“No tea bags there,” Habash joked quietly.
Shimshon folded his hands, placed them on the table, and sighed. “The Kahanes have a long history with the Regels, Emma,” he said, always anxious to find some reason for resuming his account of Avi Regel’s role in the early history of Israel.
She looked sharply at Shimshon. “How?”
He smiled ruefully. “It started in Rishon L’Zion, and it had to do with Avi. It’s important for Habash to hear, too, because it involves his people as well as ours. There are devils on both sides.”
X
Rishon L’Zion
Jerusalem/Rishon L’Zion
SHIMSHON PULLED OUT A MAP of Israel and pointed to Rishon L’Zion, explaining that it means “First to Zion.” It was the earliest European Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael. Located south of Jaffa, it had been established in 1882 by a group of Jews from Khirkov, Russia, who’d bought the land from an Arab real-estate speculator.
Shimshon described a visit Avi and Akiba had made to an adjoining Arab village and some of the difficulties they had experienced in adapting to the very different climatic conditions of this new country.
“You have to drink all day, Avi. This is dehydration country. Europeans drop dead all the time from not drinking enough,” Akiba said as he handed Avi a clay jug.
Avi took a long drink and immediately spit it out. “This is terrible water. It’s warm and dusty.”
“Aha!” Akiba exclaimed, his broad smile infectious. “Now you’re learning. The trick is not to quench your thirst. That way you drink more. A quenched thirst is the enemy of hydration. The Bedouins have a proverb: ‘When a camel stops being thirsty, it dies.’ The last thing we need around here is dead camels. Always be thirsty.”
Akiba handed Avi a hat next. “The second thing,” he said, somewhat pedantically, “is to cover your freckled Ashkenazi face. This part of the world was made for dark-skinned people, not for ghosts like us. We don’t tan. We stroke. So wear a hat.”
Avi took the hat somewhat reluctantly. “I thought I was leaving my hat in Poland,” he joked, referring to the Jewish religious obligation to keep one’s head covered.
“Maybe God purposely made his Holy Land sun-scorched so that even apikorsim like you”—Akiba joked, using the Talmudic word for a religious skeptic—“will have to keep their heads covered. Here you can eat without a yarmulke, but you can’t work without a kova, which is the Hebrew word for ‘hat.’ ”
They continued their journey along the dirt road until they arrived at a squat house made of clay bricks.
“Say salaam to Ali Barakit,” Akiba commanded Avi, putting his arm around the man’s shoulders. “He’s our manager, friend, and connection to the land.”
“Salaam,” Avi said, extending a hand.
Ali replied, “And shalom to you.”
“Ali’s family moved here last year from Ramallah. He speaks better Hebrew than you do.”
“There’s no work in Ramallah,” Ali interjected. “Only olive trees that need very little tending. Akiba wants to make wine, and I know about grapes. Grapes take real work, every day. So we moved here where my wife has some family. Now I have a good job.”
“How do you plan to make money from wine when so much of the population is Muslim?” Avi asked. “I thought they don’t drink alcohol.”
“In theory, in theory,” Ali chimed in. “You can make a lot of money on the alcohol our Muslims don’t drink in theory.”
“They’re not our market,” Akiba insisted. “We don’t want to make any problems with the imams.”
“You make it sound like the relationship between Jews and Arabs was idyllic back then,” Emma interjected, leaning her head on her hands.
“Certainly not idyllic, Emma, but a lot better than now,” Shimshon replied.
“Why has it gotten so much worse?”
“One word,” Habash said.
“And what word is that?”
“Religion. Until the 1920s, this wasn’t seen as a religious conflict to most Arabs and Jews. But then the British appointed Hajj al-Husayni to become the grand mufti, and Husayni turned it into a religious conflict over whom God gave this land to.”
“But there were agitators even before Husayni,” Shimshon interjected. “People who weren’t ready to accept new settlers. Let me tell you about one that our relatives had trouble with, and that will lead us to the Kahanes.”
