The Levanter Read Free Page A

think that he’s got something more.”
    “A hunch, or reasons?”
    “A hunch. But if Melanie had asked me, I’d have jumped at the chance of an interview.”
    “Okay them. I’ll jump. We’d better wire New York. Can we put Ghaled’s name in a cable from here?”
    “Not unless you want to be tailed by the police.”
    “Is it that bad?”
    “They’d probably tip off the local Al Fatah bureau, too. I told you. He’s poison.”
    It took me some two hours with the bureau files to find out why.
    Salah Ghaled had been born in Haifa, the eldest son of a respected Arab physician, in 1930, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His mother had been from Nazareth. He had attended private schools and was said to have been an exceptionally gifted pupil. In 1948 he had been accepted as a student by the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was to have studied medicine there, as his father had. That program, however, had been interrupted by the first Arab-Israeli war.
    The attacking forces were those of the Jordanian Arab Legion and an irregular Arab Liberation Army. On the defensive at first, but later counterattacking, was the Haganah, the Jewish army fighting to preserve the newly proclaimed State of Israel. Charges of atrocities committed against noncombatants were made freely by both sides. An Arab exodus began.
    Over eight hundred thousand Arabs went; some in panic, some because they thought that they were leaving the field clear for an advancing Army of Liberation. All expected soon to return to their land and their homes. Few ever succeeded in doing so. The Palestinian refugee problem had been born. Among those early refugees had been the Ghaled family from Haifa.
    They suffered less than many of their fellow refugees; Ghaled senior was a doctor and had money. After a few weeks in a temporary camp the family moved to Jericho. At that point Salah could have gone to Cairo and the university as planned. Instead, and apparently with his father’s blessing, he joined the Arab Liberation irregulars. This was the army which had boasted that it would “drive the Jews into the sea”.
    When, a year later, the war ended, with the Israelis more firmly established on dry land than ever and the Arab forces in hopeless disarray, Salah Ghaled had just turned eighteen. He had fought in an army which had been not only defeated but humiliated as well. Both defeat and humiliation had to be avenged. In Cairo, where he at last went to pursue his medical studies, he was soon drawn into student politics. According to a statement he made some years later, he there became a Marxist. He never qualified as a doctor. In 1952 he went to work as a “medical aide” in an UNWRA Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan.
    The guerrilla movement was in its infancy then, but he seems to have been a natural leader and was soon heading his own band of “infiltrators”, as they were called by the Israelis, in raids across the Jordanian border into Israel. As he was still on the UNWRA payroll as a medical aide, it was necessary for him to use a cover name. The one he chose was El-Matwa - Jackknife - and before long it had achieved some notoriety. One of Jackknife’s exploits, the shooting-up of an Israeli bus, was believed to have provoked a shattering Israeli reprisal raid. Among the Palestinian militants, success was measured by the violence of the enemy’s reaction. Jackknife’s reputation as a local leader was now established. When Egyptian intelligence officers came looking for Palestinians who knew the border country and would be willing to serve with the fedayeen, Ghaled was among the select few who were approached.
    The Egyptian fedayeen were heavily armed commando forces. Operating from Egyptian and Jordanian bases, they penetrated deep into Israeli territory, murdering civilians, mining roads, and blowing up installations. The Sinai campaign of 1958 put an end to their activities, but among the Palestinians the fedayeen idea persisted. The