To Jerusalem and Back Quotes

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“The search for relief from the uneasiness is what is real in Israel. Nationalism has no comparable reality. To say, as George Steiner says, that Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model can’t be right. The Jews did not become nationalistic because they drew strength from their worship of anything resembling Germanic Blut und Eisen but because they alone, amongst the peoples of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth. This right is still clearly not granted them, not even in the liberal West.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“While Israel fought for life, debaters weighed her sins and especially the problem of the Palestinians. In this disorderly century refugees have fled from many countries. In India, in Africa, in Europe, millions of human beings have been put to flight, transported, enslaved, stampeded over the borders, left to starve, but only the case of the Palestinians is held permanently open.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“The ‘Jewish Question’ itself went up in smoke. The Oriental Jews who have come here are admirable in their own way, but they are without the modern skills that are so badly needed. Yes, while the Jews suffered under Hitler the conscience of the world was aware of them, but when they were dead that awareness also died. Ah, before 1939, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe created a rich, vital civilization—a culture, a literature, institutions. It all went into the graves and into the ovens.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“From these villages come the Arab construction workers you see in Jerusalem. There are leftists, and even some old Zionists, who complain of this. They say that Jewish labor built Israel but that now the Arabs do all the disagreeable jobs and form an exploited class of bottom dogs. But this is probably not how the Arab laborers see themselves. Their wages have risen, and there is no precedent for the prosperity they enjoy.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Perhaps the Jews have themselves created such expectations. Israel has made extraordinary efforts to be democratic, equitable, reasonable, capable of change. It has, in fact, transformed its Jews.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Sartre is saying, then, that non-Jews in Russia are hostile toward Jews because Jews could go to Israel if the government allowed them to emigrate. But he is also saying that the Jews are oppressed and wish to leave, and therefore they are not loyal Socialists and good Soviet citizens.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Sartre agrees but also resists, shifting his argument. The Egyptian fellah is not a full citizen, either. He is illiterate; therefore citizenship is beyond his reach. Only “certain powerful groups against which the Egyptian government has tried to fight” enjoy full citizenship. Below them there is no category that has political rights. Having said this, he admits that, “The problem of the minorities is very often solved in the Middle East by massacre.” Sartre excuses the Jews from the charge of colonialism; if they were colonialists and imperialists, he would be constrained by his logic to call for their extermination, for in his lengthy introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth he exhorts oppressed backward people to fall upon their exploiters and murder them. Only by killing can the victims of imperialist exploitation achieve freedom, self-respect, and manhood. They must shoot down their white oppressors and redeem themselves by bloodshed.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“In the 1969 interview, Sartre, whose attitudes are generally shared by the European left, sympathizes with Israel.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“But this might have been construed to mean that what the Nazis had done to the Jews resembled what Zionism had done to the Arabs—a parallel no sane person would agree to.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Nasser didn’t want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel. The British did not create the Arab-Jewish conflict, though they may have aggravated it. If the Arab states did not deliberately exploit the Palestinians for political purposes, then the kindest interpretation of their conduct is that they were utterly incompetent. It is true that Israel might have done more for the refugees, over the years. The efforts made to indemnify those who had lost their lands and homes were far from adequate.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Sartre says, “Those who claim that the Arabs started the war, that they are criminals, forget to consider the situation of the Palestinians, the absolutely insufferable situation of the Palestinians. They also forget that the Arabs from the beginning have been led by British maneuvers to take a negative attitude toward Israel, an attitude which has persisted since 1948, when an idiotic war was provoked.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“However, the Arabs themselves have put Israel into a position in which she is “condemned—militarily and economically—to depend not on the governments of the imperialist states but on the Jewish minorities of those states, who to a large extent support the politics of those states.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“and he defends Israel against the charge that it is the instrument of American imperialism”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Between Sartre and any given problem in politics there has always stood the United States. There are in the world two superpowers, but only one has seemed to him positively evil. When he discussed the Middle East, his first concern as a friend of Israel was to dissociate Israel from American interests.