“Ali had a brother-in-law, Mustafa, who belonged to a small mosque whose imam preached violence against the Jewish interlopers. Mustafa’s imam ordered his followers to attack them wherever they were vulnerable. Mustafa decided to ambush a convoy of camels that were carrying water from Jaffa to Rishon L’Zion. Several Jews, including Akiba, were injured and their water jugs stolen.”
“How does this involve the Kahanes?” Emma wondered.
“I’ll tell you,” Shimshon continued, shifting to his story-telling mode.
* * *
Gershon Kahana was the town butcher and a physically powerful man in his early thirties, widely looked upon by the citizens of Rishon L’Zion as a leader. He was incensed when the Jewish men wandered into town, bruised, limping, and without water. Gershon proposed a plan that would teach the assailants a lesson.
The following week Avi and Akiba were once again sent to Jaffa to fetch water. Near the same dune where the first assault took place, Mustafa’s men attacked again, but this time ten Rishon men, following surreptitiously behind the camel, jumped them. A fight ensued, with the Rishon men giving the Arabs a good beating. “Next time it will be much worse!” Kahana shouted in Arabic as they chased the bloodied thugs over the dune.
A few weeks later, word reached Rishon L’Zion that two Muslim men had killed a Jewish merchant in Jaffa, shouting, “Allahu Akbar! Al mawt al Yahud!” God is great! Death to the Jews!
A meeting of the Rishon L’Zion community was organized. Gershon Kahana insisted, “We Jews must retaliate. We should kill two Arabs. We have to show them that Jewish blood isn’t cheap. This can’t become another Poland, with pogroms and no retaliations. Two eyes for an eye. Two lives for a life.”
Avi replied angrily, “An eye for an eye and a life for a life refers to the killer, not to some innocent person who happens to be an Arab. That’s barbaric. It’s precisely the improvement the Bible made over the Code of Hammurabi, which allowed the killing of the murderer’s innocent children. Our Bible forbids the revenge killing of the innocent.”
“Didn’t you want to take revenge when that Polack bastard murdered your father?” Gershon asked rhetorically.
Avi blinked. He hadn’t known that this tale had followed him from Europe. “Of course I did,” he admitted, recovering himself. “And I took revenge—on my father’s murderer, not on some random Polish peasant. And I’ll tell you the truth, it didn’t feel so good, and it certainly didn’t bring my father back. That’s one of the reasons I got out of there so quickly.”
“Well, we can’t get out of here,” Gershon insisted, preaching to the many people crowded around Avi. “If anyone’s going to leave, it’s gonna be them, not us.”
“Then what should we do?” Akiba asked.
Avi was ready with an answer. “Create a police force. Protect ourselves. Arm ourselves. Create an intelligence unit. Take action before it’s too late.”
“That’s not enough!” Gershon screamed. “Blood for blood!”
A vote was taken. It was decided to initiate a meeting of all the local Jewish settlements with the goal of creating a police force, and Akiba was told to ask Ali if he knew the identities of the two killers.
But Akiba’s requests to Ali for information were met with silence.
“I cannot tell you anything, my friend” was all that Ali would say.
Akiba felt that he didn’t know anything, but Gershon became gripped by the notion that Ali did know but was protecting his people.
So one morning while Avi and Akiba slept, Gershon went to Beit Dijan, snuck up behind Ali whi
le he was busy planting a tree, and hit him in the head with a shovel.
His young son Khamil found Ali’s dead body the next morning.
Gershon fled eastward to Hebron, where he had a sister and a brother-in-law. He knew that the Arabs of Beit Dijan would never find him but that Jews like Akiba and Avi, men who cared about their neighbors more than their own people, would. And within three days, Avi, Akiba, and a small gang of men from Rishon L’Zion were on the road to Hebron.
With the help of his brother-in-law, Reb Shlomo, Gershon snuck into the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. When Reb Shlomo saw the two pistols in Gershon’s possession, he sadly uttered, “So now Jews must kill Jews. The rabbis back in Poland said it would come to this if the Zionists tried to create a Jewish nation before the Messiah came.”
