From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  In fact the veneration of St George originated in the Byzantine Levant and did not become popular in England until returning Crusaders brought the saint's cult back with them. In 1348 Edward III made St George the patron of the Knights of the Garter, and it was around this time that George seems to have replaced Edward the Confessor as England's national saint.

  Although most scholars now tend to accept that St George probably was a historical figure, solid facts about England's patron saint are hard to come by. He appears to have been a Christian legionary from Palestine who was martyred for refusing to worship the old pagan gods, probably during the reign of Diocletian (284-305 a.d.). He may or may not have been the unnamed martyr mentioned as suffering a particularly horrible death in the eighth book of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, but what is clear is that his cult was a very early one, and that it originated in Lydda, now the Tel Aviv suburb of Lod, the Heathrow of the Holy Land, directly under the flightpath of jets heading into Ben Gurion Airport. Nothing else can be said with certainty; already in the sixth century St George was referred to as 'that Good Man whose deeds are known to God alone'.

  But lack of facts never stopped medieval hagiographers from assembling impressively detailed saints' Lives, and the cult of St George spread with astonishing speed, gathering odd stories and enveloping pagan legends as it went. By the time of Jacobus da Voragine's The Golden Legend, written in Genoa around 1260, St George's life-story had become one of the longest epics in medieval hagiography, revolving around the dragon whose breath could 'poison everyone who came within reach'.

  What is intriguing about the cult of St George as it is practised today in Beit Jala is the extraordinary degree to which it still resembles the form the cult took before it came to acquire all the late medieval accretions that fill out the pages of The Golden Legend. On the one hand, then as now, St George is seen as a fertility symbol, a sort of baptised Green Man; on the other he is the Soldier Saint, the combater of demons and the divine champion against the power of evil.

  The myths of St George-Khidr have spread across the width of Asia, and from Persia eastwards their links to Christianity have been long forgotten: outside Delhi I _was once taken to a cave where Muslim Sufis would go to fast for forty days in order to summon up Khidr, the Green Sufi. Yet it seems that there is nowhere in the East where it is quite as easy to summon up Khidr as in his birthplace at Beit Jala.

  'Ask anyone,' said Fr. Methodius when I questioned him on the matter. 'Stop anyone in the street outside and ask if they have seen St George. They will all have stories. Don't take my word for it: go out and see for yourself

  We left the church and I did as he suggested. The first person we came across was an elderly Muslim gentleman named Mansour Ali. I asked him whether he had ever seen St George.

  'Of course,' he said. 'I live just around the corner, so I see him frequently - he is always coming and going on his horse.'

  'You see this in dreams?'

  'No, when I am awake, in daylight. Khidr is not dead. Whenever we have problems he comes and helps us.' 'In what way?'

  'Well, last year I asked him to find work for my children. Within two weeks both my sons had good jobs.'

  'For other people he has worked bigger miracles,' said the old doorkeeper, who had shuffled up and begun eavesdropping on the conversation. 'Last month there was a big man from Ramallah. He was very sick: he'd had a stroke and couldn't speak. Half his body had stopped. Well, he came here and took some of the oil from the lamp which burns in front of the icon of St George. Two weeks later he came back with a pair of sheep, completely cured. In fact he wouldn't stop chattering until we locked him out of the church.'

  Later, back in the monastery courtyard, I asked Methodius: 'Do you really believe all this talk of miracles?'

  He stroked his beard. 'It is according to your faith,' he said after a while. 'If you don't have faith in St George, nothing will happen. If you really believe, then maybe you will be healed.'

  'And do you believe?' I asked.

  'Well, I'll tell you the greatest miracle,' said Methodius. 'I live here alone: there are no other monks here, and there are no other Christians in the village round about. That doorkeeper - he's a Muslim. So is my sacristan. There are mosques all around: listen - can you hear? That's the call to evening prayer. '

  Methodius pulled out his bleeper and unlocked the car. 'There are plenty of Hamas people in Beit Jala,' he said, opening the door of the Subaru. 'And however well Christians and Muslims used to get on, since the rise of Hamas in the last couple of years things have become a little strained. But I'm quite safe, and so is the whole monastery. I sleep easy at night. Now, there aren't many places you could say that of in Israel or the West Bank these days, are there?'

