The Promised Land

(See Cover)

One of Asia's suffering cities, by virtue of its peculiar sanctity, destiny and tragedy, was a focus of world drama last week. Jerusalem, the thrice holy, a Christian, Jewish and Moslem shrine, dominated the bitter struggle over Palestine. The struggle involved the British Empire, world Judaism, Pan-Islam, Russia and inevitably, as a result of its new world eminence, the U.S.

The Holy City's sun-baked walls and domes had dominated the ages. Doomed to repeated conquest, it had heard the clatter of Egyptian cavalry, the rattle of Persian scythe-wheeled chariots, had known Assyrian and Babylonian, the Macedonian phalanx and the Roman legion, Seleucid and Seljuk, Crusader, Saracen and Ottoman Turk. One conqueror supplanted the other, or declined to impotent passivity. But Jerusalem still remained, permanent in the perspective of history, as the city sometimes appears in a sudden lifting of the haze, crowning Zion.

Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, a mosaic-walled mosque in a corner of the Old City, is Islam's third holiest shrine. From the Rock, Mohamed, led by the Angel Gabriel, ascended on el-Buraq, his eagle-winged mare with the human face, to visit the seven heavens of Islam. (Mohamed's footprint, judged by Mark Twain to be about size 18, is still pointed out to true believers; in the 12th Century it was shown as the footprint of Christ.) Here the muezzin's wail is still heard from the upper air, calling the faithful to prayer (La Illaha Illa-Allah--There is no God but one God).

On the black Rock, according to one legend, Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac. Over this Rock stood Solomon's Temple. The Wailing Wall, part of the mosque area, is all of the Jewish Temple that remains. On this rock the Emperor Hadrian built a temple to Jupiter; the Crusaders built a church.

Nearby stands the Holy Sepulcher, erected as most Christians believe on the site of Golgotha (the Place of the Skull). There Christ suffered on the Cross and uttered, in extremis, the words of the Psalmist which echo over the centuries the cry of many a Palestinian Jew today: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?--My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

White & Black Threads. Last week, for Jerusalem's Moslems, it was Ramadan, the Mohammedan month of fasting: for which the Koran commands the Faithful: "Eat and drink until ye can discern a white thread from a black by the daylight, and then fast strictly till night."

During the daylight hours of fast, less pious Moslems still sold dripping sheep carcasses, eggs, fruit and vegetables in the stewing narrow streets of the Old City. Arab merchants, sitting cross-legged on bolts of cloth, still tried to entice customers in the bazaars of King David's Street. But the vendors were wary and sharp-eyed. Any sudden movement of police or soldiers was likely to bring the clang of rung-down iron shutters, a scurrying for cover. For in Jerusalem (or Haifa or Tel-Aviv or Jaffa) sudden action might mean an exchange of shots. "It is our worst year," said one Arab. "There is no spirit for Ramadan."

It was also the worst year for Jerusalem's Jews. A few Jews still chanted against the ancient grey-brown Wailing Wall: "Because of the Temple which is destroyed, because of the walls which are broken down, because of our greatness which is departed . . .we sit alone and weep."

But for most Jews in Palestine, and beyond in the vast Diaspora, last week looked like the eve of Armageddon, the decisive battle for national life.

Electric tension gripped Jerusalem. Outside the Jaffa Gate the tension was even greater. A Government "fortress" went up last week in the heart of the New City. The British evicted shopkeepers and business firms along Jaffa Road, stretched tangles of barbed wire from rooftops to the ground and along the road. Sandbagged guard posts manned by grim-faced infantrymen and paratroopers in maroon berets hemmed in the precincts of the British rulers. Tommy gunners covered everyone entering Barclay's Bank to cash a check. The Post Office, Government Lands Office, Overseas Airways office jittered as Jewish extremists carried on a "telephone terror," threatening bombings (the blasted walls of the King David Hotel were still vivid in everyone's mind). On Zion Circus the marquee of a cinema twinkled: "They Were Expendable."

