It was the fall of 1966, and in London my father’s boundless ambitions were beginning to take their toll on the family’s finances. The Jordanian embassy’s meager budget couldn’t come close to covering his ambassadorial initiatives—he wanted Jordan to develop extensive diplomatic relations with the political and diplomatic community. He’d already had to sell one of his Jordan Valley farms to make ends meet. Finally, he added up the numbers and realized that if he didn’t scale back his activities to mindless bureaucratic duties such as signing visas, he would go bankrupt. He resigned, packed everything up, and headed back to Jerusalem. As it turned out, it was a fortuitous move. Had he been away from Jerusalem in June 1967, we might all have ended up as homeless refugees.
I finally managed to take my A levels, and would have left it at that had Father not stepped in at the last minute and gotten Oxford to bend its rules by allowing me to take a late entrance exam. I was interviewed and accepted for the fall of 1968. My educational future was settled just as all the certainties of my past—my family, home, and city—began to totter.
By May 1967, Nasser felt strong enough to take some risks. After the 1956 Sinai War, the UN stationed an “emergency force” as a buffer between the two belligerent nations of Egypt and Israel. Now Nasser demanded that the UN withdraw from the Sinai. He left it to the Egyptian radio show Voice of the Arabs to explain the reason:
As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not complain anymore to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.
Within a week Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping and all ships bound for the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat. The time had come for the great Arab nation to exert its rights, and Nasser felt legally justified to ban enemies from plying his waters. Choking off commerce to Eilat was for Israel an act of war.
What no one knew—that is, no one except the Israeli military—was that Nasser had no intention of attacking Israel. It wasn’t war he was after—the troops he sent to the Sinai couldn’t have come close to defeating the “Zionist enemy.” His bellicose rhetoric was little more than posturing. “He knew it and we knew it,” said the Israeli general Yitzhak Rabin in an interview he gave to Le Monde in 1968.1
Whereas in most of the West the antiwar movement was galvanizing students—even I trooped along to some demonstrations—Nasser’s hypnotic radio addresses were turning young Arabs like me into warmongers.
Congregating daily in a cafeteria housed in a building belonging to the Egyptian Information Office, conveniently located across the street from my aunt’s house, Arab students from across England were beginning to mobilize for the oncoming conflict. All of us assumed that the humiliating debacle of 1948 was about to be avenged, and our wounded Arab pride restored. After all, we had been reared thinking that war was inevitable. Like a religious sect anticipating the Second Coming, we knew it would come, we just didn’t know the date. With Nasser as our leader and the Soviet Union behind us, war was going to be a cakewalk, a mop-up operation against a poor, badly equipped, internally divided, and outnumbered enemy, an enemy that didn’t even deserve the appellation “nation.” To us, Israel was an “entity,” a thing, at most an impersonal thorn in the flesh.
All sorts of political groups were roaming around London. (Years later the film Life of Brian would remind me of the excitement, and the absurdities, of those days.) Thanks to two older friends, one a Trotskyite and the other a Maoist, I found my way to Café Troubadour, in South Kensington. The Troubadour, with its smoky atmosphere, avant-garde owner, and deafening music (Bob Dylan was the favorite), was a perfect setting for the meeting of young revolutionary minds. Besides Trotskyites and Maoists, there were generic communists, an assortment of hippies, and several varieties of anarchists.
At first I didn’t know which group to join, and in the end I threw my lot in with the anarchists. The others reminded me of my parents and their dinner guests: too sophisticated and self-confident for my taste. What I liked about the anarchists was their hostility to institutions, and even more their favored black-and-red colors. Wearing the anarchist pin, my tattered jeans, my uncut and unruly hair, and an aggressive-looking beard, I tagged along with the anarchist contingent in their flag-waving protests against the System, institutional violence, villainous governments, and, in one case, inclement London weather.
One day at the Café Troubadour, as I was sitting around a table with the leaders of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, chain-smoking and pondering our next move, I heard that some of my older and wiser comrades were considering using the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign as a template for the Arab cause. It sounded like a good idea. After all, why shouldn’t there be a Palestine Solidarity Campaign? There was general approval of the scheme, and henceforth, in our demonstrations in Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square, we carried the banners STUDENTS AND WORKERS: UNITE AND FIGHT; AMERICA: GO HOME; MAO WILL LIVE A MILLION YEARS; and JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE.
At the Egyptian Information Office, things were far more serious, as the sound of the war drums grew louder by the day. Arab students driven by national sentiment were seeking ways of participating in the war against Israel. All over the building, meetings were taking place, statements being written, committees being formed, radio broadcasts being carefully monitored. The place had the feel of a war room.