A bit of investigation quickly led the Rishon men to Gershon’s hiding place. Akiba’s anger became even more acute. “That bastard! To hide in a holy place, a sanctuary, where there are people praying! Rabbis, kids, women. We can’t just barge in and grab him, much as I’d like to.”
“He’s playing us for fools, Akiba,” Avi said. “He doesn’t believe in that sanctuary crap any more than we do.”
“But they do!” Akiba shouted, pointing to the praying crowds.
“How are we going to get him out of there?” Avi wondered.
Akiba thought for a moment and then said, “We go into the tomb to pray.”
Avi laughed. “And how’s that gonna help? God will deliver him?”
“The people inside will. We go inside and befriend some of those who are praying. Then we tell them that a murderer is hiding among them—that he’s creating impurity in that holy place. Remember, the idea of a sanctuary for murderers is not a Jewish idea. It is Christian. The Torah provides sanctuaries only for accidental killers.”
Avi grinned broadly. “Brilliant, Akiba. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you didn’t pay attention in yeshiva,” Akiba joked.
It wasn’t long before Akiba, who was always good at making friends, befriended two rabbis inside. When the rabbis were told about Gershon’s presence, they found him and made him leave. Akiba and Avi had left two men outside the tomb, and it was these men who overpowered Gershon, took his guns, and tied him up.
They took him to Jerusalem and turned him over to the Ottomans. But Gershon’s sister, Sarah, soon raised money from some Jewish zealots and bribed the Ottoman authorities to deport Gershon instead of prosecuting him. They put him on a ship to Cyprus, from where he went to America, where he continued to rabble-rouse in favor of expelling all Arabs from biblical Eretz Yisrael.
When Mustafa learned that Gershon had been freed by Jewish bribe money, he and his gang went on a rampage, attacking several Jewish merchants in Jaffa and elsewhere. The cycle of violence had begun in earnest.
By the time Shimshon finished his tale, it was late. Hanna had gone to bed, and the long day was beginning to show on Emma and Habash. He was slumped in his chair, and she rested her head on her hand. “And Dov Kahane is a direct descendant of Gershon Kahana?” she asked as brightly as she could, considering her weariness.
“Yes,” Shimshon replied. He looked no worse for the late hour. “The olive apparently doesn’t fall that far from the branch, even if it’s from an old olive tree.”
Emma’s enthusiasm suddenly dimmed, though, and her face contorted. “But that doesn’t mean Dov Kahane was responsible for the American Colony attack. Why would he launch an attack that would kill so many Jews?”
“The camel and the scorpion,” Habash said, reluctantly.
“What camel and scorpion?” Emma asked.
“You don’t know the story?” Shimshon asked in surprise. “You can’t understand the region without understanding the story. Why don’t you tell her, Habash?”
Habash stretched and sat up. “There was this scorpion that needed to cross the Jordan River to get home, but he couldn’t swim. He saw a camel about to cross and asked him for a ride. ‘But you might sting me,’ the camel replied. ‘If I stung you, both of us would die—you from the sting and me from drowning. It is in my interest for you to make it across the river,’ the scorpion assured the camel. Thus persuaded, the camel agreed, and the scorpion climbed on his back. At the midpoint of the raging river, the scorpion stung the camel. As they both began to drown, the camel asked the scorpion, ‘Why did you sting me? Now you will die, too. It isn’t logical.’
“The scorpion replied, ‘What does logic have to do with it? This is the Mideast.’ ”
Habash smiled, and Shimshon chuckled. Emma sat still, trying to figure out the punch line.
“In this part of the world, scorpions sting whether it serves their interests or not,” Habash mused, rising from his chair.
“Instinct, revenge, honor—these are more important than logic or even self-interest,” Shimshon added. “It’s in the nature of things.”
Emma smiled. “You both agree with me, then, that although there is no hard evidence that Dov Kahane bombed the American Colony, he remains a possible suspect.”
