Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “I know Lord Peel,” Konstantin was saying. “He’s a thoughtful man, I hope that the conclusions of the commission of inquiry help to stop the conflicts.”

  “They could make them worse,” Hassan said.

  “I don’t understand why the Arabs and the Jews cannot come to an agreement,” Konstantin said.

  “They can, but with conditions. Lots of Jews have arrived here recently, more than you can imagine. They buy our land and displace our peasants. The only thing we want is for England to abandon the Balfour Declaration. What rights do the British have over Palestine? We fought with them in the Great War in exchange for some promises that they have not fulfilled. They betrayed Sharif Husayn and his children, they abandoned Faisal and Ali, and they accept Abdullah as king of Transjordan because it is convenient for them,” Hassan summarized.

  “I fought cheek by jowl with the British just as my brother-in-law Mohammed did, and his cousin Jaled. We did so because we wanted a greater Arab homeland. There was room for the Jews in such a homeland. The sharif did not mind if they had a homeland alongside us, and neither did Faisal, but there were conditions, and the British did not fulfill these conditions. Why should we hand over our own land?” Yusuf spoke for himself, but his interlocutors did not forget that he worked for Omar Salem, a powerful citizen of Jerusalem.

  “And you, Louis, what do you think of what is happening?” Hassan asked.

  The men all looked expectantly at Louis. They all knew that he was well connected with the Jewish leaders, especially those who were loyal to Ben-Gurion.

  “Arabs and Jews have to share Palestine, and the sooner we realize this, the better,” Louis said.

  “And why should we share it?” Hassan insisted.

  “Because we are both here.”

  “We were here before you came running from your tsars.”

  “You were? Since when? This is the land of Judah, where the Canaanites settled, then the Egyptians, then the Philistines, the Macedonians, the Byzantines, the Persians, the Arabs, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Crusaders, the Ottomans . . . and now the British. The Jews are made from the dust of this land and I will not argue with you when you say you are as well.” Louis’s words silenced them for a moment or so.

  “You can stay if and only if you form part of an Arab state. That was the agreement,” Yusuf said, looking straight at Louis.

  “You have your agreements with the British and we have ours. But we should both have learned the lesson that the British make promises as far as they coincide with their interests, and that they tip the balance in favor of one or the other of us as it is convenient to them. Palestine will be what you and we decide it should be,” Louis replied.

  “I don’t like all this talk of ‘you’ and ‘we.’ When we were younger we thought that there was a chance that we would all be equal.” There was a note of sadness in Samuel’s words.

  Moshe started to speak. He was uncomfortable, out of place, it was clear that he did not feel himself to be among friends.

  “The dreams of our youth break against the reality of daily life. Mayakovsky wrote that about love, but it serves for everything else as well.”

  “Reality will be what we are able to make it,” Samuel replied.

  “Men create reality, men of different types, with different interests, different beliefs, different dreams. We Jews thought that the October Revolution would bring us a new era in which we would stop being second-class citizens. We fought alongside other men, thinking that they shared the same dreams, but when the battle was over we realized that our dreams were different. That is reality, not what we keep in our heads,” Moshe said.

  “So what do you propose for Palestine?” Konstantin asked.

  “I have no solution, I only know that what the Arabs want is opposed to what we want, and the day will come in which each of us has to fight for what he wants.” Moshe seemed to be making a prediction.

  “You seem to want such a confrontation,” Mohammed interrupted him.

  “You have been on the field of battle, and so have I. Both of us know what it is to watch men die beside us, and to think that we might be the next to fall. I don’t like violence, but it is inevitable. The tsar never voluntarily handed over a single grain of his power, we had to take it from him by force. You fought against the Turks to build your Arab nation. They would never have given you a single yard of ground by themselves. And here we are now, with Arabs and Jews occupying the same space. We are trying to recover it because it was the land of our ancestors, our roots are here, our raison d’être is here. You don’t want to share it because you have lived on this land for centuries . . . There are men who fight to the death when they fight, and your mufti is one of them.” Moshe looked at them expectantly.

  “And you are one as well, as far as I can see,” Hassan replied.

  Konstantin changed the subject by asking a banal question.

  When Mohammed took leave of Samuel, the older man hugged him for a long time.

  “I will come see you. We need to talk.”

  Mohammed agreed. He felt sincere fondness and affection for Samuel, who had been a friend of his father’s. Now he took on the mantle of their friendship, although he often did not understand this man who now seemed so different to him, in his well-cut clothes, in this fashionable hotel, living with a woman who was so beautiful she took one’s breath away. He said to himself that her beauty could not compare with Marinna’s, who was a naturally elegant woman and who seemed a princess even when she was hoeing the ground. For a moment he envied Samuel for having done what he could never dare to do: live with the woman he loved. No, he could not abandon Salma or Wädi or Naima. His sense of honor prevented it. His father would never have pardoned him for such an act. But not for that did he give up dreaming of Marinna.

  Dina was in a bad mood. Mohammed had told her that Samuel would visit that afternoon.

  “He’ll come alone, right? That Russian countess is not welcome here,” his mother said.

