AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
When the smoke of the press conferences on the Middle Eastern war has finally cleared, the deafening glug-glug of the whisky bottles in the newsroom and the erratic clatter of the commentators' typewriters at last has fallen silent, one stark fact will remain: the word 'Jew' will never be the same again. I realise that in saying that I am setting off in cleated boots across an area of raw and still bleeding sensitivity, and probably laying myself open to prosecution under the Race Relations Act at the same time.
My own first inkling of the approaching transformation came at the end of May, when with the born newshound's nose for a crisis I arrived in Jerusalem only four brief weeks too early for yet another astonishing scoop. On the way up from the rather dull remains of ancient Jericho, advertised on the signpost as the Oldest City in the World, where a group of elderly American ladies in white hats and white shoes had been standing on a sun-cracked mound
listening to the almost incomprehensible guide and looking earnestly down a single deep trench filled at the bottom with dried grey mud, we had passed the miserable barren encampments of some of the million refugees from Israel. Then in the Old City of Jerusalem we sat in a dark food shop in the alley leading to the Wailing Wall, and were entertained free for lunch, in spite of the raging Jordanian thirst for the money of tourists visiting the Holy Places, and even given beer to drink which was apparently illegal and had to be whipped under the table every time the local policeman came back to show off more of his rudimentary English. It was there that we met a man who said he could look across no man's land at a prosperous busi- ness he himself had built up until he had been thrown out by the Jews with only a suitcase.
At the time it struck me that the word 'Jews' sounded strange in that context. The sound normally used to call up on one level an impression of the Victim in sentimental middle-European jokes, hand-flapping and eyes raised to heaven, or of a peaceful, industrious, intelligent and sometimes charming people on the other, outrageously persecuted and accepting suffering with almost superhuman dignity and resignation, and now the same sound was being used to call up the idea of a pugnacious and nationalistic race of grim militarists, beating up and ejecting the colourful Lawrence of Arabia-style Arabs who had been living in their promised land during the centuries of their unjust banishment. At the time, however, it seemed possible to make a logical distinction between the word Jew used in a Middle Eastern context, and the word used elsewhere with its old associations.
Then, after the menaces of the moustachioed Pharaoh of the Nile had almost restored the Middle Eastern Jew to the old image as well, the gentle martyr waiting to be massacred by the howling Arab hordes, the blitzkrieg broke loose in a dazzling series of explosions and flashes, Pow, Wham, Krunch, Shalom and the martyr flung back his penitential cloak to stand revealed, as Lenny Bruce once described him- self before jumping out of a third floor window while under the influence of drugs, as Superjew. Still, nevertheless, a Middle Eastern phenome- non. It was then, gradually, as I followed the course of the war through the pages of the Miami Herald, which serves an area whose Jewish population is higher per head than any- where outside Israel, I began to suspect that
it was not simply a Middle Eastern phenomenon. Apart from a tendency, shared with other
Western papers, to treat the war like a warmly supported sporting event, in which soldiers blinded by shrapnel or cooked alive in burning tanks were treated as tactical counters in a game of 'Attack!' or 'Sink the Bismarck,' there was an identification with the Zionist cause that went further than moral support, and seemed to be growing deep-chested and
bellicose at home in the reflected glory of the boys at the front. On Saturday night at the UN
in New York, having passed the white sheets painted with the blue star of David held out by the Jewish Fighting Fund— 'Support the Child- ren of Israel'—and already weighed down with coins and dollar bills, I felt a certain sympathy for the Jordanian delegate.
Facing the quietly insolent Arthur Goldberg,
the American ambassador who is reputed to have ruined his political career with the Jewish electorate by declaring the United States' official neutrality in the war, but whose implicit sup- port for the Israelian cause is at most times obvious, the Jordanian appealed to the warm- hearted American people not to be entirely
one-sided in their attitude to the war as a result of Jewish propaganda in the papers. Holding up a full page advertisement announcing 'Israel Wants Peace' he said this was perfectly true.
'Absolutely accurate. Israel wants piece of Jordan, piece of Syria, and piece of Egypt.'
By that time the transformation was almost complete. Walking home along Broadway where they sell the satirical buttons, I felt that, of the new series taking the wind out of Black Power, the buttons supporting Italian Power and even French Power were quite funny. The last one, proclaiming Jewish Power, seemed too near the truth. Reading the Jewish ambassador's speech on Sunday in Hyde Park appealing for a million Jews to emigrate to Israel I even began to feel quite sentimental about the million Arab refugees whose places they will be taking. The transformation from Underdog to Overdog has been too sudden: the image of Saint Sebastian suddenly plucking the arrows out of his torso and ramming them into the fleshy parts of his executioners inevitably elicits sympathy for the executioners. No doubt the sudden irruption of Jewish Power is an excellent thing to redress the imbalance that has existed for centuries, but the new role of Superjew both in literature and in life is going to take us some time to get used to.
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