic sheets. In December 1917, when the British captured Jerusalem, Allenby’s forces fought to link their army near here with the Hashemites who were advancing north on a parallel march. But the linking was not to be. The British were repulsed by Turkish forces north of the town of Salt, and Lawrence was unable to take Ma’an in the east. In the event, each army made its separate way up to Damascus. By then, each understood that its interests and objectives diverged from the other’s. The Arabs, Lawrence knew, were fighting for independence in all of Greater Syria. The British planned to divide the land into European colonies with one corner, western Palestine, set aside as a reserve for Europe’s Jews. Palestine’s Arabs would be sacrificed to pay for European anti-Semitism. The Arabs reached Damascus, but Britain prevailed. Signs indicated the Dead Sea to the south and, later, the King Hussein Bridge straight ahead. A little stand at the side of the road sold boxes of oranges, as on the pre-freeway California highways of my childhood. You could buy the oranges by the box or the kilo, or a man in a straw hat would slice them in two and squeeze them into a pint glass. Nearby, other farmers stacked celery stalks and lettuces on barrel tops to sell to the few passing drivers. We came to a village where I’d have romanticized the unchanging life of donkey carts, camels and its graceful mosque but for the neon and paint logos of the Arab Bank, Sharp, Coca-Cola, the Internet Caf? and the Green Saloon. At the largest and dustiest roundabout, a cement frame larger than a movie screen surrounded a portrait of the late King Hussein in Prince of Mecca garb: white robes and white keffiyeh, the keffiyeh held by a black egal tied around his head, the robes offset by a belt with a curved dagger in a golden sheath. It was not a poster. Someone had painted the fresco onto wet cement. King Hussein had not been dead long. A complicated man, he had saved his throne from overthrow by socialists, nationalists, communists, Palestinians and Muslim fundamentalists. Like a true Bedouin chief, he had never severed contact with his enemies – whether Nasserite, Israeli or Palestinian – and was wary of his friends – the other Arab monarchs and the Americans. He had outlived the dictators of Syria and Egypt, who had once sworn to replace all the Arab kingdoms with republics like their own. The republican dictators instead adopted regal succession, appointing their sons to replace them when they died. Could it have been otherwise? The Ram ad-Dar, the head of the household, did not leave the fate of the tribe to the masses, as if they could choose a leader with wisdom and strength to lead them. That decision was his, and the only one he could train to confront the world’s cunning and evil ways was his son. Monarchy went against my beliefs. I knew about Jordan’s prisons. The best that could be said of them was that they were probably not as bad as those in Syria, Iraq, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. People were repressed, but less so than elsewhere in the region. Palestinians in Jordan had a difficult time, but no one stole their homes and threatened to expel them en masse as in Israel and the territories it occupied. No state official prevented them from taking jobs, as in Lebanon. They were not denied passports, as in Syria and Lebanon. The crown that Hussein had passed to his son left Jordan more peaceful than its neighbours. Beyond the valley’s villages were the Bedouin tents, rows of them in white, beside white sheep and a tethered white donkey. About five miles short of the river was Jordan’s lazy border post. Within its walls, a triangular yard was bounded by an arrival hall, a departure hall and a caf?. A rusting bus waited in the middle to deliver the day’s last shipment of travellers to the other side. I made the mistake of walking into the departure building, whose offices were locked and whose windows for three different categories of traveller – Arab, Jordanian, non-Arab – were shut. A policeman in starched khaki guided me to the arrivals building. Since the intifadah began in September 2000, one room served both purposes. I filled in forms and a polite official stamped my passport. I paid the five Jordanian dinar departure tax and boarded the unlit bus with a driver and three other passengers: an old man in a white keffiyeh; his wife in a white scarf and a beautiful olive dress embroidered in scarlet eagles’ wings and pink rosebuds; and a younger man in a lightweight business suit. He called the old man ‘Haj’, a title of respect for someone who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Christians who had gone to Jerusalem were also called ‘Haj’. At five o’clock, the driver pulled the door shut. After a few warm-ups, the engine started. As the bus turned to leave the post, we saw the last royal portrait, of the two kings, father and son, Hussein and Abdallah. A gold crown hovered in a fair blue sky above them, a trinity whose spirit might pass from head to head but was eternal in its protection of the people, of the family, of the tribe. I was thinking of something Prince Talal had said to me the night before. Talal, like his uncle, the late king, and his first cousin, King Abdallah, had received his formal education abroad. His school was Harrow, and his undergraduate and graduate degrees were from Georgetown. He rode motorcycles and liked Western music. He was a crack shot and a good horseman. He said that Western politicians who met people like himself thought of them as ‘good Arabs’. I paraphrase what he said, because I did not write it down. It went something like this: ‘I dress like them. So they think I am not really an Arab. It’s like being an honorary white. But I am as much an Arab as any Bedouin who has never left the desert. And, if I have to choose, I choose to be an Arab.’ He had just told me that Jordan had arrested some of the Islamic fundamentalists of Osama bin Laden, who had tried to blow up a Jordanian phosphate plant. The Jordanians were passing information about threats to Americans in the US and the Middle East to Washington. They wanted to help, especially when the fanatics were as opposed to the Hashemite throne as to the American government. But they could not go all the way, as President George Bush demanded with his ‘You’re either with us or against us’ speech. Nor could Jordan support General Sharon’s self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’ that was a war on Palestinians under military occupation. Jordan could not, however much it disapproved of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, favour the sanctions that deprived Iraq’s people of medicine and of equipment for the restoration of sewage treatment and other basic services. To Talal, there were no good and no bad Arabs, measured on a scale of Americanization. There were good and bad people based on their humanity. The sky in the king’s fresco was a clearer blue than the one towards which our bus rumbled across the deserted plain. We came to sets of metal gates and a long runway, as if we would fly into the darkening horizon over the River Jordan and into Canaan in our sweet chariot. This was no-man’s-land, the nether-world that separated each state of Greater Syria from the other. No one lived here. No one governed the tribal buffer. No farmers farmed, no livestock grazed and no trees cast shadows to obstruct the view from either side of the other. Concrete pillars – dragon’s teeth, in American military parlance – stood sentry at intervals of ten yards on both sides of the highway. I don’t know if the land was mined against infiltrators, but nothing grew out of that cement-powder soil. Two miles of protected desolation brought the bus at last to the ‘Police Security Directorship – Bridge Security’. Metal screamed on metal, as the ancient brakes of our border shuttle stopped us crashing into the gates. A Jordanian policeman boarded and collected vouchers that confirmed we had paid the departure tax. The driver slammed the doors, fired up the engine again and released the brake. We rolled past a sign, the last I would see in Jordan. It wished us all ‘Bon Voyage’. The first Israeli fence was a little further. We stopped. We waited. We waited a long time. The old man sitting in front of me, who had been patient for a quarter of an hour, was the first to speak. ‘Why are we waiting?’ ‘Who knows?’ the driver answered. His daily route between the two border stations had accustomed him to waiting. This was his last trip of the day, and he would return empty. The old Haj repeated his question: ‘Why do they make us wait so long?’ The other passenger, the man in the suit, told him, ‘Be patient, Haj.’ The Haj looked at his wife, who smiled at him, and shrugged. The driver got out and opened all the luggage compartments for inspection by two Israeli soldiers. He drove on to a second gate, where a sign said, ‘Welcome to the Allenby Bridge Crossing Point’. We were still on the East Bank, waiting to cross a tiny suspension bridge that the Israelis, following the British, named for General Allenby and the Jordanians called the King Hussein Bridge. Impatient, the driver took the bus up to the gate and said to a woman soldier inside the guard post, ‘This is the last bus.’ She told him to reverse to where he had been. He backed up to our original position twenty yards away, with the perilous grinding of old gears and brakes. The moment he stopped, the woman soldier waved to him to come forward again. At last, we were going through. FOUR (#ulink_48ceeb8e-266b-5f1e-b5bf-79b0644db8e8) Over Jordan (#ulink_48ceeb8e-266b-5f1e-b5bf-79b0644db8e8) ‘Palestine, formed and surrounded as it is, is a land of tribes. That it can ever belong to one nation, even though this were the Jews, is contrary to Nature and Scripture.’ REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894) On the West Bank INSIDE THE ISRAELI BORDER SHED the old Haj asked me to fill in his forms. At this crossing between an Arab country and occupied Arab land, there were no Arabic entry cards. All were in Hebrew and English. The old man gave me his and his wife’s Jordanian passports and I wrote their names and addresses on the questionnaire. He was born in 1932. City of birth: Bethlehem. I hesitated at country, wanting not to complicate his entry, before writing what it said in the passport: Palestine. The purpose of their visit was to see their daughter. They thanked me and went ahead to the passport booth, where a young policewoman was polite to them both. The man laughed at something she said and then, taking his wife’s hand and wheeling his smart new suitcase, walked outside to a taxi. Next at the passport counter came the man in the suit. After presenting his American passport, he answered the policewoman’s questions in an amiable but apprehensive way. Born in the West Bank in 1960, he now worked as a businessman in Jordan. The purpose of his visit was to see business associates in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, his passport had stamps from many trips to Europe. The Israelis took him apart, first the suitcases, then his dignity. Israeli police did not treat American citizens of Arab origin as they did other Americans. They looked on them as security risks. This man would have a hard time. I had done a story the year before about another Arab American, a young man named Anwar Mohammed, from Florida. The police had arrested him as he was leaving via this same border. They took him to the Moscobieh, the security headquarters in Jerusalem known in English as the Russian Compound. He was chained to a chair, interrogated, abused, held for two months and released without charge. He was lucky, saved perhaps by the cockiness that came from his youth, his karate black belt, his belief in his American passport and, just as important, the fact that there was no evidence against him. If he had been a Palestinian with no passport, only a refugee identity card, he might have stayed for years. The American Embassy lodged no protests on his behalf. An American diplomat pointed to a warning on the State Department website that Israel did not necessarily respect the American citizenship of Arabs born in Arab countries, Israel or the occupied territories. The State Department permitted the Israeli police to determine who was and who was not an American citizen. Outside, in the dark car park, I found an Israeli taxi driver and asked him to take me to Jerusalem. The road from the Allenby – Hussein Bridge cut through the occupied – disputed Jordan Valley, knocking aside all obstacles in its straight path. Jericho, whose walls came tumbling down, sparkled on the dark horizon. ‘That her walls fell at the sound of Joshua’s trumpet,’ the Reverend George Adam Smith wrote in 1894, ‘is a summary of her history.’ No one had ever defended Jericho. Her low-lying position on the frontier between eastern desert and western mountain was indefensible and prey to raiders from both directions. Under the Oslo accords of 1993, Jericho was the first town that Israel allowed the new Palestinian administration to govern for itself, within limits. As the road had created its way through the plain, it resculpted the hills beyond. On the Jordanian side, it had rambled with the land like the rolling English road’s drunken path of no resistance. Israel’s was an American highway for which mountains and villages and forests made way, a proud, broad road that would have me in Jerusalem for dinner. ‘There is no water,’ Reverend Smith wrote, ‘from Jericho till you reach the roots of the Mount of Olives.’ There was no traffic either. Israeli settlers were afraid to drive at night, and the Israeli army kept the Palestinians confined to their towns. Daughter of the Final Solution Lily Galili had asked me to meet her in front of the American Consulate in West Jerusalem at 7.15 in the evening. An Arab taxi took me from the American Colony Hotel across the ‘seam’, as Israelis called the old Green Line between east and west, to the consulate. The car stopped opposite the late-nineteenth-century consular building, and security guards raced out of their post towards the car. I asked the driver to go another hundred yards uphill to avoid an hour’s questioning. I got out and walked towards the consulate. An Israeli security guard asked me what I wanted. I was meeting a friend. What was the friend’s name? What was my name? I ignored him, standing as I was on a public pavement, and walked further down the hill in search of Lily. Another security guard, a young woman, followed and said, ‘Lily said she would wait for you at the corner.’ Lily’s corner was dark, out of range of the consulate’s spotlights, near a passage between two stone houses that led to her friend’s flat. She apologized for choosing the consulate as our rendezvous. She had forgotten about America’s security worries. We talked a bit in the dark, catching up before we went to the dinner. Her voice was like a precocious child’s, whose judgements, criticisms, observations and stories were astute and unexpected. She was leaving soon for Krakow, the city of her birth where she said her spirit was most at home, to celebrate her fifty-fifth birthday. Lily looked a good ten years younger than I did, and I was fifty. She was a journalist at Ha’aretz, a Tel Aviv daily that employed more talent – among them Danny Rubinstein, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Daniel Ben Simon – than the top ten Western newspapers combined. Lily and I had met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was a Nieman fellow at Harvard. My friends Bernard Avishai and Sidra Ezrahi had taken me to a dinner that Lily cooked at her place, and we became friends. She once called me from London on my British cellphone, when I happened to be in a kosher restaurant in Krakow’s old ghetto. Klezmer music played behind me, and she told me about her love affair with Poland’s most beautiful Renaissance city. After the war, her family had returned to Krakow. Her mother brought her to Israel in 1956. She was ten. Lily was clutching a bottle of wine for our American hostess, who she said had ‘made aliya’. In the protected garden of an Arab house that looked as if it had been built around the same time as the American Consulate, were a group of English-speaking immigrants. They had all ‘made aliya’, that is, immigrated or ‘risen up’ like a wave to live in Israel. There were two South Africans, Benji and Anne Pogrund; a British couple, the Goldmans; and a woman who appeared to be Canadian and did not say much. During the introductions, Anne Pogrund told me that her black eye, which I could not make out in the dark, was not what I thought it was. I didn’t think anything. She said she had really walked into a door. Her husband, a rotund ex-journalist with a bearded, friendly face, did not look like he would hit anyone, especially his wife. Benji Pogrund had been a journalist on the Rand Daily Mail, a brave and honourable opponent of South African apartheid. He and Anne, a painter, had fled Johannesburg for London and then for Israel. Bob Goldman was a videotape editor in the ABC News Jerusalem bureau. Our hostess worked for an Israeli millionaire named Stef Wertheimer. After a drink in the garden, we went into the flat. It was a redesigned Arab house set on different levels, with a dining table next to the open kitchen. We’d finished our hostess’s first and only bottle of red wine in the garden, and someone opened the one Lily had brought. Our hostess drank white, and there wasn’t much of that. Dinner was ? l’am?ricaine, no first course, spaghetti on the boil in the kitchen going limp while she stirred a tomato and onion sauce, green salad with more vinegar than oil. That was all. She put two bowls on the table, and we served ourselves pasta and salad. We sipped Lily’s red wine. We talked. About newspapers. About television. About Israel. About the Middle East. About the massacres in New York and Washington. About Osama bin Laden. Polite. Civilized. The Goldmans’ children had disappointed their parents by leaving Israel. The Pogrund children had done the opposite. They went religious and would never leave. Their mother and father did not dwell on similarities between the race-based society they opposed in South Africa and the one in which they subsequently raised their children. They sounded like people who would have preferred their children to resist military service in the occupied territories or live in the West. Someone said that an internet website was criticizing the ABC News anchorman, Peter Jennings, for being too favourable to the Arabs. ‘He had an Arab wife,’ Benji Pogrund said, confirming the internet verdict. Jennings had married a beautiful Lebanese woman, Annie Malouf, in 1973. They divorced, and his next two wives were Jewish, including the one he had now. ‘So,’ Benji said, ‘Jewish wives. That’s why he likes Arabs.’ Peter Jennings, whose journalistic integrity made him scrupulously fair, was said to be anti-Israeli by people accustomed to the anti-Arab bias of American television. Later, other journalists told me Benji Pogrund was a ‘good guy’, who invited speakers with divergent points of view to address Israel’s Anglo-Jewish community. My argument that night was not with Benji, but with his wife, Anne. She was a painter and an interesting woman. She had made paintings from old studio photographs of South African blacks, formal portraits for family occasions; and she was looking for similar family photographs of Arabs in Gaza. When she discussed the September 2001 attacks in the United States, she lost me. We spoke in a polite, civilized way, but we were arguing. Her case was a psychologist’s rationale, that the killers acted out of envy. They wanted what they admired but could not have. America’s democracy and its high standard of living had made it their target. Perhaps, I said, there was another explanation. Holland, Norway and Canada had democracies and high living standards, but no one hated them. Why did they hate the United States? Not because it was richer – per capita there were wealthier lands – or more democratic. Could it be, I asked her, that the Norwegians and Canadians did not install and maintain regimes that robbed their people, did not break open the doors to their markets and did not bomb or invade them? This went on and on, towards no conclusion. There was a widespread belief in the United States that Americans were attacked because of their goodness; as many Israelis were convinced that Arabs attacked them – not because Israel occupied their territory and confiscated their land – but because they were Jewish. If anti-Semitism motivated the Arabs, would they have given their lands and their homes gladly to any other people who came from outside to displace them? Is it likely that they would have moved to make way for Albanians, Basques, gypsies, South Africans or any other group of Gentiles? The discussion went on and on and, like the political conflicts themselves, got no further than the arguments of fifty years before. I left dinner early to meet Andrew and Emma Gilmour in the Ottoman courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. There, I drank the red wine I’d been deprived of at dinner. We talked about politics, the intifadah and, Andrew’s special interest, negotiations to end the fighting. Andrew worked for United Nations negotiator Terje Roed Larsen, and Emma was a physician. Andrew’s older brothers – David, Oliver and Christopher – were probably my closest friends in Britain. Emma was expecting their fourth child in December. They invited me to stay in their house at Abu Tor, an Arab neighbourhood above the old city. Even with the discount that Pierre Berclaz, the Colony’s Swiss manager, had kindly allowed me on a good room, my advance would run out soon. Upstairs in the Pasha Room, dance music played. An American was marrying a Ramallah girl. One of the hotel guests complained about the noise, as I did once in 1987 during a wedding reception at the New Omayyad Hotel in Damascus. Then, it annoyed me so much that I left. Now, I loved the noise of a wedding. Perhaps I had improved. The music stopped at one-thirty, when I fell asleep. In Damascus, it had gone on all night. Daughter of the Revolution I had my first lunch in Jerusalem with Nadia Sartawi. Her father, Dr Issam Sartawi, was one of the heroes of the Palestinian cause. He acted on behalf of what he believed were his people’s interests – not in line with the cant and slogans of the revolution. Any journalist who reduced him to the status of ‘Yasser Arafat’s special envoy’, as a few did, enraged him. He insisted with pride that he was no diplomat. Along with Sabry Jiryis and Sayed Hammami, Issam pioneered the Palestinian dialogue with the Israelis. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I invited Issam and Israeli general Mattityahu Peled to lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, Fakhreddin, opposite Green Park in London. When I asked Peled if he were a Sabra, meaning someone born in Israel, he nodded and said, ‘Issam’s a Sabra too.’ They were already friends, both born in northern Palestine, each a patriot to his own people, both working to spare the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians more warfare. Issam saw early the futility of the armed struggle for a people as militarily weak – but with a strong moral case – as the Palestinians. He had once headed a small commando organization and knew the effect of raids into Israel: unarmed Israelis killed, world outrage against Palestinian terrorism, more hostility and retaliation by Israel. Arafat never understood. Nor did he understand that no leader could abandon certain principles, like self-determination, and maintain his enemy’s respect. When I asked Issam why the Palestinians had not produced leaders more capable than Haj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat, he said, ‘We had a good leader once, but we crucified him.’ He accused Syria of doing more harm to the Palestinians than Israel. He called for the United Nations to declare the Syrian regime a threat to world peace and dispatch a force to overthrow it. A few months later, in the spring of 1983, the hired assassins of the Palestinian radical Sabry al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, shot Issam dead in the lobby of a hotel in Portugal during a conference of Europe’s Socialist International. The Syrians, Abu Nidal’s benefactors at the time, may have put him up to it. Abu Nidal had already assassinated the director of the PLO’s London office, Sayed Hammami, in 1977, for the same supposed crime of meeting with Israelis. Issam Sartawi’s criticisms outraged Yasser Arafat, whose security service was secretly cooperating with the CIA and thus indirectly with Israel’s Mossad. In 1982, Arafat evacuated Beirut, claiming victory over the Israeli army. Issam made a public declaration: one more Palestinian victory like Beirut, and the Palestine National Council would hold its next meeting in Fiji. No one said that Arafat had killed Issam, but many Palestinians believed he had ‘withdrawn his protection’, exposing him to Abu Nidal and to Syria. Abu Nidal would himself be murdered by another benefactor, Saddam Hussein, before America invaded Iraq in 2003. Issam was a gentle, well-dressed man, who had trained as a physician and married another Palestinian doctor. I remember him at our house in London, playing with our children when they were small. Having lunch with his daughter at an Arab restaurant near the American Colony, I listened to a woman young enough to have missed most of her childhood playing with her father. She had grown up in Paris and spoke perfect French. Her English had a French rather than Arabic accent, like many Lebanese women in Beirut. Ahmed Querei, a member of Yasser Arafat’s cabinet and one of the Palestinian negotiators at Oslo, had hired her as special assistant. I asked what her father would make of her working for Abu Ala, the name by which Qurei was known. She ignored the question. Would she introduce me to Nurit Peled, the daughter of Issam’s friend Matti Peled? I knew that, after Issam’s assassination, the two families had become close. A few years after Issam’s assassination, Matti died without having seen the Israeli – Palestinian dialogue that he and Issam pioneered lead anywhere. In 1997, a Palestinian suicide bomber took the life of Nurit’s young daughter, Matti’s granddaughter, in West Jerusalem. Smedar was thirteen. Phil Jacobson, the former Times correspondent, had written a heart-breaking account of the suicide bombing that had killed Smedar and its effect on Nurit and her husband, Rami Elhannan. Nadia said that when the prime minister of the time, Benyamin Netanyahu, offered to pay his respects to the Peled family, Nurit told him not to bother. She blamed him for policies that had led to her daughter’s murder. In my view, one not shared by everyone, Dr Issam Sartawi would have condemned the agreement that his daughter’s employer had negotiated at Oslo in 1993. Issam had recognized Israel’s ‘right’ to exist, although the ‘right to exist’ is not a concept in international law, years before any other PLO leader. Recognition and dialogue did not mean surrender, and even surrender did not require self-annihilation, the price exacted at Oslo. What the Israelis and the Palestinians got instead of democratic neighbours was the submission of one, weak tribal leadership to the power of the other. It left Israel a permanent military oppressor, with all that implied for Israeli society, and the Palestinians as helots to acquiesce when settlers wanted their land, when settlers needed their water or when the Israeli army confined them to their villages. Nothing in the agreement prevented Israel from expanding old settlements, constructing new ones or building roads between them – activities that required the seizure of what little land the Palestinians had. While Palestinian Authority police protected the demographic shift caused by a doubling of settlers in the West Bank, no one protected Palestinian farmers and householders from having their land taken. Was this intended to establish peace or to extend the occupation? Was it consistent or inconsistent with the old Zionist aim of seizing Palestine ‘goat by goat, dunum by dunum’? Oslo’s terms compelled the weaker tribe to wait until it was strong enough to redress the imbalance or so close to suffocation that they exploded. At the end of September 