Free Leon Uris by The Haj Page B

Mufti blocked creation of an Arab Agency, which would have caused him to cooperate with rival clans and diminish his personal ambitions. This left the Arab community with an impoverished and ineffectual health and education system and no plans for future progress.
    Instead, the Mufti maneuvered. Arab life was completely centered around the Moslem religion. A Supreme Moslem Council was the major body controlling religious funds, religious courts, the mosques, moneys for orphans and education. Haj Amin al Heusseini seized the presidency of the Council, which, in addition to his title as Mufti, gave him a hammerlock on the Arab community.
    As president of the Supreme Moslem Council he had vast funds at his disposal without having to make a public accounting. He likewise controlled the appointment of preachers, mosque officials, teachers, and judges. So broad and dominating had the Mufti’s powers become that he immodestly added the word ‘Grand’ to his title and thus became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The calm of the decade had been deliberately broken when he turned loose his ragged legions in a raw play for absolute power.
    Although the carnage had been great in undefended Jewish holy cities, the Mufti’s gains had been limited. He had struck at isolated pockets of pious scholars and rabbis and against rival Arab clans. The rioters, however, gave wide berth to the Jewish farming settlements, which were simply too tough to be attacked.
    The Mufti tried and got nowhere in the Valley of Ayalon against the Jewish kibbutzim. Gideon Asch, the Haganah commander, had secretly armed and trained all males and females of fighting age. His area remained very quiet during the 1929 riots. A good part of the relative calm in Ayalon was due to the Muktar of Tabah, who ordered his people not to get involved in the Mufti’s ‘holy war.’
    Although Shemesh and Tabah did not cooperate in or coordinate defensive matters, there was always ongoing business to discuss and most of the original coolness changed.
    Haj Ibrahim personally did not set foot in the kibbutz proper. On those occasions when he visited Gideon he would enter the gate and ride through the fields to their rendezvous point by the stream. Likewise, Gideon visited him at the knoll but never at the muktar’s home.
    The two men seemed to find their times together a welcome respite from their burdens of office. Haj Ibrahim was constantly disarmed by the coolness of the Jew, who he felt was half Bedouin anyhow. He respected Gideon. He respected the way he handled a horse and spoke Arabic. He respected a fairness in Gideon that he was not able to practice himself. What he liked most about talking with Gideon was a new aspect of his life: an ability to speak to another person about his own hidden thoughts. Haj Ibrahim was an inner man of a people long conditioned never to speak inner feelings. His situation was even more lonely, for a muktar must never let anyone know his thoughts. A structure of silence was the rule of life. Public utterances, even to a friend or relative, were always based on what was expected to be said. No one spoke of personal longings, secret ambitions, fears.
    With Gideon it was different. It was not so much like speaking to a Jew. It was more like speaking to a flowing stream or the leaves of a tree fluttering in the wind or to an animal in the fields, an abstract way of letting the tongue go a bit wild and not guarding every word. It was delightful. He and Gideon could argue loudly and insult one another and realize they didn’t have to get angry with each other because of it. When Gideon was gone for long periods Ibrahim would send a messenger to Shemesh for an urgent meeting over an imagined complaint.
    The afternoon drifted away at the stream. Haj Ibrahim took a swig of wine, placed the bottle back into the pool to cool, opened a tin, and unwrapped a small stick of hashish.
    ‘Just a little for me,’ Gideon said. ‘I have to argue with bureaucrats