The Source

by James A. Michener

mulcting

great word.extorting

This was the staggering, incontrovertible fact: the other custodians had allowed the once sweet land to deteriorate, the wells to fall in and the forests to vanish; the Jews had brought the land back to productivity. He could not avoid wondering whether such creative use did not confer a moral right to possess the land, previous negligence having forfeited such right.

“I place maximum importance on this matter of historical claims,” he said. “I believe that any organized people which has demonstrated a cohesiveness and common purpose has a right to its ancestral lands.

“Wherever the Bedouin took his camels and his goats he destroyed good land to create his own desert. After all, very few people in the course of world history have been able to build deserts out of such fruitful areas as the Nile, the Euphrates and the Galilee.”

Are we justified in insisting that any segment of creation—a human life, a river, a horse that might run well if trained, a corner of land—must be utilized to its top capacity?

Such a dewey questipn,no?

On this spot the Canaanites drove out the original owners, and the Jews expelled the Canaanites and Egyptians and Persians and Babylonians, and God knows who else. You Arabs,” he said, pointing to Jemail, “came into the act very late. Very late indeed. You just barely got here ahead of the Crusaders and the Turks. So why suddenly should Israel, of all nations on earth, be summoned before the bar of international justice to explain its moral right?

Yeah! true of every country , no?

you’re wrong when you justify everything by custodianship of land. Anyone can attain that with a police force and some agriculture specialists. But Israel’s custodianship of people, of human rights, is going to be spectacular.” He hesitated, then pointed at each of the men with his pipe. “That’s to be our moral justification.”

was precisely the problem that faced all officers of the Turkish empire: How honest should I be … this time?

ahhhh. cruel image,

Palmach—an abbreviation for the Plugat Machatz, “striking force,” organized in 1941 to resist the threatened German invasion—for

“Itbah il Yahoud—Slaughter the Jews!” cried the Syrians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese as they leaped across the open space.

waltz of bashir

thirty-seven million Arabs against six hundred thousand Jews: ‘Obviously, the war will be short, savage and for the Jews disastrous.’

“It was the atoomi,” the old man cackled. “Be careful of the rain.” From the safe homes by the mosque of Jama el-Ahmar the Arabs had fled. In the hours before dawn they had abandoned the strong points at the ends of the Heart-Purifying Bridge, where no Jews fought. From solid entrenchments the red-capped soldiers of Iraq, the black-and-white-crowned Lions of Aleppo and the warriors of the Grand Mufti fled. Outnumbering their enemy by more than forty to one, the Arab forces had constructed their own panic, and had then obeyed it. But

lions of aleppo.... heh heh heh

Reich sent Bagdadi to investigate, and the Iraqi Jew, trailed by Ilana and Vered, ran out of town, where they finally overtook the English car, and just as Vered had reported, Gottesmann was driving slowly along the road, pleading with the Arab refugees to come back to their homes. “We need you,” he said over and over in Yiddish, but the frightened Arabs continued their flight.

People call them Arab-Jews. Strong-minded Ashkenazim fear that if such immigration dominates for the next hundred years, Israel can only become another Levantine state. A Middle East backward country in which a handful of European Jews ran things for a while before submerging their state in some kind of honorable alliance with Lebanon or Egypt. And so the vision of a Jewish homeland perishes once more. I’m not so pessimistic. I’m dedicating my life to the proposal that we can establish some kind of Jewish-Arab federation in this area, to the benefit of both. But to do this we must have more highly educated western Jews. And men like you accept no responsibility.

We are free, and our freedom is assured. The whole constitution of our society confirms that freedom, and I trust it. ISRAELI: I do too, Zodman. Until the day when China becomes a major power and humiliates you in some way. Until the day when A.T. and T. drops to forty and you have another economic crisis. Until Senator McCarthy’s successor comes along. Those days will be the test.

wowser

“You won’t fight back, Zodman, because your kind never does. You didn’t in Berlin or Amsterdam or Paris. And you won’t either, Cullinane. You’ll pray and you’ll issue most moving statements and you’ll regret the whole mess, but you won’t raise a finger. And Eliav as a trained seal of the government will announce, ‘The responsible nations of the world really must do something,’ but he won’t have a clue as to what.”

could michener have predicted the current anti-semetism of 2019?

“I was always much impressed,” Tabari said, “when your Jewish God halted human sacrifice. Here you are, restoring it.” “I’m trying to restore something much older. The brotherhood that used to exist on this land. Want to help?”

himself to stay alive until he could finish his defiant cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” to die on the long, wailing pronunciation of the word “one.”