As we headed into June, and the armed conflict appeared more and more unavoidable, demonstrations grew in size and bathos, not unlike a rowdy boxing match. In Hyde Park’s famed “Speakers Corner,” brawls broke out between young Arabs and Jews. The opposing sides, both wearing identical faded jeans, traded insults. My brother Zaki, fresh from Cambridge, was an elegant debater who delivered a forceful defense of Palestinian rights. But the crowds rarely valued the subtlety of a finely trained mind, as more often than not the debates degenerated into shouting matches. We called them fascists, and they called us fascists. Sometimes the verbal sparring transmogrified into physical blows, and in one case an angry Israeli supporter rushed at me, fists bared and ready to strike. I stood there dumbfounded, and would have gotten a good beating if the attacker hadn’t been pushed away by a fellow Palestinian student standing next to me. (Three decades later, he would be the dean of the science faculty at Al-Quds University.) That night we had to take him to the hospital to be stitched from a ferocious bite to the cheek.
During one demonstration, one of our Jewish counterparts made an extraordinary assertion. We Palestinians, he maintained with his umbrella pointed menacingly in our direction, were the real usurpers. We didn’t belong in Palestine. When the first Zionists arrived, shovel in hand, the country had been empty, barren, and neglected, hardly fit for jackals. “My family arrived in Jerusalem long before the Norman invasion,” I shouted back at him. “Why did you refuse the partition plan and go on to attack?” another protester shouted at me. The first protester nodded approvingly. “Answer him!” I heard someone else mutter. But I was too astonished to say a word.
Later, back in the café, I gave the incident some thought. Never before had I heard someone come out with the old canard that we Arabs had drifted into Palestine and as such had no deep loyalty or right to its soil. How could an educated man, as the man with the umbrella doubtlessly was, deny the obvious? How could he, with a wave of his umbrella, wipe away 1,300 years of my family history?
As the summer dragged on and the war drums beat louder, the atmosphere in London grew more hostile. Public opinion was increasingly against us, and Israel’s supporters were winning the PR battle. One day, our beleaguered faction received a visit that printed itself indelibly in my mind. A well-dressed man walked up to my brother during the weekly Hyde Park row and invited him to address a sympathetic English audience. It was a thrilling offer. Finally, we thought, we could present our case in front of respectable people.
My brother went, and when he
returned to our café he looked downcast.
“What is it?” we asked, worried that he had been lured into a Zionist trap.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he started with an expression between laughter and tears. “The people who invited me to speak were Nazis. You know, fascist pigs.” Our fervent belief in our cause wasn’t shaken, but it was appalling to discover the brown tint to our only English “allies.”
• • •
The one good thing that came out of all the 1960s histrionics was that I was politically engaged for the first time, even if it was in a barely conscious manner. I enjoyed the passion and commitment exhibited by both sides. Strangely, I didn’t even associate all the war talk with real physical violence. All I knew about the military was the Boy Scout–like drills we had to do at St. George’s and the flurry of activity around the house when the king’s tanks rolled up to the front door. It wasn’t hatred I felt, only the excitement of the moment, like at a soccer match.
It was during these heady days leading up to disaster that I was first recruited to Arafat’s Fatah organization. (Spelled backward, Fatah is the Arabic acronym for the “Palestinian National Liberation Movement.”) All I knew about it at the time was that it was a clandestine Palestinian national liberation movement whose mission was to lead the Palestinian people to freedom. My simple assignment was to collect donations. Holding the official receipt book in my hands and seeing Fatah’s emblem emboldened on every page made me feel a part of some vast rumbling coming up from the depths of the Palestinian psyche.
My connection to Arafat and his Fatah movement has always been tenuous, often ambivalent. As someone who from childhood was repelled by political chatter, the movement attracted me because unlike the different flavors of Marxism, it was a national movement with a sober, commonsensical approach to ideology. And for all its flaws, over the years Fatah has more or less managed to adjust to new realities; steering clear of the endless babble of intellectuals and ideologues, it has opted for direct action.
Before Arafat’s Fatah began to shake things up, the PLO wasn’t very different from the All-Palestine Government in Gaza. It was set up by Arab states, and the people installed to run the operation were expected to follow the lead of the Arab governments. Ahmad Shukeiri (1908–1980), its first designated leader, was anything but a radical. He was a lawyer by training and a politician by profession: he had been the assistant secretary general for the Arab League. Most of the other top PLO leaders were upper-class intellectuals living in Jordan.
The 1964 Charter may have resounded with bluster, but with Nasser in charge, the PLO toed the line that “unity and a socialist revolution” had to precede the liberation of Palestine. In other words, the interests of the Egyptian and Arab states came before those of the Palestinian people. It was a strange set of priorities for a group calling itself the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Arafat’s group was different. The first acquaintance I made with its ideology was in a crudely printed magazine, Free Palestine. From the first page, it was clear that the Fatah activists were not going to buckle to the interests of Arab leaders. Their first aim was “vengeance against the butchers of Dir Yassin.”2
But Fatah went well beyond this by taking a swipe at Arab leaders. It told the Palestinian people they could not rely on the UN or on Arab states. “Did any of the slogans relieve your distress? You remained scattered, without honor, or personal or collective identity.”3 Theirs was an argument for self-respect and political maturity, a call to life for the Palestinian people.
