The biography

Section 1Introduction

Palestine was cut out of the body of natural Syria after the First World War, once the British army under General Allenby took it on 9 December 1917, and it was placed under British Mandate by a decision of the League of Nations on 11 September 1922. Natural Syria, which had been under Ottoman rule since the forces of Sultan Selim I took it in June 1516, was divided between France and Britain, the two victors of that war, under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement they concluded in secret in May 1916, a few weeks before the Sharif of Mecca, Sharif Hussein bin Ali, declared the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule on 10 June 1916 and joined the Allied forces against the Central Powers in the war that had begun in 1914. The League of Nations decision imposing the British Mandate on Palestine required the mandate authorities to work towards what the Balfour Declaration had promised. That declaration, issued by the British foreign secretary on 2 November 1917, called for easing Jewish immigration to Palestine and creating the conditions for a Jewish national home there.

The British Mandate over Palestine therefore ran from September 1922 until 15 May 1948, preceded by some four years of occupation. Throughout it, the mandate authorities and their occupying forces opened every avenue to the immigration of Jews from around the world, and from Europe and America in particular. They eased the transfer of Palestinian land and property to the newcomers, legalised their residence, allowed them to build political, educational, health, social, economic and military institutions, and permitted entirely Jewish settlements on Palestinian land held under that British mandate. The Palestinians, the natural inhabitants of the land, resisted the seizure of their livelihoods and the transfer of their property to Zionist settlers, and rejected every measure the mandate authorities took to establish the Jewish national home on their land. The 1936 revolt was one of the most important risings of the Palestinian Arab people against the forces and authorities of the British Mandate on one side and against the Jewish settlers, their colonies and their institutions on the other. Through it they called for an end to the policies that permitted and eased the building of a Jewish national home on their land, demanded that the door be closed to Jewish immigrants and that land transfers to them stop, and called for a national government answerable to a democratically elected parliament.

Section 2Ibrahim Abu Ayyash: his origins and growth against a background of deep turmoil

The general strike had spread across Palestine from end to end, answering the call that went out from Nablus and Jaffa on 20 April 1936 and the announcement made in Jerusalem five days later of the founding of the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine.

These developments came after Palestinian armed resistance to the mandate forces intensified, in the face of the enormous rise, which those same authorities had made possible, in the number of Jewish immigrants arriving in Palestine, particularly from 1933 onwards. Immigrant numbers rose from 9,553 in 1932 to 30,327 in 1933, to 42,459 in 1934, and to 61,854 in 1935. Alongside this came the steady tightening of immigrant control over the Palestinian economy and the appearance of a Zionist civil and military structure in Palestine. The rise in Jewish immigration during that period followed the Nazi ascent to power in Germany.

Fighting between the Palestinian and Arab resistance and the mandate forces on Palestinian soil had widened and sharpened since the death in battle of the commander Izz ad-Din al-Qassam near the village of Ya'bad on 20 November 1935. In the week that ended with the declaration of the strike, several resistance operations took place in the Tulkarm-Nablus area under the fighter Farhan al-Sa'di. They spread into wide confrontations between Palestinians and Jewish settlers in the city of Jaffa, where close to a thousand settlers from Shapira, near Tel Aviv, attacked the Abu Kabir quarter of Jaffa and set it alight. The Arabs of Jaffa answered with huge demonstrations that clashed with the police and left a number dead. After a meeting between Arab representatives and the British High Commissioner produced nothing, a strike committee was formed and called on all the country's inhabitants to declare a general strike. The mandate authorities responded by declaring a state of emergency and imposing curfews over wide areas of Palestine. The strike ran for 178 consecutive days. Civil disobedience was declared: all public and private transport stopped, every bus, lorry and taxi was placed at the disposal of the national strike committee, the sailors and workers of Haifa port announced that they had stopped work, and calls went out to refuse to pay taxes. The fighting did not pause during the strike. It widened and moved into many parts of Palestine.

The echoes of the battle of Halhul, fought on 26 September 1936 between the rebels and the mandate forces, were still sounding across the Hebron highlands, since Halhul lies no more than six kilometres from Beit Ummar. Matters in the Hebron highlands and in Palestine as a whole had begun to move towards a kind of calm after that battle, following the appeal that the kings and heads of the Arab states addressed to the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine on 12 October 1936, asking it to halt the strike and to give their British friends a reasonable period to prove their good faith and meet the rebels' demands.

In that month, and on its twenty-second day, that is on 22 October 1936, Abdel Hameed Abu Ayyash was given a son, whom he named Ibrahim. The news brought joy and gladness to the family and to the people of the village after the long months of strike that Beit Ummar and all of Palestine had lived through.

Abdel Hameed had married a daughter of the village, Jameela Abu Maria, at the age of twenty-four; Jameela was then twenty. She had a magnetic presence, an evident intelligence, and a sense of responsibility mixed with wit and good humour. She was strongly built, proud, and generous. She could milk ninety ewes without tiring. Ibrahim took after his mother, who succeeded in planting much of her own character in her son. Abdel Hameed at that time worked for the government of Palestine, appointed by the British mandate authorities, as a forest warden responsible for some of the woodland of the Hebron highlands. Alongside that post he farmed and raised livestock on land owned by the Abu Ayyash family. The family lived in a three-storey house, a ba'lali house as the farmers of Beit Ummar called it then. The ground floor was a byre where the sheep were kept, a store for farming materials and tools, and a place to keep the summer harvest for the family's use through the winter. The second and third floors held bedrooms for the family, and a space was made in the loft of the third floor to lodge guests when they came to visit.

The family engaged a number of men from Beit Ummar and the neighbouring villages to plough and work the land. Some of them stayed in the family's service for many years. Jameela from time to time called on Hussein al-Yatawi, or Ahmad al-Halhouli, or one of the village women, for household tasks and for the washing, particularly once the load grew heavier as the family grew larger. When Ibrahim was born, Abdel Hameed's family consisted of four boys (Badawi, Ahmad, Mohammad and Yousef, who died as a child of four or five) and two girls (Azizeh, and Safiyyeh, who died in infancy). Within ten years the family had grown to nine, with the arrival of Khalil, Ghazlan, Ghazaleh and Yousef, after losing two of its members.

The younger children of the family, boys and girls, lived in the rooms of the second floor of the house. The older children lived on the third floor.

The Abu Ayyash family owned land in the village of Beit Ummar and grew a range of crops on it, from various fruit trees to many kinds of vegetables. The family shared the planting, the tending, the picking, and the handling and sale of the produce. They also owned a flock of sheep, entrusted to a number of shepherds who worked for the family for a set wage. Members of the family, Ibrahim among them, took part in planting the family land, picking its fruit and carrying it, and he did not hesitate to spend time herding the family's animals when the shepherds were away.

In spring the family, or a number of its members, would move with their animals to open country a few kilometres from Beit Ummar known as Izbet al-Muzayri'a, and stay for some days or a few weeks. During these journeys the family lodged in caves prepared for the purpose. The journeys were known as ta'zib. On one of them Ibrahim's sister, who had charge of him at the time, lost sight of her brother as she moved from one wooded patch to another, and could not find him. Ibrahim was then not yet three years old. The whole village, men and women, turned out to search for the boy, and the rebels of the Hebron highlands joined the search until they found him after some forty hours, lying at the foot of one of the forest trees. From that day Ibrahim was known to everyone and a subject of the villagers' concern.

Abdel Hameed Abu Ayyash never had the chance of schooling, for there was no school in Beit Ummar at the time, but his hunger for learning drove him to learn to read and write from the village kuttab teachers. He was not known for bigotry or narrowness. He was liberal in his view of life. He treated his wife and his daughters exactly as he treated his sons. None of his daughters veiled her face or covered her hair. They worked in the house and helped with the field and its demands. They received the family's male friends naturally, without stiffness or bigotry. They received their own friends at home and visited them in their houses, with no objection or unease from any of the men of the family. Jameela often objected to an opinion or a position of her husband's without hesitation or fear. She treated everyone with respect and gave everyone room to speak their mind. This was the setting in which Ibrahim was raised and grew.

Abdel Hameed Abu Ayyash's work as a forest warden for the mandate authority meant spending a good deal of his time away from home, for days at a stretch. He rode to work each day on his mare, which he called al-Shahbaa; the mare and her owner were closely bound to one another, and she was the object of the whole family's care and affection. He continued in that occupation until 1962: through the end of the British Mandate over Palestine at midnight on 15 May 1948, the seizure by the Zionist Jews of the greater part of Palestinian land and their declaration of their Zionist entity upon it, and the annexation of the lands of the West Bank of the Jordan to Jordan and the declaration of the union of the two banks in April 1950.

Ibrahim's mother, Jameela Abu Maria, belonged to one of the known families of Beit Ummar; her grandfather, Salameh Ali Doudin, had held the post of governor of the district under Ottoman rule. Although she had no schooling of any kind, since none was open to girls in her district at the time, she believed in the importance of education and encouraged her daughters to take whatever schooling was available to the village girls in the 1940s. That chance appeared with the opening of the first boys' school in Beit Ummar in the middle of the 1930s. The notables of the village raised no objection to the few girls who wished to learn sharing the classrooms with the village boys and taking their basic primary schooling alongside them. Two of her daughters accordingly received a basic education in the mixed boys' school of Beit Ummar, before matters ended in 1945-1946 with the opening of a separate school in the village for its girls, which took in many of them that year.

The schoolmistresses came from outside the Hebron district: Mrs Maysar Hamdan from Jenin, and Kafa Abdel Hadi from Nablus. The Abu Ayyash family gave the teachers every support in their work and hosted them in the family house. They would not leave them alone in their lodgings at the school on the bitterly cold days. Ibrahim often carried them fresh food cooked by his mother, on her instructions.

The boys' school of Beit Ummar had been founded in the village in 1933-1934, and its highest class was the fourth primary. It grew, so that by the second half of the 1940s it offered its pupils the seven basic school years. The system of the day was taken from the British one, which ended with the pupil obtaining the certificate known as the matriculation, after passing a public examination held each year and after four further years beyond the basic stage. The matriculation allowed a pupil to enter the university system in Britain and complete his higher education.

