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One evening Father explained to his friends who had come over for a glass of tea that ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, long before the appearance of modern Zionism and unconnected with it, the Jews constituted a clear majority of the population of Jerusalem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, still before the beginning of the Zionist immigrations, Jerusalem, under Ottoman Turkish rule, was already the most populous city in the country: it had fifty-five thousand inhabitants, of whom some thirty-five thousand were Jews. And now, in the autumn of 1947, there were about a hundred thousand Jews living in Jerusalem and some sixty-five thousand non-Jews, made up of Muslim and Christian Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, British, and many other nationalities.

But in the north, east, and south of the city there were extensive Arab neighborhoods, including Sheikh Jarrah, the American colony, the Muslim and Christian Quarters in the Old City, the German Colony, the Greek Colony, Katamon, Bakaa, and Abu Tor. There were Arab towns, too, in the hills around Jerusalem, Ramallah and el-Bireh, Beit Jalla and Bethlehem, and many Arab villages: el-Azariya, Silwan, Abu-Dis, et-Tur, Isawiya, Qalandaria, Bir Naballah, Nebi Samwil, Biddu, Shuafat, Lifta, Beit Hanina, Beit Iksa, Qoloniya, Sheikh Badr, Deir Yassin, where more than a hundred inhabitants would be butchered by members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang in April 1948, Suba, Ein Karim, Beit Mazmil, el-Maliha, Beit Safafa, Umm Tuba, and Sur Bahir.

To the north, south, east, and west of Jerusalem were Arab areas, and only a few Hebrew settlements were scattered here and there around the city: Atarot and Neve Yaakov to the north, Kalya and Beit ha-Arava on the shore of the Dead Sea to the east, Ramat Rahel and Gush Etsion to the south, and Motsa, Kiriat Anavim and Maale ha-Hamisha to the west. In the war of 1948 most of these Hebrew settlements, together with the Jewish Quarter inside the walls of the Old City, fell into the hands of the Arab Legion. All the Jewish settlements that were captured by the Arabs in the War of Independence, without exception, were razed to the ground, and their Jewish inhabitants were murdered or taken captive or escaped, but the Arab armies did not allow any of the survivors to return after the war. The Arabs implemented a more complete "ethnic cleansing" in the territories they conquered than the Jews did: hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were driven out from the territory of the State of Israel in that war, but a hundred thousand remained, whereas there were no Jews at all in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Not one. The settlements were obliterated, and the synagogues and cemeteries were razed to the ground.

In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted. It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor. In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared fate. Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor.

That may well be the case with the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The Europe that abused, humiliated, and oppressed the Arabs by means of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them. But when the Arabs look at us, they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication, and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East—in Zionist guise this time—to exploit, evict,