  That night, in my rooms in Jerusalem, I thought back to my first stay on the West Bank in the summer of 1990, when I had heard a story that illustrated as well as any the tensions in the occupied region. The story had been told to me in the village of Biddya, and concerned Abu-Zeid, the corrupt village mukhtar (mayor) installed by the Israeli military authorities to rule the village for them.

  Seven times the villagers had attempted to rid themselves of the hated collaborator, and the story of his eventual demise had rapidly turned into something of a folk tale across the West Bank. I had been wanting to get to Biddya to try to seek out a relatively trustworthy account of the story ever since I had first started hearing heavily elaborated versions of it in the coffee houses of Ramallah, but it was not easy. The village was nearly always under curfew, most recently as punishment for a Molotov cocktail lobbed at a passing Israeli patrol. But at six one morning I had been rung up by my contact in the village, a Palestinian landowner named Usamah, and told that the curfew had been lifted until noon. He said I should get ready; he would pick me up at seven.

  We drove out of Ramallah, past an avenue of Israeli army checkpoints - little birds' nests of Uzis and razor wire - and out into the West Bank countryside: low, dry, rolling slopes; silvery olive groves; villages of old stone houses sheltering under the lee of the steeper hills. Only a mile before Biddya did the scene change. Turning the bend of a dry wadi, we saw Setdement Ariel ahead of us: a modern Western town with shopping arcades, sports centres and supermarkets. No Palestinian, either Christian or Muslim, ever needed to bother applying to live in Ariel: its houses were available only to Jewish settlers. When local Palestinian labourers at the settlement were forced to wear large badges reading 'Foreign Worker', some liberal Israeli commentators went as far as drawing comparisons with the race laws of Nazi Germany. The badges were later removed.

  'That was my grandfather's land,' said Usamah as we passed beneath the settlement. 'It has belonged to this village since the time of the Canaanites. But the Israelis took it in 1977. We've never received any compensation.'

  Ariel, Usamah explained, was now home to eight thousand Israelis, but was projected ultimately to house a hundred thousand - a gloomy prospect for Biddya, which, sited precariously beneath the town, looked certain to have all its remaining land requisitioned for new housing estates from which Palestinians would be banned. This year, said Usamah, a further series of olive groves separating the village from the settlement had been seized and bulldozed to provide room for a thousand new houses being built for Soviet Jews fleeing a resurgent Russian racism. Yet again it was the Palestinians who were being made to pay the price for European anti-Semitism.

  'A Russian can come to my land tomorrow and have more right to it than me, my wife or my children,' said Usamah. 'Now the cultivated land has all been taken, and nearly all the olives cut down. Every year they take a little bit more. They think that if they can take it piece by piece there will be no trouble.'

  In the end, however, Biddya had not stood by and waited for the slow extinction that was being imposed on it. On the outbreak of the intifada Palestinian flags had been raised on the power lines, demonstrations had been mounted, stones thrown. Faced with this defiance, the Israelis could ha
ve placed the village under rigorous curfew. This would have limited the trouble but would have been time-consuming, expensive and have tied up large numbers of troops. Far less effort was the option of controlling the village through a client mukhtar who, in return for power over the village, would keep order for his Israeli masters.

  For seven years Abu Zeid had ruled Biddya as a tyrant, but since his demise the Israelis had been forced to rule the village directly. Neither method had managed to subdue Biddya, but together they had succeeded in ruining it. Of a total population of 3,300, more than five hundred villagers - most of the younger generation - were currently in prison, and forty families had had their houses destroyed. Moreover, after every incident the army made a point of cutting down an olive grove: so far two thousand trees had gone, and only a few remained. Ninety per cent of the village's income used to come from its olives, and it is now bankrupt.

