reality of the Zionist dream: a middle-aged man, gazing upon a constellation of enemies, waiting for the next one to explode.
DINA WAS WAITING for him in the corridor in her stocking feet.
“It feels familiar to me, Gabriel.”
“What’s that?”
“The way they carried it off. The way they moved. The planning. The sheer audacity of the thing. It feels like Munich and Sabena.” She paused and pushed a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear. “It feels like Black September.”
“There is no Black September, Dina-not anymore, at least.”
“You asked us to look for the thing that’s missing. Does that include Khaled?”
“Khaled is a rumor. Khaled is a ghost story.”
“I believe in Khaled,” she said. “Khaled keeps me awake at night.”
“You have a hunch?”
“A
6 TEL AVIV: MARCH 20
THEY RECONVENED AT TEN THAT EVENING. THE mood, Gabriel would recall later, was that of a university study group, too exhausted for serious enterprise but too anxious to part company. Dina, in order to add credence to her hypothesis, stood behind a small tabletop lectern. Yossi sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by his precious files from Research. Rimona, the only one in uniform, propped her sandaled feet on the back of Yossi’s empty chair. Yaakov sat next to Gabriel, his body still as granite.
Dina switched off the lights and placed a photograph on the overhead projector. It showed a child, a young boy, with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders. The boy was seated on the lap of a distraught older man: Yasir Arafat.
“This is the last confirmed photograph of Khaled al-Khalifa,” Dina said. “The setting is Beirut, the year is 1979. The occasion is the funeral of his father, Sabri al-Khalifa. Within days of the funeral, Khaled vanished. He has never been seen again.”
Yaakov stirred in the darkness. “I thought we were going to deal with reality,” he grumbled.
“Let her finish,” snapped Rimona.
Yaakov appealed his case to Gabriel, but Gabriel’s gaze was locked on the accusatory eyes of the child.
“Let her finish,” he murmured.
Dina removed the photograph of the child and dropped a new one in its place. Black and white and slightly out of focus, it showed a man on horseback with bandoliers across his chest. A pair of dark defiant eyes, barely visible through the small opening in his kaffiyeh, stared directly into the camera lens.
“To understand Khaled,” Dina said, “one must first know his celebrated lineage. This man is Asad al-Khalifa, Khaled’s grandfather, and the story begins with him.”
TURKISH-RULED PALESTINE: OCTOBER 1910
He was born in the village of Beit Sayeed to a desperately poor fellah who had been cursed with seven daughters. He named his only son Asad: Lion. Doted on by his mother and sisters, cherished by his weak and aging father, Asad al-Khalifa was a lazy child who never learned to read or write and refused his father’s demand to memorize the Koran. Occasionally, when he wanted a bit of spending money, he would walk up the rutted track that led to the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah and work all day for a few piasters. The Jewish foreman was named Zev. “It’s Hebrew for wolf,” he told Asad. Zev spoke Arabic with a strange accent and always asked Asad questions about life in Beit Sayeed. Asad hated the Jews, as did everyone in Beit Sayeed, but the work wasn’t backbreaking, and he was happy to take Zev’s money.
Petah Tikvah made an impression on the young Asad. How was it that the Zionists, newcomers to this land, had made so much progress when most of the Arabs were still living in squalor? After seeing the stone villas and clean streets of the Jewish settlement, Asad felt ashamed when he returned to Beit Sayeed. He wanted to live well, but he knew he would never become a rich and powerful man working for the Jew named Wolf. He stopped going to Petah Tikvah and devoted his time to thinking about a new career.
One evening, while playing dice in the village coffeehouse, he heard an older man make a lewd remark about his sister. He walked over to the man’s table and calmly asked if he had heard the remark correctly. “You did indeed,” the man said. “And what’s more, the unfortunate girl has the face of a donkey.” With that the coffeehouse erupted into laughter. Asad, without another word, walked back to his table and resumed his game of dice. The next morning, the man who had insulted his sister was found in a nearby orchard with his throat slit and a shoe stuffed into his mouth, the ultimate Arab insult. A week later, when the man’s brother publicly vowed to avenge the death, he too was found in the orchard in the same state. After that, no one dared insult young Asad.
The incident in the coffeehouse helped Asad find his calling. He used his newfound notoriety to recruit an army of bandits. He chose only men from his tribe and clan, knowing that they would never betray him. He wanted the ability to strike far from Beit Sayeed, so he stole a stable full of horses from the new rulers of Palestine, the British army. He wanted the ability to intimidate rivals, so he stole guns from the British as well. When his raids began they were like nothing Palestine had seen for generations. He and his band struck towns and villages from the Coastal Plain to the Galilee to the hills of Samaria and then vanished without a trace. His victims were mostly other Arabs, but occasionally he would raid a poorly defended Jewish settlement-and sometimes, if he was in the mood for Jewish blood, he would kidnap a Zionist and kill him with his long, curved knife.
Asad al-Khalifa soon became a wealthy man. Unlike other successful Arab criminals, he did not draw attention to himself by flaunting his newfound riches. He wore the galabia and kaffiyeh of an ordinary fellah and spent most nights in his family’s mud-and-straw hut. To ensure his protection he spread money and loot among his clan. To the world outside Beit Sayeed, he appeared to be just an ordinary peasant, but inside the village he was now called Sheikh Asad.
He would not remain a mere bandit and highwayman for long. Palestine was changing-and from the vantage point of the Arabs, not for the better. By the mid-1930s, the Yishuv, the Jewish population of Palestine, had reached nearly a half million, compared with approximately a million Arabs. The official emigration rate was sixty thousand per year, but Sheikh Asad had heard the actual rate was far higher than that. Even a poor boy with no formal schooling could see that the Arabs would be a minority in their own country. Palestine was like a tinder-dry forest. A single spark might set it ablaze.
The spark occurred on April 15, 1936, when a gang of Arabs shot three Jews on the road east of Tulkarm. Members of the Jewish Irgun Bet retaliated by killing two Arabs not far from Beit Sayeed. Events spiraled rapidly out of control, culminating with an Arab rampage through the streets of Jaffa that left nine Jews dead. The Arab Revolt had begun.
There had been periods of unrest in Palestine, times when Arab frustration would boil over into rioting and killing, but never had there been anything like the coordinated violence and unrest that swept the land that spring and summer of 1936. Jews all across Palestine became targets of Arab rage. Shops were looted, orchards uprooted, homes and settlements burned. Jews were murdered on buses and in cafes, even inside their own homes. In Jerusalem, the Arab leaders convened and demanded an end to all Jewish immigration and the immediate installation of an Arab-majority government.
Sheikh Asad, though a thief, considered himself first and foremost a
