Then something happened that made him forget himself, forget Suwayr, forget his studies, forget everything else. Fighting broke out between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian resistance organisations in Amman. Everyone huddled around their radios to listen for the latest news and details of the battles. Everyone was obsessed by what was happening in ‘Wahdat’, ‘Marka’, ‘al-Mahatta’ and ‘Jabal Hussein’, which they took to calling ‘Revolutionary Jabal’, just as the fedayeen themselves did. Hisham would leave college and head straight for his friends’ house, where they would gather in the hall around a radio and a large pot of tea, drinking it by force of habit and listening in a silence occasionally punctuated by quick, angry comments:
‘Hussein has confirmed that he is a collaborator; there’s absolutely no room for doubt.’
‘Didn’t he say we are all fedayeen?’
‘What a traitor!’
‘How happy Israel must be!’
‘Nasser* won’t stand with his hands tied in the face of this bloodbath and this treachery!’
‘The hope is that Syria will intervene’
‘How could the Iraqi army not intervene in Jordan?’
‘It’s a conspiracy, a conspiracy!’
Shrieks of joy would ring out whenever news came that a division of the Jordanian army had joined the resistance, or that a military commander had rebelled against the army and joined the ranks of the fedayeen. There was an overwhelming feeling that the resistance would persevere and that the fedayeen would triumph despite the conspiracies and treachery of Jordan’s King Hussein, of Israel, and of America, who lurked behind it all.
The needle on the radio jumped from station to station: from ‘London’ to the ‘Voice of America’ to the ‘Voice of the Arabs’ and the ‘Voice of the Revolution’ – where it usually stayed. When the needle fell by chance on Radio Amman or the Israeli Broadcasting Authority they would fumble to change it, cursing and swearing. Muhanna wanted to keep the needle the whole time on ‘Voice of the Arabs’, but the others wanted ‘Voice of the Revolution’. He would give in, huffing and puffing and muttering incomprehensibly, then slip away to his room where the transistor radio was permanently tuned to his favourite station. He would shut the door, having already made himself a pot of tea.
Their thirst for knowledge could not be quenched by the news from ‘London’, the ‘Voice of America’ or any other station. The young people believed that America and the imperialist powers were behind the conspiracy. They trusted only the ‘Voice of the Revolution’ and only felt happy when it gave them news of resistance victories.
Their excitement reached fever pitch when a delegation from the Arab League managed to smuggle Abu Ammar (Yasser Arafat) out of Amman to Cairo, in preparation for the Arab summit conference called by Gamal Abdel-Nasser to address the situation. The story of his departure sounded more like a fantasy from the traditional stories of the ‘Days of the Arabs’.* The delegation managed to smuggle him out in traditional Arab dress, and the stock of the Kuwaiti Sheikh Sa‘d al-‘Abdallah al-Sabah rose considerably, after his role in this extraordinary operation became known. Muhanna was exasperated by this summit story; he would have preferred Nasser to intervene directly and finish King Hussein off. Despite this, he kept repeating, ‘Didn’t I tell you … only Nasser can solve it.’ As much as they were agreed on loathing King Hussein, they harboured a deep admiration for Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi, especially when he drew his revolver on King Hussein at the conference. It was enough for Nasser to have described al-Gaddafi as the ‘guardian of the nation’, and to say that al-Gaddafi reminded him of his youth, for Muhanna to admire him. In fact, this was reason enough for everyone to admire Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi, regardless of anything else.
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* Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1918–70) led the Free Officers’ Movement that brought an end to the Egyptian monarchy on 23 July 1952, becoming President of Egypt (1954–70). Events alluded to in chapters 19 and 20 include the war over Suez (1956); the union of Egypt with Syria in the United Arab Republic (1958–62); the 1967 Six Day War with Israel; and the Palestinian-Jordanian clashes of ‘Black September’, 1970.
* Stories of inter-tribal conflicts among the pre-Islamic Arabs.