Badawi Abu Ayyash, born in 1928 and Abdel Hameed's eldest son, ran the family's affairs and property while his father was away, and stood in for him in practice. Badawi learned to read and write from the village kuttab teachers and showed skill and quickness in learning. The family's income from its crops and its livestock trade, together with the salaries and wages its members earned, went into a central box that Badawi managed and drew on for the household's needs and obligations on one hand and each member's needs on the other. There was no barber's shop in Beit Ummar at the time, which obliged Badawi to take the scissors to his brothers' heads from time to time.

Umm Badawi and her daughter Azizeh, born in 1926, saw to the house and the family. The main meal was cooked in the afternoon, and the family gathered to eat it each evening after returning from the fields or after school. Ibrahim had a larger share of his mother's care and attention, a thing well known within the family, and it grew stronger after she felt she had almost lost him when he was lost in the woodland near the village, as related above.

Ibrahim drew not only his mother's attention; he held a special place with his uncle, who was also named Ibrahim. His uncle was a figure of standing in Beit Ummar and among the bedouin of the district, having lived a period of his life among them. He judged disputes between the villagers, farmers and bedouin alike, and his house in the village served as both courtroom and guest hall, where he received his visitors and those who came to him for judgement. Ibrahim spent a fair share of his time in his uncle's company, and took from him not only wisdom and a judge's gift for weighing matters and settling disputes, but also a heavy habit of coffee and the smoking of the hisha and the pipe, before he was ten years old.

Ibrahim was no lover of food as a boy, which gave his skin a yellowish cast and led his mother to nickname him the Yellow One. The name stayed with him through his childhood in Beit Ummar, and he remained a light eater all his life. He was slender, handsome and quick-witted, and always drew the interest of the girls of his village. He liked late evenings and card games, was sociable, and played football with the other village boys and his schoolmates.

Ibrahim entered the village school in 1942. The Second World War had not yet ended, and the whole country was passing through hard economic conditions that sharpened the want and made the basics of life difficult to secure for every class and layer of society.

Ibrahim passed through the basic school years in the village classrooms with success and distinction. He was sharp, with will and resolve, and his quickness and intelligence drew the attention of his teachers and his fellow pupils. The school was run by Hashem al-Anani, and among his teachers were Kayed Abdel Haq, who belonged to the communist National Liberation League and came from Nablus, and Ibrahim al-Nuaimi. The number of pupils in a single class at that time did not exceed the fingers of one hand. Beit Ummar had no electricity then, and pupils studied by oil lamp or candle.

Ibrahim was gentle, quick-witted and easy company, and built firm friendships with the other boys of the village. From childhood he loved reading literature, and sought through his teachers to get hold of Shakespeare and some of the great works of English literature. He was sensitive by nature and always enjoyed particular regard from the men and women of the village. The family was comfortably off, given the range of its sources of income. That allowed it to host his sisters' friends, the schoolmistresses, and the girls who came from the neighbouring villages. Ibrahim drew the interest of the girls of his village from his teenage years, and was bold, never hesitating to make his feelings known to them by one means or another.

Beit Ummar, the quiet village in the northern part of the Hebron highlands at close to a thousand metres, was a farming village in the full sense, with wide lands of more than thirty thousand dunams and a striking natural beauty. Its people, numbering in the mid-1930s something over a thousand to twelve hundred, worked in farming and in raising and herding livestock.

Two settings pulled at the village: a purely agricultural one and a bedouin one. When the villagers sat together of an evening they passed on many stories about the history of Beit Ummar, and about the village mosque, which receives worshippers in the two rooms of its upper floor and in its open courtyard, holding on its ground floor the remains of Matta, father of the prophet Yunus, and named for that reason the mosque of the prophet Matta. They told too that Omar bin al-Khattab had passed through the village on his visit to Jerusalem more than fourteen centuries ago.

The village was known for its many springs: Ein Kufin, Ein Marrina, Ein al-Fureidis and the springs of al-Arroub, which lie within the lands of Beit Ummar. Those springs supplied the village and its farming with all the water it needed. The woodland that Ahmad Sameh al-Khalidi established in the area of Beit Ummar gave a place of recovery for patients with chest illnesses. A model agricultural teaching institute was also built on part of the village land, on the pattern of the well-known Khadouri agricultural school in Tulkarm, along with a hospital founded by a missionary body and named the Allenby hospital, for chest diseases. All this made the village a draw for farmers from the surrounding districts and one of the reasons for its stability and its steady growth.

It also whetted the appetite of the Jewish settlers and their financial institutions, and pushed them from the late 1920s to work by every method and in every form to seize the village's land. The mandate authorities helped them take control of wide stretches of miri land, which they used to build the Kfar Etzion settlement in the northern part of the village's land. The village springs had no pumps, so the boys and girls of the village carried water for domestic use in jars and tins, using mules and donkeys. Ibrahim took part in this work with the other young people of the village.

The climate of Beit Ummar and its clean air, the taste of its sweet clear water with its natural coolness, the grapes, peaches, plums, apples, figs, tomatoes and olives, all held a dear place in Ibrahim's memory and in the making of his mind. All these small things carried to him the meaning of homeland, of the farmer, and of family, and deepened his attachment to all of it.

Kfar Etzion was in fact a cluster of several Zionist settlements. The settlers grew kinds of fruit and vegetable new to the district, using methods of cultivation, irrigation systems, and ploughing and harvesting equipment unknown to the farmers of Beit Ummar at the time, along with tools for picking, ways of collecting, sorting and canning, and means of grafting trees and dealing with pests, insects and disease. The settlement had electricity, generated by diesel sets. All this led the farmers of Beit Ummar to watch what went on in the settlement with open eyes and an appetite to learn.

The farmers of Beit Ummar watched what happened in the settlement near their village from a distance, for the settlement stood on part of their own land. They saw how it was given every financial and technical means and every kind of expertise in order to grow and expand, while they, the people of the district since time out of mind, were denied every means of growth and development. The contrast deepened the sense of injustice and oppression among the farmers of Beit Ummar and sharpened their bitterness towards the settlers and the mandate authorities that helped them.

Grave events followed one another during Ibrahim's years at the village school. Word reached him of the end of the Second World War in 1945 with the defeat of Hitler's Germany. He recalled that he and his schoolmates and the children of the village used to hold contests of their own in the school yard, playing at war by dividing into two camps. The Allied camp won. He heard that Jewish immigration to Palestine had grown sharper and heavier during that war and because of it. The older people in the village grew more uneasy and anxious as the days passed.

The Abu Ayyash family was the only one in the village that owned a radio at the time. The men of the village spent some of their evenings in that house. The set ran off a car battery that needed constant recharging. They listened to the news bulletins of Jerusalem radio, London radio and Cairo radio. It was one of the most important sources of news about the events shaking Palestine and the countries of the region.

News began to arrive of the quickening events in Palestine from 1947. On 7 October 1947 the League of Arab States decided to form an Arab military committee to follow developments on the ground, and on 29 November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations resolved to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the Jerusalem area placed under international administration. The resolution granted the Jewish settlers in Palestine a share of the land greater than the share it granted the original owners of that land. The resolution was rejected, and Britain then announced its decision to end its mandate over Palestine in August 1948. The Zionist movement in Palestine, for its part, set its armed groups in motion after the partition resolution and launched terrible and repeated military operations of terror, under a complete plan aimed at wide-scale ethnic cleansing: driving the inhabitants out of Palestinian towns and villages, emptying broad areas of Palestinian land of their owners and residents, and opening those lands to the Jewish settlers brought to Palestine from many countries for the purpose of settlement. Backed by its network of international connections, the Zionist movement in Palestine achieved much of what it aimed at before Britain's sudden announcement that it was withdrawing its forces on 15 May 1948. At the same time Palestinian resistance to the settlers' campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing grew fiercer, with the modest means available, but the military balance, together with better administration and organisation, worked in favour of the Jewish settlers. The sound of artillery and rifle fire began to reach the people of Beit Ummar, for the neighbouring villages were under attack by military units of the Jewish settlers. The seizure of Beit Nattif, Beit Jibrin, Deir Ban and other villages drove their people out towards the other villages and towns, and Beit Ummar took its share of the refugees. For the first time Ibrahim saw whole families from those villages, men, women and children, in their midst, seeking help and support, and the family sheltered a number of refugee families in its house in that period. These conditions brought schooling to a halt in the government schools across Palestine, particularly in the areas that received the refugees, since the school buildings had to be used to house them. Because of this, schoolchildren lost a full academic year in 1948-1949. Ibrahim, along with others from Beit Ummar, took part in helping those refugees.

Forces of the Jordanian Arab Army had also begun entering Palestine in that period and took up positions in the Hebron highlands. When news began arriving that the settlers were attacking Palestinian villages around Beit Ummar in the areas the partition resolution had assigned to the Palestinian Arabs, terrorising their people and driving them out, the Third Company of the Arab Army in Palestine under Hikmat Mihyar, working under the command of Abdullah al-Tal, together with rebels from the district, attacked the Kfar Etzion settlement cluster near Beit Ummar on the mornings of 12 and 13 May 1948. A fierce battle ended with the destruction of Kfar Etzion and the surrender of some of the neighbouring settlements. Dozens of armed settlers were killed and 286 taken prisoner, and moved to the Mafraq camp on the east bank of the Jordan. Sixteen soldiers of the Arab Army were killed, and twenty of the rebels, among them Abdel Majeed Abu Ayyash, one of Ibrahim's uncles, and three of his cousins: Yousef, Mousa and Abdel Hameed. The soldiers of the Third Company then used the land of Kfar Etzion as a camp for the Arab Army and the National Guard units, and those forces remained in position until 5 June 1967. The officers and men of the Arab Army fought bravely in that battle, and the people of the district still recall the exceptional courage shown by Captain Qasim Mohammad, one of the company's officers, during the battle of Kfar Etzion; he remained the military authority in the district for many years afterwards.

The Arab split over how to deal with the new situation in Palestine after the declaration of the Zionist entity in May 1948 had begun to take shape and to surface plainly and openly, particularly after the publication of the report of the United Nations mediator Bernadotte, three days after his assassination on 17 September 1948, in which he proposed annexing the West Bank to Jordan, and after the declaration of the All-Palestine Government on 23 September 1948. Two opposed positions appeared at that point, embodied in the Egyptian and Jordanian stands towards the newborn government. The split reflected itself on the Palestinians themselves and deepened the disorder, confusion and fragmentation they were living through after the catastrophe that had befallen them. Division and confusion spread and entered every house in Palestine.

