The demographic reality had changed past the point of no return, but that seemed moot to the Mufti. She tried another tack. “You speak of a country. You speak of one nation. Would the clans put on the national yoke you are advocating? Would the Tarabin, the Tiaha, the Azazma tribes of the south want to be subsumed, becoming a part of such a…political construct?”
His eyes widened. She knew far more than most. Too much. With accentless Arabic and golden hair, who was she?
He cursed. “We were better off before al yahud came,” he said, staring at the dark public square.
She laughed in derision. “Before the Jews came, your people had been living in mud hovels with no windows and populated with all manner of insects, and frequented by hungry dogs hairless with mange, and filled with the vile stench of goats, sheep, and donkeys sharing quarters with humans.” Her eyes narrowed in scorn. “You dumped shit in the streets, and your villages swarmed with mud flies, ticks, and fleas settling in open butcher shops and on babies’ nostrils and eyes. The village water pools were infested with leeches feeding on bloated animal carcasses.”
Mortified, his mouth worked, but no words came out.
She continued, relentless, “The fields had no fertilizers. The smaller villages had no wells, carts, or medical services. The meager wheat yield went to the government in payment of tithe and to the effendi in interest loan payments. So don’t talk to me about the good old days, the days before the yahudi came.”
“I would rather be poor without the Jews than rich with them!” al-Husayni shouted.
“It is easy for you to say—born to a rich, ruling family.” He bristled at the suggestion, but she just glowered back at him. “Say what you will, haven’t your peers voted otherwise—with their wallets?” For appearance’s sake, she produced a piece of paper and scanned a list of names. “Omar al-Baytar, member of the Arab Executive, discreetly sold some tracts of your precious homeland to the Jews.” She glanced up at him, a hint of mockery in her eyes, before resuming to scan the list in her hand. “Then we have Shaykh Salim Basiso, Mufti of Beersheba and Gaza; Yaqub al-Ghusayn, president of the National Congress of Arab Youth; and Amin ‘Abd al-Hadi, member of the Supreme Muslim Council.” The contempt was now unmistakable in her voice. “Not to mention the mayors of Tulkarm, of Gaza, of Jerusalem, and of Jaffa.” She tutted and shook her head in mock regret. “My, my. The valiant defenders of Palestine just fell over each other selling the land, parcel by parcel, to the yahudi, haven’t they?”
The Mufti clamped up. He would never admit it, but her words hurt him like a branding iron.
“At this late hour, the partition is the only viable road a governing body can take to establish peace.”
“Peace?” he spat, all restraints now gone. “Who said anything about that? There is no room for peaceful coexistence with our enemies. The only solution is the establishment of a Palestinian state of Arabs and of those Jews who settled the land before 1917—alongside the liquidation of the foreign conquest in Palestine.”
Finally, the naked truth came out, thought Hagar.
She got up, and the Mufti found himself jumping to his feet. She gestured. “Start walking, your Eminence. You will find that this street leads back to the world you know.”
He began to turn but stopped. “This land, Palestine, is sacred to us, you know.” His eyes sought hers, his voice holding defiance mixed with an odd sense of desperation.
Hagar eyes blazed in fury. The Mufti unknowingly took a step back, suddenly more afraid than he had ever been.
“Sacred, you say?” she lashed out, and her voice hit him like a physical blow.
He gaped at her.
“If it is so holy to you, why have you been desecrating it?” She made a sweeping motion and said harshly, “Sand dunes have advanced inland along the coast, and the rivers are impeded by marauding Bedouins and surrounded by infested swamps. The coastal plains have become virtually uninhabited—a mournful land, pockmarked by centuries of warfare and neglect.” She regarded the Mufti with open anger at the flagrant abuse of the earth. “In the hill country, you had cut down the trees then cultivated without terraces. And as soon as one area had been denuded of soil, you have moved on to another.” Her voice now rang in the still, eerie night. “Through the centuries, you have turned Palestine to a land of gray rocks and gray ruins. A land of stony mountains and stony plains on which little grows but scrub and thorns.”
And after that, neither of them had anything more to say. The Mufti adjusted the white fez on top of his head and stiffly walked down the street, his knuckles white over his walking cane.
Rehovot, Palestine
“So, what are you doing with the whey, Doctor?”
The President of the Jewish Agency for Palestine jolted upright at the sudden voice. He stared at the girl in short shorts sitting on one of the tables, her legs swinging. “My dear girl, if I did not know better, I would’ve said that you materialized out of thin air.”
He took a closer look, his shock greater yet. “I remember now…twenty-five years ago…you were in my lab in Manchester. But that’s—”
“Impossible?” the girl laughed good-naturedly. She jumped off the table and went to the window.
Dr. Weizmann joined her, feeling lightheaded. Who are you, he wanted to ask, but found himself anxious. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.
“You people have done some inspiring work here on the land, Doctor.”
