by Sandy Tolan
Al-Ramla was named for sand, some believed, from the Arabic word raml Mostly the soil here was good, bearing citrus, olives, bananas, lentils, and sesame. The year Ahmad Khairi built his house, Arab farmers in Palestine would produce hundreds of thousands of tons of barley, wheat, cabbage, cucumber, tomato, figs, grapes, and melons. The Khairis tended oranges, olives, and almonds in a communal waqf, land owned collectively by the extended family and administered under Islamic law.
The Khairis traced their history and landed wealth to the sixteenth century and the religious scholar Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi. Khair al-Din came from Morocco to preside as a judge for the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, based in Istanbul, would rule Palestine for four hundred years. At its height, the empire stretched from the outskirts of Vienna through the Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. From Istanbul, the Ottoman sultan bequeathed to Khair al-Din the productive waqflands that would sustain the family for centuries.
By 1936, Palestine was under the rule of a new overseer, the British, who had arrived at the end of World War I as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. By this time, the Khairis of al-Ramla had their own family quarter, an expanse of open grounds and houses connected by stone gates and archways that made it possible to travel from home to home without ever leaving the compound. The women rarely ventured out, leaving the shopping to maids and servants.
The Khairis owned the town's cinema, and on Tuesdays it was made available for the exclusive use of the clan. Dozens of family members would come to watch the latest films from Egypt. In the privacy of their own theater, the Khairi women would not be exposed to the looks of strangers, especially men. Khairis rarely married outside the clan, but at his wedding seven years earlier, twenty-two-year-old Ahmad was an exception: His bride, Zakia, nineteen, was from the Riad family of al-Ramla. Quiet, discreet, and loyal, she was considered a good housewife and was much loved by the Khairis.
Ahmad's uncle Sheikh Mustafa Khairi was both the family patriarch and the longtime mayor of al-Ramla. Mustafa was like a father to Ahmad; when Ahmad was seven, his parents died, and Mustafa's family had raised the boy as their own. Mustafa was popular both with the town's citizens and with the British colonial overseers, despite growing tensions.
The British had arrived in 1917, the same year of the historic Balfour Declaration, in which England pledged to help establish a "national homeland for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This was a triumph for Zionism, a political movement of European Jews founded by Theodor Herzl. The British had authorized "an appropriate Jewish agency" to help develop public works, utilities, and natural resources—in essence, the beginnings of a Jewish government in Palestine. In recent years, Jewish immigration to Palestine had driven the Arabs and the British further apart, and Sheikh Mustafa, as mayor and town patriarch, had to mediate between the colonial overseers and his restive fellow Arabs.
Ahmad watched his walls go up from the loamy soil on the eastern outskirts of al-Ramla: from foundation to roofline, fourteen layers of Jerusalem stone. His decision to move out of the family compound, and its world unto itself, was unusual. Ahmad wanted to feel independent, however, and he conferred with Sheikh Mustafa. They agreed that from the young man's inheritance, his own share of the Khairi wacff income, and the income from his al-Ramla furniture workshop, his family's home would rise. It was time. Zakia, now twenty-six, was pregnant with her fourth child, which Ahmad hoped would finally be a boy.
The young couple had envisioned a house with an open design. Ahmad had gone over the master plan with a British friend and builder, Benson Solli, one of only a few Jews who lived in al-Ramla. For the Khairis, as for many Arabs, Jews like Mr. Solli, as Ahmad's children remembered him, were simply part of the landscape of Palestine. Jews from the kibbutzim bartered for wheat, barley, and melons at al-Ramla's Wednesday market. Arab laborers worked in nearby Jewish fields, pushing hand plows made in the kibbutzim, and Jewish farmers brought their horses into al-Ramla to be shod. Arabs would recall Jewish engineers and conductors working for the Palestine railroad that passed through town; some remembered bearded, Arabic-speaking Jews riding by donkey to purchase bags of cement at the local factory. For the most part the two communities lived and worked in separate worlds, but their degree of interaction was undeniable. The well-to-do of al-Ramla traveled to Tel Aviv to have suits cut by Jewish tailors, fezzes cleaned by Jewish drycleaners, or portraits taken by Jewish photographers. Khairi women recalled traveling to Tel Aviv to have their dresses made by a Jewish seamstress. One of the Khairi family physicians, Dr. Litvak, was Jewish; and at the Schmidt Girls College in Jerusalem, where Ahmad and Zakia's daughters studied, many of the girls' classmates were Jews. "They all spoke Arabic and were Palestinians like us," one Khairi daughter would remember decades later. "They were there—like us, part of Palestine." Mr. Solli, an architect and builder, was a quiet man, unassuming, with daughters named Rosalie and Eively. He spoke Arabic and, according to later generations of Khairis, coexisted comfortably among the town's Muslim and Christian Arabs.
