The last Palestinian
E. C. Hodgkin
suppose he was the last of the Palestin- ians,' someone said as, on a Monday afternoon earlier this month, we followed the coffin of Musa Alami from Aqsa mos- que in Jerusalem across the incomparable Haram area to the Damascus Gate of the Old City. 'And the greatest,' someone else added. Those are the sort of oversimplifica- tions liable to be made at funerals — what is greatness, anyway? But certainly in the days when Palestine was a country rather than a cause Musa Alami represented most of what was genuine and hopeful among the Palestinian Arabs, as well as in an all too human way sharing some of their weaknesses.
Musa was an unusual mixture. He was an aristocrat, a lawyer, a philanthropist, an autocrat, a reluctant politician, a superb host, and a very amusing raconteur. He had been in a school for NCOs in the Ottoman army and an undergraduate at Trinity Hall. He had been both a senior official in the Palestine mandatory government and exiled by it. He knew all the leading Arabs of his generation and many of the younger ones. Most of them asked his advice; a few of them took it; the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, paid him the compliment of trying to arrange for his assassination. For choice he lived very simply, but when he felt it necessary, usually for the sake of friends, he enjoyed living rather grandly. It didn't particularly matter to him whether it was a truckle bed or Park Lane.
I call him a reluctant politician, but he was not exactly that. He reminded me a bit of Adlai Stevenson — fascinated by politics but not much good at the rough and tum- ble. Intellectually superior to most of those he had to deal with, he would easily back down if he failed to get his way. Then he could sulk. 'I'm just a simple farmer,' he would say. But quite late in life he could be lured into something like a surreptitious meeting with Ben Gurion even though he knew it would almost certainly be profitless and perhaps personally dangerous.
Musa has a place in the history books as the man who was chosen to be the sole representative of the Palestine Arabs at the 1944 Alexandria conference which set up the Arab League, but he rightly, regarded as his main achievement the separate talks he had in the autumn of 1938 with Malcolm MacDonald, then Colonial Secretary, which resulted in a protocol in which Mac- Donald conceded that in the forthcoming London conference on Palestine one of the objectives would be to find ways and means of achieving 'the independence of Palestine'. Musa felt that the intrigues of dimmer-witted Arabs and the backtracking of sharper-witted Britons had meant that this unique opportunity had been missed. He may have been right. The tragedy of the Palestinians was that they were outgunned and outmanoeuvred politically, and that someone like Musa, who knew better how British minds work, tended for that reason to be suspect. Compare his position with that of Weizmann at the same time (secrets leaked to him direct from the Cabinet) and the huge disparity of resources available to the two sides is obvious.
For all his sophistication Musa shared some of the inability to turn events to their advantage which bedevilled the Arabs in the colonial period and which they have by no means grown out of. He used to refer with much indignation to the time he was taken to see John Kennedy, then a senator, who, it seems, had asked him 'how much it would cost to settle the Arab-Israeli pro- blem'. Musa thought this showed ignorant plutocracy at its worst and clammed up; national rights were not to be bought or sold. But a more opportunist man would have made something of it — used the occa- sion to start a relationship which could have been useful to both, for he had abundant charm and could talk well from an indepen- dent position.
But all this is in a way subsidiary when making claims on Musa's behalf, because his really original contribution, and what made people seriously suggest him as a can- didate for the Nobel Peace Prize (though considering the Middle Easterners who did get it maybe he was lucky to escape) was the project for refugees which he created in the Jordan valley and for over 40 years inspired and controlled. When he used to tell the story of how he and a few others started in 1949, in the hottest season of the year and in one of the hottest regions in the world, digging for water, first with spades and then with a small drill lent by an oil company, and how after five months they found it in abundant quantities, he made it sound like the Klondyke or the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb — with both of which, indeed, it could justly be compared.
Almost alone among the defeated after the 1948 debacle he did something prac- tical. That required superb obstinacy, an arrogant disregard for the experts who said he was attempting the impossible. The result was 2,000 acres of trees, crops, cowhouses, chicken farms, workshops, in which up to 200 orphan boys from the camps (he chose to help the most helpless) were trained — and exceedingly well trained — to become agriculturalists, carpenters, metal workers, and so on. Until com- munications were cut they produced the best vegetables and dairy products in the Middle East, as grateful international customers testified.
Three times wars or riots almost destroyed the project, and three times he picked up the pieces. The severest blow was of course the occupation of the West Bank in 1967. Nearly half his land was occupied by the Israeli army; 14 of the 25 wells were destroyed; 100,000 shade and fruit trees died through lack of irrigation. (When, eight years later, after this land had been handed back to Musa, some of his friends from England went to see Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Defence, to suggest that the army might like to help in the work of rehabilitation, they were told, 'The business of the Israeli army is destruction, not reconstruction', which closed the conversa- tion.)
I think it was in these last years that Musa showed at his most admirable. He was allowed back to Jericho in 1970 (he had been abroad when the war broke out), at the age of 73 — no question of voluntary exile for him. The life of anyone under alien military occupation is hard. For an old man, belonging to one of the half-dozen families which had for centuries been domi- nant in Palestine, to be suddenly without rights, to have to beg favours from strange and indifferent soldiers and civilians, was a bitter draught. Alternately harassed and patronised by the occupiers, he bore it with a dignity and patience that amazed me.
Sitting in the small house he had built for himself on the project, wrapped in his ab- ba, he found consolation in reminiscing to friends about all the people he had known and the events he had experienced in a long life, attending to the needs of his guests, supervising with an eagle eye details of the welfare of the boys — 'Why hasn't that boy got a clean shirt?' Those chairs must be re- painted — tomorrow!' He could find satisfaction in a small but beautiful lifeboat of his own construction saved from a gigan- tic wreck.
The Palestine Arabs are often, and not without reason, accused of having played badly such cards as they had. Musa cannot escape all blame for what happened bet- ween 1920 and 1948, though he comes off much better than any of the other leaders. Perhaps, in view of the resources of wealth and influence they were up against, nothing in the long run would have changed the story. It is good that one of them has left a monument as well as a memory.
Previous page
