The Levanter (13 page)

“In some countries I know, Mr. Ghaled, the man would have been shot”

“Better to shoot him than to destroy what makes his life.”

“His wife and children might not agree. Besides, as you pointed out earlier, a state of war exists between Israel and her neighbours. I take it that your man had not crossed the border just to
pay a social call.”

“He was a courier, that is all.”

“When was this sentence carried out?”

“Three weeks ago.”

“What was the name of the village?”

“Majd el-Krum. But I mention this incident, Mr. Prescott, not because it is rare or special, but to remind you how Arabs live under the Zionist police dictatorship.” He fumbled inside his sheepskin coat. “I
will show you something.” He dragged out a fat tooled-leather wallet and pulled a sheaf of photographs from it.

From the size and the way the edges of the prints were trimmed I could see that they had been made with an old-style black-and-white Polaroid. There were ten or twelve of them in plastic covers. He sorted them through, then thrust the lot into my hands.

“Take them, Mr. Prescott. Look at them.”

For a moment his eagerness reminded me, incongruously, of the lonely man on the long plane flight who wants to share his homesickness with you. “
Look,
there’s a shot of us all together up at the lake last summer.”

Only these were not family snaps. The top one was a picture of a young woman. Her throat had been cut and she was dead.

She was lying on a patch of bloodstained earth at the base of a concrete wall. The cut in the throat was deep and gaping; you could see the severed ends of the veins and arteries. Her clothing was up over her waist and there were stab wounds in her thighs and belly.

Ghaled said something else and again Miss Hammad interpreted.

“Look well, Mr. Prescott, look well.”

I slid the top print aside and looked at the next. It was of a dead man. He was naked except for a torn shirt, and his genitals had been cut off. The next was of a child of ten or so. I went through the rest of them.

The attitudes of violent death do not vary much. When the cause has been sudden, the rag-doll effect is usual, though muscular spasm can sometimes freeze the limbs in strange ways; when death comes less suddenly the knees and arms are often drawn up together in the fetal position; a human being incinerated by napalm becomes a gray-black clinker effigy of a dwarf boxer with fists up ready to do battle. There were no burn cases among these pictures, however; all the subjects had been cut, stabbed, or hacked to death; you could believe that they had been human beings. One or two of the bodies, those of children, had obviously been rearranged, by or for the photographer, and posed so as to dramatize the death agonies.

In war it is possible, as well as necessary and advisable, to get used to horrors. What I have never been able quite to get used to is the man who chooses to collect and keep pictures of them. Ghaled’s private gallery would have an ostensible propaganda purpose, of course, but the prints had been well thumbed before they had been protected by plastic. The last collection I had seen like it had been carried by a Special Forces lieutenant in Vietnam. He had claimed a propaganda purpose. He had said piously that he kept it to remind him of what he was fighting against. I didn’t believe him. He kept it for kicks. The British policeman in Malaya who treasured a jungle photograph of himself, shotgun in hand with one raised foot resting sportively on the disembowelled body of a Liberation Army Chinese, had been less inhibited. He was grinning proudly in the picture and he had grinned proudly when he had shown it to me.

I handed his photographs back to Ghaled.

“Well, Mr. Prescott?”

“Well what, Mr. Ghaled? I’ve seen pictures like that before. What are those dead bodies supposed to prove?”

“Those were Arab villagers murdered and mutilated by Zionist forces.”

“You say so, Mr. Ghaled. I say that they could equally well be Arab villagers killed by other Arabs, or Israeli villagers killed by
the
fedayeen.
Where were the pictures taken? When were they taken? On one occasion or several? Who was the photographer or was there more than one? Of what value are these photographs as evidence?”

“These photographs were taken on my orders and under my supervision after a raid, a typical raid, by Druse commando traitors of the Zionist army, on a refugee village in Jordan.”

“In this typical raid were no bullets used?”

“What do you mean?”

“None of the wounds shown in those photographs was made by a bullet. For a commando raid that seems odd.”

