With the Arabs in Jerusalem
225
taking more pictures of Ismail I made sure of a fine breakfast
every morning until the Mandate ended and real war broke
out.
In charge of our arsenal in Osborne House—a small
boarded-up back room piled high with sandbags—was one of
the bloodthirstiest Arabs I ever met. He was a thin, morbid
fanatic with blazing eyes, named All. I won his friendship by
photographing him repeatedly in the act of firing a Bren gun.
Thereafter he would often tip me off to the location of extra
food on the premises. We would steal it together and eat it
in the privacy of our arsenal. I was careful not to cross Ali,
for he had a vile temper. I had seen him fly at a Green Shirter
with a knife; only the brawny Moustafa was able to stop him.
Sitting on a box of bullets or grenades, I would look at Ali
with the conviction that I was facing a dormant savage, a
ruthless killer whose passions were violently suppressed. One
day, after we had finished a can of purloined sardines, I started
off impressively with a bare-faced lie:
"Ali, I have studied medicine, psychology, and the science
of the human mind. I can tell many things about a person by
looking at him. You are a very strong and a brave Arab, but
you are afraid to do what your heart dictates. Tell me what
it is. Maybe we can do it together."
Ali looked at me intently, with a savage glint in his eyes
which made mc uncomfortable. We were alone; he was
armed, and 1 knew that I was no match for a man whom I felt
instinctively was a killer. . . . Ali opened up gradually, first
by confessing that as a boy he had beaten a playmate to death
because he caught him stealing. Growing up in a Cairo slum
—with no schooling or formal training—Ali had developed a
fanatic sense of right and wrong. All wrong was to be punished
by death in order to end the progeny of wrongdoers and
eliminate evil from the world.
"Who will determine what is right and wrong?" I asked.
"I make the judgment," Ali said. He had been jailed. "It