The Syrian Prince
Months after the Schwarz-Dayan wedding, in April 1936, at his Montfort Castle on the other side of the Esdraelon Valley from Nahalal, Habib Hawa threw a glittering three-day wedding extravaganza for his sister-in-law. The English called Habib the “Syrian Prince” because of his poise and sense of entitlement, and the fact he lived in a Crusader fortress.
Habib was raised in a wonderful jumble of worlds: on top of the pyramid stood the Ottoman governor and his retinue of officers and belly dancers, there were the patriarchs in Jerusalem, Latin and Greek with their icons and archaic rivalries; next came families like his headed by men traveling back and forth to Alexandria, Damascus, and Beirut on the new railway line, men who carried on long conversations about a better future over the glowing red embers of a nargilla while sipping Lebanese wine. These aristocratic families were served by a bevy of butlers and maids and mistresses. On the bottom of the social rung were peasants sweating in the fields. Bedouins with long flowing desert robes occasionally led their camels through the countryside. Automobiles began to appear on the roads when Habib was a young boy.
Habib was a product of the Ottomans, if only because its decrepitude determined much of his early life.
His grandfather was the governor of Aleppo and his father the honorary British consul. Habib studied at the elite Jesuit St. Joseph School in Lebanon and then Alexandria—when he returned to Palestine on visits, he took a private train. In the Galilee, his family owned 40,000 acres around the family’s Montfort Castle, and members of a Druze clan took care of the tobacco fields, the pork farm, and the stables of Arabian horses.
Back in Alexandria he lived the life of a young dandy. He grew a fashionable toothbrush mustache and cavorted with his class peers and the demimondes of the city, lighting the ladies’ Dunhill cigarettes using ten-pound notes.
Habib eventually headed off to study law at the Sorbonne and stood out with his olive-colored thin face, his tall and slender frame, his francophone polish and refinement. Following the British capture of Palestine in 1918, he returned to Acre to manage his family’s far-flung and feudal string of properties and estates including seventeen villages. Habib, with his own ship for trading in wheat and other commodities, became the chief contractor of the British army in Palestine and Egypt.
Habib reminisced to his daughter Raymonda many years later, after becoming a pauper with a bad limp from an Israeli bullet, how since the days of Richard the Lionheart the country hadn’t seen such a grand wedding feast. “I was like King Sarastro in the Magic Flute!” There were belly dancers, French chefs, costumes for a ball, a full orchestra brought in from Cairo, and over a hundred guests, including top British officers and Arab notables with herringbone jackets and monographed handkerchiefs.
Raymonda’s mother, Habib’s wife and the sister of the bride, was the only one at the castle privy to his secret plan. With the brandies and finest whiskeys flowing, he chose the perfect moment to launch a rebellion he hoped would frustrate, once and for all, the Zionist designs on his country and his honor. Under the veneer of the pleasure-seeking grandee, free-wheeling, fun-loving Habib was an Arab nationalist with a strong awareness of a thousand years of family history in Palestine, and someone who regarded British rule as a mere stopgap before Arabs could become the masters of their own fate.
The English brought modern administration, indoor plumbing, the rule of law, and helped Arabs build a modern society, and for that he was grateful. What he resolutely opposed was the Zionist plan to erect a tractor-drive modern Jewish state in Palestine, and to do so with British backing.
To get to the castle in their fleet of Fords, Citroëns, Mercedes, and even a few Rolls-Royces, guests traveled along a bumpy country road. Most of the invitees must have been delighted to attend the three-day party because it felt like reentering the romance of the Crusader period. Nowhere in Palestine was there such pomp, nowhere was the food so sumptuous, nowhere the atmosphere more glittering. The only frown in the otherwise perfectly choreographed ceremony was on the face of Habib’s sister Sylvie. It had been four years since her younger brother had “dishonored” the family by marrying “the wild villager,” and she had yet to forgive him.
The “wild villager,” named Christmas and the sister of the bride, wore a Coco Chanel dress, rayon stockings, and a string of pearls. Habib was still very much in love with his wife’s lithe beauty, feisty character, and American-bred independence: Christmas came from a family in the Christian village of Kfar Yassif close to Haifa, and was raised in New York. She had decisively New York attitudes about gender, democracy, equality, and the ludicrousness of class snobbery. She would be the source of her daughter’s feminism. She and Habib’s sister Sylvie avoided one another. In a society in which women were expected to “keep among themselves,” Christmas smoked cigarettes with the officers and businessmen, talked politics with some of the invited political leaders, and held her own during debates about the brewing conflict with the Zionists.
On the second day of the wedding party, following yet another bacchanal feast, and after Habib had retired to his chamber for a nap, Christmas saw the signal from the valley. She roused her husband and told him the guerrillas were ready to strike.
Habib dressed in his tuxedo and tails, stopped the thirty-piece orchestra, and asked the British officers to meet the guerrilla leaders he now summoned up from his stables. The meeting was brief and cordial. Without giving away details of precise time and place, Habib let the officers know there would be trouble that evening. The two sides shook hands, the officers left the wedding, and the fighting broke out later that night. Nahalal, the biggest settlement in the north of the country, was the first target. The Plain of Esdraelon has been the pathway of warriors since the Battle of Megiddo in the fifteenth century BCE. There the Greeks battled the Maccabees, and the Jewish armies defied the Romans; Mongols, Mamluks, Salah al-Din, and Allenby all seized the valley because of its immense strategic worth. It was the most natural place for the rebels to begin their attacks.
That night guerrillas shot dead the gardener who had taught Moshe how to graft fruit trees.