Operation Igloo. From the simple massiveness of Government House in the New City, Lieut. General Sir Alan Gordon Cunningham, K.C.B., C.B., D.S.O., M.C., liberator of Ethiopia, High Commissioner of Palestine, looked out over his capital toward the bustling half-Jewish, half-Arab port of Haifa, 75 miles away. There the long arm of British policy, of which Sir Alan was but the firm hand, wrought its most arresting works last week. There Operation Igloo was in progress.

When London announced last fortnight that illegal immigration of Jewish refugees into Palestine must end, the 1st Infantry Division threw barbed wire round the port area, patrolled its perimeter with tanks and armored cars. Early one morning Tommies and Royal Marines began transferring 1,286 refugees from two small sailing craft (popularly called "floating sewers") where they had sweltered in filth for two weeks. Like Moses, these Jews might glimpse the Promised Land, but they could not enter it.

Some hurled sticks, cans, jars of preserves as the British moved them to barbed-wire pens aboard British troopships. At the Henrietta Szold, the soldiers threw smoke bombs to quiet the Jews. The Jews tossed them, back. At last the screaming cargoes were embarked. Sympathizers ashore tried to aid them. About a thousand Jews from Haifa defied the British curfew, tried to crash through the barbed wire to the docks. Tommies fired; three Jews were killed, seven more wounded.

As the transports sailed for Cyprus next morning, their unwilling passengers defiantly sang the Zionist anthem Hatikvah: "Yet is our hope not lost, our ancient hope, to dwell in the land of our fathers, in the city where David encamped."

Then two more ships arrived in Haifa with 1,500 more refugees. This time Haifa Jews set up their own barbed-wire enclosure, gathered inside to hear underground leaders urge them to protest the deportation of "our flesh and blood." But again resisting refugees were transferred to British ships, again the transports sailed for Cyprus.

The shouts and sobs of desperate Jews, the hobnailed clatter of angry Tommies, the plash of bulging refugee ships, had been heard around the world--in Whitehall, where a harassed Labor Government hoped that the outraged moment would soon fade into the indifferent past; in the White House, muffled in discreet silence; in the Kremlin, where alert eyes watch any disturbances on the lifeline of Empire.

If I Forget Thee. Why had Palestine, a narrow, 10,000-square-mile strip of desert land, become a concern to all men? In part the answer, as old as history, was the yearning of Israel for its promised land: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. . . If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. In part it was as old as man's desire to be free, now manifested in Arab determination to win independence. In part it was as old (and as new) as the facts of 20th Century power politics.

For nearly two thousand years, since the Romans first drove them into exile, Jews, wherever they were, dreamed wistfully of a return to Palestine, waited for the Messiah who was to lead them back. But by one of history's ironies it was not the religious fervor of Judaism that finally brought them back from the Diaspora. It was a new feeling of nationhood among a people united partly by religion (though among them were atheists), partly by race (though many bore no blood relation to the biblical tribesmen who were their "ancestors"), partly by tradition (though they included extreme political and social experimenters), but chiefly by fellow-suffering. Despite differences among them, they were all Jews to a world whose affection was inconstant and whose hatred through the ages had been sudden and cruel.

The first great leader of modern Zionism (the name given the Return) was Theodor Herzl, who had been a foppish Viennese journalist until the Dreyfus case in France convinced him that Jews could never hope to be assimilated by other peoples. Herzl, who once claimed to sum up life in the words of a French popular song ("Life is vain, a bit of hope, a bit of hate, and then--good night!"), suddenly became the dynamic leader of Russian ghetto dwellers. At first he favored a British suggestion that persecuted Jews settle in fertile Uganda, but he found his followers would go nowhere but to Palestine. He shouted his cause so loudly that even those who found his black-bearded, top-hatted figure ridiculous realized that the Zionist organization he had created was a force that would survive him and prosper. But by 1914 there were only 12,000 Jewish colonists settled in Turkish Palestine.

