PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 136

clothing, dresses in particular, which quickly became
the envy of the women. And that is how the barrels of
babaçu were exchanged for dresses.
After a year, after having gathered 8000 tonnes of
nuts, we sent them all to the port in Itaqui, and from
there to the US. But the weeks passed and the letter of
credit was not released. The Americans were not paying
up. I had to get on a plane to go and meet my con-
tacts in Pennsylvania: in their offices, there were four of
them, each with his lawyer beside him, and they could
not understand why I had come without mine!
‘I am not here to tell lies,’ I retorted, which solicited
a general movement of irritation.
Had I not sent them what they wanted? Why did
they not pay? They stopped me dead: their order had
been for 9000 tonnes and I had sent “only” 8000. I had
not respected the terms of the agreement. I would lose
everything, they would pay nothing.
Hearing them speak in this tone, I felt humiliated.
I got up and I looked at them, one after the other, like
the men in Gaza do, and I expostulated:
‘I am Muhyeddin Al Jamal, I am from Gaza. I am
Palestinian. I have spent a year in the Amazon for you,
I have suffered, and you don’t want to pay? I will not
let myself be had…’
One of them answered that if I threatened them, I
would go to jail. And I said:
‘When I get out of prison I will come back, to get
my revenge!’
Luckily, one of the four, probably the most impor-
tant one, a German, took me on one side to invite me
to dinner at his house. Barely had I crossed his thresh-
old than he gave me a telex: he had paid me.
During that evening with his family in his beauti-
ful home, he spoke of his businesses, coal mines among
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Memories of 1948
others, and suggested that I work with him on the contin-
ued production of babaçu. But I aspired to other things.
Once back in Rio, I learned that car sales had gone
down and that the garage was going bankrupt. I had
to ask my contacts at Ford to increase the quota of cars
I was normally allotted, and they accepted to do so –
they even called it the “babaçu quota”. By chance, the
Ford Corcel II had been voted “car of the year” and
was selling well. My business recovered so well that I
bought two other concessions, Chevrolet and Volkswa-
gen. We worked very hard, sometimes 18 hours a day.
My mother could be proud of me.
By the early 1980s, I had become a well-known
person in the Arab community of Rio de Janeiro, and
we made connections with our counterparts in South
America, even creating a Latin-American confederation,
the Fearab. I was often called when Arab personalities
came to visit Brazil. For example, I was the one who wel-
comed Prince Mohammad of Jordan in 1983. He kindly
invited me to have a drink with him and I ordered a
guaraná, the national drink. The prince also thought it
was delicious, so much so that I had the idea to create a
factory to make it in Jordan.
As it happened, I had been wanting to settle with
my family in an Arab country, and Prince Mohammad
gave us Jordanian nationality, 22 which meant we could
get closer to Palestine… 23 Unfortunately, the Brazilian
manufacturers of guaraná did not like the taste of the
water in Jordan: it tainted the drink, they said… and
the project failed. But our family settled in Jordan,
even if later, our children studied in the US. I invested
in an insurance company in Palestine, produced car-
pets in Jordan and invested in some financial products.
But I have never forgotten who I am and where I come
from: Muhyeddin of Gaza.