Taking sides

I had always been utterly bored by the Arab-Israeli dispute and felt I really had to read a book on a subject. Finally, I read a history of Palestine written jointly by an Israeli and Arab historian, which made me pro-Arab. Oddly enough, though, I only read the chapters written by the Israeli and only those up to 1948. 

I am pro-Arab simply because of how the Jews behaved in Palestine between 1918 and 1948, when Jewish immigrants settled in Palestine and within thirty years had seized it from its indigenous inhabitants driving out most of them. I am not pro-Arab because of what happened after 1948 and I recognise that very many of the people who oppose Israel do so for very misguided reasons: because they dislike Western civilisation or an immigration policy based on ethnicity or because they automatically side with sallow skinned people or Muslims. 

I suppose I sympathise with the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who said:

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

Though of course the Arabs should sign a decent agreement if one is offered and everyone knows what it would look like, though who knows if Hamas or Israel would abide by it. 

But one of my travel rules is to observe, not to judge. (Another is to use public transport, a third not to climb things.) So I try not to feel aggrieved on behalf of the Arabs, but simply to observe. I am always sorry when In Turkey that the Armenians and Greeks were killed or expelled and in Bulgaria or Greece I am sorry for the Muslims removed from the Balkans bag and baggage (Gladstone's hope was fulfilled - what rot liberals talk). But I do not let these things pre-occupy me. Here in Israel it is much harder to forget because the past is not the past but the present. 

The Jews between 1918 and 1948 behaved with great audacity, ruthlessness and cynicism, and succeeded in a way that seems providential, though it does not seem so to the Arabs. I have to say I wish Israel did not exist and am delighted that she does. I suppose the English, when they conquered England, and the English in America, when they displaced the Red Indians, behaved in a far worse way. But the Red Indians and the Ancient Britons were killed or fled. The Arabs will stay.


Most people in Israel whom I ask, Arabs and Jew, think there will never be peace. Like the Ulster Scots, the Jews may be a transplant that will not take. The strength of the Arabs is the strength of their anger. 

The South African apartheid government fell because the National party were too Christian to massacre their opponents in sufficient numbers, unlike the Communists in Russia. We shall see what compromise the Jews will find between their religious and Enlightenment principles and the need to repress the Arabs.

I see a parallel between the Jews who settled in Palestine and the American manumitted slaves who settled Liberia. In both cases the settlements were partly began as a means of getting rid of people: the Jews from Europe and blacks from the USA. The descendants of the American slaves rule over the vast majority of Liberians to this day and I sense, reading the coverage of the current Israeli election in the Israeli press, that the Middle Eastern Jews, who usually do less well paid jobs, are regarded as inferior by the 'whites'. 

More generally, I am told, by Jews, that all the Arabs are the kindred of the Jews and only differentiated from the Middle Eastern Jews by religion. The Muslim Arabs are very much closer to the Jews who lived in Palestine up to 1918 than the colonists who came from Europe. 

All in all, a very curious chapter in the mostly unhappy and tragic history of migrations of people in the last hundred years. The fate of the Palestinian Arabs serves as a warning of the dangers of an open door immigration policy.

My taxi driver this morning was a character and an Arab Muslim, but beardless and therefore presumably not very religious. He told me that he loved Christians and Jews and did not differentiate according to religion. I agreed. When I broached the subject of how the Arabs lost their land to the Jews. however, he waxed indignant. His objection, interestingly, was not that having lived here until the reign of the Emperor Hadrian did not give the Jews the right to return here in the twentieth century. His objection was quite other. He said that God offered this land to Moses and the Jews turned down the offer. How differently the Middle Eastern mind works from mine. He asked me, oddly:

'If I offer you a Mercedes car on top of the roof of that building over there and you say "No, thank you" then how can you turn round and say the Mercedes is yours?'

I wondered how I would get the Mercedes down from the roof of the building, even if my title to it were established.