He tried to smile, deeply unsettled by the sudden appearance of the girl. But this was something he’d talked about on numerous occasions, and he heard himself saying, “We think we possess a thing only when we build it with our own hands. Historically, we always arrived at a place when it was already established.” He paused, but she was still at the window, her back to him. “Here was an opportunity to start from the ground up. To build, settle, and convert the marshes to cultivated land.”
“Well, yes,” Hagar said, peering at the hills. Beyond the small garden and the fence of the Daniel Sieff Institute, an Arab boy was herding some sheep, much as his ancestors did in that area for countless generations.
The Doctor watched her. “Palestine is the only country in the world where the Jews, as a race, can regard as their historical homeland. And there is no other nation—I do not say population—there is no other nation as a whole that regards this territory as their only homeland.”
“You people shouldn’t have come here.” She turned around and faced him. “What was wrong with Argentina?”
“We tried. People drifted to the big cities, leaving behind the settlement enterprise.”
“So you should’ve tried harder,” she snapped at him. “What is with you Jews and this subconscious need to be persecuted and harassed?” She was glaring at him now.
Hagar took a step toward him with a suggestion of a sneer. “But you haven’t really settled the historical heartland of Eretz Yisrael, have you? It is one thing to buy fallow land from landlords on the coastal plains, it is something else entirely to gain a foothold in the populated hill districts.”
“Dear lady, we have every right to be here,” he told her with a touch of coolness. “This is the very mission statement of the Mandate for Palestine—placing the territory under such political, administrative, and economic conditions that will secure the establishment of a Jewish national home.”
Hagar made a sharp gesture. “Don’t talk to me about rights,” she said impatiently. “Slowly but surely you are displacing the indigenous population and instituting here a foreign rule.”
“You cannot simply sum it up like this: foreigners came and displaced the natives.” He met her gaze. “There was no century in which we did not have some presence here.” He continued in a stronger voice, “There was no century in which Jews did not attempt to return. The Jews carried Palestine in their heart and in their head wherever they lived. It was our homeland u
ntil two millennia ago.”
She was unimpressed with that last statement. “You had a tribal kingdom for a few centuries in the Iron Age and one during the Hasmonean period. These two eras of reign are separated by hundreds of years yet united by backstabbing, scheming, and suicidal statesmanship.” She shook her head. “Anyway, Palestine has been a land of many people.”
Hagar studied two Arabs who were traveling on a faraway dirt road. The man led the way, riding a donkey; the woman walked behind him, carrying on her head a large basket overfilled with vegetables. “There is more you need to understand yet.”
She jerked her head in the direction of the two distant Arabs. “They are not much to look at, but neither were your ancestors. Those who stayed went one way. You went the other. And neither of you are the Israelites of two thousand years ago.” Hagar regarded the shocked man in front of her. “Where did you think the indigenous population came from? Naturally, many of them are the descendants of the Israelites that stayed behind. The fallen brethren. They have the historical claim to this land more than any other.”
Visibly shaken, Chaim Weizmann collected himself with some effort. “As we return to Palestine, we wholeheartedly agree that nothing shall be taken from the local inhabitants that they need for their well-being.”
“Wake up, Chaim.” She leveled a sober look at him, and all of a sudden there was nothing girlish about her demeanor. “One million Mohammedans declared a jihad on your people. Have you not heard their slogan? ‘British to the sea and Jews to the graves. Fight the heretics and the hypocrites; their dwelling-place is hell.’ They want the entire territory and refuse to share power.”
“We are lucky that Arabs are much more proficient with their tongues than with their swords,” observed the Doctor.
Despite herself, she smiled. “But then again, you don’t know the first thing about fighting, either.”
“Look,” he said, “we can formulate a constitutional expression that, irrespective of our numbers, we shall not interfere with their language and civilization. Furthermore, we are perfectly willing to aid them with self-development.”
Watts was her only remaining analyst, and his report suggested otherwise. But she let the matter drop.
Hagar wearily shook her head. “You are deep within the House of Islam here. They will not accept an infidel, colonial polity on a sacred Islamic soil. Let alone a polity that assumes jurisdiction over al-Quds, that is, over Jerusalem. Let alone by the disciples of the annulled, false religion of Judaism, which Islam was to replace and supersede. And it doesn’t matter if your state will assume control over five thousand square kilometers or over one.”
He gestured vaguely. “We’ll negotiate with them.”
“Arabs don’t negotiate with invaders.”
“Well, just like us they’ll have to compromise. Men of reason are found in every camp. I’ve met them among the Arabs.”
“They have been and will be branded as traitors or lackeys of the West.” She regarded him impassively. “Your good intentions have brought about a wave of antisemitism throughout the Arab world and the rise of a fascist youth movement here. You have condemned the Jews of Palestine and their descendants to a state of warfare. Is that the path you wish to take your people on, Doctor?”
He sighed. “Dear lady, we no longer have the luxury of time or options. Dark clouds are building up across the continent. The Jewry in Eastern Europe is facing a disaster of historic magnitude. It is crucial we establish a haven—here and now.”
Her analyst had suggested as much. But she remained silent, studying him. Neither sympathetic nor condemning.
