The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
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over the bridge and never went back’ was to conceal thoughts and emotions that could not have died. He did not elaborate, although I asked him to. Five centuries of scholarship? The beautiful stone houses, the fountains in verdant courtyards, the libraries? The cousins and aunts and uncles left behind?
He lit another cigarette, offered me more Turkish coffee and related the third act in his saga of Israeli occupation. He had resumed teaching at the American University Hospital in Beirut, experimenting with a method of instruction through problem solving that had been developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. By the early 1970s, when I was living in Lebanon, the Palestinians had come to dominate West Beirut, culturally, politically, militarily. Young Palestinians were fighting for their independence – from Israel, from the Arab states, from Western domination. Usama, perhaps in accord with familial tradition, did not join any of the movements with their abundance of alphabetical acronyms, PFLP, PDFLP, PFLP-GC, PLF et al. Commandos who launched raids across the border from Lebanon were usually killed. They often attacked civilians on beaches or in buses. When captured, they were tortured. Many of their sympathizers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were also taken to the interrogation centres and the prisons. Others – in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan – also went to the cells and the torture chambers. The disparate, tribal, sometimes juvenile, brave and desperate Palestinian organizations inspired a defeated people – not only Palestinians, but many other Arabs. They did not end Israel’s occupation, impede its confiscation of land or prevent the construction of all-Jewish colonies that were displacing Palestinians from the territories that Israel conquered in 1967. But the Palestinian commandos would not let the world – especially the Arab world – forget the injustice done to them. They made trouble, in Israel, in Jordan and, then, in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon.
At the time, Usama and his wife were living in an apartment building that also housed the Palestine Research Centre. Just above Rue Hamra, with its Café de Paris, cinemas and dress shops, the Research Centre was far from the Palestinians’ military structure in and near the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila and Borj al-Barajneh. It should have been left alone, but it wasn’t. Between 1979 and 1983 it was bombed five times, by a Syrian-run commando faction called As-Saiqa, by Christian Lebanese and by Israel. In 1982, after a three-month Israeli siege, the Palestinian commandos evacuated Beirut by sea. Under the terms of an agreement guaranteed by the United States, Israel was to remain outside the western half of the city. It violated the agreement, sending tanks and infantry across the Green Line from the Christian, eastern side. Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon invited Christian militiamen to eliminate ‘terrorists’ in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Although all armed Palestinians had gone, the Christians butchered hundreds of women, children and old men while Israeli troops guarded the camps’ entrances. When Israeli soldiers reached the Palestine Research Centre, they loaded all of its archives, its books, precious documents, computers and its internal files onto trucks that took them to Israel. (Scholars who wished to consult its documents on Palestinian history could do so, with security clearance, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)
‘We were at home until the Israelis got close,’ Usama said. ‘Then a car bomb destroyed most of our house.’ The Israelis later admitted they had used car bombs in Beirut to assassinate Palestinian leaders. Sharon said later that his only regret about Lebanon was that he had not ‘liquidated’ the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, when he had the opportunity.
After the car bomb, Usama moved into a friend’s apartment. While the Israeli army looted the Research Centre on the first floor, soldiers broke into all of the flats above. ‘They walked into our house,’ Usama said. ‘They shat on things. One had to appreciate their ability to shit on top of a refrigerator. They tore a lot of books. It was more vandalism than theft.’
Usama’s outrage was nowhere evident in the telling. His conclusion: ‘I don’t think it was fun, to put it mildly.’ He had left West Jerusalem in 1967. In 1982, he stayed in Beirut. Eventually, after the Lebanese suicide bombings, the Israelis were the ones to leave. Usama restored his flat, replaced his books and continued to teach. In 1983, the largest car bomb of all demolished his building. Twenty-two people died, including the wife of the Research Centre’s director, Sabry Jiryis. Jiryis had grown up in Israel, spoke and wrote Hebrew and had been in Israeli prisons for non-violent political activity. A fine writer and scholar, he was among the few Palestinians to urge his people to understand the Israelis, to compromise, to reconcile. After his wife’s funeral, he left Lebanon for another exile.