The Zionist entity managed to create a fait accompli after declaring its existence in May 1948. The backing of the great powers, the weakness of the Arab states and the stripping away of their will played their part, until Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon were each obliged to sign armistice agreements with the usurping entity. The result was that the people driven from the Palestinian towns and villages had to be absorbed into refugee camps set up in many places inside what remained of Palestine, and outside it in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon; and that entity was able to make those camps permanent.

For Ibrahim, then twelve years old, this meant watching the displaced people of the villages near Beit Ummar being moved and gathered on a piece of land near his village at the junction of the Jerusalem-Hebron road, where the Arroub camp for Palestinian refugees was built, one of dozens set up at the time. For Ibrahim the building of that camp was daily proof of the crime committed against the people of his country, who had done nothing to deserve it and for which no mind or logic could accept a justification.

The picture of the refugee camp stayed before Ibrahim every day. After finishing at the village school in 1950 he had to enrol at the Hussein bin Ali school in Hebron to continue his studies and take the matriculation. Sometimes he walked the road from Beit Ummar to Hebron, a distance of about twelve kilometres; at other times he tried to catch the passenger bus running the Jerusalem-Hebron line to reach Hebron and get to school before the morning bell. To do so he walked each morning the stretch from Beit Ummar to the Arroub area near the Jerusalem-Hebron junction, close to a kilometre, and waited there for the bus to carry him to Hebron. While he waited his eyes were drawn to the Arroub camp and its refugees, and he asked himself why all this oppression and humiliation had come upon his people.

Bitter cold settles over the Hebron highlands in winter. That obliged Ibrahim, a boy of sixteen, to spend the night at the house of one of his friends. That friend was Mousa al-Nather. A strong bond grew between Ibrahim and Mousa over the years Ibrahim spent as a pupil at the Hussein bin Ali school. The two friends shared the distinction of being among the top pupils. At other times he slept at the house of another friend, Ahmad Abbas, one of the pupils whose family had been forced into the Fawwar camp near Halhul. Ahmad Abbas rented a narrow space above a shop near the Hussein bin Ali school and used it as a sleeping place. That space saw nights in which Ibrahim was the guest of his friend Ahmad Abbas. In such conditions Ibrahim naturally had to look after himself and rely on his own resources. None of it weakened his arm or shook by a hair's breadth his conviction that he had to finish his studies and take the matriculation. He understood that ignorance and the spread of illiteracy among the village people of Palestine were two of the main causes of the catastrophe that had befallen them.

Missing the bus on the Hebron-Arroub camp line meant that Ibrahim either walked back to Beit Ummar or spent the night at the house of his friend Mousa or of Ahmad Abbas. Sleeping at Mousa's or Ahmad's did not trouble him. Their meetings were a chance to trade ideas and news, and to study. Ibrahim longed for a cigarette or more from time to time, and getting one in Hebron meant buying it. Staying with his friends in Hebron let him save the bus fare out of his allowance, and the saving gave him the means to buy a cigarette or two. His Hebron friend Mousa did the buying from a shop near his house.

The school year in those days began at the start of October. That left the pupils free to join the people of their towns, men and women, in the harvest of grapes, fruit and olives. A family's income depended on the season's yield, picked and sold. Ibrahim and his friends took part in the picking season each September. Every member of the family had a productive role and contributed to building the household's economy.

The Zionist entity had been formed not only on the land assigned to it in the partition resolution but on a large part of the land set aside for the Arab entity in Palestine. The new entity reached armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon during the first seven months of 1949, and succeeded in fixing the ceasefire lines as quasi-borders between the parts of Palestine it had taken and the Arab states around it.

On 20 December 1949 the Jordanian government issued a nationality law supplementary to the 1928 law, granting Jordanian nationality to all Palestinians resident on the east bank of the Jordan on the date the law was issued, and to all inhabitants of the areas administered by the Jordanian Arab Army west of the river.

The areas that remained in the hands of the Jordanian army after it entered Palestine in May 1948, known at the time as the West Bank of the Jordan, became on 24 April 1950 part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, after the first parliamentary elections were held on both banks of the new kingdom and the union of the two banks was declared. From that time Beit Ummar was a village of the new kingdom, subject to its laws and regulations.

Ibrahim spent four years in secondary education at the Hussein bin Ali school in Hebron, from 1950 to 1954. Those years were full of movement and event. Four months before the declaration of the union of the two banks, on 8 December 1949, the General Assembly of the United Nations resolved to found an international agency to provide aid and relief and to employ Palestinian refugees. For Ibrahim this meant that the displaced part of his people was now dealt with under a new designation: refugee. The scene had changed. The Palestinian who had been a citizen in his own country was now a refugee, and no longer a citizen, in the camp built to keep him alive. The Palestinians of the areas on which Israel built its Zionist entity became citizens holding Israeli nationality. The people of the part of Palestine now called the West Bank were granted Jordanian nationality. The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, citizens and refugees alike, found themselves overnight without citizenship at all. And the homeland from which they had been driven became a homeland for the Jewish immigrants brought to it from every corner of the earth. That picture, for Ibrahim, was the catastrophe in its plainest form. He asked himself what had become of resolution 194, passed only a year (on 11 December 1948) before the General Assembly resolution founding the relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees. Ibrahim recalled that only a year and three months after the declaration of the union of the two banks, on 20 July 1951, King Abdullah was assassinated as he entered the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Argument and debate raged in every house and everywhere. How had the catastrophe happened? Why had it happened? Who was responsible? What was to be done? These questions rose among the pupils of the Hussein bin Ali school. Several conflicting intellectual and political currents contended among them. Some belonged to the Liberation Party and promoted forms of Salafi Islamic thought. Others in the National Liberation League in Palestine called for socialist and communist ideas. Others still, of the Baath party and the Arab Nationalist Movement, held to nationalist thought and called others to it. The Liberation Party men tried to draw Ibrahim to their thinking, and so did the communists. This ferment was not confined to the pupils; it burned among the teachers as well. A number of the school's teachers belonged to the National Liberation League: Akram Doudin from the village of Dura near Hebron, Jameel Banoura, and Nasri Qumsiyeh from the town of Beit Sahour. Others held nationalist views, such as Elias Hilal from Bethlehem, and some belonged to parties of religious thought or to no party at all. Ibrahim was certainly marked by this atmosphere and by the struggle of the currents. He joined no party in that period. But a mixture of ideas pulled at him then, leftist, nationalist and liberal on one side, religious on the other.

Ibrahim was deeply marked by his years at the Hussein bin Ali school and by the days he spent with his friends in Hebron. What stayed in his memory was not only the party and political arguments that broke out among the pupils, but also the hours he spent listening to the new headmaster, Talat al-Sayfi, who had replaced Husni al-Ashhab in his final year at the school, playing the oud before the pupils. Al-Sayfi loved art and music, and encouraged pupils he found to have a gift for playing or singing to practise it, organising entertainments for that purpose which the pupils themselves put on and performed. The approach his new headmaster took widened Ibrahim's sense of what learning was and how much its contents matter, and it left a deep mark on his character, his tastes, his pastimes and his interests in life.

Although the struggle between the political and intellectual currents among the pupils of the Hussein bin Ali school was fierce at the time, and the pupils were caught up in it looking for answers to the questions raised, Ibrahim did not let it affect his studies. He stayed among the top results through his four years at the school, and crowned them in the matriculation examinations of 1954 by coming first among the pupils of both banks of the kingdom. His result brought joy and gladness to every house in Beit Ummar; feasts were held and animals slaughtered. The village boy had put Beit Ummar on the map of events. In fact Ibrahim was the first of his village ever to obtain the matriculation. His result was also a source of pride for the Hussein bin Ali school in Hebron, for its teachers and staff, under its headmaster Sameh al-Sayfi, who had taken charge of the school in Ibrahim's final year in place of the well-known Husni al-Ashhab, who had been transferred to the education department of the Hebron district. Al-Ashhab went himself to the family house in Beit Ummar to bring them the news of Ibrahim's first place as soon as he learned the results.

Section 3The long wait before university: from Beit Ummar to Beirut

Coming first in the Jordanian matriculation examinations of 1954 gave Ibrahim the chance of a scholarship to study at the American University of Beirut. The Jordanian ministry of education had obtained funding for its scholarship programme for outstanding pupils at that university from an American agency known at the time as Point Four. Ibrahim, one of the top candidates in the matriculation, travelled to Amman by way of Jerusalem. There he met the officials in charge of the scholarship programme at the ministry, Khalil al-Salem and Mustafa al-Dabbagh, with a representative of Point Four present. At the meeting Ibrahim confirmed that he wished to study engineering at the American University of Beirut. He returned to Beit Ummar the same day. It was the first time he had seen Amman. While he was there he met his friend Mousa al-Nather, who had come for the same purpose, being also on the list of top matriculation candidates. The meeting ended with word that they would be told the outcome of the interview shortly. This was at some point in August 1954.

Ibrahim returned to Beit Ummar and Mousa to Hebron. The two friends stayed in touch and called in from time to time at the education department in Hebron to learn the result of the interview. The days passed without news. The start of the university term drew near, indeed had almost arrived, with the two friends still waiting. Ibrahim and Mousa met the deputy director of the education department of the Hebron district, Husni al-Ashhab, told him of their worry at the delay, and asked the department's officials to intervene with the ministry of education in Amman. The department's doorman was listening to the conversation with Husni al-Ashhab. Those present were taken aback when the doorman came in holding two letters in envelopes addressed in English. Husni al-Ashhab took the two letters and was stunned to find them addressed to Ibrahim Abdel Hameed Abu Ayyash and Mousa al-Nather, and that they had reached the department more than two weeks earlier, with nobody there paying them any attention because they were written in English. He opened the envelopes, and the letters proved to carry the agreement of the programme's funder, Point Four, to fund their scholarships at the American University: Ibrahim to study engineering and Mousa chemistry. The letters set out a timetable fixing the dates for presenting themselves on the campus in Beirut and for the entrance examination, and it became clear that the dates in the letters had already passed by the time they read them. The two friends were shocked and at a loss. There was no point in blaming anyone. What mattered to them was to hold on to their dream of studying at the American University of Beirut. After talking it over they decided to travel to Beirut without delay and face whatever this strange situation put in their way.

First of all, two passports had to be issued. The West Bank was then still under martial law administered by the military governor appointed by the government in Amman. Issuing a passport also required the consent of a guardian, since neither Ibrahim nor Mousa had yet turned eighteen. Mousa had his passport, as his father worked in the finance department in Hebron, while Ibrahim's father was working at that time in the Jericho area and living there. Ibrahim and his friend spent two days before he could complete what was needed for the two passports to be issued.