  “He is our friend, and we should receive him with whomever he wishes to bring with him,” Mohammed replied.

  To Dina’s relief, Samuel came alone. It was clear that he had no other desire than to speak with Mohammed alone, so Dina and Salma left them to themselves.

  “I don’t know how to thank you for Wädi’s saving Ezekiel’s life. If my son is alive today, it is because of what Wädi did for him. We are deeply indebted to you. I would like for Wädi to come with Ezekiel and study in England. There are excellent boarding schools where they can both learn whatever they like. It’s a great opportunity for both of them.”

  “Thank you for the offer, but I do not wish to be separated from Wädi.”

  “Come on, Mohammed! Do you know how many children of the great Jerusalem families are educated in England? The British are your enemies, and I know you have your reasons not to trust them, but don’t take away the chance for your son to have a good education. You studied in a British school, St. George’s.”

  “I don’t want to send my son to my enemy’s homeland. Don’t you understand what the British are doing to us?”

  “They are no worse to the Arabs than they are to the Jews,” Samuel replied.

  “You owe me nothing, Samuel.”

  “I owe your son my son’s life.”

  Mohammed fell silent, unhappy at the direction the conversation was taking.

  “I will not insist, but if you change your mind, all you need to do is write to me and tell me.”

  “Ezekiel and Dalida will be going to London with you?”

  “That is what they wish, and I hope to convince Miriam to let me have my children near me. But let’s talk about other things. I was worried when I heard Yusuf speak last night.”

  “This is no longer the Palestine you knew, Samuel. The breach between the Arabs and the Jews grows bigger every day. If you only knew h
ow we’ve been attacked for visiting you at the King David hotel. One of my best friends almost went so far as to accuse me of treason.”

  Now it was Samuel’s turn to remain silent. He seemed to be thinking before he spoke.

  “I don’t want to lie to you, Mohammed. Konstantin and I are helping the Jews to leave Germany. We work with the Jewish Agency and, via them, with the Jewish leaders here.”

  “You are not a Zionist.”

  “No, I have little attachment to any country. Where do I belong? In the Polish village where I was born? Russia, my father’s homeland? France, my mother’s? Palestine, because I am a Jew? No, I don’t like homelands, people kill each other for them.”

  “But you help those of your race make Palestine their homeland.”

  “I help them to live.”

  “No, it’s not just that. If you work with the Jewish Agency, then you want what they want, which is to make Palestine the Jewish homeland. And to do that you need to get rid of us.”

  “That’s how you see things?”

  “That’s how things are.”

  “You know my story, Mohammed. You know that my mother and my brother and my sister were murdered in a pogrom, and that I myself had to flee from Saint Petersburg after my father was murdered. I came here because my father dreamed that we would come here together one day, not because I was looking for a homeland.”

  “Yes, maybe the first Russian Jews who came here to escape the tsar had no other intention than to live here in peace, but now you want to take our land.”

  “That is not my intention, Mohammed.”

  “Maybe it is not, but you help those for whom it clearly is.”

  They did not have much more to say to each other, so they fell into their own thoughts while each smoked a cigarette. Samuel was the first to break the silence.

  “I want to ask you a favor.”

  Mohammed made a gesture for him to speak.

  “If conflict is inevitable . . . if things go badly . . . promise me that you will protect my children in case Miriam does not let them come with me.”

  “I will never raise my hand against Hope Orchard,” Mohammed replied, offended.

  “I know, just as Louis told me that you punished those who burned our house and our olive trees and our laboratory . . .”

  “What does Louis know! What I do is my own business.”

  “If the conflict gets worse, will you protect my children?” Samuel insisted.

  “My father would not forgive me if I didn’t.”

  “If paradise exists, my good friend Ahmed will be there, the best man I ever knew.”

  Samuel had not yet left Jerusalem when the Peel Report was published. The British aristocrat recommended dividing Palestine in two, leaving one part for the Jews and one for the Arabs; each group would govern themselves as they saw fit, and Jerusalem would be under the control of the British Empire.

  Omar Salem called a meeting in his house.

  “We will never accept the division of our country!” one of his guests exclaimed.

  “We made a mistake, not paying attention to Lord Peel. The Zionists sucked up to him and we ignored him,” Yusuf said, scandalizing those who heard him.

  “Do you really think we could have changed anything? What more could we have said? The British and their commission know all too well what our demands are: we want them to stop allowing thousands of Jews to come here and take our lands. How often do we need to repeat it? Of course, we also want the British to leave.” While he said this, Omar looked suspiciously at Yusuf.

  “We don’t only need to be right, we need to know how to convince people we are right, and the Zionists managed to convince Lord Peel. While our leaders showed no interest in the commission, the Jews made their position count,” Yusuf insisted.

  “Maybe we should consider the proposal, more than seventy percent of the land will still be ours and the rest will belong to the Jews. If we put more pressure on them, then maybe the percentage could be even more favorable,” said another guest, a man getting on in years.