The bombing wounded Usama and his wife. Six months later, when they recovered, they moved to Jordan. Their flat on the ground floor of a new stone building could have been in Jerusalem, so much had its walls and floors and shelves been covered in Khalidy memorabilia. ‘This was the grandfather of my grandfather’s father,’ Usama indicated a reproduction of an old painting of an old man attired in the style of his Sultan – a dark robe, a turban, a beard. ‘Mohammed Ali [Khalidy] was the deputy judge of Jerusalem. The chief justice was a Turk, who never came to Jerusalem. So, Mohammed Ali was in effect the chief judge. He died in 1862.’ To be a jurist in the Ottoman Empire was to be a scholar, and a Muslim judge adhered to one or another of the schools of legal philosophy that defined the nature of one’s belief in Sunni Islam. The law had been as significant in the consciousness of an Ottoman Sunni Muslim, whether Turk, Kurd or Arab, as it remained for strict Orthodox Jewish rabbis. The law and the devout study of law – law giving, law making, legal interpretation, the source and legitimacy of legal precepts – involved not only jurisprudence, but philosophy, history and theology. The law made the Khalidys into scholars, and the tradition persisted among the latest generations – academics, but not a lawyer among them.
Usama Khalidy did not subscribe to the Islamic school that proscribed and condemned visual representation of the human form. He lived surrounded by family portraits of long-dead Khalidys in Ottoman robes of office and of his two modern and wildly beautiful daughters. I asked about a black and white drawing propped against the books behind him. I’d been looking at it for some time: six men on their feet, four seated in front, all eyes fixed on the artist. ‘This is one of the oldest pictures in the Middle East of my ancestors,’ Usama said.
The ten, who looked like a difficult jury to impress, divided into two phases of Ottoman history. The elders, frail in white turbans atop snow-white beards, had grown up in the last years of a Sultanate that had not absorbed the cultural lessons of its military defeats by the once-insignificant Christian kingdoms of Europe: in Greece, in the northern Balkans, in much of North Africa. The younger men, all fresh and trendy in sporty tarboush and twirling moustaches, were coming of age when the Sultan understood that weakness required concessions to the foreigner and new arrangements with the more dissatisfied natives. In the mid-nineteenth century, those Khalidys in the fezzes were the new men of reform, of progress, of enlightenment. The Sultan would govern under the new men, reorganize the empire, invite the hated Europeans to train his army and buy the new steel cannon of Krupp and the Maxim gun. Soon, the Sultan’s subjects would be wearing trousers and conspiring to depose him.
‘This is our ancestor, Yusuf Dia Khalidy,’ Usama spoke with a certain pride of this man, one of the oldest in the picture. ‘Yusuf Dia was sent as a judge to Kurdistan. He wrote the first dictionary of the Kurdish language.’ The dictionary was in Kurdish and Arabic, languages that flourished under the Ottomans, but which had been banned – except for prayers in Arabic – in the modern Turkey that Moustafa Kemal Atatürk created after the First World War. Usama said I should buy a copy of the dictionary, still in print from the Librairie du Liban, when I reached Beirut.
Usama’s two daughters, Mouna and Ramla, lived in Beirut with their husbands and children. Ramla, Usama said, was an old Arab name, so rare that I’d not heard it except as the name of an Arab town in Palestine. More Christians than Muslims, he said, gave their children the ancient names. The Christians were more tribal, following the traditional pattern of marriage within their Jund. Jund, classical Arabic for army, was also a division of land: great west – east stretches between the Mediterranean and the desert, self-sufficient and parallel regions of fish and commerce beside the sea, fruit and timber in the coastal mountain range, wheat and vegetables in the fertile plain, and, at the desert’s edges, the Bedouins’ meat, milk, yoghurt and cheese. Jund Dimashk went from Beirut over Mount Lebanon