  Usamah's uncle, Tariq, was part of the large Nasbeh clan that had ruled Biddya until the Israeli military authorities deposed them. We found him in the walled garden of the family's ancestral house, tending his old musk roses under a trellis of tumbling vines. Usamah had sent word that we were coming, and his aunt, Um-Mohammed, had prepared breakfast for us. She was a big woman and wore a big blue dress, trussed at the waist. At her command we sat on stools, nibbling from the avalanche of olives, mountains of humus and several low ranges of feta cheese she had spread out for our pleasure.

  While we ate, Tariq began. 'Abu-Zeid - God burn his bones! - was a very clever man.' He rearranged his shift and twirled his worry beads around his index finger. 'Ya Allah! No one knew how to extort money like him.' 'How did he do it?' I asked.

  'The wild dog!' said Um-Mohammed. 'He tried everything.'

  'It's true,' said Tariq. 'My great-great-great-grandfather brought Abu-Zeid's Negro forebears here from the Hijaz to be our house-slaves. This was his way of getting revenge.' Tariq shook his head sadly. 'He did everything he could to ruin this village. He would threaten to build a road through someone's house, then collect bribes to stop it. Once he cut off everyone's water and electricity and demanded 500 dinars [£700] from every family before he would reconnect it.'

  'Tchk!' said Um-Mohammed, spitting on the ground. 'That was nothing. It was what he did with our land that made us hate him.'

  'My younger brother was in prison for throwing stones,' explained Tariq. 'Abu-Zeid came to our house and offered to get his sentence reduced. He asked my father to put his thumbprint on some papers. It was only later that we discovered that he had tricked my father into signing away 110 dunums of our land west of the village. Ariel has an industrial park there now.'

  'Abu-Zeid tricked all of us,' said Um-Mohammed. 'Like a mad dog he bit everyone around him.'

  'We got a petition signed by every family in the village and took it to the Military Governor. He was a good man, and I think he would have replaced Abu-Zeid. But the settlers at Ariel blocked it. Abu-Zeid was their man. After our petition failed, Abu-Zeid arranged the killing of the old man who had organised the petition. We knew then that we had to destroy Abu-Zeid before he destroyed the village.'

  'We are under military occupation,' said Usamah. 'We have no courts or civil authorities to look after our interests. This is what the occupation has reduced us to.'

  'At that time we knew nothing about killing,' said Tariq, 'so we hired a Bedouin to do it for us. The Bedouin collaborate with the Israelis and are allowed to join the army and possess weapons. But they will kill anyone if they are paid. My brother knew this killer from Kafr Qasim. After we hired him, this man waited for

  Abu-Zeid and shot him with an Uzi. He took fourteen bullets in the stomach. But he didn't die. The Israelis took him to a new hospital in Jerusalem and gave him a new plastic stomach. After a month he was back. The Bedouin is still in prison.'

  Tariq popped an olive into his mouth. 'After the Bedouin failed, we vowed to finish Abu-Zeid ourselves. Our first attempt was very amateur. We tried to run him over. The first time we used a car, but he clung onto the bonnet. When the car crashed against the wall, the driver was killed but Abu-Zeid was unhurt. The next time we used a big lorry. That put Abu-Zeid in hospital - he lost his left leg - but although both his younger sons were killed, Abu-Zeid lived.'

  'We didn't give up, though,' said Usamah. 'We sent a boy to buy two grenades on the black market in Tel Aviv. When he got back he experimented with one in a cave. It seemed easy to operate, so the next day he threw the other at Abu-Zeid. It sailed through the window of his car, but it was faulty and didn't blow. After that the Israelis gave Abu-Zeid many more weapons and rebuilt his house so that it was like a fortress.'

  'Abu-Zeid went crazy,' said Usamah. 'He destroyed the houses belonging to everyone he thought of as an enemy. Then he bought two huge Rottweilers. He used to hobble around the village on his wooden leg, patrolling with the dogs, his brother and his two remaining sons. They beat anyone they found in the streets after dark.'

  'Abu-Zeid promised, "Before the next olive season I will have destroyed this village completely,"' said Tariq. 'People said he had gone insane. He blew up the olive press we had been given by the Jordanians before 1967, then began systematically cutting down the olive trees of those he didn't like. But he didn't run away. He knew we would try again, and wherever he went we would find him and kill him.'