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Reading Sartre on the Middle East, I wonder whether he really knows what he is saying.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“WHETHER people who are greatly respected know what they are saying: Laura (Riding) Jackson warns of the danger that “thinkers” can constitute for the rest of humanity.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Our subject: science and religion; the boundaries of scientific knowledge, the certainty that there are other kinds of knowing.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Very few Americans seem to know, for instance, that when the U.N., in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the U.N. plan, vowing to resist partition by force and assaulting the Jewish community in Palestine. The Arabs have succeeded in persuading American public opinion that the Jews descended upon Palestine after World War II and evicted the native population with arms.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“There is, besides, a considerable tradition of left-wing anti-Semitism in France and Germany. The history of Socialist anti-Semitism is, alas, long and dirty, but I doubt that much of this older, leftist anti-Semitism has survived among European intellectuals.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Toward the end of the meal, the talk turns to an important and neglected subject: public opinion. Rabin admits that Israel has not been effective in its publicity. I say that Arab propaganda has become extremely effective and that the Arabs have succeeded in winning worldwide public support. Yes, they have a talent for that sort of thing, Mr. Rabin says; he implies that this is not one of Israel’s major problems. I disagree. The”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“We turn to other matters. The Arabs, says Rabin, are not interested in territorial concessions and will never be satisfied with them. They consider themselves owners and masters of this land. Jews and Christians are tolerated in Muslim society only as second-class citizens. There is therefore no point in making offers, saying to the Arabs we will give you this or that piece of ground in return for recognition and peace. The hope is that as the Arab countries grow rich and modernize themselves they will grow less hostile, more concerned to produce goods than to fight.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“He was romantic about Islam. He told me, and probably was right, that I didn’t understand. Though he once wrote me a letter saying that he wanted to join the Mississippi civil-rights marchers, he had no sympathy whatever with Zionism. After the war of 1967 he cried out, “You have no business in Arab lands, you Jews!” In the heat of argument he then said many rash things. Of course few people do understand the complexities of Arab history, and it made Marshall frantic when he saw a pattern of Western political ideas being imposed ignorantly on the Middle East. But he knew as little about Jews as I did about Arabs. Nation-states have seldom if ever been created without violence and injustice. Hodgson believed that the Jews had behaved as though the Arabs were an inferior, colonial sort of people and not the heirs of a great civilization. Of course the Arabs had themselves come as conquerors, many centuries ago. But one didn’t present such arguments to Marshall. The Arabs were his people. He failed to understand what Israel meant to the Jews. It wasn’t that the Jews didn’t matter—he was a Quaker and a liberal, a man of humane sentiments—but that he didn’t know quite how they mattered. Some years ago, Hodgson went out to jog on a boiling Chicago afternoon and died of heart failure.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Ben-David knows a lot about the lives of Jews from the Arab countries. He often makes the point that they, too, are refugees who fled from persecution and whose property was confiscated. World opinion concentrates on the Palestinian refugees while these Oriental Jews—nearly a million of them—are given no consideration. It is inevitable that he and I should turn to politics. Sightseeing is all very well, but our heads are full of news, omens, and speculations.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“(Ben-Gurion was always careful to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism; he did not believe that Bevin was anti-Semitic.) The fact”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Why is it that Alsop is writing such a letter, warning Israel that it stands in danger of destruction and reminding it that it has only one protector? It is because “bad trouble has begun between Israel and America.” For one thing, Alsop is shocked by Israel’s ingratitude to Secretary of State Kissinger.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“Arab demands for self-rule in Jerusalem will eventually have to be taken into account. Kollek is certainly aware of this, and my guess is that he is prepared to consider reasonable proposals for a shared administration. The Arabs know that there is no meanness or arbitrariness in him. He has shown by his fairness that coexistence is possible and desirable. He is Israel’s most valuable political asset.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“makes his day to greet the aged Greek Patriarch. It does a lot for me, too, I must say. The Patriarch is ancient, densely bearded up to the eye sockets, faltering a little as he walks toward us. He kisses Kollek on both cheeks, and with warmth. He sits in a comfortable chair to the left of his throne. We are served coffee and seven-star Greek brandy. The conversation, in French and English, is lively.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back