The friends packed their bags and set off for Qalandia airport. The Beirut flight left in the evening. No arrangements or bookings could be made in advance at the time. That meant they would reach Beirut late and would have to find somewhere to spend the night of their arrival in order to go to the university the following morning. They were seized by a boundless fear. It was the first time either had flown, and the first time they had left for another country of which they knew nothing. But they had no choice other than to lean on one another to get through the difficulty of the moment.

She watched their movements and followed their talk from her seat on the plane to Beirut. She saw that they were flustered and needed help. She was sitting next to them. She spoke to them first and offered her help. Samira Abu Ghazaleh was a second-year student at the American University of Beirut on her way back to her faculty. When they reached Beirut she asked the taxi driver to take them to the Rabiz pension on Jeanne d'Arc street, close to the main entrance of the university. It brought great relief to their hearts.

When they arrived at the pension they found every room taken. Another taxi driver moved them to a different hotel, the Hotel Watani in Burj square in Beirut. He told them the hotel was cheap, decent and respectable. In the end they got a room on the roof of the building with two beds. As they were settling down to sleep they were startled by movement in the room. The hotel clerk was bringing in another bed, which he had let for the night to another guest. They were in no position to object. They decided to spend the night in the room and to deal with the matter in the morning.

Early in the morning they went to the university. Once through the main gate, in the area facing the Chapel building, which the university used for worship and also as an assembly hall, they went to a noticeboard set up near the hall entrance. There they were surprised by a notice giving a final date for the entrance examination for those who had missed the earlier dates. It was half past seven in the morning when they read it, and by their good fortune the entrance examination was to be held half an hour later in the very hall outside which they stood. They went to the hall before the appointed time and tried to explain their situation to the receptionist. But within moments the invigilator was explaining to the candidates how to handle the questions, and so they had to answer the examination papers handed to them. There were only ten candidates in the hall. Applicants to the university had to pass the entrance examination to establish their command of English. It was a necessary condition of admission.

They left the hall when the examination was over and began asking where the Jordanian student mission was based. They were told that the mission, headed by Khalil al-Salem, would meet the Jordanian scholarship students that evening in West Hall. Khalil told them they would have to wait for the result of the examination.

The next day the two friends went to the university registrar, the well-known Farid Aflaihan. He told them they had passed. They were overjoyed. For them it was a real achievement, and from that moment they had to complete the admission and housing formalities. Two students from Hebron who had entered the university a year earlier helped them through it: Izzat Zahdeh and Yasser Obeid stayed with them until everything required was done. The accommodation inside the campus was fully occupied. The university had rented the King building on Sadat street, outside the campus, to house students. The booming voice of Rouhi al-Sharif, who had entered the university a year before them, filled the place when they arrived at the building. The two friends lived in one of its rooms for most of the first term of their freshman year.

Section 4Ibrahim: the university years, 1954 to 1959

Ibrahim moved, then, from Beit Ummar to live in Beirut, a city known at the time for its wide openness, socially, culturally and academically, and counted the most developed of the Arab cities in commerce, industry, tourism, social life, culture and politics alike. Despite the conservative setting he came from and had lived in, the small world of his village of Beit Ummar and the city of Hebron, known for its strictness and conservatism, Ibrahim showed a remarkable ability to adapt quickly and to enter deeply into the new society and its different setting.

Ibrahim lived in Beirut for five full years, from 1954 to 1959. A number of students from the kingdom who had passed the 1954 matriculation entered the American University with him, among them Awni al-Masri, Talat Kawalit, Awni al-Saket and Muneer Khoury. He and his fellow students threw themselves into university life and its many activities, cultural, social, academic, student, sporting and recreational. During his studies he also came to know many Arab students.

University life in the various faculties, through its many and varied activities, gave him the chance of a living exchange with fellow students from the different Arab countries. What added to the weight of the experience for the students of that period was that the Arab region was still trying to shake off the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and the betrayal of the Arab allies by the victors of that war: they went back on the promises Britain had made to Sharif Hussein bin Ali, who had supported the Allies by declaring the revolt from Mecca against the Ottoman despotism under which those peoples had laboured for four full centuries. After their victory the powers worked to abort the first Arab national revolt, to punish the Arabs and subject them to various forms of colonialism and domination, to destroy their national dream of a state of unity by dividing the Arab region into separate entities, to plant a Zionist entity on the land of Palestine and drive its Arab people into refugee camps outside their own country, and to pursue policies that entrenched the systematic plunder of the nation's wealth and control over its resources.

Against this background Ibrahim lived his life within the American University. His university years saw a revival in the work and activity of the Arab nationalist movements, which coincided with Gamal Abdel Nasser's declaration of his nationalist, liberationist and unionist policies: his fight for national and pan-Arab self-determination, his projects to reclaim and develop national wealth, his land reform policies and industrialisation programmes and his pursuit of social justice, his stand against the tripartite aggression on Egypt after nationalising the Suez Canal, his resistance to the Baghdad Pact, his success in founding the first Arab union project between Egypt and Syria in 1958, his support for liberation movements against colonialism in the Arab world, Africa and Asia, and his declaration that the road to Arab unity, to control over national will and wealth, and to progress, was the road to liberating Palestine from Zionist settler colonialism.

From his first days at the university Ibrahim found himself caught up in the huge demonstrations that broke out on campus in November 1954 in support of the Algerian revolution against the French occupation of Algeria, which had lasted since 1830. The revolution had been declared on the first of November with a number of military operations against the French occupation forces in the Aures mountains. Women students of the university took an active part in those demonstrations. He always remembered the prominent role of the Jordanian women students in them; he saw Samira Abu Ghazaleh, Intisar Dukaidek and others among those leading the marches. The Urwa al-Wuthqa society had played a vital part in organising the protests against the French occupation of Algeria, in support of its revolution and in pressing the case for Arab backing for it, for which Nasser had announced a programme of assistance. On his first day in the university housing in the King building, Ibrahim was startled by knocking at his door at the very break of morning, calling him to the dawn prayer. When he talked it over with a number of his fellow students that morning, he realised that some of the students belonging to the Islamic Liberation Party recruited to the party through this kind of activity. He learned that some of them had been his schoolmates at the Hussein bin Ali school in Hebron who had also made it to the university in Beirut.

To take a first degree at the American University a student had to pass the freshman level, two terms providing the general foundation sciences. Ibrahim drew the attention of his teachers and fellow students with the outstanding results he achieved in his first term. In fact a number of the Jordanian students did excellently in that term's examinations and a few failed them. At the end of the first term of the freshman year his friend Mousa was offered a place in Fisk Hall inside the campus, and decided to move there.

During that period Ibrahim came to know rather better a large number of the Jordanian students who had entered the university's faculties of science, engineering, arts and humanities. Some had graduated from the schools of Amman, Salt, Karak, Nablus and Jerusalem. Among them were Awni al-Masri, Talat Kawalit, Muneer Khoury, Awni al-Saket, Ali Suheimat, Ali Ukrayyim, Abdel Ghani Abu Qarwareh, Haidar Abu Jaber, Fouad al-Rayhani, Raja Halazoun, Mohammad Jardaneh, Abdel Hameed Sharaf, Ibrahim Izz al-Din and Intisar Jardaneh. Sharp arguments went on among the students at the time about the situation in their countries and about developments in the region. Ibrahim noticed that the party currents that had stirred among the pupils of the Hussein bin Ali school worked far more effectively among the students of the American University in Beirut. The students were pulled between intellectual convictions and party loyalties ranging from the religious thought of the Liberation Party to that of the communist party, by way of the nationalist parties, the Baath and the Arab Nationalist Movement.

During the first term of his freshman year Ibrahim grew close to his fellow engineering student Awni al-Masri, who came from the city of Nablus and had placed fifth on the list of the kingdom's top ten graduates. The two friends agreed to live together, and Awni joined Ibrahim in his room in the university housing in the King building; they shared it through the second term of the freshman year. In the years that followed they went on sharing a home. In their second year at the university they moved into two rooms rented from an elderly lady in a flat in a building in the Ras Beirut and Hamra area. For the remaining three years before graduating, the two friends lived in a flat owned by a lady known as Madame Haddad, which they rented in one of the buildings on Jeanne d'Arc street.

Faisal's restaurant near the university on one side, and the flat on Jeanne d'Arc street the two friends had chosen on the other, were not only places for a light meal but a stage for fierce argument and debate among students of the different currents of thought, and of nationalist thought above all. It gave the students room to work on one another and to grow intellectually and politically.

Being able to swim was a necessary condition for moving up to the next level of study after the sophomore year. Students had to take special swimming instruction in one of the university's pools and to pass a swimming test in order to move up. Ibrahim was no swimmer when he entered the university, but he knew the rudiments, having taken lessons from his brother Ahmad, an officer in the Jordanian army, in the Arroub pool, an old pool that the mandate authorities had rebuilt and put back into use, fed with water from one of the village springs.

Study at the American University did not only prepare a student academically; it gave him various skills a person needs to conduct his social and working life soundly. In their later years in the faculty of engineering, students had to learn to drive, and the university arranged special courses for the purpose.

The student societies formed at the university in various fields gave students the chance to learn collective, professional and syndicate work. Those societies, among them Urwa al-Wuthqa, the Civic Welfare League and the Cultural Society, gave students the chance of cultural and intellectual exchange, of getting to know one another socially, and of drawing closer across differences of ethnicity, sect, culture, thought and politics. They gave students room to work alongside difference and live with it, to differ without rejecting the person differed with. Ibrahim took part in many of these societies, and in several of them his gift for leadership showed.

Ibrahim's quickness, sharpness and distinction drew his teachers' attention. Those qualities interested Dean Weidner in him, and over time a friendship grew between Ibrahim and Weidner. Each week the dean held an hour-long meeting with the students of one of the faculty's classes, given over to open discussion of matters that concern an engineering student after graduation, and of the student's role in his society and in its growth and development. Ibrahim took part in those discussions.

There was an exchange between the Upper Campus, for the students of the humanities faculties, and the Lower Campus, for the students of engineering and the mathematical and physical sciences, and between these students and the students of Beirut College for Women. The university organised social evenings with various cultural and recreational activities: poetry readings, guest lecturers on thought and politics, dancing, theatre, and joint trips to different parts of Lebanon, which gave students of all nationalities, men and women, room for healthy exchange and growth in a natural atmosphere, away from stiffness and bigotry. Ibrahim was a star of these occasions.

