something.’ Having been to the West Bank and Gaza many times since the accord, I disagreed. Oslo had given the Israelis something: a Palestinian administration that policed the occupied territories while the settlers took more Palestinian land. Salibi believed Oslo was less the problem than Israeli refusal to implement all its provisions on schedule. ‘The Israelis are behaving like savages. They are going to be the losers in the end. They are going to have to accept a settlement, even if it means a Palestinian state on a few metres. It will puncture the Zionist balloon. Zionism is a package deal. It’s Eretz Israel, the Bible land, heritage. They want to get all the Jews from all the world and cram them there. The whole thing is a package deal conceived in a seminar room. The least puncture and the speed with which it will deflate will amaze you.’
He thought the Israelis were ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ over making peace with the Palestinians. The wiser course was to make peace. ‘The more generous they are, the better it is for them,’ Salibi concluded, even if it meant punching a hole in – or setting a limit to – Zionism’s dream.
Did he imagine that the Arabs would accept Israel? Not as a tactic, but as a long-term proposition?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The minute there is a settlement, you cannot imagine what will happen. The Arabs are very forgiving. Think of Lebanon. Twenty years of fighting and the minute the fighting stopped, East Beirut and Jounieh filled with Muslims. The Christians flocked to West Beirut. There were Eid al-Fitr tents in Jounieh.’ East Beirut and the seaside resort of Jounieh were Christian ghettoes, and Eid al-Fitr was the Muslim feast to celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast. ‘Arab society is very forgiving. Grudges are not borne for long – except by one family against another. The hatred does not last.’ Salibi was from Bhamdoun, a Christian village in the Shouf hills of Mount Lebanon. In 1983, when Israel withdrew its army from the Shouf, the Druze massacred Christians and sent most of them north in an act that Yugoslavia’s wars would later give the term ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘I don’t bear a grudge against the Druze,’ Salibi said. ‘People are going back.’ He thought that Europeans took longer to forget. ‘I was in England in the 1950s. The Dutch students refused to listen to German music.’ During the bloodiest days of Lebanon’s war, Christians swooned to the voice of a Muslim diva, Oum Kalsoum, and Muslims never lost their love of the Christian singer Feyrouz. But the end of the war did not end the Lebanese animosity to the Palestinians. What was Israel to make of that?
Salibi went on, ‘Jordan made peace with Israel. Not one Israeli visitor was hurt. Palestinian refugees over the age of fifty who had shops refused to sell to them, but everywhere else they were accepted. They object to their stealing – not to their being Israelis.’ The only people who objected in principle to Israel, he believed, were the Islamists. But in Jordan, unlike in Egypt, they did nothing to harm Israelis.
‘Listen,’ he urged me. ‘The Jordanian army is on cordial terms with the Israeli Defence Forces. The Palestinian Authority was the same. If there is an agreement, then the whole hatred of the West in the Arab world will vanish. Abracadabra!’
Abracadabra?
‘It’s originally an Aramaic word that means, “vanish like a word”. The wind will be out of the sails of the Islamic movement in the Arab world.’
I reminded him that, in Lebanon many years before, he had told me Syria would never make peace with Israel. Its existence and strength depended upon keeping Israel isolated from the rest of the region. He had told me to think of the map. With Israel excluded from the region, all east – west Arab trade had to pass through Syria. There was no other land route between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. If Israel were accepted, trucks could collect goods at Haifa port and drive them to Iraq and Saudi Arabia through Israel and Jordan. Pipelines and railways would leave Syria out. Acceptance of Israel would deny Syria its leverage and render it insignificant. Having an Israeli enemy also justified Syria’s military dictatorship and police repression, he had said then. Now he believed peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would change that. ‘Syria will lose her blackmail position. It will sign a deal only after the Palestine question closes and only then.’
Problems lingered, I said. I had imagined that, once Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizballah would end its war against Israeli occupation. Yet Hizballah fought on – for a small area called the Shaba Farms that Israel did not leave. Hizballah said it was Lebanese territory and Syria agreed. Years before, however, Damascus claimed Shaba was part of Syria.
‘Shaba is a small mountain town,’ he explained. ‘It’s Sunni Muslim. In 1967, Israel occupied that area when it took the Golan Heights.’ Until 2000, Syria had claimed Shaba for itself. ‘Israel pulled out of Lebanon to the last bit, because Syria and Iran told them to.’
The real battle was not at Shaba, a containable sideshow. The struggle for Israel, for Palestine, was under way in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Things have changed since 1948,’ Salibi said. ‘If there were a few shots then, many people fled. This time, the Israelis destroy whole cities and only a few people leave. They’ve been hardened. Israel is turning the Palestinians into lions. The Israelis don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know what they have done. They have, how many Sharons? Three or four? How many Palestinians will be suicide bombers?’
Kamal Salibi was born in 1928, when France was occupying Lebanon and Syria and the British held Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. His parents, his teachers and all the elders of Bhamdoun had been Ottoman subjects. The era of independence had done more to disrupt their lives by moving large numbers of people – Tolstoy’s definition of history – than had the Ottoman centuries. History was being made in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli settlers were moving in to force Palestinian Arabs out.
Salibi gave me some books to read, as he used to in Beirut. His houseboy went out to find me a taxi. That evening, he was having dinner at Usama Khalidy’s house. For them, Amman was a little like Beirut. In my taxi, between Salibi’s house and Shepherd’s, I looked at the vast hotels, Kentucky Fried Chicken shops and elegant stone houses. Amman was an unexciting city, but it had not surrendered to the vulgar brutality of Beirut and other Arab capitals. Houses had to be built of native stone, as in Jerusalem over the river. Streets were swept and washed. The cars were mostly new.
I dropped the books at the hotel and went for a walk. In the all-male cafés, men played cards and backgammon. There was no real souq, no central bazaar as in Istanbul or the other old Ottoman cities. Beirut’s souq had been a proud centre, until the civil war and the property developers reduced it to powder. Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Nicosia had kept their ancient marketplaces. Amman had never had a real souq, not having been a city since the days when the Romans called it Philadelphia. It had retained the culture and appearance of a large Arab – Circassian village in the Cotswolds, all quaint stone and ordered life. It was a town for driving in rather than walking. ‘In Jordan,’ Salibi had said, perhaps explaining his choice of Amman over Beirut, ‘they did not repudiate what the British taught them. If they build a road, it’s a good road. Look at the Pan-Arab Highway. The Jordanian part is beautiful. The bumps start in Syria.’ That much was true. But, as good as Jordan’s highways were, they were neither as vast nor as smooth as those next door in Iraq and in Israel.
Amman’s surrender to British and then to American culture made a kind of sense. Amman did not have much to cling to. Most of its people came from elsewhere. Its rulers were Hejazis from the Holy City of Mecca in what became Saudi Arabia. Their subjects had come there from other parts of Jordan, attracted by the royal court, administrative jobs, the army and business. Other Arabs had moved there from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to marry or to enjoy its relative political stability. Half the city had escaped there from Palestine in the cataclysms of 1948 and 1967, unwillingly driven from towns and villages to which they believed they – or their children or their children’s children – would return. It had no claim on their loyalty.