  'The fifth attempt was a mass attack,' said Usamah. 'The intifada was at its height and the shabab [young men] had formed hit squads. On 6 March at eight o'clock the shabab attacked his house with molotov cocktails. Their object was to blow him up by igniting the gas canisters he kept in his garage. But they didn't know that the Israelis had given the garage new metal doors. As they tried to break in, Abu-Zeid hobbled up onto his roof and began picking them off with his gun. After he had killed four, the village imam broadcast an appeal for help on the mosque loudspeakers. The whole village rushed into the street and joined in. There must have been seven hundred people out there.'

  'But we didn't get anywhere,' said Tariq gloomily. 'While we all went off to evening prayers, one of Abu-Zeid's sons slipped out the back and ran to Ariel. When prayers were over, we managed to get into the garage and blow up his bulletproof car. But before we could do anything more the settlers arrived. They were all armed, and began firing into the crowd. Later, when the army came, they put the village under curfew, arrested a hundred people and demolished ... I don't know how many houses.'

  'Ya Allah!' said Um-Mohammed, who had reappeared with a little bowl of humus. 'There wasn't a woman in the village who wouldn't have gladly strangled Abu-Zeid after that.'

  'It's true,' said Tariq, raising his eyebrows and giving his beads a twirl. 'But we thought he would not suspect this. So on the sixth attempt we dressed up one of my nephews as a Palestinian woman and sent him off to Abu-Zeid's house with a basket of fruit on his head. Abu-Zeid was sitting outside with Zeid, his eldest son. My nephew put the basket down, pulled out a pistol from under the figs and fired six shots from twenty metres. He hit both men and killed Zeid, but he only succeeded in taking off Abu-Zeid's left arm and wounding him in one lung. Abu-Zeid was fifteen days in intensive care and they had to give him a new arm and a mechanical lung. By this stage he was more like a robot than a man. But within a month he was back.'

  'Some in the village believed that Abu-Zeid was some kind of djinn,' said Um-Mohammed. 'We thought he would never die.'

  'He escaped us six times. Six times! But we got him in the end.'

  T saw it with my own eyes,' said Um-Mohammed, rearranging her white calico chador. 'It was a few days before the olive season. I was coming back from my brother's house early in the morning when I noticed Abu-Zeid's car coming along the Ariel road. He turned a corner and saw that there was a roadblock. At the same time two shabab leapt out from behind a wall and - pfoo! -peppered his car with Uzi guns.'

  'The Israelis had given him bulletproof windows,' said Tariq, 'but he had left them open.'

  'Abu-Zeid tried to reverse and escape
, but he hit a wall and they got him all the same.' Um-Mohammed's face exploded into a broad grin. 'He died in great pain. I was so happy.'

  'The village gathered around and one of the old men said that they should pour gasoline over the car and burn it, otherwise the settlers might take him away to Tel Aviv and bring him back to life with one of their machines. After his earlier escapes they were worried he might survive even thirty bullets in the chest.'

  'But do you know the strange thing?' said Um-Mohammed, scooping up some humus on a piece of pitta bread and popping it into her mouth. 'Because he was half Negro, the smoke was as black as pitch. The place where he died, nothing grows there now.'

  'So you understand now why we were so pleased when we finally got him on the seventh attempt?' asked Tariq.

  'After we killed him and made a fire of his body, the Yahoodi [Jewish] settlers saw the black smoke and came running again. But they were too late. There was only a burned skull, a leg bone, a fire-blackened lung machine and a great pile of plastic sludge that had been his stomach. All they could do was put it all in a sack and give it to his wife. '

  'She threw it onto a rubbish tip,' said Um-Mohammed. 'Abu-Zeid had another woman in Kifl Harith. His wife hated him as much as the rest of us.'

  'The army put the village under curfew for two weeks,' said Tariq. 'We couldn't even harvest our trees. But no one minded. Inside every house it was like a holiday. People were singing and dancing.'

  'Even in the prisons there was rejoicing,' said Usamah. 'All Abu-Zeid's old enemies - there were about two hundred of them in jail at that time - they had a big party also.'