Ahmad and Mr. Solli designed large living and sleeping quarters separated by double wooden doors in the center. Workers walled off a small bedroom in a corner. They laid tile, hung wire for electric lights, and ran pipe for indoor plumbing. Zakia would have an inside kitchen with a modern stove. Instead of baking her Arabic bread in the taboun, the open-air, wood-fired oven found at most traditional homes, she now had the luxury of sending her dough to the communal ovens in al-Ramla, to be brought back as warm bread ready for the table.
These were new luxuries for the town founded twelve centuries earlier, in 715 A.D., by the Muslim caliph Suleiman Ibn Abdel-Malek. Suleiman, it was said, did not name the place for its raml, or sand, but rather for a woman named Ramla who had been generous to him as he had traveled through the area. Suleiman made al-Ramla the political capital of Palestine, and for a time it became more important than Jerusalem. The town lay halfway between Damascus and Cairo, and soon it was a stopover for camel caravans hauling leather, swords, buckets, walnuts, barley, and cloth. Suleiman's workers built the White Mosque, considered one of the most beautiful in the Arab world. They built a six-mile-long aqueduct to carry fresh water to the town's residents and to irrigate its fields. The gently sloping lands surrounding al-Ramla would be considered among the most fertile in Palestine. By the tenth century, a Muslim traveler would write of al-Ramla:
It is a fine city, and well built. Its water is good and plentiful; its fruits are abundant. It combines manifold advantages, situated as it is in the midst of beautiful villages and lordly towns, near to holy places and pleasant hamlets. Commerce here is prosperous, and means of livelihood easy . . . Its bread is of the best and the whitest; its lands are well favoured above all others, and its fruits are of the most luscious. The capital stands among fruitful fields, walled towns, and serviceable hospices. It possesses magnificent hostelries and pleasant baths, dainty food and various condiments, spacious houses, fine mosques and broad roads.
In the next thousand years, al-Ramla would be conquered by the Crusaders, liberated by the Muslim hero Saladin, and ruled by the Ottoman sultans from Istanbul. By the 1930s, the town housed a military garrison used by British forces and a colonial office for a subcommissioner dispatched from London. British officers were fond of hunting fox through the olive groves, over cactus hedges and stone walls, with hounds from the town's kennels. A British subcommissioner filed periodic briefings to His Majesty's government in London. In a cursive scrawl with his blue fountain pen, he noted crops, tonnage, and, by 1936, as Ahmad Khairi's house rose, an increasing disintegration in the public order.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, and the situation for Jews was deteriorating across Europe. Within a few years, demands for Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. Underground Zionist organizations began smuggling boatloads of Jews in ever greater numbers from European ports to Haifa, along the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine. The British authorities struggled to contro
l the flow. Between 1922 and 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine quadrupled—from 84,000 to 352,000. During the same time, the Arab population had increased by about 36 percent, to 900,000. In those intervening fourteen years, as the Jewish community in Palestine had grown more powerful, a nationalistic fervor began to rise among the Arabs of Palestine. For decades, Arabs had been selling land to Jews arriving from Europe. Gradually, as land sales increased and Jewish leaders pressed their call for a state of their own, many Arabs began to fear Jewish domination. Already more than 30,000 Arab peasant families, or nearly a quarter of the rural population, had been dispossessed through the sale of land to Jews, many by absentee Arab landowners. The families arrived impoverished in the cities of Palestine and in many cases earned wages by building houses for the new Jewish arrivals. By the mid-1930s. Arab leaders had declared that selling land to the Jews was an act of treason. They were opposed to a separate Jewish state, and, increasingly, they wanted the British out of Palestine.