Ibrahim had finished the first academic year after the freshman year when Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the signing of an arms deal for the Egyptian army with the Soviet Union. This was on 26 July 1956. Those events, and the Egyptian president's declaration of support for the Algerian revolution against the French occupation, led to a British, French and Israeli agreement to attack Egypt, and the attack began on the morning of 29 October 1956. The first term of the second academic year had begun.

Angry demonstrations broke out across the Arab world in protest at the aggression and in solidarity with Egypt. The students of the American University in Beirut applied to receive military training at the hands of Lebanese army officers. It came to nothing: Camille Chamoun, the Lebanese president at the time, had declared his opposition to breaking diplomatic relations with the Western states that had attacked Egypt, a position at odds with what the Arab public then wanted. The students accordingly cabled the commander of the Syrian army asking for the chance to train in Syria. Approval came without delay, and they were asked to report to the Khalid bin al-Walid camp in Homs. A delegation of students met the university's vice-president Constantine Zurayk, the prominent nationalist thinker, and told him what they intended. Zurayk blessed the students' initiative. On the morning the journey to Homs was arranged, the students were surprised to find Zurayk there to see them off. A party of seventy students set out that morning for Homs, where they received basic military training, including techniques of guerrilla warfare and urban combat. Crossing the Orontes on ropes was an experience that stayed in Ibrahim's memory. When the students returned to Beirut at the end of the course, the aggression had stopped. The university had kept in touch with its students throughout that training; some of its officials made a point of visiting them, and it gave the students the chance to make up the lessons they had missed while away. Ibrahim was one of those students, and he stood out among the trainees and showed real skill.

After the tripartite aggression ended in late 1956 and the invading forces withdrew from the Suez Canal, the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and the countries of the region went on through striking events, one after another, which left deep impressions on Ibrahim's mind that never left him. The Arab states split into two camps at that time. Some Arab countries took a position in favour of joining the Baghdad Pact, which Britain had called for in order to face the rising Soviet influence in the countries of the Middle East, particularly after the failure of the tripartite aggression on Egypt. The Lebanese president Camille Chamoun expressed his support for the pact. That angered a wide section of the Lebanese and Arab public. The split within Lebanese society deepened with the negative position Chamoun took towards the projects of Arab unity, particularly after the declaration of the United Arab Republic between Syria and Egypt in February 1958 and then the fall of the monarchy in Iraq in July 1958. Armed internal disturbances broke out in Lebanon during the second half of 1958, which led Chamoun to request American intervention. American forces landed in Beirut in July 1958. The disturbances exploded, and Lebanon entered a deep crisis of division and civil fighting. The rise of the Arab nationalist movement under Nasser at that time played a tangible part in ending the civil fighting in Lebanon and in the withdrawal of American forces from Lebanese soil in October 1958.

The students lived those events minute by minute. They moved from one district to another inside Beirut, whose quarters were then divided by ceasefire lines. They witnessed the first live exercise in war and civil fighting in an Arab country. The division had taken various forms and dimensions by then. The students came to know patterns of division along sectarian, confessional, political and party lines. A single sect divided against itself. Study at the university did not stop through that time. The division reached into the ranks of the students too, and the Lebanese among them above all.

In the same period the Jordanian students were following events in Jordan, which also went through disturbance at that time. Events in the region were not separate from one another. News came in 1957 of an attempted military coup in Jordan, followed by the declaration of martial law. The project of the Hashemite Union, declared between Jordan and Iraq on 14 February 1958, ended with the military coup and revolution of July 1958 in Baghdad, which brought down the Baghdad Pact. British forces landed in Jordan a few days after the fall of the monarchy in Iraq, on 17 July 1957. Demonstrations swept the Arab cities in that period. The Jordanian students at the American University in Beirut lived those events minute by minute, and their impressions stayed planted in their minds.

The system of study at the American University of Beirut includes a programme of practical professional training in various fields. To this end the university organised each year training camps in different parts of Lebanon which a student had to join and complete. The university also contracted with various companies and institutions in a number of Arab countries to provide training on engineering projects under construction there, so that students could gain practical experience on site. Ibrahim completed practical training in surveying at a camp organised in the town of Zgharta in Lebanon, and spent three full months in practical training with a foreign firm, the Pomeroy Hawaiian Dredging Company, working on the construction of Shuwaikh port in Kuwait, in his final year at the university, where he learned the techniques of pile driving in seawater and of dredging. This was part of a training programme agreed between the American University of Beirut and the Kuwaiti ministry of public works. Such opportunities let Ibrahim develop as a professional and temper his theoretical knowledge with practical experience.

Ibrahim was not known to have had a love affair with any particular girl during his years of study in Beirut. But he had an enormous gift for forming close friendships and for winning the affection of everyone he met. He made no secret of his interest in women and his love of a woman's beauty. He loved women and loved to immerse himself in the pleasures of life, without vulgarity or recklessness. He had many relationships during those years of study, with young women from the university circle and from outside it. Beirut gave him the chance to know the city girl, after his knowledge of women had been confined to the girls of his village.

Section 5Ibrahim Abu Ayyash: the journey between 1959 and 1966

Moving to the United States

Ibrahim graduated from the American University of Beirut on the honours list. That earned him a scholarship to continue his higher education at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, in the state of Georgia in the United States. He travelled to the United States by sea from the port of Beirut. During the voyage he took part in the entertainments the ship's captain organised for the passengers, and he beat all the other players in the chess competition held on board. After a year of study at Georgia Tech, Ibrahim obtained a master's degree in structural engineering, again among the graduates on the honours list.

After graduating he worked for close to two years with an engineering consultancy in the United States, then returned to Jordan. His father had been retired in 1962. The family feared that Ibrahim might take to the American way of life and settle there. They knew how close the bond between Ibrahim and his father was, and that led them to tell him that his father's retirement was due to an illness. Ibrahim hurried home, in the summer of 1963. He travelled to New York on his way back to Amman. His brother Khalil invited him to visit him in Germany during the journey; Khalil was then living in a small town near Hanover. Ibrahim contacted his friend Mousa al-Nather, who was working towards a doctorate in chemistry at Harvard. The two friends met in New York and spent three days there. It was a chance for Ibrahim to see something of the city. They went to a musical and dance performance by one of the well-known groups in a New York hall. Mousa took his friend to the port and saw him off. There Ibrahim boarded the ship for Hamburg. He spent many days aboard before it docked at Hamburg. From there he took the train to Hanover, and then to the town where Khalil lived. The brothers spent some days in Germany before he returned to Jordan. For him it was a new experience. He saw the way of life in a Germany that had come out of the world war in ruins less than twenty years earlier. In this place Nazism had practised its racism and its persecution of the Jews. And in his country the price had been paid. From here and from the countries of Europe the Jews of Europe and other peoples of the continent had been driven out during the war. And there in his country, Palestine, the victorious powers had worked to empty Palestine of its natural inhabitants and scatter them into refugee camps in the neighbouring Arab countries, and to settle the Jews of Europe in their place, on their land and in their property. Could there be an injustice more terrible than the one that had befallen his people? That was what turned over in Ibrahim's mind on his way back from Germany to Jordan.

The chance to study, live and work in America enriched Ibrahim's character with further knowledge and experience. It gave him the chance to see the Western way of life in all its dimensions, and through it to grasp the laws and principles that govern that world, and the equations and balances that govern the policies of the great powers towards one another on one hand and towards the countries of the second and third worlds on the other. He understood that progress and development have their own logic and laws, that the backwardness of the third world has its causes, and that it too has a logic and laws which must be broken to escape its constraints. There too he grasped the essence of the organic relationship between the United States and the West on one side and Israel on the other. In the United States of those days the streets were alive with demonstrations, meetings and movements against racial discrimination and demanding equality and civil rights. At one such meeting in Georgia he had the chance to meet Martin Luther King, the leader of the civil rights movement, and to hear him speak. That left impressions on Ibrahim that stayed with him to the end of his life. He never held back from taking part in such activities, or from listening now and then to live jazz played by great musicians. During his university years in Beirut and Georgia he learned the art of listening to and enjoying the music of other peoples, the symphonies and works of Beethoven and Mozart and Chopin and others, and the songs of the famous singers of the day. He gathered in his own library many records of the great musicians and singers, and returned to them again and again in his hours of study alone, or with his friends. Ibrahim learned to master his time to the point of perfection, and was able to pursue his many and varied activities and pastimes without any harm to the main task he had come to Georgia to accomplish. Those experiences tempered his character and gave it a human dimension and a fine feeling for the value of the arts and of culture in the work of development, which Ibrahim carried with him through the stages of his life.

A short period of work in Saudi Arabia

Ibrahim did not stay long in Jordan after returning from the United States. Once reassured about his father's health, he decided to accept an offer of work with the General Projects Company, one of the large Saudi firms in the construction sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, owned by Jamal al-Husseini, a cousin of the mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, who worked as a special adviser to King Saud after the catastrophe of 1948 and obtained Saudi nationality during his time there. Ibrahim worked for no more than a year as manager of the Medina-Tabuk road project, from October 1963 to September 1964. During that year he lived in one of the trailers of the camp set up in the desert. In that period he came to know the engineer Yousef Ghanem, who was the supervising engineer on the project for the Saudi ministry of communications. Ibrahim and Yousef spent their off-duty hours together, and a friendship began then that lasted until Ibrahim's death. The way of life in Saudi Arabia did not appeal to Ibrahim, and he found that work in construction contracting did not attract him and did not fit his ambitions in consulting engineering. He also felt that staying on there would come at the cost of his private life and go against his convictions and his way of living, so he decided to return to Amman, in October 1964.

