• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1037 0

of the proposed Jewish state was uncultivated desert land. Meanwhile the Palestinian Arab leadership and all the nations of the Arab League declared at once that they would not accept any compromise, and that they intended "to resist by force the implementation of these proposals, and to drown in blood any attempt to create a Zionist entity on a single inch of Palestinian soil." They argued that the whole of Palestine had been Arab land for hundreds of years, until the British came and encouraged hordes of foreigners to spread all over it, flattening hills, uprooting ancient olive groves, purchasing land, plot by plot, by subterfuges from corrupt landlords, and driving out the peasants who had farmed it for generations. If they were not stopped, these crafty Jewish colonists would swallow up the whole of the land, eradicating every trace of Arab life, covering it with their red-roofed European colonies, corrupting it with their arrogant and licentious ways, and very soon they would take control of the holy places of Islam and then they would overflow into the neighboring Arab countries. In no time at all, thanks to their deviousness and technical superiority, and with the support of British imperialism, they would do here exactly what the whites had done to the indigenous populations in America, Australia, and elsewhere. If they were allowed to set up a state here, even a little one, they would undoubtedly use it as a bridgehead, they would flood in, millions of them, like locusts, settle on every hill and valley, rob these ancient landscapes of their Arab character, and swallow everything up before the Arabs had time to shake themselves out of their slumber.

In the middle of October the British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, uttered a veiled threat to David Ben-Gurion, who was the executive head of the Jewish Agency: "If troubles begin," he remarked sadly, "I fear that we will not be able to help you; we will not be able to defend you."*

Father said:

"Herzl was a prophet and he knew it. At the time of the First Zionist congress in 1897 he said that in five years, or at the latest in fifty years, there would be a Jewish State in the Land of Israel. And now fifty years have passed, and the state is literally standing at the gate."

Mother said:

*Dov Joseph, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 (London, 1962), p. 31.

"It's not standing. There is no gate. There's an abyss."

Father's reprimand sounded like the crack of a whip. He spoke in Russian, so that I would not understand.

And I said, with a joy I could not conceal:

"There's going to be a war soon in Jerusalem! And we'll beat them all!"

But sometimes, when I was all alone in the yard toward sunset or early on Saturday morning when my parents and the whole neighborhood were still asleep, I would freeze with a stab of terror, because the picture of the girl Aisha picking up the unconscious child and silently carrying him in her arms suddenly seemed to me like a chilling Christian picture that Father showed me and explained to me in a whisper when we visited a church once.

I remembered the olive trees I saw from the windows of that house, which had left the world of the living ages before and become part of the realm of the inanimate.

Jest a minute rest a minute jest a rest a jesta resta.

By November a sort of curtain had begun to divide Jerusalem. The buses still ran there and back, and fruit sellers from the nearby Arab villages still did their rounds in our street, carrying trays of figs, almonds, and prickly pears, but some Jewish families had already moved out of the Arab neighborhoods, and Arabs families had begun to leave the west of the city for the southern and eastern parts.

Only in my thoughts could I sometimes go to the extension of St. George's Street northeastward, and stare wide-eyed at the other Jerusalem: a city of old cypress trees that were more black than green, streets of stone walls, interlaced grilles, cornices, and dark walls, the alien, silent, aloof, shrouded Jerusalem, the Abyssinian, Muslim, pilgrim,