He went on, “Recently, the government of Poland announced there are a million Jews too many. Citizens of Poland, the Jews have been linked with that country’s fate for one thousand years. They have made their mark—good, bad, or indifferent as everybody else. Why should they be singled out as being a million too many? Where can they go?” He held her gaze. “In Central and Eastern Europe are six million Jews doomed to be in places they are not wanted, and for whom the world is divided into areas where they cannot live, and areas in which they cannot enter.” His voice broke a little on the last words. He took a deep breath. “Palestine offers a possible salvation for those people.”
She just kept looking at him expressionless, her green eyes hooded.
The Doctor took a step closer toward the enigmatic girl. “The Arabs came out of the War with something like three kingdoms—Hedjaz, Iraq, and Transjordan. Well, it may not be all human beings could wish for, but who in this world got the satisfaction of all his wishes?
“There should be one area in the world, in God’s wide world, where we, Jews, could live and express ourselves in accord with our precepts and culture, in our own ways, and with our own institutions.”
He continued, “It is moral to alienate a small portion of land from those who are numbered among the great landowners of the world in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless people—even if it means that one fraction, one branch, of the Arab race, and not a big one, will have to live as a minority in someone’s else home.”
Hagar drew on the cigarette and violently blew out a blue-white stream. Dimly he noted that the cigarette-looking object she held was not lit, and that it was not smoke that came out but vapor.
He pressed on, with a sudden sense of urgency, “This is not a clash between right and wrong but a clash between two rights. The Arab standpoint has validity, but our moral need is greater. Theirs is a claim of appetite, ours is a claim of starvation.”
She audibly exhaled blue vapor and turned her back on him. Finally she spoke: “Get control over all of Palestine and oust the local Arabs from throughout the territory. Get the plains; get the hills region; expel their inhabitants—and don’t look back. That may be the only way. But also know that this will permanently stain the psyche of your budding national home.”
She approached the man in goatee. And as they stood looking at one another, she leaned and kissed him on his cheek.
Then vanished in a sudden rush of air.
“Well?” asked Mr. Watts, trying not to appear anxious as his mistress drew near, marching across the field by his house. But he badly wanted to hear what she had to say about the cooperative settlements.
“Well what?” she snapped.
“Admit it, boss.”
“So what?” She inhaled deeply from the cigarette-like object.
“So something.”
Hagar shook her head, visibly frustrated. She blew out bluish vapor. “That’s exactly it; it’s not. It is only this one-time journey. These collective settlements draw their strength from the formation of the Jewish national home. It is a fellowship of generosity, camaraderie, and sacrifice fueled by unique circumstances.”
She continued, “And one day, their members may reach the mountaintop as a Jewish state come into being. They will stand, admire the view, and then settle in for the long haul. They will install air conditioners, pave their roads, and manicure their lawns. It will become merely another community. The wonderful bad old days of hardship will be gradually superseded with pedestrian good days. And the fish, well, they will just taste like fish—nothing more.” She sighed, vexed. “This is also when they will have the luxury of time to note the terrible shortcomings of the collectives they have begotten.” Hagar knelt and absently traced in the dirt some geometrical shapes with her finger. “You know, when you first told me these communal settlements have been thriving for decades, I was astounded.”
“And now?”
“Learning of their dynamics and culture, I am even more astounded. I’m surprised they lasted the first month, much less twenty and thirty years, as some of them have.”
Mr. Watts raised an eyebrow.
Hagar made an agitated motion. “They’ve no sense of social boundaries and decorum crucial for working in close-knit groups. T
hey do not hold the family in sanctity. A desire for privacy and withdrawal are suspect. Divergent beliefs are frowned upon. They have no space, both literal and figurative, for sexually-charged relations. Parents do not maintain the vital link to their young offspring. The kvutza was formed by adolescents, and its culture and norms are locked into that age bracket. As a result, the aging members are not regarded as venerated old but as frail and failing young, still referred to by their diminutive first names. The kvutza suffers from a lack of spiritual depth, which binds communities, and there is no sense of the sacred and of the ritualistic. When the national goal is carried out, what will be left to give meaning and identity in these settlements?”
Hagar fell silent and hugged her knees. She laughed softly with fondness. “I stayed in the dining hall, playing the accordion.”
Her analyst smiled in appreciation.
“Later on in the evening, a lecture was to be held, an analysis of the Spanish Revolution. Well over a hundred members filed back in and took their places. But the speaker? I looked around and ended up noting a young man busy clearing some tables. When he finished, he removed his apron and worked his way to the front of the room—and started the lecture.”
Mr. Watts laughed. “Was he good?”
Hagar grinned back at him.
She stood up and shook off the dirt.
“I’ve got a meeting with destiny near Cairo.” She eyed him kindly, bowed her head in farewell, then disappeared.
With a spring in his step, Mr. Watts walked toward his home when he unexpectedly felt hands seize him from behind in a powerful grip. Before he could shout, a needle pricked his neck. Blackness overtook him.
Chapter 7
Somewhere Outside Cairo, Egypt, the Netherworld
The Earth Hearing Page 6