The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

‘The West Bank is killing Jordan,’ Norma Shalhoub said at lunch. She was not discussing attacks by Palestinians or the arrival of West Bankers in search of work. She was talking about perception. ‘I’ve been to trade fairs in Japan three times.’ The Shalhoubs had opened a travel agency to complement their hotel business. ‘The first time, the Japanese asked if we could hear the bombs in the Iran – Iraq war. The second time, could we hear the bombs in Lebanon? And the last time, did we hear the explosions from the West Bank? They think it’s all the same.’ Amman had been tranquil since 1970.

We were at her mother’s house. Norma lived next door on one side, her brother and his family on the other. Norma’s mother gave us rice, vegetable stew and chicken grilled in the Lebanese way with lemon and garlic. Although they were patriotic Jordanians, the Shalhoubs’ ancestors had migrated to Amman from Lebanon – from the same Christian mountain village that my great-grandmother had left for France and Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century. Her food was like my grandmother’s. As a gesture to me, Norma had gone out to buy cans of beer. Like most other people in Jordan, where alcohol was legal, the Shalhoubs did not drink.

When the Israeli border opened in 1994, they built the Palace Hotel in Petra. Mrs Shalhoub remembered Udi, an Israeli tour operator, coming to the house for lunch. He was pleasant and polite, and they looked forward to working with him. But he warned them: ‘This is just the beginning, but wait. I promise you that after a year of doing business with Israelis, you’ll be anti-Semitic.’

The anticipated profits from the Palace Hotel in Petra did not materialize. Most Americans toured the Middle East on Israeli package holidays. Only the more adventurous – and such people are few – came to Jordan on their own. ‘The day tourists,’ Norma said, ‘would bring their own food – even their own water – from Israel.’ Israeli tour operators bussed the tourists to Petra for a few hours, stopped by the Palace or some other hotel to buy postcards and bussed them back over the border. It was to make them pay something, Mrs Shalhoub told me, that the government introduced the ten-dinar entry fee. Again there were stories of Israeli tourists stealing glasses. But Udi the tour operator failed as a prophet. The Shalhoubs were spared anti-Semitism by the kindness of Jewish families in America. When Mrs Shalhoub’s younger daughter, Lena, moved with her American husband to Pittsburgh, she stayed home all day with two small children in a foreign country while he worked. In Jordan, her mother, sister, aunts and cousins would have been with her. In Pittsburgh, she became isolated and unwell. Mrs Shalhoub said, ‘The only people who offered to help were Jewish.’

Norma drove me on a tour of Amman’s newer quarter, Abdoan, and its shopping centre – a mall I thought I had seen under another name in the San Fernando Valley. The logos of American suburbia beckoned: Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream, Planet Hollywood, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s. An American atmosphere pervaded Abdoan, kids in fresh-washed cars, boys and girls eyeing one another through the black lenses of reflecting sunglasses, families at outdoor tables eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola. Did I want to see the new American Embassy?

The previous embassy had been a modest stone office building whose front door opened onto the street opposite the main journalist hotel, the InterContinental. It dated from the days when anyone could walk into a US Embassy without being searched, scanned and security checked. It took a few bullets during the Black September 1970 battles but it was otherwise unharmed. The new embassy, not far from the mall, was a citadel of the American world order. It lay within a perimeter of walls that an Olympic pole vaulter could not scale. Jordanian army tanks surrounded the compound, guns pointed outwards. The embassy itself was a gargantuan block of stone, trimmed in satellite dishes, television and radio aerials and, higher than them all, a flagpole. Norma told me the embassy was self-sufficient. Its PX sold cornflakes and peanut butter so the staff would not have to buy Arab food outside. It could have been a French Foreign Legion fort in old Africa, awaiting the inevitable and futile assault by the natives.

At dinner that night, in an Italian restaurant called Romano’s, I ate alone with a book of conversations with Middle East historians – Approaches to the History of the Middle East by Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher. The author’s first interview was with Albert Hourani, whose History of the Arabs remained the standard fifteen years after its original publication. ‘Between the powerful and the powerless,’ Albert said, ‘there cannot be an easy relationship of friendship. Having power is quite different from being under someone else’s power, which is a far deeper experience, just as victory is a much less profound experience than defeat.’ Albert was one of two historians – the great Mediterranean and Crusades’ scholar Sir Steven Runciman was the other – who had advised me on Tribes with Flags. Both had since died, and I missed their counsel. Reading Albert’s reflections was like having lunch with him, as we used to in London at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. In the most diplomatic manner, he would tell me that I had misinterpreted the histories of Islam, the Crusades or the Ottoman Empire. Sitting in Amman with my book, I saw couples – well-dressed men and women – at other candle-lit tables. I thought about Albert Hourani and Steven Runciman, two of Britain’s grandest old men of letters. Ageing was sadder for the loss of your mentors. Solitary travel too was becoming a trial, when you ate alone and all the pretty women in the restaurant were with other men.

Notables in Exile

‘We’re not very numerous,’ Usama Khalidy said of his family. ‘We’re probably not more than three or four hundred.’ The Khalidys had for five centuries contributed generation after generation of scholars to the Muslim world. Their longevity as nobles of Jerusalem had prompted Usama’s younger brother, the historian Tareef Khalidy, to respond to the accusation that the Khalidys were decadent with: ‘Decadent? Three hundred years ago, we were decadent.’

Usama was the middle of three accomplished brothers. The oldest was Walid, another academic who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tareef, the baby, taught history 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 Khalidy, Usama’s brother Walid.

For a man like Usama to say ‘I went 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 to Damascus and the Syrian Desert. To its south were Jund al-Urdun and Jund al-Falastin. There would be more family ties hundreds of miles across the Jund, from Hebron over the Jordan to Kerak or from Jerusalem to Salt in Jordan, than between towns a few miles north and south of one another in different Junds. The Christians, few as they were, preserved tradition. Usama said that they were the last in Jordan to perform a ritual operation on their babies to remove the uvula from inside their mouths. ‘They say it improves their speech,’ Usama explained. ‘I was told there is a Yemeni tribe who do that as well. It’s similar to circumcision.’