The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
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at Cambridge, the one in England. Before Cambridge, he taught at the American University of Beirut. Throughout Lebanon’s long war, he resisted the deadening effect of military occupations by Syria and Israel, massacres and the anti-intellectual bias of Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian sectarian barbarians.
The three Khalidy brothers – Walid, Usama and Tareef – grew up in Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Their family owned beautiful houses and a library of rare and ancient Islamic manuscripts within the stone walls of Jerusalem’s old city. Like many other Arabs and Jews, they had built villas away from the squalor of the old city – whose rain-fed cisterns sometimes bred unhealthy bacteria – on the open hills to the west. In 1948, when the Arab inhabitants were expelled or fled the violence, West Jerusalem became Jewish Jerusalem.
Usama’s father, a teacher and scholar like most of his family, had written some of the first textbooks in Arabic. ‘He did an experiment with me,’ Usama said. ‘I did not go to school until I was nine. I knew every cave in the area. I knew where to catch scorpions. I knew every plant. I knew every shepherd. I did not know how to read and write.’ Illiteracy did not impede his progress through academe. A tutor taught him enough one summer for him to pass his exams for the third-form elementary. He was nine. By the time he celebrated his nineteenth birthday, he had a degree in biochemistry. By then, he lived in Beirut. By then, there were no Khalidys in West Jerusalem.
‘I am one of the few who has had the honour of being occupied by the Israelis three times,’ Usama said, proud of his record. He spoke without anger. The way he sat, almost as if his body had fallen into a restful sleep, said he would be at home wherever he escaped. Usama Khalidy’s apparent indifference to his treatment by Israel’s armed forces was inexplicable in a man who, again and again, had been on the losing side. His first Israeli occupation took place in April 1948, when he was sixteen. The Khalidys – mother, father, three boys and two girls – remained at home south-west of Jerusalem’s old city. ‘I was coming back from school by the Jaffa Gate,’ Usama said. It was his last term at the Rashidieh School. ‘I saw the people who had been captured in Deir Yassin and been left in the sun for three days,’ he said of the most famous massacre of Palestinian Arabs, about three hundred of whom were killed by Menachem Begin’s Irgun with assistance from the Haganah over the night of 9/10 April 1948. ‘They were dropped at the Jaffa Gate. It created panic.’
Before dropping them at the Jaffa Gate, the Irgunists had put Deir Yassin’s survivors in cages and paraded them through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighbourhoods. ‘No less disgusting [than the massacre],’ the Labour Zionist historian Jon Kimche wrote in his 1950 book, Seven Fallen Pillars, ‘was the subsequent publicity parade by the Irgun of a number of poor Arab prisoners through the streets of Jerusalem.’
Was it, I asked, when they had been displayed in cages?
‘It was after they had been in the cages,’ he answered. ‘There were twenty or forty, I don’t know. They were mainly women.’
I told him that Deir Yassin, now a part of Israeli Jerusalem called Givat Shaul, had become the site of a mental hospital.
‘Very appropriate,’ he said. ‘I remember an argument between my father and my uncle. My father was in the Arab Higher Council. My uncle wanted to tell the story completely. My father said they should play it down, because it would cause a panic. My uncle won.’ The Palestinian Arabs lost. Arab leaders advertised the massacre to show the Western world that they, not the Zionists, were the victims. The world did not care. Zionist leaders, especially Menachem Begin of the Irgun underground movement, used the events at Deir Yassin to inspire other Arabs to leave their homes. Begin wrote in his memoir, The Revolt, ‘Out of evil, however, good came … This Arab propaganda spread a legend of terror amongst Arabs and Arab troops, who were seized with panic at the mention of Irgun soldiers. The legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel.’ He said that Deir Yassin helped in ‘the conquest of Haifa’: ‘all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting: “Deir Yassin!” ’
I asked Usama whether the massacre at Deir Yassin had inspired him to fight.