“They do not waste bullets on helpless women and children and crippled men.”

“I must accept what you say, of course.” In fact, all I would have accepted from him after that was his claim to have supervised the taking of the pictures; but there was no point in pursuing the argument. I wanted no more of him, and it seemed a good moment to bring the interview to an end.

“One or two final questions, Mr. Ghaled. Does the fact that so many of your Palestinian colleagues, your fellow leaders in the guerrilla movement, profoundly disagree with your views and policies ever cause you to question them yourself?”

“Naturally. Self-examination and
self-criticism are always necessary. As for disagreement, I would remind you that many of Lenin’s closest colleagues profoundly disagreed with him. But who in the end was proved right?”

“You see yourself as the Lenin of the Palestinian revolutionary guerrilla movement?”

“I see myself as the Ghaled of the Palestinian Action Force.”

“And time in the end will no doubt prove you right. I see. Thank you, Mr. Ghaled. You have been most patient and helpful.”

When Miss Hammad had translated that she looked at me questioningly.

“That’s all,” I said.

“Interview between Salah Ghaled and Lewis Prescott concluded,” she said and switched off the recorders. While she packed them up again Ghaled took the bottle of arrack and refilled the glasses.

He seemed pleased with the way the interview had gone and lit up a fresh cigar with the air of a man who has just concluded a successful deal. If he had spoken enough English he would probably have fished for some expression of satisfaction on my part.

He took the two tape cassettes which Miss Hammad handed him and one of the recorders. While she showed him how to operate it, I sipped the arrack and wondered how I was going to get back to Beirut The prospect of being driven down that mountain road in the darkness by Miss Hammad was not attractive.

I need not have worried. After the ceremonial leave-taking and the scramble back down to the Volkswagen, she explained the position. There was no question of our driving back to Beirut right away. During the hours of darkness nobody was allowed through the military roadblocks. We would have to wait at the chalet until it was light.

There I had a Scotch to take away the taste of the arrack, and Miss Hammad began to question me about my “impressions” of Ghaled.

I
had expected that and was ready for her.

“Frankly,” I said, “I was disappointed.”

“Disappointed!”

“You’re a Journalist, Melanie. You should know that there’s no story in what he gave me.”

“No story!” She was amazed.

“Melanie, forget your own interest in the man and your sympathy with the cause. Look at it professionally. Ghaled moved out of the mainstream of the Palestinian movement when he formed the PAF and denounced the PLO and Al Fatah. The Popular Front people have brushed him off. He’s little more than a gangster now and he has sense enough left to realize it. So he’s trying to talk his way back in with this crackpot stuff about destroying Israel single-handedly.”

“That is not what he said.” She was indignant now. “He said ‘defeat’, not ‘destroy’, and he did not say ‘single-handed’. You are seriously underestimating him.”

I shook my head. “A punchy has-been still kidding himself that he’s in line for a championship bout. That’s all I see.”

“That is a ridiculous comparison!”

“I don’t think so. Destroy, defeat the Zionist state? Don’t tell me you can take that seriously.”

“Indeed I can, and I do.”

“All that nonsense about fulcrums and levers?”

“It is not nonsense!”

“Sorry, Melanie, I think it is.”

“That is because you do not know what is planned.”

“And you do?”

“I know a little, yes.”

That was the first thing I had wanted to find out. I went on needling her.

“Plans for defeating Israel are easy to make. The Arabs have made quite a few. Carrying them out, though, doesn’t seem to be so easy. The combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan couldn’t do it. I can’t see your Mr. Ghaled improving on their efforts.”

“He will.”

“What with? Bombs in grapefruit?”

“You were not so contemptuous of bombs when they were planted in airliners by the Popular Front.”

“No. But what did that little campaign achieve against Israel? Did it stop the tourists going to Israel by air with their travellers’ checks? It did not. More tourists than ever went. When your Mr. Ghaled’s friends shot up the Israeli buses taking tourists into the occupied territories, did they stop the buses running? At no time.”

“It will be a different story when Salah has finished.”

