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opinion has now lost the last shred of influence it possessed, and al-Ramla, where the moderates grouped under Sheikh Mustafa Kheiri [Khairi], the Mayor, exercised some restraining power, has capitulated to the gunmen."
    Ahmad's uncle Sheikh Mustafa was in trouble, caught between the British occupying forces and the fedayeen of the Arab Rebellion. For fifteen years, he had commanded great respect as al-Ramla's mayor and leader of one of its most influential families. Sheikh Mustafa's popularity, according to later generations, was based on his defense of the rural poor and their rights to pay lower taxes. "When Sheikh Mustafa came into a room, everyone would stand," remembered Khanom Khairi,, "When he walked by people on horseback, they would get down from the horse. People who were working would stop working. No one asked them to do so; they did it out of respect." The sheikh was tall and good-looking, with hazel eyes and a mustache, and he was never without his abaya, or dark cape, and the white turban of the religious scholar. He would wrap the turban himself before placing the dark red tarbush (fez) over it.
    The charismatic mayor walked a fine line between the imperial power and the rebels. He had opposed the Peel Commission plan and battled with Arab "notables" who he felt were too close to the British and the Zionists. The mayor, according to later Khairi generations, even secretly used his sons to ferry information on British troop movements to the rebels and to transport weapons in the trunk of a car. If this is true, they did so at the risk of execution.
    Still, Mustafa Khairi was a mayor in a land under foreign occupation and by definition needed to cooperate with the British authorities. Despite his self-image as a nationalist, he was known to oppose Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the rebel leader of the Arab Higher Committee. Sheikh Mustafa was for a time a member of the National Defense Party, which was aligned with Husseini's rivals, and considered to be "collaborators" with the Zionists.
    As the rebellion accelerated anew, rumors began to spread that some Arab elites were cooperating with the British and the Zionists, even informing on the rebels by revealing details of operational plans. Equally incendiary were reports that many of these Arab "notables" had sold land to the new arrivals, prompting evictions of Arabs and the emergence of an angry class of landless peasants. In al-Ramla, townspeople told of a Jewish man from Tel Aviv who was making the rounds, trying to buy more land. It was said that another of Ahmad's uncles, the doctor Rasem Khairi, had angrily sent the man away. Shukri Taji, a cousin of Sheikh Mustafa's and one of the town's most prominent citizens, was said to be going door-to-door in al-Ramla, warning people not to sell their land. But even Taji himself, records would later indicate, had once sold land to Jews. As the reports of informants, collaborators, and land sellers grew, the insurgents killed hundreds of their own people, including, in late 1938, two municipal councillors in nearby Lydda.
    According to British accounts, the mayor stood up to the fedayeen by resisting the taxes they demanded to fuel the Arab Rebellion. In October 1938, according to a British subcommissioner's report, Sheikh Mustafa, "the very able Mayor" of al-Ramla, "left the country" for Cairo "because of fear of assassination. . . . The loss of the Mayor will be keenly felt." The British, meanwhile, used the anger over the rebels' tax demands to recruit more informants from among the disgruntled.
    Within a month Sheikh Mustafa returned to al-Ramla, pledging to try to stay out of nationalist politics and to focus on municipal affairs in the large stone building along the Jaffa-Jerusalem road.
    In May 1939, it appeared to some Arabs that the sacrifices of their rebellion had brought a political victory. With British forces still heavily engaged with the rebels, and with the situation in Europe creating tens of thousands of