Ahmad and his workers hung wooden shutters on the windows. For the exterior fence, they fastened lengths of iron bar to limestone pillars. They laid the tiles for a small garage—for a car that Ahmad didn't yet own but hoped someday he would.
Before long, Ahmad would turn his attention to the garden. In the corner of the yard behind the house, he had chosen a spot for a lemon tree. Once the tree was in the soil, Ahmad knew it would be at least seven years, and probably more, before the strong Palestinian sun and sweet waters of the al-Ramla aquifer would nurture the tree to maturity. The act of planting was thus an act of faith and patience.
The Khairis' stone house was finished by late 1936. To celebrate, the family butchered a lamb and prepared a huge feast: Chicken stuffed with rice and great piles of lamb were common for such occasions, along with handmade couscous, date-filled cookies made with soft buttery dough, and kanafe, a hot, pistachio-covered sweet that is shaped like a pizza and looks like shredded wheat. Cousins, sisters and brothers, and Sheikh Mustafa would all have come from the Khairi family compound to admire the new home, with its layers of white Jerusalem stone rising up from the earth. There stood Ahmad, in his coat and tie and fez; a pregnant Zakia; and their three girls—Hiam, six years old; Basima, four; and Fatima, three. Ahmad still waited for a son. He came from a good family with land and wanted to pass on the inheritance in the way of his ancestors. Zakia understood this clearly
Ahmad and Mr. Solli had designed the house to withstand the weight of three floors. Ahmad and Zakia hoped later to expand the home as the family grew and the income provided.
But the sense of security the Khairis might have hoped for in their new home, on the land their families had inhabited for centuries, was tempered by the reality of daily life in Palestine in late 1936. By then, their homeland was in the midst of a full-scale rebellion.
The Great Arab Rebellion had erupted the previous fall, when an Arab nationalist named Sheikh Izzadin al-Qassam took to the hills near Jenin in northern Palestine with a small band of rebels. Arab nationalists had long suspected the British of favoring the Jews over the Arabs in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration had helped put in motion the machinery for building a Jewish state, including a trade union, a bank, a university, and even a Jewish militia, known as the Haganah. As for the Arabs, Balfour said simply that the Jewish homeland would not adversely affect "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." In the fall of 1935, when the British authorities uncovered a Zionist arms-smuggling operation but did not find and prosecute the organizers, Arab mistrust of the British deepened, and Sheikh al-Qassam launched his rebellion. He was convinced that only armed insurrection could bring about national liberation for the Arabs.
The British suspected al-Qassam's band of causing two firebomb deaths at a kibbutz and other killings. They called the sheikh an "outlaw"; Zionist leaders said he was a "gangster"; both agreed he was a terrorist. In November 1935, al-Qassam, who liked to declare, "Obey God and the Prophet, but not the British high commissioner," was hunted down and shot dead near his cave in the hills. "The band was liquidated by police action," a British report stated. Arabs of Palestine spent the winter mourning the death of their first Palestinian martyr and organizing for the long fight ahead.
On Wednesday evening, April 15, 1936, as Ahmad Khairi and his friend Benson Solli made plans to break ground in al-Ramla, the trouble began. On a road twenty-five miles north of town, two Jews crossing northern Palestine by car were held up by what the British authorities would later describe as "Arab highwaymen." The Arabs robbed the Jews, then shot and killed them. The next night, two Arabs near Tel Aviv were killed by Jewish assailants. In the coming days, Jews stoned Arab delivery trucks and looted Arab-run shops. Rumors, apparently false, spread quickly of the murder of two Arabs at Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv; Arabs responded with violence. The attacks, reprisals, and counterreprisals had begun.