2000, that explosion came. It was a year into the explosion when Nadia and I met for lunch. The last time I had seen her was the year before, when the uprising began. Then, she went to her office and hoped the Israelis would propose some compromise that would allow the Palestinians to end the intifadah and resume discussions. In the meantime, the Israeli electorate chose General Ariel Sharon as their prime minister. Now, Nadia said, Israeli checkpoints prevented most of the Palestinian Authority from reaching their offices. She was living – more of the confusion of this area – in an old Arab part of the Jewish, western half of Jerusalem. She was renting an Arab house, whose original residents had either fled or been expelled in 1948, from an Israeli landlord. She was an Arab, but she carried a French passport. The passport allowed her not only to live in a Jewish-owned Arab house, it permitted her to clear the Israeli checkpoints to reach the Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah. Other PA staff in Jerusalem could not reach Ramallah, as those in Ramallah could not go to Jerusalem. The only Palestinians moving freely within the occupied territories were those who – through marriage or some other accident – had foreign, non-Arab passports. As natives, they could not go anywhere. Only new visitors to this lunatic asylum noticed that the set-up, both on paper and in reality, was untenable. Nadia was one of many Western-born or Western-raised Palestinians to return to the homeland after Oslo in 1993, when they imagined they would build a state. You would meet them in the offices of the Palestinian Authority, private companies and charities, all speaking perfect English with British, American or Canadian accents. Many were studying Arabic for the first time. The country had not seen such idealism, hope and talent since young, educated European Jews answered Zionism’s appeal to build the kibbutzim, irrigate the desert and learn Hebrew. Working for Abu Ala, one of the most egregious prototypes of the unpopular Palestinian politician with big bodyguards and bigger cigars, had made Nadia more cynical than I remembered from the year before. Her belief in working within the PA towards statehood was becoming harder to maintain. Israel was dismantling its institutions and the PA’s leaders were stealing from it. My criticisms of the PA annoyed her, and she talked about what help she might offer me. Like a Lebanese aunt, she told me which was the best hotel in Gaza, where to rent a cellphone and how to lease a car for a few months. She also made me write down a dozen useful telephone numbers. Abu Ala must have found her indispensable. Palestinian Neighbours Emma Gilmour, pregnant and every inch a natural beauty, was driving me through West Jerusalem with her three children in the back seat. The car was a big Land Rover, white with United Nations number plates. We stopped at a red light near Yemin Moshe, the pretty collection of old stone cottages that Jerusalem’s mayor lent to visiting artists and writers. The driver of a car beside us motioned to me to roll down my window. His knitted kippa covered most of his clipped hair above a short, patchy beard. He pressed a printed sign against his window for us to read: ‘UN UNwelcome No Bodies, Go Home!’ This spontaneous act of bravery seemed to please him. The light changed, and we went our separate ways. Later, I told a friend at another United Nations agency about it. She said the settlers did that all the time: ‘They hate us.’ At six in the evening, the Gilmour children were having tea in the kitchen of their house in Abu Tor. The lights went off. Caitriona, one of the prettiest and most fey three-year-olds I knew, cried. She was not noisy. She was afraid. Emma lit candles so that the children could see their food. Outside, all the streets and houses of Silwan and Abu Tor were in darkness. In the distance, the Jewish quarters of west Jerusalem were in full light. Their power was never off. Ours came on again an hour later, while the children were in a candlelit bath. From time to time at the Gilmours’, Palestinians neighbours would drop by. One was a young woman, who, like Emma, was about to have a baby. You meet people and don’t think much about them, until someone tells you that this pregnant woman with a bridal veil of dark hair had spent two years in prison. And you look at the young mother, playing with her children, and you ask yourself, as you would in a country where people were free, what she could have done to merit a two-year sentence. Later, Emma told me her story. After the Israeli security forces shot dead fourteen unarmed young men for throwing stones in the Al Aqsa mosque grounds, Intisar took a knife from her kitchen and went down to Jerusalem to take revenge. Several other Palestinian women – not in concert or with any plan – did the same. They went, each on her own, to the Jewish Quarter of the old city to stab an Israeli settler. Did Intisar stab anyone? No. The soldiers searched her, found the knife, put her under arrest and sent her to the court that passed judgement. Two years later, she went home. Another woman came to the Gilmour house one evening to babysit the children, so that Emma, Andrew and I could go to Fink’s Bar for dinner. She did not say much. Her dress was black, and her long hair had almost as many white strands as brown. In the car on the way into the city, Andrew and Emma told me that the Israelis had shot and killed her husband at the end of the June 1967 war. She raised five children on her own. Her husband’s family offered her no help, unusual in Arab society in which children are the responsibility of the paternal family. She refused payment for babysitting the Gilmour children. To look after the younger son, Xan, I’d have demanded a year’s salary. In return for the favour of watching her neighbours’ children, the widow expected reciprocal favours: a ride into Jerusalem, help with her shopping, advice. It was an exchange between equals. Defending the Doomed At nearly ninety, Mrs Valentine Vester was the grande dame of old Jerusalem. Proprietress of the American Colony Hotel, she was the niece of Gertrude Bell, the English Oriental traveller and linguist who helped to create modern Iraq when Britain occupied the country during the First World War. I had met Val and her husband, Horatio Vester, in 1972. The Colony belonged to his family, descendants of nineteenth-century American religious pilgrims. They also had an ophthalmic hospital in the old city. Horatio, whose urbane demeanour reminded me of No?l Coward, ran the place in those days. Raconteur and bon vivant, Horatio was loved, especially in the bar, by the hotel’s guests and staff. When he died, Val employed a Swiss company to manage what was beyond doubt Jerusalem’s finest hotel. She went on living there and kept an eye on the place, as she always had. With her snowy hair and benevolent smile, she oversaw the Israeli gardeners and the Palestinian receptionists. She had known them for generations. Perhaps I should not have repeated to Val the joke that Andrew Gilmour told me about her hotel restaurant’s fame for slow service. She had returned the day before from a visit to her son in London. Her hearing was beginning to fail, and I had to shout without letting the head waiter, Ahmed, and the rest of her long-time and loyal employees hear. ‘Do you know how the Jordanian army lost Jerusalem in 1967?’ The Jordanian general staff were having lunch here at the American Colony. When they heard that the Israelis were invading, they asked for their bill. By the time it arrived, the Israelis were in Jericho. Val laughed. Ahmed watched us from his corner of the garden, and I knew I would wait longer than usual for my club sandwich. Ahmed was just as slow to bring Mrs Vester her rabbit risotto. She didn’t mind the wait, she said. She’s had thirty-eight years to get used to it. My favourite place to meet people was the courtyard where we had lunch. It may have been the stone walls and the parapets or the oriental arches or the gushing fountain and the scented blossoms. It may also have been the mix of Palestinians, Israelis and sojourners in a setting that predated the British occupation, Zionism, nationalism and uprisings. It was the most tranquil corner of Jerusalem, and there were days when I hated to leave it for the chaos outside. Jonathan Kuttab, a Palestinian-American lawyer whose practice was in Jerusalem, came to the courtyard for coffee. I had met him first in the spring of 2000, a few months before the failed negotiations that Bill Clinton had staged between Yasser Arafet and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David. I had come to Israel to do a story on torture for American television. The Israeli High Court had just banned certain forms of torture. The court’s decision meant that, in the absence of laws authorizing the mistreatment of detainees, anyone who committed torture could be held to account in the civil courts. The decision had two consequences: it reduced torture, and it prompted Likud Knesset members to introduce legislation to protect torturers from lawsuits. Jonathan Kuttab, a University of Virginia graduate, had represented hundreds of security detainees during the first intifadah. After the Palestinian Authority was established, it detained Jonathan’s brother, a respected West Bank journalist named Daoud Kuttab, for criticizing Yasser Arafat. Amid Valentine Vester’s flowers, the fountain, and the bougainvillea, Jonathan and I ordered Turkish coffee. I asked if the High Court ban on torture had expired with the new intifadah. ‘Totally,’ he said. Jonathan was more than a lawyer. Like all other Palestinians, he was a political analyst. He augmented the basic knowledge that circumstances gave every Palestinian with lessons from the political prisoners he represented, from the Israeli military and civil courts in which he worked and from his American formal education. The last time we had met, before the Camp David failure and the uprising, he told me that disaster was inevitable. ‘The Israeli grand design to have and to expand settlements and contract out security to the Palestinian Authority could not work,’ he said, one year into the new intifadah. ‘In fact, if this intifadah had not been against Israel, it would have been against the PA.’ The question that confronted Palestinians about Yasser Arafat was: is he governing for us or for the Israelis? If for the Palestinians, he should have been moving politically to dismantle the Israeli settlements and give the land back to their owners. If for the Palestinians, he should have made his executive accountable and open to them. If for the Palestinians, he would have made it impossible for his ministers to steal and to help the Israelis construct settlements. But, if he governed for Israel, he would arrest Palestinians who attacked settlements, allow his advisers to grow rich selling cement to the settlements, cooperate with the intelligence agencies of Israel and America to suppress resistance to occupation and demonstrate his contempt for those who criticized him in the Palestinian legislature, media and civil society. ‘Arafat,’ Jonathan said, ‘I think, sensed it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t so much Jerusalem or the refugees, but Barak’s insistence at Camp David that this was it, the end of the road. There was no possibility you could improve the terms. He couldn’t do it. His people would not have gone along with it. From that day to this, Tenet, Mitchell’ – meaning the missions of the two Georges, the CIA director and the former senator – ‘everything has been an attempt to revive security cooperation. If Arafat hits Hamas, the Israelis will stop hitting him. Nothing else. It’s simply not going to work.’ What will work? ‘A two-state solution.’ To many Israelis that was an unacceptable, maximalist demand. It was, however, the result of an evolution in Palestinian thought born of eighty years of defeat and a compromise of their previous ideal of a ‘secular, democratic state’ in all of Palestine. It had taken generations for them to realize they did not have the strength to win back the part of Palestine – 78 per cent – they lost to Israel in 1948. By the first intifadah in 1987, they were ready for independence in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers and Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Barak told Palestinians they were unreasonable to demand all of the West Bank and Gaza, all of Israel’s 1967 conquest, all of the 22 per cent. At Camp David, where Bill Clinton caused a conflagration with his quixotic pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize to redeem his tarnished presidency, Barak had excluded the largest settlement blocs from discussion and was prepared to consider adjustments only to the rest of the occupied territories. Under Barak’s vague proposals, Israel would have kept about 30 per cent or more of the land, 80 per cent of the water and all of the sky above for its right to fly and use the airwaves. Even a leader as craven as Arafat could not say yes to a mere 15 per cent of all Palestine on which to build his Arab Bantu-stine. ‘Israel holds all the cards,’ Jonathan said, ‘and they know it. They are furious with the Palestinians for failing to recognize that. This is more on the left than on the right.’ Jonathan had discussed this with the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. ‘Peres told me, we are not negotiating with the Palestinians. We are negotiating with ourselves.’ The Israeli leadership regarded its decision on what to ‘give’ the Palestinians as an internal matter rather than as a subject for negotiation with the occupied people. ‘When subcontracting control to the PA failed,’ Jonathan concluded, ‘the left had nothing else.’ Israel turned to Sharon ‘with his policy of hit them and hit them harder’. Sharon had his critics, but Jonathan said they were even further to the right, demanding that the old Arab killer ‘get tougher, expel’. The Palestinians were making the settlers feel insecure on their roads in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Palestinians now have guns and are willing to use them,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Gaza settlers are no longer safe. Period. Palestinians can exact a daily price, which means Israelis don’t hold all the cards.’ In response, he admitted, ‘The Israelis made life absolutely miserable.’ Sharon was, he said ‘absolutely furious. And he’s trying to keep it going. More incursions, more killings.’ In his pink Ralph Lauren shirt with preppy button-down collar, Jonathan Kuttab was as much American as Palestinian. But he misjudged the United States, as parts of the world did when the attack on Afghanistan was beginning. ‘America needs the Arab world,’ he said. ‘It cannot invade Afghanistan without neutralizing this place. Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the rest will not go along with this crusade unless the Americans do something about the Palestinians.’ He was wrong. The United States let Sharon deal with the Palestinian problem as if its only dimension were security, as if Israel provided the model for the US to deal with Osama bin Laden and the tribes of Afghanistan. It did not seek or obtain Arab support. ‘The only basis for optimists,’ Jonathan said, ‘is that you cannot ignore one billion Muslims for ever.’ Jonathan, a Christian, may have been wrong about that as well. We went back to the local conflict that was emblematic of the larger dispute between an all-powerful America and a helpless, supine Arab world. And we were back where we began more than a year before: that total weakness of the man in the torture chamber. ‘It’s not pure sadism,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the first intifadah, the problem was that ordinary soldiers were doing the interrogation. That’s sadism. They beat them up. But it was not effective. They have to force them to give information and to sign confessions. And they need professionals to do that. When you physically weaken someone, humiliate him, you can force him to do what you want. They use sleep deprivation and violent shaking. They are more effective. They study this. They are scientific and methodical. There are time limits, when people are vulnerable. If they have not broken down by the fiftieth day, they let them go.’ Did he know anyone who had taken it longer than fifty days? ‘I had a client who did. They released him on the fifty-fifth day. He had a few teeth broken. He was tired, weak, but in very good shape.’ The ones who survived the best were those who neither confessed nor implicated their comrades. Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, based on his experience of French repression in Algeria, had observed the same phenomenon. Those who cracked, who named names, left prison ashamed and broken. Those who held out – despite being tortured longer – recovered. One of Fanon’s other observations was that those most in need of psychiatric treatment were the torturers. He told of a French policeman who came to Fanon begging for help. He wanted to stop beating his wife and children but to continue torturing Arabs. A journalist at Ha’aretz told me of an Israeli psychiatrist who specialized in torturers, some of whom found their only remedy was to quit. What had the Palestinians achieved with their suffering? In my lifetime, the Vietnamese had driven out the French and the Americans. The Algerians had expelled the French. The Belgians, the British, the French and the Portuguese had left Africa, the Dutch abandoned the East Indies. The whites of South Africa had surrendered power to the majority. Yet the Palestinians were left behind, ignored by the great powers, betrayed and used by the Arab states, beaten down by the Israelis. Young Palestinians emerged from the Russian Compound to repair their damaged spirit and flesh, then grew old to watch their sons relive the experience. ‘Let me tell you something,’ Jonathan said. His elbows were on the table. His black hair and moustache made him look like a sombre Charlie Chaplin. I leaned forward to listen. ‘I never defended anyone accused of possessing, manufacturing or buying communications equipment. Give me a break. I’ve defended thousands of security defendants. How come no one is trying to listen to the Israelis? This is so embarrassing. In terms of armed struggle, we Palestinians are not serious.’ It wasn’t the coffee or Valentine Vester’s young blossoms that filled the morning air of the courtyard just then. It was despair. Jonathan, who for most of his professional life had attempted to defend Palestinians in the military courts, said that he had switched to business law. Hidden Treasure Papa Andrea’s restaurant was empty. I liked the place, not for the food, but for its open roof in the Christian Quarter. Most of the old city’s landmarks were nearby, all Jerusalem’s domes and spires and rain troughs and polished stone roofs. Just below were the souvenir shops, whose owners had set tables and chairs to play cards with one another outside. The largest shop, Yasser Barakat’s, was shuttered and padlocked. Two years earlier, in preparation for Pope John Paul II’s visit, the shopkeepers had no time for cards. The streets were crammed with pilgrims and tourists along the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Today, the large fountain where five streets met was dry. Flies swarmed over discarded cans of Coke and Pepsi where clear water should have collected. At street level, the cobbled walkways, the deserted businesses and the broken fountain made the old city a forlorn setting. Between the street and the roofs were the windows of the settlers’ flats. Each window sprouted a flag and blue metal mesh shutter. Tiny T-shirts and large underwear dripped in the sunlight. In one window, children pressed against the grille to watch the Arabs at their card tables. Their parents had settled there with the express purpose of forcing the Arabs out, as they had forced other Arabs out of Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh and, more recently, much of the West Bank. Would those young faces one day rebel against their parents’ radical hatred and learn Arabic and play cards in the street with their neighbours? Or would they, like their mothers and fathers, find some subterfuge to seize another flat and evict its Arab residents? A middle-aged settler – her hair bundled under a scarf and her legs hidden inside a long skirt, like so many modest Muslim women – limped past the card players. Dragging her groceries in a bag from the Jewish Quarter, she did not look at the men. They did not glance up from their cards. Neither existed for the other, the Arabs living in their pre-Israelite past, the settler in some Arab-free future. The Armenians dwelled, like ghosts, between the two. ‘There are two thousand Armenians in the old city now,’ George Hultunian, community historian, said. ‘Their children have no future.’ Armenia was the first kingdom in history to embrace Christ, and its priests were among the earliest to establish hostels for pilgrims visiting the scene of their Saviour’s execution and resurrection. Most of the two thousand lived within the walls and gates of St James’s Convent. The Armenian Quarter had no shops apart from a few groceries, Vic Lepejian’s ceramics factory, the Armenian Tavern and a photo shop. Benjamin Disraeli, who came to Jerusalem in 1830 and 1831, later compared its Jews and Armenians in his novel Tancred. Eva ‘the Jewess’ noted the similarities between her people and the Armenians: Go to Armenia and you will not find an Armenian. They too are an expropriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: ‘In every city of the East I find a home.’ They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races and little degenerated; with all our industry, and much of our energy; I would say with all our human virtues, though it cannot be expected that they should possess our divine qualities; they have not produced Gods and prophets and are proud that they can trace up their faith to one of the obscurest of the Hebrew apostles [St Gregory the Illuminator] and who never knew his great master. The resemblance turned to tragedy in the twentieth century when both peoples were subjected to genocide. The Armenians of Jerusalem were cut into factions and sects and categories as if they had been a million. By faith, they were Gregorian (Orthodox), Catholic and Protestant. By Armenian politics, they were Hanshak or Tashnak, dating from the pro- and anti-communist fights of the Russian Revolution and its Soviet conquest of non-Turkish Armenia. They were also, like the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, either local families or descendants of refugees from massacres. Many were Palestinian nationalists while others just wanted to get by, no matter who governed Jerusalem. George was from a native Jerusalem family, a Gregorian and a Palestinian nationalist. His friend Albert Agazarian, he said, was a refugee from northern Syria, a Catholic and also a Palestinian nationalist. Neither he nor Albert had strong views on Armenian politics, having made their stand as Palestinians. Eight Armenians languished in Israeli prisons for resisting occupation, and one Armenian, Artin Gouzelian, had given his life for Palestine. George said that an organization to which he belonged had sent 350 Bibles in Arabic to Christian political prisoners in Israeli custody. Christians, including the Armenians, were leaving the country. Muslims, particularly since the new intifadah began, were leaving as well. Christians went to the West, whose countries gave them visas. Muslims, more than 100,000 in the previous year, went over the bridge searching for work in Jordan. Natalie Zarour, one of the managers at the American Colony Hotel, was emigrating with her family to Canada in a few weeks. Christians from Bethlehem, the Zarours were tired of the violence, the restrictions, the settlers who treated Arabs as sub-humans. I had known Natalie for years and would miss her beautiful face behind the Colony’s reception desk. George took me upstairs to the refectory of the Armenian Convent. Among long tables of stone and marble, under vaulted ceilings, I imagined the monks eating in silence and awaiting an unwelcome visit from the city’s Turkish governors. A bridge, under which I had often walked and driven, formed part of the refectory. George indicated a hidden door. ‘If the Turks came,’ he explained, ‘the monks would disappear through here.’ It was an Armenian Bridge of Sighs, along which the monks would, like Casanova, escape. It was built in AD 1370. Until 1830, he said, the Ottomans did not collect fixed taxes. Instead, they demanded money when they needed it. ‘The Turks raided the monasteries. They were a good source of income, because of the pilgrims.’ The monks would clamber through the priest’s hole, across the covered bridge and onto a roof. After that, they hid or dispersed in the gardens on the other side of the city wall. As we stepped onto the convent roof, guarded by a sixth-century gable, George explained the economics of Jerusalem life before the British occupied the city in 1917. ‘Three or four hundred people lived in the convent,’ he said. ‘It had about eight hundred rooms. They filled with pilgrims at Easter. In fact, at the times of pilgrimage, the whole city’s population grew about ten times. This convent could take in eight to ten thousand people.’ After the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the convent filled with refugee families. Some of them, like Albert Agazarian’s, were still there. ‘In 1917,’ George said, ‘three days before they left Jerusalem, the Turks demanded the Treasury.’ The convent’s treasure of gold, silver and jewels lay hidden behind another secret door within the church. George opened it, but swore me to keep the secret of its location until I died. ‘The Armenian patriarch filled wagons with the treasure in sealed boxes. He covered the boxes in coal.’ Horses pulled the Armenian community’s wealth to safety outside the city until the Turks withdrew. It seemed strange that no Turkish sentry would question a load of coal leaving the city in winter. George referred me to Sir Ronald Storrs’ Orientations, where the tale is recounted as he told it. The Cathedral of St James, beyond a small plaza near the iron-door entrance to the monastery, was more beautiful to my eye that any other church in Jerusalem. ‘In sharp contrast to the sombre weariness of the Holy Sepulchre,’ Fr Jerome Murphy-O’Connor wrote in The Holy Land, ‘this church mirrors the life and vigour of a colourful and unified people.’ I was not sure about the unity, but the ceilings and walls let loose tributes of colour and vigour. In terms of icons per square foot, St James’s could hold its own with any Greek church. It also contained one of the holiest relics, the head of St James the Less. Herod the Great’s feeble son, Herod Antipas, had done with the apostle’s head what his father had to John the Baptist’s, in AD 44. George, with great patience for a man who must have shown the church to hundreds of ignorant visitors, told me the story of every panel, every painting, every door. Three hundred and fifty candle-bearing lamps, all lit and suspended from ropes, could be lowered and raised via small pulleys. Each bore the inscription of its Armenian donor community. Much of the church’s beauty was the gift, George said, of an eighteenth-century patriarch called Gregory the Chain-bearer. In Gregory’s time, Armenians elsewhere were neglecting their church in Jerusalem. He went to Constantinople to shame them. ‘He put a chain around his neck and sat in front of the churches to raise money,’ George said. Gregory’s takings paid for the grand plaza, or porch, at the church door and for much of the restoration within. The cathedral was a warren of hidden doors and secret passages. Some led to chapels, others to refuges from tax collectors – the world’s first tax shelters. George and I wandered through the convent grounds. They comprised about a sixth of the old city and almost the entire Armenian Quarter. At the Convent of the Olive Tree, there was indeed one olive tree. ‘This is, of course, a very young tree,’ George said, ‘but they say it is Ananias’s tree.’ By very young, George meant a few hundred years. Ananias had been a high priest two thousand years ago, when, legend claimed, Christ had been tied to the tree and whipped. Interestingly, both a non-Armenian church and a mosque stood within the grounds of the Armenian Quarter. St Mark’s, believed to have been the house of St Mark’s mother, Mary, was a Syrian Orthodox church. And the tiny Yaqubieh, or Jacob, Mosque had once been the chapel of the martyr St James of Persia. He was known as St James the Cut-Up, because the martyr’s singular form of execution was to be chopped to pieces. The entire Armenian Quarter was clad in the smoothest stone I had ever seen, as slick as a seal’s back. The roofs, the courtyards and the plazas all had surfaces you could run your hands over or run barefoot across without taking a scratch. The rooftops and walkways formed an intricate system of water collection. Every massive stone was set to point the water towards a channel, and every channel made its way to a reservoir. ‘Under every church,’ George said, ‘there is a cistern. Before the rainy season, people spend weeks cleaning the roofs.’ Like the Nabataeans of the desert, the people of Jerusalem saved every drop the sky gave them. To waste water was a sin. To run dry was death. The Armenians, like the Arab Christians of Palestine, were running out of people. We walked by the yard of the Armenian school, where a few boys played basketball. ‘The children have no future,’ lamented George, himself unmarried and childless. ‘Our generation didn’t care about the future. Albert and I, for example, have no possessions. We are a proud generation. We lived under Arab sovereignty and dignity. We were treated as normal citizens.’ He looked at the children, all born long after Israel conquered the old city in 1967. ‘They have known only occupation. They have had only humiliation. They challenge it in the intifadah, but that is superficial.’ The Armenians had survived genocide by Turkey. They would survive the Israelis, I said. Jerusalem, he reminded me, was a long way from the massacres in Anatolia, northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Jerusalem, in the last years of the Ottomans’ chaotic empire, was a refuge. ‘The Turks,’ he said of those who ruled the old city, ‘wanted money. These people want the land.’ The monks hid their money or begged for more. Land cannot be concealed or replaced. George, a bespectacled and subdued man in a grey cardigan, hated the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the indignity meted out to both Arabs and Armenians. He told me that the only way he had found to endure was, like the monks of old, to seek a refuge. His refuge, he said, was the nineteenth century. The View from the Convent Jerusalem had always been a real estate scam, Albert Agazarian told me. George had left me at Albert’s house inside the convent. Albert lived there with his wife, son and two daughters. At home in his Syrian stone house, where every room opened on the courtyard as in old Damascus and Seville, Albert was a pasha. Madeleine, whom he had married when they were still in their twenties, brought coffee, tea, tobacco and sweets without his asking whenever anyone dropped by. He often had a guest – a journalist, a diplomat or an instructor from Bir Zeit University where he worked and his children studied. He usually received them in his library, a cluttered, domed room, with overstuffed sofas, shoe-sized ashtrays and books in no discernible order that he pulled down to quote some passage or other. There was no point in making an appointment to see Albert. He and Madeleine rarely bothered to answer their telephone. God, could Albert talk. ‘You went to the leather tannery?’ he asked me. The ‘leather tannery’ was Dabbagha Square, just below Papa Andrea’s rooftop restaurant. ‘Up until 1860, that place stank like hell. After the Crimean War, the Russian pilgrims started coming. There was a wedding here between Russian piety and generosity on the one hand and Byzantine cunning on the other. It was Eftimos, the Orthodox treasurer, who got rid of the tannery and the smell from those dead cows and rotting hides.’ He said it as if the aroma had just cleared his nostrils. ‘Eftimos built the first well and the first hotel in the old city. It was not a khan.’ A khan, or caravanserai, was common in the Levant of the nineteenth century. Travellers stopped for shelter, but brought their own blankets and food. A hotel that provided beds, linen and meals was an innovation. ‘This hotel was the Hospice of St John, the first modern hotel in Jerusalem. This is where the settlers have been since April 1990.’ Those were the blue-grilled windows with Israeli flags that I had seen at lunch. Madeleine, supporting a tray of coffee and cakes, pushed through the door and cleared space among the papers on the coffee table. Albert got up, opened a drawer and searched for something. Whatever it was, he did not find it. Madeleine poured the coffee and started for the door. I asked why she did not stay. Friends were waiting for her in the kitchen, and their conversation was more interesting. ‘The hotel was successful,’ Albert continued. ‘Its success instigated the Greek Orthodox to open the Grand Hotel and Grand New Hotel.’ The two hotels, built of Jerusalem stone in the high splendour of late Victorian and Habsburg design, dominated the western portal of the old city at the Jaffa Gate. ‘The Grand changed its name to the Imperial when Kaiser Wilhelm visited in 1898.’ The period from the Egyptian invasion of 1830 to Kaiser Wilhelm’s pilgrimage in 1898 made modern Jerusalem. The Christian powers – Russia, England, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Italy – erected churches and hospices in the Christian Quarter, on sites they bought in the Muslim Quarter and on hills outside the walls. German Christians erected the Augusta Victoria Hospital on a summit where the Kaiser was said to have had his first view of the Holy City. Prior to that, Imperial Russia staked its claim to Jerusalem with the construction of the Ascension Church, all onion domes and multicoloured like St Basil’s in Moscow, in 1870. Most of the modern Christian Quarter was built with foreign Christian donations in the late nineteenth century. England and Prussia opened the first Protestant church in the Holy Land, Christ Church, near the Jaffa Gate in 1849. It was a time when ideas born in Europe invaded the near Orient, Jerusalem in particular: imperialism, la mission civilitrice, the romantic Christian Zionism of Lords Shaftesbury and Palmerston (who suggested in 1840 that Europe’s Jews should be removed to Palestine and originated the phrase ‘land without a people for a people without a land’), nationalism, the forced opening of Ottoman markets to European trade with all its dislocating effects, the political Zionism of Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl and the first purchases with Rothschild money of Arab land for Zionist settlement. The Kaiser’s well-publicized procession through the Holy Land attracted Herzl from Vienna. Herzl paid homage to Kaiser Wilhelm and requested German sponsorship for the colonization of Palestine. At the Herzl Museum in West Jerusalem a photomontage in badly focused sepia depicted the elegantly dressed, bearded Father of Zionism on foot and doffing a white pith helmet to the mounted Kaiser. The Kaiser did not sponsor the Zionist project, whose architects wisely turned to Britain. ‘Before 1831,’ Albert said, ‘the population of Jerusalem was never more than 10,000. There were 4000 Muslims, 3000 Christians and 2000 Jews. The gates of the city were locked at night.’ From 1840, with the European Christian building programme and the missionary attempts, mostly failed, to convert Muslims and Jews to Christ, the modern age began. Britain in 1917 accepted the status quo in the old city, freezing the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim land holdings where they were. Israel, after 1967, was more flexible. This took Albert back to Jerusalem’s first hotel, the St John Hospice, where I had watched settler children staring through wire mesh at the Arab world below them. ‘The settlers got in through the protected tenant,’ he said, ‘who unfortunately was an Armenian.’ He dropped his pipe in an ashtray and jumped up to find a book. Then another. He handed them to me. One was Robert Friedman’s Zealots for Zion and the other Dilip Hiro’s Sharing the Promised Land. ‘Look on page ninety-nine,’ he said, pointing at the Friedman book. There it said that an Armenian named Martyros Matossian had received $3.5 million to assign his family’s protected tenancy in the hospice to a group of Israeli settlers. The Hiro book, on page twenty-two, made the same allegation, but said Matossian, who then fled the country, received $5 million. Albert explained that most of the property in the Christian Quarter belonged to the churches – with the Greek Orthodox owning most. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘my mother has leased her house from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate since 1932. The leases are with local tenants, and tens of people in a family could have shares in the same house. The settlers find the one who needs money. They ask him to sell his room in the house. Then they elbow their way in.’ Albert knew families who had settlers in one cramped bedroom of their house. ‘If there is an explosion,’ he said, meaning a Palestinian bomb targeting Israelis anywhere, ‘the settlers will get angry and beat everyone in the house. They go on the rooftop and pee in the water tank.’ The old city settlers were, for the most part, extremely religious. ‘Traditionally, the Jewish religious establishment opposed Zionism,’ Albert said. ‘Ben-Gurion told them, we have a state and it must be based on the rule of law. We have conscription. We have state education. We have public transport on Saturday. The money we receive is for all the Jewish people. You must reach an accord with us. And they did. It was the new status quo.’ The religious establishment, who believed Jewish nationalism contradicted the centrality of Jewish faith, arrived at a mode of co-existing with the state. The religious were exempt from military service. They sent their children to religious, rather than secular state, schools. Public transport did not trespass in their neighbourhoods on the Sabbath. They took a share of government expenditure to disburse among their own as they saw fit. ‘From 1948 to 1967,’ Albert recalled, ‘the father of Avraham Burg, the speaker of the Knesset … his father, Yossef Burg, was the longest-serving Knesset member. As head of the National Religious Party, he served in all of Israel’s governments. He did not get involved in Israeli politics. Instead, he represented religious interests. It created a strange relationship. He used your money to attack you, the government. After 1967, a completely new relationship emerged.’ The religious colleges, the Yeshivas, developed a new theology and, with it, a new politics. ‘Their interpretation was original. For the first time, they said, we now have Hebron. We have Jerusalem. This means we are living in Messianic times. Our mission is to redeem the land. This line of reasoning surfaced in 1972 in Hebron when the Gush Emunim grabbed its first settlement.’ Gush Emunim, Bloc of the Faithful, settled in a Hebron hotel. To persuade them to leave the centre of the Arab city, the Labour government allowed them to establish Kiryat Arba on a hill it confiscated above Hebron. ‘After Kiryat Arba, the religious settlements began to proliferate, like amoebae, under different names: Ne’vot David at St John’s, El Ad and the rest. These are now the people who are holding the government by the balls.’ The settlers had also returned to Hebron, where they regularly abused and attacked the Arab inhabitants. One of them, Baruch Goldstein, had shot and killed twenty-nine men in the Grand Mosque. Albert showed me one of the settlers’ slogans, in English, on that most American of political advertising media, the bumper sticker: ‘G*d is a religious Zionist.’ He laid some of their literature, booklets and pamphlets on the table. There were biblical passages from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua on ridding the land of Canaanites and Philistines. ‘I predict,’ Albert said, as if sermonizing from a pulpit, ‘that within ten years, the religious will take over the army.’ The army, in Albert’s view, was already leading the country. Sharon remained more soldier than politician. His tanks and helicopters swarmed all over the West Bank and Gaza, but he did not know how to pass a budget. ‘This is a government that serves the army,’ he said. ‘How far can this go?’ From time to time during my stay in Jerusalem I would stop by Madeleine’s kitchen. It was no accident that my visits often coincided with lunch. She cooked well, and her food was the closest to Lebanese in Jerusalem. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis were great cooks, but the Lebanese and Armenians were. Among the Armenians, Madeleine Agazarian was one of the best. I understood why Albert and the children lunched at home almost every day. It was rare that I was the only guest. Sometimes, George Hultunian was there in a tattered cardigan. Often, women of the Armenian Quarter or further afield appeared. There were occasional academics and journalists, but I never saw a priest. During one lunch, the women were talking about ‘the settler’. There were so many settlers in old Jerusalem that I did not know why they singled out this particular man. Madeleine and one of her friends had seen wives of the Arab labourers who had worked for him restoring his old house. They were standing outside his door, begging for their husbands’ unpaid wages. One of them had a small baby. ‘Haram,’ one of the Armenian women said. Pity. I asked what was going on, and Albert said it was not important. I pressed the women, and they told me the story. ‘The settler’ was an American, who had taken a house on Ararat Street next to St Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Church. It was at the edge of the Armenian Quarter, not far from Habad Street in the Jewish Quarter. The house he took needed work, and he hired Arabs to do it. When the time came to pay them, he replaced them with other workers. The labourers demanded their wages, and he ignored them. They were afraid to tell the police. Arabs from the occupied territories could not approach the authorities without being arrested themselves for working without permits. Their wives went to the settler’s house to shame him. But, the women said, he refused to give them any money. It was the scandal of the Armenian Quarter, and no one had the power to make the settler pay. In the evening, I walked from Armenian Patriarchate Road into St James’s Road, a footpath too narrow for cars. At the Ararat Grocery, I asked the way to St Mark’s. ‘That’s my church,’ the young man behind the counter said, not without pride. There were a few hundred Syrian Orthodox in Jerusalem, and he was one. He took me outside, and under the feeble lamps of the ancient city carefully pointed the way. Passing under the arches, the vaults and sky, I found the Church, no larger than a small chapel, of St Mark. Behind it, extending in a graceful curve over the lane, was the house of the American settler. I recognized it by the new, unfinished cement steps built by the unpaid workers. A ramp, with two-by-fours nailed to it, led to the front door. This was where the neighbours said the workmen’s wives had stood crying and begging for the money their husbands had earned. I went to the door, but no one was home. What was I going to say? Would I tell him, American to American, to pay the men? Or would I ask him for his side of the story? Taking a man’s labour without paying him was slavery, and we had fought a civil war over that. The Room Down Next door in St Mark’s Church I met the remarkable Sister Yostina al-Banna. An orthodox nun from Nineveh, which she called ‘the great city of Jonah’, she had three brothers who were priests. One of the three, George Yusuf al-Banna, taught geology at a university in Portland, Oregon. The second lived in Jordan, and the third was still in Nineveh. Sister Yostina had left Iraq, homeland of most Syrian Orthodox, little more than a year before. ‘This is the first church in Christianity,’ she said, making it one of the many first churches I have seen. The early Christians had no churches. They gathered in synagogues and, when uncircumcised Gentiles were admitted to their communities, in one another’s houses. They gave themselves the name Christian at Antioch, where I visited a cave in 1987 that also claimed the distinction of first church. The Turks had turned it into a museum. St Mark’s was still a church. Sister Yostina said St Mark’s, built in AD 37, had been destroyed three times. ‘The first time was in 71, when the King Titus come to this city and destroy Jerusalem. Everything high, he cut it. The twelfth century was the last time.’ The nun, like the church itself, was old and small. But, also like the church, warm and welcoming. She showed me an Aramaic inscription that she said had been discovered in 1940. Aramaic, or Syriac, was the language of Palestine, spoken by Jews as well as Gentiles, at the time of Christ. The Syrian Orthodox still used it for their liturgy, as Lebanon’s Catholic Maronites did until Vatican II instructed them to use the vernacular. She said of the inscription, ‘It’s old, fifteen hundred years old. It is written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, from right to left.’ Then she translated it: ‘This is the house of St Mark’s mother, who was chosen of Christ from the Apostles.’ St Mark’s mother, Mary, lived in the house below the church. That was the legend. If true, it was where St Peter took refuge when the angel helped him out of prison. The church was a museum of Christian legends. ‘In the upper room of the house down [down meant the levels below the church itself], Jesus made the Last Supper,’ she told me, adding another astonishing detail, ‘and, also, the washing of the feet.’ The Virgin Mary, she believed, was baptized here; although the New Testament did not mention her baptism. There were more stories, not all of which I understood. Sister Yostina said, ‘Jesus sent St Peter and St John. He told them, “You shall enter the city Jerusalem, and you shall see a man carrying a jar.” In those days, only women carry jar. This was the miracle from God. St Mark went and stand and carry a jar. And they follow Him until He reach the house of his mother. So, they prepare for Him the upper room of the house down.’ That was not all. ‘After the cross, the Apostles with the Virgin Mary were afraid. They don’t know where they can go. They are strange in this city, so they turn back to the house of St Mark’s mother. They remain three days, until Jesus appear to them, after He be in this life, after three days.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/charles-glass/the-tribes-triumphant-return-journey-to-the-middle-east/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.