Working for the regional authority for the Jordan tributaries

Israel was pressing on with fortifying its existence as a fortress in the middle of a sea of Arab hostility. It needed as much of the water of the surrounding region as it could get, so as to bring more Jewish immigrants to Palestine and to complete the many infrastructure projects it needed for its aims of consolidation and expansion. Its eyes had been on the Jordan, its tributaries and the springs that feed it since it began, in the 1920s, working towards the project of a Jewish national home on the land of Palestine. Diverting the waters of the Jordan and its tributaries from their natural courses into artificial canals and pipes to the coastal plain of occupied Palestine and then to the Negev desert was the goal it pursued. For Israel, settling the Negev would open the way to absorbing hundreds of thousands of new Jewish immigrants. To meet this danger, President Gamal Abdel Nasser called in late 1963, on 23 December 1963, for an Arab summit to agree a plan to confront the Israeli project, which would also drain a large part of the waters of the Jordan and deprive the Arab states along the river of a main source of life for their Arab populations. The summit was held in Cairo on 13 January 1964 and resolved to establish an authority to exploit the waters of the Jordan tributaries and to draw up an engineering plan that included building the Mukheiba dam in Jordan on the course of the Yarmouk, diverting the waters of the Banias in Syria, and building a diversion dam on the course of the Hasbani in Lebanon. The summit's resolutions also included military protection for the execution of these projects by a joint Arab command, and the founding of a body to look after the Palestinian affairs of the Palestinian people, known as the Palestine Liberation Organisation. On the basis of those resolutions, the Jordanian regional authority for the exploitation of the waters of the Jordan and its tributaries was founded, and the law establishing it was issued in the third quarter of 1965. The founding meeting of the Palestinian National Council, from which the Palestine Liberation Organisation emerged, was held in Jerusalem in late May 1964. After returning from Saudi Arabia in September 1964, Ibrahim worked for the Development Board in Amman as the engineer in charge of the technical department. The board seconded him to that authority from the moment it was formed, and he was given various responsibilities for the projects it intended to carry out in Jordan. But matters on those projects did not go according to the plans laid: Israel destroyed the construction equipment belonging to the Arab Contractors company that was being used to build the Mukheiba dam, months after work on it began. Work on those projects stopped as a result.

Founding the Arab Bureau for Engineering and Development

These developments led Ibrahim to buy the share of the engineer Samir Katkhuda, who in February 1966 had joined the engineer Dr Mohammad Fayyad in founding the Arab Bureau for Engineering and Development. This took place in July 1966.

Section 6Ibrahim Abu Ayyash: the journey of a lifetime

Ibrahim Abu Ayyash: from bachelorhood to marriage, 1966-1967

Rawda al-Batneej, the beautiful girl of the village of Beit Ummar. Her father, Mahmoud Nimr, owned a lorry working the Jordan-Kuwait route and was an old friend of the Abu Ayyash family. Rawda had passed the Jordanian tawjihi examinations for the school year 1963-1964. She then worked for a time as a teacher at one of the relief agency schools in the Dheisheh camp, and afterwards at an agency school in the village of Surif. Ibrahim had known Rawda when she was still a young girl taking her basic and secondary schooling at the village girls' school. He met her after his return from the United States on a day in the autumn of 1963 on the bus running the Beit Ummar line, where she was accompanying one of his relatives. No love grew between Ibrahim and Rawda in those passing meetings, but the beauty of the fair-haired girl caught his attention. The picture of her, the village girl, stayed in his memory. So when Abdel Hameed Abu Ayyash suggested to his son that he marry Rawda, during one of Ibrahim's visits to Beit Ummar in early February 1967, Ibrahim did not hesitate to accept his father's suggestion. Ibrahim held his father in particular affection and gave him a high place in his heart. During that visit Rawda's hand was asked for Ibrahim. Rawda did not hesitate to say yes: the picture of Ibrahim, the son of her village, the handsome educated young man with the piercing look, had been in her mind since she met him on those journeys. The Fatiha was read and their marriage contract written. This was on the tenth of February 1967. Ibrahim then returned to Amman and to his work at the Arab Bureau, the company he had helped a number of his colleagues found. Events moved quickly through the last quarter of 1966 and the first half of 1967. On 13 November 1966 large Israeli forces attacked the village of Samu, one of the villages of the Hebron highlands, on the pretext of destroying a base of Palestinian fighters there. Those forces clashed with the Jordanian Arab Army units camped in the area. In fact the battle of Samu was a prelude to the Israeli attack of 5 June 1967. Developments quickened through May 1967 and ended in a naked Israeli attack on 5 June 1967, which brought the Palestinian Arab territories still in Arab hands after 15 May 1948, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, along with the Syrian Arab Golan Heights and the Egyptian Arab Sinai peninsula, into the hands of the Israeli occupation forces. The scene repeated itself. Thousands left their homes in the West Bank and Gaza for Jordan, and some suffered exile twice over: once through the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and again through the Israeli attack and the military operations of 1967. Through June and July 1967 the armistice and ceasefire line area was in a state of chaos and disorder. People were still moving across those lines in both directions. The Israeli occupation forces eased movement towards Jordan. Ibrahim was in Amman during that war. It had never crossed his mind that matters would end in such a result. After nineteen years of military preparation by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the Arab armies collapsed before the Zionist attack within a few days. That was not easy for Ibrahim or for the peoples of the Arab nation to swallow or to take in. The question came back again: why had it ended as it did? Where had the mistake been made, or where did it lie? And then, what was to be done? Ibrahim's mind was on his family in Beit Ummar and on the fiancée he had contracted to marry there. Communications had broken down with the collapse of the institutions of government in the West Bank and the occupied territories. Ibrahim took advantage of the arrival of a lorry from Beit Ummar in Amman and decided to go back with its driver to Beit Ummar. Vehicles returning to the West Bank were not allowed to use the official roads and the crossing points on the bridges; the occupation forces had opened those roads and crossings to those leaving the West Bank. They were, of course, working to empty the West Bank and drive out its people so as to swallow yet more land. Ibrahim persuaded the driver returning to Beit Ummar to take him along. They agreed that Ibrahim would pass as a driver's mate if the occupation forces stopped them on the way. The driver loaded a case of Jordanian beer into the lorry to bribe the Israeli border guards if they were halted. The lorry took a dirt track near one of the bridges at a crossing point. It was night, and they had to avoid the Israeli border patrols working in that area. The lorry put out its lights as it headed for the river, then crossed the little water left in the Jordan, after Israel had succeeded in diverting the greater part of its flow to the Negev in occupied Palestine, towards the occupied bank on the other side. It was summer, when the level of the river falls naturally. The lorry made its way along farm tracks until it reached the official road to Beit Ummar at the Arroub camp junction on the Jerusalem-Hebron road. The route was full of danger: the first groups of Palestinian fighters were using that road to smuggle weapons to the resistance cells then forming inside the towns and villages of the West Bank. The first house Ibrahim visited on entering Beit Ummar was that of his fiancée Rawda. Then he went on to the family house. His father, his mother and the rest of the family were astonished to see him arrive in the village in such conditions. Ibrahim was glad to see his family and Rawda's. No harm or direct injury had come to them from the attack and the occupation that followed. The picture looked bleak to everyone. All were stunned, bewildered and at a loss at what had happened. Why, and what, and what was to be done? Ibrahim spent several days in Beit Ummar. His father and mother pressed him hard to return quickly to his work in Amman. Nobody knew what the coming days would bring or where things were heading. During his stay in Beit Ummar, Ibrahim proposed that Rawda go back with him to Amman. It was agreed, for the situation warned of developments no one could predict. There was no time for preparations of any kind. A car was leaving Beit Ummar for the King Hussein bridge, the Allenby bridge, the next day. They packed in haste, and the newly married pair took the car to the bridge. There the occupation forces had begun to control departures and arrivals in the way that served their aims. When Ibrahim and Rawda crossed the bridge to the other bank of the river, a Jordanian military post was organising the arrivals. Once the registration was done, Ibrahim waited for a Jordanian taxi to carry him and his bride to Amman. Ibrahim and Rawda reached Amman on 26 July 1967. That date stayed in the couple's memory down the years.

Ibrahim was living in a flat he had rented in a building in Jabal al-Hussein, near the trade school building on the edge of the Hussein refugee camp, which had been founded there after the first exodus of 1948.

Ibrahim had not prepared the flat to live in with a bride. It was set up for a bachelor's life. Even so, Ibrahim and his bride went to the flat. They were exhausted after the hard journey between Beit Ummar and Amman. The road took about an hour and a half before the occupation. That miserable journey took more than ten hours.

His bride had not made herself ready for marriage and for going with her husband to a married home when they took their decision to leave Beit Ummar. Matilda Ammar, one of Rawda's aunts, was living in Amman at the time. Rawda turned to her aunt for help in getting together some of the clothes and things a bride from Beit Ummar would need in her new home in Amman. Matilda was one of the daughters of the grandmother Augusta. Augusta was a well-known figure in Beit Ummar. She had worked as a midwife there before she left. In fact Augusta was responsible for the birth of most of the children of Beit Ummar. She had also worked as a nurse at the clinic of Doctor Dabdoub in the city of Bethlehem, a doctor well known to the people of Beit Ummar. Women from Beit Ummar and the neighbouring villages went to Doctor Dabdoub's clinic as soon as illness struck or a condition required a doctor. Augusta had learned nursing abroad, in Argentina; she had emigrated there with her father and his children while still a girl, but returned home with her father when he found he could not bear the separation any longer. She came back to Beit Ummar with more than one skill acquired abroad. On her return she worked as a seamstress, and sewed the first pair of trousers Beit Ummar ever saw, worn at the time by Mahmoud Nimr, Rawda's father. The people of Beit Ummar also credit the grandmother Augusta with bringing the first iron to the village. Augusta left for Amman after the occupation of the West Bank and worked as a nurse at the Dar al-Shifa hospital in the Jabal al-Hussein district of the city.

Those days were hard on Rawda. For the first time she had left her family's house in Beit Ummar to share a married home with Ibrahim, a man she had known from a distance and met only a few times. The dream of the wedding dress, the wedding party, the dancing and singing and the dabke was still in her mind then, but the occupation turned everything upside down. It destroyed all those sweet dreams. How Rawda hated, and still hates, that loathsome occupation. Ibrahim had many friends in Amman. They wanted to celebrate the couple after their arrival from Beit Ummar. Ibrahim organised a party for his friends at his flat in Jabal al-Hussein. About forty of them gathered there. That gathering served as the wedding party for Ibrahim and Rawda.

Ibrahim stood in the elections for the sixth council of the Association of Engineering Professionals in Amman for the years 1968-1970 and won the post of vice-president, while the post of president went to the engineer Jaafar al-Shami.

