Edward Whittemore - Jericho Mosaic

A month after the Six-Day War the leaders of el Fatah moved into the territories lost by Jordan west of the river to begin a popular war of liberation. From the marketplace of the Arab city of Nablus, in biblical Samaria, they directed sabotage operations in Israel and tried to organize civil disobedience in the occupied territories.

But the PLO wasn't accepted then by the local Arabs. Its followers were unable to move through the villages as Mao Tse-tung said resistance fighters should move, as fish in water.

By the end of the year the attempt at popular resistance had failed and the PLO left the land and moved back into Jordan. There they set up bases near the border to strike across the river. When these bases were destroyed by Israeli raids, the PLO moved more deeply into Jordan and dispersed its forces in refugee camps and in Jordanian villages and towns, where they couldn't be easily targeted without causing heavy civilian casualties. This increased the PLO's safety but made it less effective for fighting. Having failed at a popular war in Palestine and at a war of attrition from neighboring Arab countries, the PLO turned to bombings and terror in Europe, in particular to hijacking planes in Europe.

At first the PLO concentrated on Israeli airliners. But when armed men were put on Israeli flights, the PLO

began hijacking European and American airliners. The campaign culminated in September 1970, when three hundred hostages from Swiss and American flights were taken to an airfield held by the PLO in Jordan.

King Hussein of Jordan had steadily been losing control of his country to the PLO. After the three hundred Swiss and American hostages were freed, the Jordanian army attacked the PLO bases in Jordan — Black September to the PLO — and drove their armed units out of the country into southern Lebanon. Syrian forces invaded Jordan but then pulled back when Israel made it clear it would oppose a Syrian attempt to overthrow Hussein.

Such was the course of history for the Palestinian national movement in the first years after the Six-Day War, a murky tale of violence and conflicting intrigues, of ruin and retreat and terror, made up of innumerable moments of hope and despair, disinterest and suffering.

***

Ali was one of those young men who heard the call of idealism in the summer after the Six-Day War.

Unknown to his brother, Ali joined a cell of el Fatah in east Jerusalem. The boys he dealt with were amateurs and their organization was inept. Ali at nineteen was among the older members of the cell. They met at night to design the acts that would lead to a better future, to plan liberation from the conqueror in passionate surges of commitment.

But Ali's role in history was over almost as soon as it began. His cell was raided one night and he tried to escape out the back of the building, firing a revolver which he didn't really know how to use. The exit was covered and he was shot, killed on the spot.

***

Yousef was so stunned by the suddenness of Ali's death he didn't know how to react. After the interrogations ended he went to sit in the church of the Greek monks who had educated him, the church dedicated to the miracle of Lazarus raised from the dead. There, alone and undisturbed, he could weep like a child and experience his feelings of loss, above all his emptiness. Their mother had died several years before, and Yousef had no one in the village to share his grief.

Yousef didn't pray in the church. He was too skeptical to be a follower of rites and rituals or a believer in divine mystery of any sort. The figure of Jesus had always been meaningful to him but in the simplicity of the Nazarene's life, not in the hierarchy of ceremony man had constructed from it. As with Mohammed or the Buddha or Moses, Jesus was to him a messenger and prophet of God, a bringer of the vision of man's better nature and a teacher of the great moral truths which would allow man to realize it. In this as in so many things, Yousef reflected the feelings of his own moral teacher — Bell.

For a long time Yousef was suspended in remembering. He hovered over his memories of Ali as a hummingbird hovers over a lemon tree and savors the mysteries of its blossoms, recalling his brother's passionate smiles and warm embraces and loving voice.

He could make no sense of Ali's death. Yousef believed in liberty and equality as much as anyone, and because of his reading in history he knew more about them than most people. But what did Ali's death, he kept asking himself, have to do with any of that? This pathetic attempt at conspiracy? These gestures of defiance and enthusiasm offered up in the company of some spellbound village boys beguiled by their own rhetoric? Ali had gone about reworking the future the way he would have gone about any childhood game, eyes glittering with confidence, ready to set things right with his very own hands and then exult in the triumph, as if history and wars and conflicting peoples, the whole enormity of memory, were no more complex than a little electric motor waiting to be undone and rewired by nimble fingers and a clever mind.

It was pathetic, futile. If only they had talked about it, thought Yousef. If only Ali had come to him and told him what he had in mind. Then they could have examined it together and Yousef could have helped his brother to see more, to grasp more, to do more.

The bell tolled above the church of Lazarus and the solemn Greek monks came and went leaving their trail of prayers and incense. The candles burned low and shadows flickered over the walls of the church as Yousef sat on in the half-darkness, remembering Ali.

He talked with the Greek fathers and heard their prayers, which brought him no solace. He raised his eyes and gazed at the painting of Jesus on the dome of the church, arms spread in hope in the role of the Paraclete, the comforter and intercessor. Jesus had walked in this village with friends. He had accepted their food and their water and even raised a brother among them from the dead. And it was in this poor place that Jesus had chosen to stay, not in glorious Jerusalem on the other side of the Mount of Olives.

Yousef left the church and took to wandering across the barren hills below el Azariya. All day and most of the night he sat out on the empty slopes in the fierce summer heat and the cool evenings looking down on the bare hills, watching some bird soar in the sunlight, alone in the still starry nights.

When he was able to face it he went down to Jericho to grieve with Abu Musa, with Bell, with Moses. Abu Musa burst into tears and gripped him tightly, holding him for long minutes.

Such a fine boy, sputtered Abu Musa. Such an excellent boy. So full of life and laughter and the good things of the earth, our passionate little Ali.

Bell, too, wept. Alone with Yousef under the grape arbor, he bowed his head and let the tears flow, his face a thousand years old in its grief, a timeless map of endurance as scarred and ravaged as the Judean wilderness itself.

Gentle Moses the Ethiopian also expressed his sorrow.

Each morning at four, said Moses, I sing the Psalms for our lost little brother. In my language the very act of prayer is known as to repeat David, to recite the Psalms, and this I do each morning in wonder and thanksgiving at the memory of our departed Ali.

Abu Musa sat hunched in his great bulk. To live, he murmured sadly, is to become expert in farewells.

I feel responsible for his death, said Yousef. I didn't talk with him enough and explore his concerns and help him consider what is and what might be done. It was all so pointless, so useless and to no end, but what can I do now? What can I do?

To each of the three men in Jericho, Yousef put this same question.

You can live honorably and according to your own inner voice, replied Abu Musa. Every man must do that and no man can do more.