That was the second piece of information she gave me.

I shrugged “So what? A few unfortunate tourists are killed. Okay, the tourist trade is important to the Israeli economy, but it’s not
that
important. A slight letup in the dollar flow isn’t going to destroy Israel.”

“Who can tell what it might lead to?” She was becoming angry now. I didn’t think I would get any more out of her, but after a moment she went on. “You said ‘destroy’ again. The word Salah used was ‘defeat’. You see now why he insisted on tape recordings.”

“Destroy, defeat? What’s the difference? He used both words.”

“But in different contexts. Where Israel is concerned the distinction is important. If it cannot be destroyed from without it must be defeated from within,”

“Sorry, I don’t get it.”

“You said yourself that Israeli unity has been an Arab achievement.”

“That was part of a loaded question I was asking. Israeli unity is a product of many things - religion, faith, history, the drama of the
Ingathering
, the toughness of the
sabras
, the dedication of the
aliyah immigrants
, common purpose, self-respect - all the ingredients of high national morale are there. The presence of
Goliath
and the continued success of
David
against him are only parts of the story.”

“They are the parts that count most. Without the pressure on it from the outside the Israeli state would have fallen to pieces. Even now, with Goliath, as you call it, still at the gate, they are torn by hate and dissension.”

“Dissension is part of democratic government.”

“But not hatreds such as theirs. The
Ashkenazim
hate the
Sephardim
, and both are hated by the
Oriental Jews
, the underprivileged proletariat. The
Aduk
hate the
Ostjuden
and the
Taymanim
hate those of
Mea Shearim
and their like who are Jewish anti-Zionists. The
sabras
hate everyone, even themselves.”

“You mean Ghaled is counting on Israel becoming politically unstable and falling apart? Because if so…”

“Who can say,” she challenged, “what will happen when, for the first time,
David’s
boasts are proved empty, when it is
Goliath
who has the sling and the simple bag of stones, when the Israelis have to taste defeat?”

“I’d say they’d close ranks and make damn sure it didn’t happen again.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. Defeat does strange things to those without experience of it.”

“Israel isn’t
going to be defeated by
pinpricks.”

“One pinprick will collapse a balloon, especially if the pressure inside is high.”

“And if Ghaled had the right fulcrum he could move the earth, I know. Let’s skip it, Melanie.” I yawned. I didn’t want her to realize how much of the cat she had let out of the bag, so I didn’t leave it there. “One thing I forgot,” I went on, stifling the yawn. “How do you spell the name of that village Ghaled mentioned, the one near Haifa? Majd el something, wasn’t it?”

“Majd el-Kram.” She spelled it out. “But I thought you said that there was no story.”

“I don’t think there is, not for me anyway, but the tapes will be transcribed. We may as well have it right.”

I had another drink and slept for a couple of hours in a spare room. She got me back to Beirut in time for a late breakfast. When I had showered and changed I went to the bureau office.

Frank Edwards was there and expectant.

“How did it go, Lew?”

I told him about the setup of the meeting and gave him my two tape cassettes.

“Most of it’s there,” I said. “There’s one thing I’d like to check if it’s possible here. There was an incident in Israel about three weeks ago in a village called Majd el-Krum near Haifa. An Arab was sentenced for not informing the police about a visit from his brother who was a member of the PAF. Is that sort of thing reported in the Israeli press?”

“Sometimes. We get the Israeli papers by mail via Cyprus. Three weeks ago you say?”

“About then.”

He found the item to the English language
Jerusalem Post.

“Here we are. The case was heard in the Haifa District Court. The man Ali gave the brother a drink of water and them turned him away.”

“The Israelis blew up his house for that?”

“What do you mean, blew up his house? He was sentenced to three months in jail and then the judge suspended the sentence. Ali left the court amid the cheers of friends from his village.”

“What about the PAF man?”

“He was caught. In fact, it was he who told the police that he had been to see his brother Ali. Charmimg fellow. He’ll be up for trial soon. The judge won’t suspend
his
sentence.”