In short, after a week the dervish came and said, “During the night Muhammad, riding on al-Buraq, appeared and said to me : ‘Go to Sheikh Abdullah and tell him that in the bushes in the wadi is hidden a rifle for each man over twenty in the village.’”  The sheikh rolled back his abayah over his shoulders, jumped into his sandals, and ran to the wadi with the whole village running after him.   They arrived and found a hundred English rifles.  “What is there to discuss?  A dervish from the land of the dervishes!  Stay with us in the village and dream for us.”

The dervish stayed in the village, and after a week the dervish came and said, “During the night I saw Muhammad on al-Buraq, and he said to me: ‘Go tell Sheikh Abdullah that tomorrow in the wadi thirty Turkish soldiers will pass by.  I command you to kill them all, and in exchange for that you will gain their weapons and belongings.’”  The sheikh rolled back his abayah over his shoulders, got into his sandals, got all the men and ambushed the Turks.  After the battle, when they returned to the village with victory cries and a plunder of rifles in their hands, they could not find, to their amazement, the dervish.

It was Lawrence.

In this chizbat, the armed uprising of the Arabs against the Turks during World - War I is depicted as a trick perpetrated by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who arrives at the Bedouin camp disguised as a dervish.  Lawrence passes not merely as an Arab, but as an Arab holy man.  It would seem that in this chizbat the Palmach vision of reconstituting a Jewish identity in terms of Bedouin culture is presented as a clear possibility.  If Lawrence can assume an Arab identity so successfully, why can’t the Palmach?  But despite Lawrence’s success in passing as an Arab, it is only a trick.  He remains unalterably British.  His object in promoting the Arab revolt is to further British ambitions; when these objectives are realized, he disappears.

At the beginning of the tale, when the dervish asks for the whereabouts of Sheikh Abdullah, he is told, “He is sitting on the rubbish heap with his sons, telling chizbat.”  Although chizbat is an Arabic word, it does not designate an Arab genre of storytelling.  Only in the Palmach did chizbat have this connotation. At another level, therefore, Abdullah and his sons represent the Palmach.  It is they who can be fooled into believing that Lawrence’s disguise—a deliberately assumed image— stands for the real thing.

Beni and the land immigrants

Beni the Politruk (culture officer) would eat himself alive if he missed one operation.