‘There weren’t enough weapons to give even to adults,’ he answered, smiling to dismiss any notion of him as a warrior. Shooting between the two sides often kept him awake, but no one in his neighbourhood fired at the neighbouring agricultural school run by ‘Madame Ben Zvi’. Mr Ben Zvi, a colleague of David Ben-Gurion, became Israel’s second president. The Khalidys were evicted, not by the Israelis, but by the Red Cross. ‘The Red Cross asked us to leave so they could make the house a refuge for displaced persons from both sides,’ he said. Israeli forces occupied the area and announced that no Arabs, even those who had complied with a humanitarian request from the Red Cross, were allowed to return.
Usama went to Beirut, where he earned his bachelors and masters degrees in biochemistry, and then to Michigan for his doctorate. He returned to the American University of Beirut’s hospital to teach for twenty-five years. In 1967, on a year’s sabbatical, he taught in the children’s department of Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital. The Augusta Victoria, a late German Gothic stone edifice, dominated the eastern half of Jerusalem from a hilltop that Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion had held in 1948. In 1967, Israel and the Arab states fought another war. ‘When the war started, Dr Najib Abu Haidar’ – Abu Haidar was a highly regarded physician I had known in Lebanon, a contemporary of Usama’s – ‘and I went up to the hospital. I was put in charge of the blood bank. We never got any blood.’ The bloodless blood bank fitted the Arab logistical profile in 1967: Jordanian troops defending East Jerusalem did not receive ammunition or other supplies. Israeli artillery next to a Jewish hospital, Hadassah, shelled the Augusta Victoria. ‘They fired mortar shells and napalm shells. The top of the hospital caught fire. We stayed for three days in the basement with our patients. It was very frightening, especially with the roof on fire. I kept working there, until the Israelis came to occupy the hospital. They held us for three or four days, then let us go.’
When Usama emerged from the hospital, he saw the bodies. They lay, like abandoned cars, unburied and unmourned, on either side of the road. They were all Arabs, like him, Palestinian civilians and Jordanian soldiers. They would not be buried until the Israeli army granted permission. Usama did not speak of the war as an act of injustice. He did not, as many Palestinians did, list the villages the Israeli army demolished in 1967. Nor did he bemoan the destruction of the Moroccan Quarter in the old city to clear the ground for a Disneyesque viewing platform beside the Jewish Western, or Wailing, Wall. A scientist, Usama told me what he saw – no more, perhaps much less. As with 1948 – the year the Palestinians refer to as their national nakhba, catastrophe – he left it to me to supply words like tragedy, pity, injustice. His languid posture, his monotone, his frequent and paced drags on his cigarette spoke of resignation. Events were like chemical reactions observed under a microscope. If a mix of substances exploded, that too was an event. He would not explode with them.
What did he do after he walked down the hill from the Augusta Victoria?
He went to his family’s old house near the Bab az-Zahir and waited. ‘We were going to leave anyway at that time,’ he said. His sabbatical from the American University Hospital was over. ‘I went over the bridge and never went back.’
Jerusalem had been ‘reunited’, according to the joyful Israelis who danced on the new plaza where Arab houses had stood the day before. It had been ‘conquered’ and ‘occupied’, in the words of United Nations resolutions and of the Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem after June 1967. The Khalidys had lived there for a thousand years, an offshoot of the tribe of Beni Khalid – sons of Khalid – who had migrated with the seasons between Syria and the Persian Gulf. For five hundred years at least they had been Jerusalem’s judges, teachers, diplomats. They had earned respect by remaining aloof from the tribal battles that blooded Jerusalem’s older feudal Arab families, the Nashashibis and the Husseinis. The Khalidys had collected manuscripts, written books and kept records of the Arab presence – Christian and Muslim – in Palestine. It was no accident that one of the best volumes of documents on the Palestinian conflict, From Haven to Conquest, had been edited by a