Roots of Conflict. Then came World War I. Britain, with her back to the wall, acted to safeguard the Middle East, its highway of Empire, and to strike at Germany through Turkey. It promised Arab leaders independence from the Turks and self-government through most (the Arabs now say all) of the Middle East. At the same time Britain sought to rouse world Jewry (including German Jews) to support the Allied cause and weaken Germany. In his famous Declaration, Foreign Secretary Arthur (later Lord) Balfour informed Lord Rothschild, the prominent British Zionist, that "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object." Britain's League of Nations mandate over Palestine incorporated this pledge. From the double root of those conflicting promises to Arabs and Jews has grown the present conflict.

Thorn of the Cactus. Between World Wars I & II, Palestine's population grew apace--the Jews largely by immigration, the Arabs by propagation. Arabs now number over one million, twice the 1922 figure; the Palestinian Jews number over half a million. The springs of Jewish colonizing vigor, amply fed by the money of world Jewry, flowed out on to the desert. U.S. Jews have contributed almost $100 million to Palestine, invested $50 million more. The "hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land," which Mark Twain saw in 1867, was dotted with green fields and citrus groves.

Tel-Aviv (Hill of Spring) became the first all-Jewish city. One out of four Jews went to farms. Colonists of every political shading organized settlements--the Moshavah, middle-class farm villages where all own their own property; the Moshav, cooperatives where farmers work their own farms, leased from the Jewish National Fund; the Kvutzah, collective colonies where all work under orders of a central committee, and no one owns any personal property; the Kibbutz, workers' communes, including industrial workers as well as farmers, who turn their earnings into a common fund.

In the towns the colonists built new factories (few Jewish factories in Palestine are more than 20 years old) for textiles, foodstuffs, chemicals, metal work.

On the land there grew up a new race of rural Jews who knew nothing of the ghetto. Arthur Koestler describes them* as "mostly blond, freckled, broad-featured, heavy-boned and clumsy . . . haunted by no memories. . . They had no ancient curse upon them and no hysterical hopes; they had the peasant's love for the land, the schoolboy's patriotism, the self-righteousness of a very young nation. They were Sabras--nicknamed after the thorny, rather tasteless fruit of the cactus, grown on arid earth, tough, hard-living, scant."

Among this new generation of Jewish patriots (and hardened soldiers newly arrived from Poland) are the most eager recruits for the Jewish underground organizations. Haganah (numbering an estimated 70,000) was organized to defend settlers from the Arabs, now helps illegal Jewish immigration. Two offshoots, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (3,000) and the Stern Gang (2,300), are the terrorist groups who believe that the only way to achieve the Jewish state is to drive the British out of Palestine.

Neither Honey nor Sting. It was the Jews' relentless pioneer zeal as well as the pressure of Jewish numbers that troubled and angered the Arab world. But it was numbers that caused the present crisis. Should 100,000 more Jews be permitted to migrate to Palestine immediately from the "displaced persons" camps of Europe?

Nazi persecutions and continuing anti-Semitism in Europe (particularly Poland) have swelled the stream of migration far beyond the dreams of World War I Zionists. About 400,000 homeless Jews who survived Hitler's crematories and death squads (about six million were killed during the war) want to leave Europe, and most of them want to go to Palestine. Wretched Arab Fellahin, the peasant workers, have angrily watched their landlords sell Arab lands to the Jews at inflated prices. This meant even fewer poor acres for the impoverished Arabs. The Arab landlords and princes have angrily watched the Jews upset Palestine's traditional feudal ways. In the upsurge of Arab nationalism, Palestine's Arabs have wondered why they, alone of Arab peoples, should be denied even the semblance of independence. The tide of Arab nationalism, sweeping in from the desert, met the tide of Jewish immigration sweeping in from Europe; the clash culminated in the "disorders" of 1936-39, when Arabs fought first the Jews, and then the British.