Ibrahim Abu Ayyash: building a family as the resistance began, 1967 to 1970

In May 1968 Ibrahim was visiting the site of a road to be built in the Jafr area in south-eastern Jordan, for which the engineering bureau he belonged to had won the design contract, when word reached him that Rawda had been taken to the maternity hospital in Amman. Ibrahim hurried back, and on reaching the door of the Dar al-Shifa hospital in one of the districts of Jabal al-Hussein he ran to the room booked for his wife. There he met Nabila and Muhaytab, two sisters married to his friends Awni al-Masri and Ali Suheimat. They told him Rawda was in the delivery preparation room. He went there and heard her cries. He met Augusta, who had been working for some time as a nurse at the hospital. The grandmother Augusta had in fact followed Rawda through her whole pregnancy. That day Augusta reassured Ibrahim about Rawda. Long hours passed before news of the birth reached him. Augusta brought it, and went with Ibrahim to the delivery room. There he found Rawda, worn out, and there too was the newborn girl, still not free of the marks of a long labour and a hard birth. When he looked at his daughter for the first time, a wave of feeling swept over him. Ibrahim could not take his eyes off her. His heart beat hard. "She looks like your mother," Rawda said to him when she saw him gazing at his daughter. From that moment Ibrahim was a father and Rawda a mother, and Ibrahim had a small family. From that moment he was captive to his firstborn daughter, and a particular bond began between them that grew stronger as the days passed. Ibrahim loved Arabic poetry and literature. He admired the poet Abdel Karim al-Karmi, known as Abu Salma, and his verse. Salma was one of the Arabic names dearest to Ibrahim's heart. So when Rawda suggested naming the newborn girl Salma, Ibrahim did not hesitate to accept; indeed he supported it strongly. For Rawda, Salma was the name of a friend she held dear; for Ibrahim it was a lovely Arabic name that suited the striking presence of the newborn child. From that moment, when he joined the ranks of the resistance, Ibrahim took the nom de guerre Abu Salma. Abu Salma was no longer only a nom de guerre: Salma gave the name a real force, for a time.

Ibrahim loved life and its pleasures. The cares of the period and the demands of work never kept him from coming home each day when he could. The first thing he did on getting home was to pick up the baby Salma and sit playing with her while he waited for Rawda to finish preparing lunch. Within another year Ibrahim had a son, Abdel Hameed. For Ibrahim this fulfilled a wish and gave shape to part of his devotion to his father Abdel Hameed. From that moment Ibrahim's common name among those who knew him became Abu al-Abed.

With the new child expected, Ibrahim had moved to a new ground-floor flat in a two-storey building of two flats per floor, opposite the Frères school in the Maxim circle area of Jabal al-Hussein in Amman. It was one of the first buildings in Amman with central heating. The flat had a back garden used for hanging out the washing. That drying yard saw lovely days for Salma and Abdel Hameed (Abboud) and their friends as they grew. There Ibrahim watched his children play. He teased them with his remarks, but he was not known for indulging a child by carrying him about. At times he did not hold back from sharing the effort of putting together the pieces of some toy or other.

Events in Amman were moving fast and the situation growing tenser since Israel's occupation of the West Bank of the kingdom. The resistance to the occupation had made the East Bank its base, setting out from it in its effort to liberate the occupied territories of the kingdom and to restore Palestinian Arab rights to their owners. The military presence of the resistance on the East Bank gave rise to frictions that were deepened until they became contradictions and armed clashes. Those clashes reached Amman and the whole of the East Bank in the second half of September 1970, when the security and military services of the East Bank launched full-scale military operations against the armed presence of the resistance on its territory. On 17 September 1970, army and desert force units entered Amman. Two days into the fighting, Ibrahim was still at home near the Maxim circle with his small family. His brother Yousef was staying with them at the time. Those events caused Ibrahim great pain. Any loss suffered by either of the forces engaged, whether soldiers of the army or fighters of the resistance, was a loss to the nation and to the Palestinian cause. In Ibrahim's view the only gainer from this fighting was the Zionist enemy that had occupied the West Bank of the kingdom, and all of Palestine, and parts of Egyptian and Syrian territory, and whose appetite had not yet stopped: it regarded other parts of the kingdom as part of the Jewish national home, or as a place to absorb the results of its occupation of the Palestinian Arab territories, that is the people of those territories, by driving them out beyond them, to the East Bank of the kingdom. For Ibrahim, failing to liberate the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the occupied Arab territories from the occupation forces, keeping the Palestinian Arab people permanently deprived of its basic rights, failing to work towards the conditions needed to apply the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, and failing to resist the Israeli settlement projects in the occupied territories, were together nothing but a recipe preparing the way for a new Zionist occupying expansion into the Arab lands neighbouring Palestine, and into the East Bank of the kingdom above all. For Ibrahim it was only a matter of time. Just as the Israeli enemy had expanded towards what remained of the Palestinian territories in the care and protection of the Arab Army and spread its occupation over them and over the Syrian Golan and Egyptian Sinai, once it had digested what it seized in 1948 and 1949, so it would expand again in due course, once it had digested this new helping of Arab land. That battle between the army and the resistance was therefore, in Ibrahim's eyes, a live exercise in destroying the very capacities needed for the battle of liberation and the restoration of rights, and a free gift handed to Israel for nothing. The house Ibrahim lived in shook with the force of the fighting in the streets around the Maxim circle. Ibrahim was at home with his brother Yousef and his comrade Abdel Rahman Akkawi. All of them sheltered in the boiler room from the violence of the shelling then going on. Ibrahim was not a full-time worker in the ranks of the resistance. He went each morning to his office in one of the buildings around the second circle of Jabal Amman. At the same time he was active in syndicate work through his position as vice-president. But he was an active member of the resistance: he had taken military training at one of the Fatah camps in the Wihdat camp area near Amman, spent time visiting the fighters' bases in the Jordan Valley, and on various occasions took part in night guard duty at one of Fatah's installations in the area between there and Jabal al-Hussein. He accepted such tasks and regarded them as a national duty that the nature of the period demanded. Ibrahim had drawn the attention of Fatah's cadres during the engineers' meetings at the association's headquarters. He was bold in putting his views. He always had a distinctive vision on matters concerning the development of professional and syndicate work. Fatah cadres approached him. Ibrahim accepted being counted as close to Fatah, and Fatah accepted that Ibrahim keep his independence. Ibrahim saw Fatah as the movement of the Palestinian people towards the liberation of its homeland. He did not see it as a political party. He regarded it as a movement able to take in every political and intellectual current from the far right to the far left, provided it believed in armed struggle as the road to liberation. In the association council elections of 1968, Fatah split: Ibrahim stood for the post of vice-president on the list of the engineer Jaafar al-Shami, while a current within Fatah backed the rival list. The list of Jaafar al-Shami and Ibrahim Abu Ayyash won. This strengthened Ibrahim's position in syndicate, professional and political work in Jordan. Ibrahim, then a young engineer, entered those arenas with resolve, confidence and persistence. He drew still more of the attention of Fatah's leaders and cadres, but kept his composure and his independence, neither confirming nor denying nor proclaiming his relationship with Fatah.

A military unit came to Ibrahim's house, searched it, and then arrested him, his brother Yousef and every one of his comrades who was there, apart from his wife Rawda and their two children, Salma and Abdel Hameed, who had been born sixteen months before those events, in May 1968. After Ibrahim's arrest Rawda heard a great explosion. The army had destroyed Ibrahim's Citroën, which stood at the corner of the street beside the building where he lived. This was on 19 September 1970. The two brothers and Ibrahim's comrades were taken to the Tabarbour military area near Amman. Ibrahim was in his pyjamas when he was arrested; he and his comrades had taken the boiler room of the building as their shelter from the violence of the shelling. He was not allowed to change his clothes. At Tabarbour the detained fighters of the resistance and the civilians accused of cooperating with it were piled together. The barracks in which Ibrahim and his brother Yousef were put was filled to the brim with hundreds of detainees. Those barracks belonged to the band of the Arab Army. They were not built to serve as a prison. In that barracks Ibrahim met his Fatah comrade the engineer Bakr Abdel Munim. They spent some time together there before Bakr was moved to another detention centre in the Awjan area. The place could not hold such numbers. Detainees in military dress were called out and taken to interrogation rooms and to other places. The lavatories available were nowhere near enough for all these people. The next day the detainees were given some drinking water, and one meal a day. There was not room for all of them to sleep at once, so they took turns to sleep. Days passed with no interrogation at all. Ibrahim showed patience and forbearance in detention. He knew many of the neighbours, friends and resistance cadres there, and many knew him. Ibrahim was one of those active in supporting the resistance in its effort to accomplish liberation. He made no secret of it. He was ready to carry arms to liberate his land, to liberate his birthplace, Beit Ummar, which lay under occupation along with the land of his people.

As for the people who remained on the land of the homeland, this Zionist enemy had turned them either into refugees or into an oppressed and subjugated population under occupation. For Ibrahim, the existence of the occupation in itself required the existence of the resistance. This did not confuse him; it was among the settled matters. After the occupation of the West Bank, Ibrahim joined one of the resistance camps and took military training there. Detention did not frighten him or weaken his will to support the resistance and the work of resistance, and to oppose the policies aimed at weakening the resistance to the usurping occupier. The destruction of the army's and the resistance's own capacities was something that grieved him, indeed made him weep.

In 1968 Ibrahim had been elected vice-president of the sixth council of the Association of Engineering Professionals for the term 1968-1970. The president was the engineer Jaafar al-Shami. His brother Yousef passed word to one of the officers in charge of the detention camp that the vice-president of the Jordanian Engineers' Association was being held at Tabarbour. This was the day after the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser was announced. Nasser had been working before his death to stop the bleeding of Arab strength caused by the fighting between the army and the resistance. It seems the new circumstances and the syndicate position Ibrahim Abu Ayyash held led those in charge of the camp to decide to release Ibrahim and his brother and take them to his house near the Maxim circle. The road to the Maxim circle was at that time still full of danger. A military vehicle took Ibrahim and his brother to an area near the house. Yousef insisted to the vehicle's commander that they be taken to the house itself, given the dangers surrounding the area at the time. After some insistence he agreed. When Ibrahim was arrested, Rawda was harassed by one of the men of the unit that entered the house. The unit was not from the security forces but from the desert forces. It was not easy to reason with its men, and they behaved roughly. Rawda tried to prevent her husband's arrest, but to no avail. When Ibrahim came back from detention, his wife and their two children were at home to meet him.

