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By Root 950 0

a religious community that knew its place under the protection of Islam and lived according to the laws and customs of Islam." The Jews, added a preacher at the great mosque in Jaffa, were not a people and not really a religion either: everyone knew that Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, himself detested them, and had therefore condemned them to be accursed and despised forever in all the lands of their dispersion. The Jews were the most stubborn of the stubborn: the Prophet had extended his hand to them, and they had spat at him; Issa (Jesus) had extended his hand to them, and they had murdered him; they had even regularly stoned to death the prophets of their own contemptible faith. Not in vain had all the nations of Europe resolved to be rid of them once and for all, and now Europe was planning to inflict them all upon us, but we Arabs would not permit the Europeans to dump their rubbish on us. We Arabs would frustrate with our swords this devilish plan to turn the holy land of Palestine into a midden for all the refuse of the world.

And what about the man from Aunt Greta's clothes shop? The compassionate Arab man who rescued me from the dark pit and carried me in his arms when I was only four or five? The man with big bags under his kind eyes, and a brown, soporific smell, with the green-and-white tailor's tape-measure around his neck, both ends dangling down onto his chest, with his warm cheek and pleasant gray stubble, that sleepy, kindly man with a shy smile that flickered for a moment and died under his soft gray mustache? With his square, brown-framed reading glasses, which he wore halfway down his nose, like a kindhearted, elderly carpenter, a sort of Gepetto, that man who walked so slowly, dragging his feet in a weary sort of way, through the thicket of women's clothes, and when he pulled me out of my solitary confinement, said to me in his husky voice, a voice that I will always remember with longing: "Enough child every thing all right child everything all right." What, him too? Was he "sharpening his curved dagger, whetting the blade and preparing to slaughter us all"? Would he too sneak into Amos Street in the middle of the night with a long curved knife between his teeth, to slit my throat and my parents' throats and "drown us all in blood"?

Balmy are the nights in Canaan

as the breeze blows over all.

From the Nile hyenas answer

the Syrian jackals' call.

Abd el-Qadr, Spears, and Khoury

stir their poison brew of gall.

...

Stormy March winds puffand bluster

sending clouds across the sky.

Youthful, fully armed, and bristling

Tel Aviv tonight lets fly,

Manara keeps a lofty vigil,

watchful is the Huleh's eye.*

But Jewish Jerusalem was neither youthful nor fully armed and bristling, it was a Chekhovian town, confused, terrified, swept by gossip and false rumors, at its wits' end, paralyzed by muddle and terror. On April 20, 1948, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, following a conversation with David Shealtiel, the commander of the Haganah militia in Jerusalem, his impression of Jewish Jerusalem:

The element in Jerusalem: 20% normal people, 20% privileged (university etc.), 60% weird (provincial, medieval, etc.).**

(It is hard to say whether Ben-Gurion smiled when he wrote this entry in his diary; either way, Kerem Avraham was not included in the first category, nor in the second either.)

At the greengrocer's, our neighbor Mrs. Lemberg said:

"But I don't trust them anymore already. I don't trust anybody. It's just one big intrigue."

Mrs. Rosendorff said:

"You absolutely mustn't speak like this. I'm sorry. You must please forgive me if I say this to you: speaking like this simply wrecks the morale of the entire nation. What are you thinking? That our boys will agree to go and fight for you, risk their young lives, if you are saying that it is all an intrigue?"

*Natan Alterman, "Nights in Canaan," from The Seventh Column, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1950), p. 364.

**David Ben-Gurion, Diary of the War, 1948, ed. G. Rivlin and Dr. E. Oren, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1983), p. 359.

The greengrocer, Mr. Babaiof,