  “We cannot even consider it! Why should we abandon our land, abandon even a yard of it? Lord Peel wants the Jews to have the best part, anyway. The coast, Galilee, Jezreel, what will we have left? The desert?” Omar replied, scandalized.

  “Yes, we have the worst part, the West Bank, the Negev, the Arava Valley, Gaza . . . and the worst bit is that they want these lands to form part of Transjordan, so we would stop being a problem by becoming Abdullah’s loyal servants,” Hassan said angrily.

  “You can’t blame Emir Abdullah for looking favorably on the British proposal; his family did fight for a greater Arab state,” Yusuf pointed out.

  “Ah! You always defend Abdullah! Yes, we helped the English fight against the Turks, thinking that they would allow us to build our own nation, and look at what they have left the Hashemite family. Nothing, crumbs; Transjordan was a bribe to Abdullah,” Hassan replied.

  “Yusuf, you need to decide if your heart is with Abdullah or with Palestine,” one of the guests said, and his words seemed to carry with them a threat.

  All the men looked at Yusuf and waited for his reply.

  “I won’t give you an answer. You know me well and you know that I have spilled my blood on the battlefield. Yes, I have always been loyal to the Hashemite family, I was loyal to Husayn in his role as the guardian of Mecca, I fought alongside his sons Faisal and Abdullah. I know who my enemies are, and they are the British, and not Abdullah.”

  “Let us not fight among each other,” Omar said. “A friend has told me that the Zionists don’t like Lord Peel’s solution either. They want Palestine all for themselves. So we are in agreement there.”

  “But they will accept it, reluctantly, but they will accept it,” Mohammed said, surprising Omar’s guests.

  “What are you saying? Of course they won’t accept the proposal,” his Uncle Hassan insisted.

  “They will protest, they will pretend to be offended, they will say that they can never give up Jerusalem, but they will accept it. They will do this because it is more than they have, more than they could expect. They are not stupid, Yusuf is right,” Mohammed concluded.

  They argued for a while, all of them worried that Britain could impose the partition of Palestine. Omar was blunt:

  “The mufti will never accept it, and the main families in Palestine won’t allow themselves to be led by the nose.”

  Then he gave Mohammed a task to perform.

  “You have a good relationship with your Jewish neighbors, you should talk with them to find out what their leaders think about all this. Maybe Hassan is right and they will reject the partition as well. I wouldn’t be surprised, they are too ambitious to put up with only a third of Palestine.”

  It was not that Omar Salem had no other way of finding out what the Jewish community was thinking, but he liked to find out information from different sources. Ever since he had supported Sharif Husayn’s demands, he understood that it was impossible to beat one’s adversary without knowing what the enemy was thinking. Yusuf knew that Omar Salem had an extensive network of informants in Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, and even Iraq. And he passed this information on to the most loyal followers of the mufti, men who he knew had no doubt about what their final aim was: the expulsion of the British and the transformation of Palestine into a free state.

  This time, Mohammed went to Hope Orchard to look for Louis. He had considered whether to talk to Samuel, but he decided in the end to talk to Louis. He knew that more than once there had been squabbles between the Palestinian Jews and their leaders abroad, and he had heard Louis say that the Palestinian Jews would not let the heads of the Jewish Agency in London or Zurich decide their fates, that they would decide for themselves, in Palestine. That was what Ben-Gurion thought, and Louis was a disciple of this rough and grumpy-looking man who non
etheless exercised a natural authority over the Jews who had, like him, come to Palestine from the former empire of the tsars.

  Louis did not seem surprised to see him appear as the sun was beginning to set. They sat under a vine, each smoking one of the Egyptian cigarettes they both liked so much.

  “Will you accept the Peel Report?” Mohammed asked him directly.

  As he took a long drag on his cigarette, Louis seemed to be looking for an answer. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “They are not offering us much. Twenty percent of the land and a lot of problems. I suppose that the Jews who now live in what will be your part will be moved into our twenty percent, and the Arabs who live in what will be our part will have to leave their homes to settle again in your more than seventy percent. I don’t think that anyone will be satisfied. As for Jerusalem, can we give her up?”

  “So, what would you do?” Mohammed insisted impatiently.

  “And you? What would you do? What does Omar Salem say, what do your friends say?” Louis asked in turn.

  “I think you know the answer already.”

  “Yes, I know it. You consider the Peel reforms an insult, and unacceptable, so your rejection of them will be firm and unequivocal, but even so . . .” Louis fell silent and let his gaze wander across the landscape.

  “Who do the English think they are to divide our land and tell us where we can live and where we cannot? Do you think that we could accept it?” There was bottled anger as well as profound weariness in Mohammed’s voice.

  “Palestine is under a British mandate whether you like it or not, and they are the ones in control of the situation. Lord Peel has been almost like Solomon in his solution, I say almost because the recommendation is not an equal division but one that allows you to have the larger part. Look, Mohammed, the Romans took our homeland away two thousand years ago, and made the Jews into pariahs, until now. The only thing the Zionist movement wants is for us to have a place to live. This place can be none other than the land of our forefathers. This twenty percent may be the most we will ever achieve. It will be little, but it will be ours. And here lies the problem.”