The British brought in military reinforcements to Jaffa and Tel Aviv and imposed a state of emergency. Colonial authorities imposed strict curfews, arrested Jews and Arabs, searched their houses without warrant, and censored letters, telegrams, and newspapers. Arab guerrillas, meanwhile, set up national committees in towns and villages across Palestine to serve as the bases for an insurgency. Leaders of Arab political parties in Palestine had formed the Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who called for a general strike and a boycott of Jewish goods. The mufti, who had been appointed by the British to represent the Muslim community in Palestine, had turned against his former colonial masters. His Arab Higher Committee demanded an end to Jewish immigration, an end of land sales to Jews, and an end to the British Mandate in favor of a single state.
Arab fighters in checkered keffiyehs, or head scarves, struck from the hills, firing on British forces and Jewish kibbutzim. The rebels, known as fedayeen, cut phone and telegraph lines, sabotaged water pipelines, mined bridges, burned forests, derailed trains, and sniped at Jewish settlements and detachments of British forces. "There have been widespread acts of murder and other outrages by gangs of armed terrorists," declared a report of His Majesty's government. British troops responded with baton charges, live ammunition, and a new tactic: demolitions of the stone homes of suspected rebels and their relatives. "This preliminary work of demolition," one British communique declared, "will be punctuated by frequent detonations and crashes of falling masonry . . . the neighbourhood should not be surprised, misled, or alarmed when they hear these noises."
In the summer of 1936, the entire Khairi clan, along with the rest of al-Ramla, prepared for the annual festival of Nabi Saleh. Despite the rebellion and the British crackdown, thousands of Arabs came from across Palestine to honor this early miracle-working prophet who foretold the coming of the Prophet Mohammad. Delegations from each city in Palestine would come to the ancient mosque at Nabi Saleh, planting their city flags. "Women went to his tomb in al-Ramla to pray for fertility and better health," Ahmad and Zakia's daughter Khanom remembered. "There would be singing and dancing and prayer and picnics. This event was the highlight of the year."
News of the conflict reached the family sporadically. The rebels were exacting a toll. Many Jewish farmers couldn't get their crops or livestock to market, and those who tried were often attacked and their animals killed. Water projects were suspended as survey crews were attacked. Rural guerrillas had mastered hit-and-run tactics, firing upon British patrols, in some cases retreating to nearby villages to disguise themselves as women. A British report underscored the frustration. Colonial troops "were continually finding themselves shot up on all sides," only to find "that the hostile area was apparently populated by unarmed peaceful shepherds and agriculturalists." On one occasion, "a small party of British troops were bathing near Beisan on the 12th August [and] were subject to a surprise attack by a large Arab armed band. Unfortunately their Lewis gun 'jammed' and those who were on guard were killed by the band, who succeeded in capturing the Lewis gun and some rifles
." The rebellion was just as alarming to the Zionists. "On one side, forces of destruction, forces of the desert, have risen," declared Chaim Weizmann. "And on the other side stand firm the forces of civilization and building. It is the old war of the desert against civilization, but we will not be stopped."
At night, fedayeen fighters moved from house to house, sleeping in their muddy boots in the homes of peasants or city dwellers. Family oral history suggests some Khairis were also sheltering rebels. Organizers in the local committees set up networks for smuggling arms and for collecting "taxes," sometimes by intimidation, to finance the insurgency. Rebel leaders were pressuring urban Arabs to abandon their fezzes and put on the keffiyeh, so that the rural rebels would not stand out. It isn't clear if Ahmad's furniture workshop was a target of such "tax collection," but increasingly, his uncle, Mayor Mustafa Khairi, was facing threats from rebels who saw him as too close to the British. Despite the pressure from all sides, the family tried to continue living normally.
With the birth of baby Khanom, Zakia and Ahmad now had four daughters. Ahmad still waited for his son, and he had begun to wonder if his wife was capable of bearing one. "We also didn't have any uncles," Khanom said. "So it was even more important to have a male baby." Of her mother, she said, "Of course we thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world." At home Zakia always wore a dress: a housedress for family and fancier dresses with dark stockings for visitors. She smelled of Bombay perfume, which she applied from a special flask shaped like an Indian woman. Most people in al-Ramla in those days used the public baths, but the Khairis had their own; sometimes the girls' schoolteachers would come to use the bath, which shocked the children. "When we were young we thought teachers were like angels and did not need to bathe or eat or sleep," Khanom recalled.