The Haj

by Leon Uris

So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.

On May 9, 1916, the British and French entered into a clandestine treaty on how they intended to carve up the region. The treaty was the Sykes-Picot, named for the negotiators. Always described as infamous, the treaty ignored both Jewish aspirations and Sharif Husains personal ambitions. And so Palestine became the "twice promised land."

Hatred is holy in this part of the world. It is also eternal. If they become inflamed, I am but a muktar. I cannot stand against a tide. You see, Gideon, that is why you are fooling yourselves. You do not know how to deal with us. For years, decades, we may seem to be at peace with you, but always in the back of our minds we keep up the hope of vengeance. No dispute is ever really settled in our world. The Jews give us a special reason to continue warring."

"The Jews, we Zionists," he said, "will never be able to settle more than a few million people here. That is reality. What is also reality is the fact that such a state will always be surrounded by tens of millions of hostile and unforgiving Arabs. You cannot expect to hold them at bay forever. Sheer weight of numbers and a Moslem society that perpetuates hatred makes that impossible. If you are to survive, you must establish the principle of retaliation.

The Arabs will never love you for what good you've brought them. They don't know how to really love. But hate! Oh God, can they hate! And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you have jolted them from their delusions of grandeur and shown them for what they are - a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition . . . except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep. You are dealing with a mad society and you d better learn how to control it."

Palestine was the twice-promised land once to the Jews as a homeland through the Balfour Declaration and once to the Arabs as part of the Greater Arab Nation.

The belt of Islam held some of the planets worst land, which ran from North Africa into the dismal places of the Pacific Ocean. It was that crushing part of the world where men could not beat the earth. Numbly they embraced Islam and its fatalistic outlook. Islam gave them something to grasp hold of in order to continue the struggle through life. This land bullied everyone who attempted to exist on it. So harsh, so brutalizing were the forces of nature that those people imprisoned upon it were convoluted into forming a society where cruelty was commonplace.

Because girls were not permitted to show anything of themselves except their hands and part of their face, they made their eyes do the work for them. No women in the world can say more with their eyes than Arab women.

Repetition in tales and poetry, repetition in the shapes of our houses, repetition in the music over the radio, repetition in everything was our life.

Most important to Moslems is the Sunna. Although the Sunna is not formally written down, it cannot be divorced from the Koran. It is an interpretation of the values of the Koran by experience and tradition. Those who believe in the Sunna are called Sunni Moslems. Everyone in Tabah was a Sunni. The Sunnis make up most of the Islamic world.

All Moslems realize they have no control over their own lives and destinies. Illness, death, drought, pestilence, earthquakes, any disasters must be fatalistically accepted as the will of Allah. Only by being a believer, accepting Mohammed's word, accepting Allah's will, can we get into paradise. So life on this earth is really not to be enjoyed, but it merely makes us prove ourselves worthy of joining Mohammed forever in heaven.

Haj Ibrahim had long ago realized that fantasy and reality were one and the same thing among his people. The fantasy had to be kept alive at all costs.

The Arab population of Haifa ran without cause. Fears of annihilation were merely echoes and reflections of their own designs. They and their leaders had promised death to the Jews. The Arabs were consumed with fear that the Jews would do to them what they planned to do to the Jews. Their terror was played upon by their own leaders, who urged them to flee in order to clear the way for their armies. The Haifa exodus was repeated in Safed and Tiberias, where Arab populations bolted after short battles.

Islam is going to turn this world upside down before this century is out and you'd better have enough guts to deal with it. It's lonely here, Brompton. It's lonely."

I fear that our people do not know how to participate in a community. Government to them is a mystical extension of Islam, something that falls out of the sky. They want rulers to take care of them, with no conception that they get only what kind of government they are willing to pay for."

"To remind you that the Palestinian people have never ruled themselves, nor ever attempted to rule themselves. We have been content for a thousand years to let people outside of Palestine make all the decisions for us. There was no possibility that any authority in Palestine could have prepared us for this war.

In the brutal heat and poverty, it became easier to cope by finding some shade, seeing mirages, and allowing fantasy to enter and take over my mind. Through the Bedouin I came to know why the Arab adopted a passive acceptance of the unmercifulness of life. Everything was predestined by fate, and there was little one could do but accept the bitterness of earth and look forward to the relief of the trip to paradise.

In our world, when five men do the work of one, four justify themselves through obstruction.

"Nonsense. Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone. We Arabs are the worst. We can't live with the world, and even more terrible, we can't live with each other. In the end it will not be Arab against Jew but Arab against Arab. One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail. We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts. The world will tell us to go to hell. We, who tried to humiliate the Jews, will find ourselves humiliated as the scum of the earth. Oh, put down that silly potsherd and let us have some coffee."

"We do not have leave to love one another and we have long ago lost the ability. It was so written twelve hundred years earlier. Hate is our overpowering legacy and we have regenerated ourselves by hatred from decade to decade, generation to generation, century to century. The return of the Jews has unleashed that hatred, exploding wildly, aimlessly, into a massive force of self-destruction. In ten, twenty, thirty years the world of Islam will begin to consume itself in madness. We cannot live with ourselves . . . we never have. We cannot live with or accommodate the outside world . . . we never have. We are incapable of change. The devil who makes us crazy is now devouring us. We cannot stop ourselves. And if we are not stopped we will march, with the rest of the world, to the Day of the Burning. What we are now witnessing, Ishmael, now, is the beginning of Armageddon."