In Koestler's novel an Arab effendi sums up the Palestine Arab attitude: "I care not for their hospitals and their schools. This is our country, you understand! We want no foreign benefactors. We want not to be patronized. We want to be left alone, you understand! We want to live our own way and we want no foreign teachers and no foreign money and no foreign habits and no smiles of condescension and no pat on the shoulder and no arrogance and no shameless women with wiggling buttocks in our holy places. We want not their honey and we want not their sting, you understand!"

At first the opposition to Jewish immigration came only from a few Arab leaders and freebooters. But today, if those leaders gave the word, it would find a readier response among the mass of Arabs. On the eve of World War II, Britain yielded to Arab demands, limited immigration into Palestine to 75,000 more Jews, sharply restricted the sale of land to Jews.

Living in a Highway. Wrote H. G. Wells (see FOREIGN NEWS) in The Outline of History: "The life of the [biblical] Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon living in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being run over constantly by omnibuses and motor-lorries." In the mechanized 20th Century, the land bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa is busier than ever. Now it is not only a military highway and a vast airfield. It flanks the Suez Canal. Its soil is crossed by oil; 42% of the world's proved oil reserves are puddled below the deserts of Iraq, Persia and Saudi Arabia. One of the vital pipelines from the British-controlled Iraq fields stretches across Palestine to Haifa. A convenience in peacetime, the pipelines are a vital necessity in wartime. Britain has no intention of jeopardizing them.

And Britain needs not only oil, but bases. Egyptian agitation has forced the British out of Egypt. Palestine, with its harbor of Haifa (to replace Alexandria) and the flatlands of the Negeb (for airfields) is the next available base for defense of the highways to the Far East.

To the British Government, the hard problem could be seen most realistically in terms of cold statistics: total number of Jews throughout the world: 11 million; total number of Arabs: 50 million; total number of Moslems in the world: 209 million.

In this crisis, what was the U.S. doing? President Truman starting on his 18-day vacation (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), was silent on the Palestine problem. Previously he had refused publicly to endorse the plan of Anglo-U.S. Cabinet Committee experts to "federalize" Palestine and placate the Arab world with a grant of $250 million. They had recommended that Palestine be divided into a 1,500-square-mile Jewish zone, British zones in the Negeb and Jerusalem, an Arab zone in the remainder, with ultimate power (including authority over immigration) reserved to the central British Government. Instead, the President secretly offered some "suggestions" to London (based partly on Jewish Agency compromise proposals): increase the Jewish zone to about 2,500 square miles; give the zones greater powers of self-government, including power to regulate immigration.

To meet British insistence that the pressure of Jewish refugee migration be distributed throughout the world and away from Palestine, President Truman said he would recommend to Congress that "a fixed number" of displaced persons, in-including Jews, be admitted to the U.S. Meanwhile the U.S. Government relaxed its pressure on Britain to admit the 100,000 Jewish refugees clamoring for admission.

Clearly, these were only palliative measures. But the U.S., which has no policy for the Middle East, could scarcely be expected to have one for Palestine. If it could achieve the first, the second would follow almost as a matter of course. It was high time. For the Palestine crisis had highlighted among other things the fact that in the postwar world the U.S. has vital interests in the Middle East, in its peace, its peaceful trade, in the condition of the British Empire.

Neither Empire, Jews nor Arabs could wait for the U.S. If a settlement could not be devised, there would be war in Palestine. Who would write the judgment?

But no settlement would meet the extreme demands of any party. Lawrence of Arabia, who knew the Middle East as few foreigners know it, wrote that the ancient "Semites [ancestors of some Jews, some Arabs] had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colors, or rather of black and white. . . . They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades."

But in the same stark hills of Palestine where ancient Israelite and medieval Arab had fought and worshiped in simple patterns of black and white, there were still many among their descendants (not the Stern Gang or the Grand Mufti) who had learned the finer shades of compromise. The time was short for them to blend their differences. But if they did not do so, a darkness might overtake them in which no man, Moslem or Jew, could enjoy the luxury of discerning a white thread from a black.

*In his novel Thieves in the Night, to be published by Macmillan Co. in November 1946.

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