Rawda had taken shelter with the Kurdi family, who lived in a house next to hers, after her husband's arrest. She had been threatened after Ibrahim and his brother were taken. She was afraid to stay alone in the house with two children while her husband was away. Those conditions drove her to take refuge with the neighbours, who gave her protection and a room of her own in their house. She spent a few days there before deciding to return home. The house was in a pitiful state; everything had been turned upside down when it was raided and searched. She spent some time trying to bring things back into some kind of order.

Returning to normal life was not easy in the years that followed the events of September 1970. Matters remained in a state of security disturbance and political disorder until the second half of 1971. Business too was at a low level of activity in that period. The security pursuit of the political opposition was at its height, and feelings of mistrust spread through society.

Entering national, syndicate and professional work: the period after 1970

Those developments did nothing to weaken Ibrahim's belief that he had to carry on with the task without slackening or tiring. He took part in the work of the eighth session of the Palestinian National Council, held in Cairo from 28 February to 6 March 1971, and remained an active member in all the council's sessions from that time. His effective part in the work of the eighth, ninth and tenth sessions, and finally the eleventh session held in Cairo in January 1973, and his valuable contributions to the discussions aimed at assessing the situation and shaping policy, were a main factor in his election to the Central Council of the National Council, which that session's meetings decided to form. From 1973 Ibrahim kept his elected membership in the sessions of the Central Council of the national councils without a break. He held the trust and respect of all the Palestinian national factions and the Palestinian professional and popular organisations. In his part in the meetings of the national councils and the central councils from 1971, Ibrahim represented the independents among the Palestinian Arab people.

Those conditions were followed by a state of political conflict between Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organisation over the representation of the Palestinians. They overlapped with the war that Egypt and Syria launched against Israel on 5 October 1973 to recover the occupied Syrian and Egyptian territories, later known as the October war. For the first time in their history the Arab states used the oil weapon in the battle, cutting off oil from the states that took part in or supported the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. That war took place without any Jordanian participation. This weakened Jordan's political position and its claims regarding the West Bank. It was confirmed at the Arab summit held in Rabat in October 1974, at which the summit recognised the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arab people.

Cutting off Arab oil from the Western states that backed Israel during the October war of 1973 brought a sharp rise in oil prices. The income of the Arab oil states grew enormously as a result. In consequence the countries of the region saw a great building boom, above all in infrastructure projects.

Despite the tension and the erosion of trust in the positions and relations between official Jordan and the PLO in the period after the events of September 1970, Ibrahim continued to believe that the special and intimate relations between the two Arab peoples, Jordanian and Palestinian, were so deep, so important and so necessary that no official position taken by either side could touch or breach them. He believed that destroying that relationship was a Zionist aim par excellence. He believed too that the Zionist entity was a direct danger to Jordan, no less than the dangers still surrounding the Palestinian people's hold on its land. As for facing the Zionist danger, Ibrahim was fully convinced that although the task fell mainly on the Palestinian people in the occupied homeland at a given stage, meeting it effectively required the energies and resources of the whole Arab nation. The Zionist entity is backed by enormous global imperial resources and energies, and is a danger not only to Palestine and the Palestinians but to the heart of Arab national security as a whole and to the rights and interests of its peoples.

Ibrahim was acutely sensitive to any position, initiative or move by any party that touched the special relationship between the two Arab peoples, Jordanian and Palestinian. He believed that Jordan is strong through its citizens, and that a Jordan strong on its home front is the one able to face the dangers threatening Jordan and Palestine together. Ibrahim was a nationalist to the marrow. He saw the revival of Palestinian identity as a task of struggle and a necessity for confronting the Zionist entity and its claims that Palestine was a land without a people, that no Palestinian people existed, and that establishing the Zionist entity in Palestine required the inhabitants of that land to be absorbed into the Arab countries around it or far from it, it made no difference which. Ibrahim was therefore fiercely hostile to any regional or parochial tendencies aimed at destroying the unified national fabric of Jordan. This approach of his was borne out in all the professional, syndicate and political activity he pursued through his life, and above all in the period after the events of September 1970.

Against the background of these events, Ibrahim carried on his professional work through the Arab Bureau consulting engineering company. At the same time he maintained a political position through the 1970s and 1980s in opposition to the official policies of the Jordanian governments of that period. His syndicate activity also grew: he led broad opposition national coalition lists in the elections of the Jordanian Engineers' Association for several terms in that period, or played a leading part in forming them. Those lists succeeded in leading the syndicate's professional and political work until 1988, and then took an active part in the elected councils until 1992. They took radical national positions and demanded the lifting of martial law, an end to security pursuit, and different domestic and foreign policies. They also took on the task of developing professional engineering practice and protecting engineers' rights by developing the legal and organisational structure of the profession and the rules of engineering practice. They played a leading part too in developing the organisational structures of engineering and professional work at the level of the joint Arab engineering bodies and the Union of Arab Engineers.

During that period Ibrahim Abu Ayyash's house and his office saw constant and heated meetings between representatives of the opposition political parties working in Jordan. The talk in that period turned on forming coalitions and shaping alliances between those forces to lead the syndicate's work and preserve the association's progressive national role in Jordanian and Arab political life.

During that period Ibrahim Abu Ayyash's family grew from two children, Salma in May 1968 and Abdel Hameed in May 1969, to five, with the arrival of Sama in April 1972, Luma in June 1976 and Yousef in September 1978. The family had moved to a house in the Umm al-Summaq district of west Amman, built under the engineers' housing schemes. That was in 1976.

Despite the many professional, syndicate and political demands on him through the 1970s and 1980s, Ibrahim stayed close to the family and bound to its members. In that period he set habits and ways of doing things that his sons and daughters felt. He rose early with his companion Umm al-Abed. The children were still in their beds at that hour. Abu al-Abed and Umm al-Abed took their morning coffee together in the sitting room every day, with cigarettes and the news bulletin from Radio Monte Carlo. When Salma woke and got herself ready for school, she would catch sight from a distance of her father's tousled hair and a cloud of morning cigarette smoke creeping from the sitting room into the corridors of the house. She tried to avoid passing that part of the house. Salma hates cigarettes and still does. How many times she got into an argument with her father and mother about smoking, its harms and the need to give it up, and to no purpose. It was a sacred ritual, kept up every day.

At midday Abu al-Abed made a point of eating lunch with his children. After lunch the family gathered over the afternoon coffee. He listened to their news in those sessions and they talked about school and the pupils' mischief, and other stories and requests. After the coffee Abu al-Abed changed out of his work clothes into his pyjamas, closed the bedroom shutters, threw himself on the bed and took a nap of no less than forty minutes every day. During those forty minutes the children were forbidden to make any sound or noise at all. The afternoon nap was another sacred ritual of Abu al-Abed's.

On Fridays Abu al-Abed made a point of taking his children out, either to the swings at the Orthodox club in Abdoun, or to the pool at the associations complex in Shmeisani, or to their uncle Mohammad Abu Ayyash's bookshop, or shopping at the Sweet supermarket between the fifth and sixth circles in Jabal Amman. Friday belonged to the children. He let them have whatever they wanted: toys, chocolate and sweets, sandwiches and the rest. That too was a sacred ritual, which Abu al-Abed kept up regularly on Fridays.

On some Fridays or holidays the family gathered with relatives or friends to grill meat or fish in the garden. Abu al-Abed's house was always full of guests: relatives, politicians, syndicate people, professional partners and colleagues. The children watched, and sometimes listened to the arguments that broke out among those gathered, or to their heated discussions. When the children grew up they noticed that some of the figures who visited the house were people they saw on television or whose pictures they saw in the papers and magazines. Among those they remember are Haidar Abdel Shafi, Hanan Ashrawi, Yasser Arafat, Ibrahim Bakr, Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, Abu al-Houl, Marwan Abdulhameed and many others. Ibrahim was deeply committed to his children within the limits his time allowed. He treated them with great respect, listened to their views, and gave them his own without trying to impose it. He avoided rebuking or blaming any of them for something they had done or failed to do. He avoided heaping praise on any achievement of theirs. He worked for Palestine and in the field of public affairs, but at no time did he ask any of his children to hold a particular position on those questions. He left them to work out their own positions and express them, and pressed them to exercise their right to choose. The children watched their father at his political, syndicate and public work, doing it with devotion and without display, and giving without counting the cost. Abu al-Abed became a model for his children, and his qualities, his ideals, his ways of working, his way of thinking and, on some questions, his conceptions were planted in his daughter Salma's being and at the core of her character. Over time a kind of meeting of minds, or harmony of vision, grew between them. He would pass her an important article or study from time to time that he thought she should know, and she would sometimes send him a book she thought it necessary and worthwhile for him to read, or point him to a television programme or a piece of reporting she thought he should see.

Salma recalls that at one of the sessions of the Palestinian National Council in Amman in 1984 she was watching a live broadcast of a sitting when she saw her father on the screen rise from his seat and shout at the top of his voice, objecting to the results of the vote count that established the quorum for one of the sittings. The quorum was met, but the dispute was over the number at which it was declared met. Ibrahim was bold in stating his position plainly and clearly. Ibrahim had not wanted to attend the sessions of the conference in Amman. He feared that holding the National Council would entrench the split in Fatah and in the PLO. Arafat, for his part, was concerned at that time to secure the quorum for the council's sittings. Heavy pressure was put on Ibrahim Abu Ayyash to make him go back on his decision to boycott the council's meetings, and promises were made to him that real efforts would be made to mend the rift in the ranks of Fatah and the organisation, in order to secure his attendance. That conference came after the split that shook Fatah following the fighting between the two Fatah camps in northern Lebanon and the city of Tripoli. A sharp polarisation had taken place within Fatah and the organisations of the resistance movement in that period, in which one camp turned to Damascus, and because of which Arafat left Tripoli aboard an Egyptian ship for Egypt. The Baghdad summit of 1978 had decided to boycott Egypt after Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David accords and took Egypt out of the circle of conflict with the Zionist entity. Abu Ammar's visit to Egypt at that time amounted to a breach of the boycott resolutions.

Salma also recalls that the telephone rang at the house some days after the council met. Someone asked whether her father was at home. She said he was. She told her father. He knew at once that the night visitors were coming. He went to his room and put the essentials he needed into a small bag. Some time after that call, the visitors came to the house. Salma had left minutes earlier. Ibrahim was taken from his home that night. He did not return for thirty-four days, spent in their corridors. Ibrahim remained in detention for thirty-four days. Several months before his arrest he had won the elections for the fourteenth council to the post of president, at the head of the list of the alliance of the left, nationalist and national opposition forces in Jordan.