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