And so as the others continued to talk, Fatah mounted its first operation inside Israel in 1965, a brazen guerrilla attack near the Arab village of Ailaboun, aimed at the Israeli National Water Carrier Pipeline. The message to the Israelis was that there was a Palestinian force ready to fight. Pamphlets, leaflets, and various publications to that effect began circulating around the West Bank.
In my capacity as fund-raiser, I managed to raise only a few dollars before the start of the Six-Day War. With the first shot fired, Zaki and I lost all contact with home. The phone lines didn’t work, and our telegraphs didn’t get through.
News reports were sketchy at the time. On June 5, all we knew was that major battles had broken out. Rumors spread that the victorious Arab armies were marching unfettered into Tel Aviv, with the Israeli soldiers—cowardly upstarts whose luck had finally run out—in frenzied retreat. An inimitable euphoria took hold of us in the cafeteria of the Egyptian Information Office. We all wanted to join the victorious Arab armies commanded by the new Saladin. At one point some friends and I rushed over to the Egyptian embassy, only to find it closed. Undeterred, we continued on to the Soviet embassy, thinking the Russians could use us. We were barely in the front door before Slavic guards twice our size kicked us out.
The BBC reports told a different story. The fighter planes in the Egyptian air force didn’t even get off the ground before they were blown to smithereens by an Israeli preemptive strike. Most alarming for my brother and me, the BBC report stated that Israel had crossed over the border between it and Jordan, and hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the West Bank were fleeing before the invading army. Naturally, we were desperate to know the fate of our family. The telephone and telegraph lines had been cut, and there was no getting through.
By day three, we all knew that the glorious war was turning into an ignominious debacle. Egypt’s fleet of Soviet T-34 and T-10M tanks was easy prey for the American Shermans. The entire Egyptian army was prostrate, crippled, helpless. In the West Bank, King Hussein had never wanted the war, and if it had been up to him, the No Man’s Land dividing the city would have stayed in place until the end of time. But he felt he had to put up a halfhearted show of resistance, as a prophylactic measure against the inevitable Arab charge that he was cooperating with the enemy.
Symbolic or not, the shots fired by Jordanian soldiers went against the silent understanding that the king had had with the Israelis. The Israelis took the opportunity to decimate the Jordanian army, capturing the West Bank and Gaza, along with nearly a million Palestinians. In 1948 my father and his friends had defended the Old City with everything they could muster. This time, no one lifted a finger. In East Jerusalem, the Israelis blasted a hole through the New Gate and flooded the quarter with soldiers. Solders sang the “Hatikva” at the Western Wall, while a rabbi accompanying the troops offered a prayer: “Blessed are thou, who comforts Zion and builds Jerusalem.”
The reaction throughout the Arab world was stunned silence. After 1948, revolutions had swept away the old leaders accused of backwardness and corruption. This time, with the revolutionaries in charge, whom could you blame? If mighty Egypt, with its charismatic leader, Soviet armaments, and vast army, could be defeated without even putting up a fight, was there any worldly force capable of regaining Arab honor? As a sign of the bankruptcy of Arab politics, there was an outbreak of mystical sightings in Egypt. Muslim peasants, in a strangely ecumenical mood, reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. Defeat also bred spurious rumors about the conquerors. One theory held that the Jews in Palestine were none other than tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans or Vikings. Superhuman Wagnerian heroes, not fellow Semites, had defeated us.
Zaki and I had still had no word from our family. At the Egyptian Information Office cafeteria, nibbling our nails, we were like anguished fans watching our favorite boxer get hit with the opening swing, swoon, and then crash unconscious to the mat.
Then, suddenly, in one of those rare moments in the history of Arab politics, Nasser tendered his resignation as the only manly thing to do. Within minutes, an emotional current swept through the Arab world, reaching all the way into our crestfallen little band sitting unshaven and unwashed in our London café. At once, we leapt to our feet and raced off to the Egyptian embassy. We might have lost the war, but we weren’t about to lose our leader.
From Fez to Baghdad, hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women like us marched with the same purpose
, begging Nasser to come back. You may have failed us, but we still love you.
It wasn’t until several days after the war that word finally came that my parents were safe. Because our house and that of my grandfather, now belonging to my cousins, were on the border, the extended family had decided to sit out the first two days of the war in the basement of a shuttered-up Arab school just down the street. Our vacant house was an open invitation for Israeli soldiers to plunder. Sure enough, soldiers spirited away the family crystal and silver, my father’s tennis championship cups, and his gold medals from the British, including Her Majesty’s Knighthood of the Malta Order of St. John’s Hospital. At least they didn’t take his powdered wig. (My son Jamal, who’s now finishing his law degree, has it.) All the family’s papers and letters and photos were heaped into a corner, the beds had been slept in, and the stock of Scotch whiskey had been reduced to empty bottles. An officer found the keys to the family Volvo and drove off with it. (A few days later, the car was returned with a full tank of gas and an apology from an Israeli army official.)
My brother and I, relieved that our parents were safe, began to worry about our own fates. Our fear was that the Israelis would do as they had with refugees in 1948: block our return. The longer we stayed in England, the more we risked not being allowed back into our country.
Once Upon a Country Page 10