Leon Uris Read Free Page B

occupies a small but strategic knoll in Ayalon, which has been described as both a valley and a plain. A German archaeological dig before the First World War determined that remnants of civilized man on this hillock dated back over four thousand years. If one were to come from the sea from Jaffa moving south and east toward Jerusalem, one would enter the plain through the twin guardian cities of Ramle and Lydda, where St. George the dragon slayer allegedly held court.
    Ten miles into the plain one would come upon the knoll where the Village of Tabah stands sentinel as the gateway to Jerusalem. Beyond Tabah the road takes on a tortuous uphill route, snaking along the bed of a steep ravine known as the Bab el Wad. The Bab el Wad squirms a dozen miles to the outskirts of Jerusalem.
    Before Joshua’s battle, this was ancient Canaan, a land bridge between the powers of the Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia and Egypt. Then, as today, the land of Canaan lay like a morsel between the jaws of a crocodile, a passageway for invading armies. Waves of Semitic tribes drifted or swarmed into Canaan and settled to create a prebiblical civilization of city-states that were eventually conquered and absorbed by the nomadic Hebrew tribes.
    After Joshua, the knoll of Tabah bore witness to the scourging armies of Assyria and Babylon, of Egypt and Persia, of Greece and Rome. It was the pale of the ill-fated Hebrew Tribe of Dan and the home of the errant Jewish judge, Samson. It knew the wheels of the Philistine chariot all too well.
    It saw the great Jewish revolt against the Greeks, and here Judah, ‘the Hammerer,’ assembled his Maccabees for the assault to liberate Jerusalem.
    It is said that Mohammed stopped at the knoll on his legendary overnight journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and back, riding his mythical horse, el-Buraq, which had the face of a woman, the tail of a peacock, and could gallop in a single stride as far as the eye could see. Mohammed, any villager will tell you, leaped from the knoll at Tabah and landed in Jerusalem.
    Mohammed was followed to this place by the armies that swept out of the desert under the banner of Islam to evict the Christians from the Holy Land.
    And Richard the Lion-Heart encamped here before his disastrous march to Jerusalem that ended his Crusade in a shambles.
    The knoll of Tabah witnessed the British legions fighting their way to Jerusalem in the First World War.
    Between those times, millions of pairs of feet of devout Jews, Christians, and Moslems passed here on their pilgrimage. Insofar as the pageant of history goes, the Village of Tabah rested on a hill that was.
    The most recent of the captains of conquest were the Ottomans, who stormed out of Turkey to devour the Middle East in the sixteenth century and drew a curtain of darkness over the region for four hundred years.
    Under the Ottomans, the Holy Land lay gasping, the rocks of her fields protruding like the baked bones of a monolithic mastodon, or from mucky, diseased swamp. As a minor backwater district of the Syrian province, Palestine had been devalued to bastardy and orphanhood. It had no status except dim echoes of its past. And Jerusalem, wrote the travelers of the day, was reduced to sackcloth and ashes.
    Total cruelty, total corruption, and pernicious feudalism spelled out the infamous rule of the Turks. A few influential Palestinian Arab families did the dirty business for the Ottomans. One of these was the Kabir family, which was rewarded for its collaboration by large land grants in the Palestine district. One of its holdings covered a good part of the Valley of Ayalon.
    In the eighteenth century the Kabirs took over several farming villages and peopled them with illiterate, impoverished, land-hungry Arab peasants, then proceeded to suck them dry. Tabah was the central village, with smaller ones scattered about the valley. The Kabirs had long abandoned permanent residence in the desolation of Palestine for Damascus, from which the Syrian