DIARY CHARLES GLASS
While the fighting was still in prog- ress,' Yitzak Rabin wrote in a censored passage of his memoirs, about the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, 'we had to grapple with a troublesome problem: the fate of the populations of Lod and Ramleh, number- ing some fifty thousand civilians. . . . I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out We took them on foot towards the Bet Horon road. The popula- tion of Lod (Lydda) did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force. The inhabitants of Ramleh watched, and learned the lesson: their leaders agreed to be evacuated voluntarily, on condition that the evacuation was carried out by vehicles.' One of the Ramleh inhabitants forced to leave was a 13-year- old boy named Khalil al-Wazir. Al-Wazir made his way to the Gaza Strip, where he was arrested by the Egyptians in 1954 for launching a raid against Israel. Later, he moved to Kuwait where, with Yasser Arafat, he founded the Al Fateh Palesti- nian commando group. He became the equivalent of the PLO's minister of de- fence with particular responsibility for operations in Israel-occupied territory. His Israeli opposite number, Yitzak Rabin, was part of the cabinet which decided to Put Abu Jihad to death — exactly 40 years after he had driven him from his home. He leaves his wife, Intisar, and their three children, Issam, Iman and Hanan. Ariel Sharon said, 'Justice has been done.'
Ithink that of all the Al Fateh leaders Abu Jihad was the mot popular with the foreign journalists who cover the Middle East. He was soft-spoken, where Arafat was excitable; and he was straight forward, where Arafat prevaricated. I remember him in Tripoli in December 1983, when pro-Syrian Palestinian dissidents were driv- ing Al Fateh out of Lebanon. We were sitting in Arafat's office, and every time a shell fell nearby, Arafat would shout, 'You see? You see? It is the double conspiracy, the Syrians from the mountains and the Iraelis from the sea.' Abu Jihad just shrugged his shoulders. He was more interested in organising his defences and his forces' evacuation than in telling us who was shelling. It was no secret that he had been on the telephone to the West Bank and Gaza almost every day since the uprising began, trying to preserve it as a mass demonstration against Israeli occupa- tion and not a series of assassinations which would lose world support. It would have pained him to know that the Israelis shot and killed between 14 and 17 people during protests against his murder. It was at first reported he would be buried in Karameh, Jordan, scene in March 1968 of an Israeli infantry and paratroop attack which was successfully repulsed by a joint PLO-Jordanian force. It was one of the few battles Abu Jihad could claim as, however minor, a victory. The PLO has since announced he will be buried in Damascus. Perhaps some day, the Israelis will permit him to be buried in his native land.
An appeal from the Israeli army group Yesh Gvul (Hebrew for 'There is a limit') arrived in the mail asking for help for soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories. Four hundred reservists signed a letter in which they said they would not serve in the occupational forces. One of them, 23-year-old Ofer Kassif, is serving a month in prison for refusing to go to Gaza. Another, 19-year-old Charles Lechner, was jailed for disobeying orders to police East Jerusalem. Yesh Gvul asks for letters and telegrams supporting the 'refuseniks' to be sent to Israeli missions overseas and for money to assist the families of impris- oned soldiers (Yesh Gvul, P.O. Box 6953, Jerusalem 91068, Israel). It is tragic that there is no similar dissident movement in any Arab army whose soldiers are called upon to conduct internal repression, but, then again, the penalties in a country like Iraq would be far more severe than one month in prison.
Last weekend, I went to Soho to see a final cut of the film A Fish Called Wanda. Starring John Cleese and Michael PalM for this country, and Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis for the United States, it appears to be a rare successful attempt to combine American and British humour. It is a little like intercutting sketches from Monty Python and Saturday Night Live in the hope it will work in both countries. The producer is an American named Michael Shamberg, who produced The Big Chill and with whom I plan to collaborate on a project. He's not like any film producer I knew when I was growing up in Hollywood in that he knows which fork to eat with, has an attention span longer than five minutes, has been married to the same woman for 20 years and listens when other people speak. I cannot understand how he has been so successful, in Hollywood, that is.
Abarrister recently asked us at a dinner party in Hampstead to think of a number between one and ten. He then asked us to think of another number above ten. Now, I might ask you to do the same. Done? 'I would guess', he said, 'that you have thought of an odd number under ten.' We had. When we asked how he knew, he said, 'Most people do.' It is awful to be so unoriginal, as we were, and even worse when he said most people, as we were then doing, thought of even numbers over ten. In and of itself, this made little difference, he explained. But it did have implications for the criminal justice system. He said judges regularly passed down sentences, when required to imprison an offender up to ten years, in odd years. Over ten years, terms of 12 and 20 were more common. How many men in Taki's old quarters are serving an extra year because of the hitherto unexplained propensity of most people to choose odd rather than even numbers under ten?
It is disturbing to learn that the process taking place in one's neighbourhood is called 'yuppification'. It somehow did not seem so bad, though never good, when it was mere 'gentrification'. It seems howev- er that one of the unfortunate side-effects, along with driving out most of the interest- ing people, is the number of means some people find for redistributing wealth. The other day, a man rang the bell of the house where we have lived in Notting Hill for the last nine years. He told our nanny (all the yuppifiers with children hereabouts have nannies) he was from the Entryphone company and had come to repair our Entryphone. Nothing was wrong with the Entryphone, but the nanny let him in anyway. He fiddled with exchange boxes and Entryphones and finally left. When we discovered that evening what had hap- pened, we called Entryphone to find out whether they had sent an engineer. They had not. Why had the man come? It seems this is an increasingly common ruse to gain entry to a house. Some brigands mas- querade as British Telecom engineers, flashing bogus Telecom identity cards, and appear to repair telephones. Some of these phones really are in need of repair raising the possibility of collusion with real Telecom employees. Our Entryphone man took nothing, not realising before he en- tered that we had already been burgled of everything of value by the more conven- tional means of a late-night break-in. If the culprits are ever caught, perhaps they'll get nine years.
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