But there was no time for the two men to agree or disagree with her, for as Shimshon walked Habash to the door, the night was interrupted by Habash’s ringing cell phone. The sound made Emma jump; it was nearly two in the morning.
Shimshon and Emma looked at each other nervously. No good news came at that hour.
Habash’s face went pale as he listened to the person on the other end of the line. “Oh, no! How? Who did it?”
“What happened?” Emma whispered harshly.
Habash looked at her with a grave expression. “They poisoned our client,” he said, placing a hand over the mouthpiece as he listened for details.
“Well?” Emma hounded after he ended the call.
“All I know for sure is that Faisal Husseini has been poisoned,” he said, passing a hand over his eyes. Suddenly he looked ten years older. “He was given his dinner, by the same attendant who serves him every day, and two hours later he was in cardiac arrest. Fortunately, the jail had a defibrillator. He’s critical, but at least he’s alive.”
“This was an attempted assassination,” Shimshon said.
“Why?” Emma was confused. In all the years she’d lived with Abe, nobody had ever tried to kill one of his clients, and he’d represented men and women who inspired fervent anger in those who believed in their guilt. This was uncharted territory for Emma, but Habash seemed unsurprised. Worried and thoughtful, but unsurprised.
It was Shimshon who answered Emma’s question. “To keep him quiet. He knows whether his group is responsible or not. And somebody was afraid he might talk.”
“So somebody else—whoever poisoned him—also believes that he didn’t do it,” Habash said with an air of vindication.
“Not necessarily,” Shimshon said, thinking as he spoke. “Whoever tried to kill him might know he did it but might be afraid that he would deny it when the reality of execution or long-term imprisonment hit home. Dead men don’t change their stories.”
“It could still be TNT,” Emma insisted. “To throw everyone off the track. Remember, they don’t want to be caught. They want the Arabs, but not the authorities, to believe they were responsible.”
“And then there is the scorpion,” Habash said with resignation.
“Again with the scorpion,” Emma said with frustration. “What do you mean?”
“We’re thinking rationally about who would have a motive. It could be an entirely irrational act by someone without a clear motive.”
“In other words”—Emma sighed, shaking her head—“we’re no closer to solving the bombing than we were before our client was poisoned.”
“Maybe we can learn something from the medical report,” Habash said, grasping for something positive.
XI
Poison
The Offices of Pal-Watch, Jerusalem
A HALLUCINOGEN?” Emma asked. It was the next day, and she was in Habash’s of
fice at Pal-Watch. Both of them were bleary-eyed and on edge. Habash’s mood only worsened as he read aloud from a file that had been delivered first thing that morning.
“Yes, in addition to a drug that stops the heart,” he replied.
Emma sat in the chair directly across from his desk. “How could the Martyrs of Jihad or TNT or another group get access to both these drugs—and access to his food?”
“The medical report doesn’t answer hows or whys, only whats,” Habash said, still reading.
“So what happened?”
“All we know is that he didn’t finish his meal. It was a sort of goulash, and it spilled, apparently accidentally, after he swallowed a few spoonfuls, or maybe he tasted something funny and threw it down. We don’t know. What we do know is that if he had finished it, he would be dead. According to the tests they ran, there was enough in it to kill a sumo wrestler. When the guard found him, he was in cardiac arrest and most of his meal was spilled across the cell floor. Even with what little he ate, his bloodstream was loaded with drugs.”
Emma took the paper from Habash so that she could read it herself. But seeing the words on the page didn’t make anything clearer for her. “Could he have somehow given himself the drugs? So that he could die as a martyr?”
“No way. Martyrs don’t poison themselves. It’s a dishonorable way to die. They must die by the hand of the infidel,” Habash insisted.
Emma thought about that. “You think somebody paid a guard or the cook to poison his meal?”
“Could be,” Habash said, throwing up his arms. “All we can be sure of is that it was someone who wanted him dead before any trial.”
“So we’re back where we started. Whoever wanted him dead had him poisoned. But why? Because he was guilty or because he wasn’t?”
“Precisely.”
The Trials of Zion Page 6