In and out of season
Sir: I would not wish for one moment to be thought to be endorsing George Gale's ut- terly tendentious remarks about Jerusalem (27 December 1969). Nevertheless, I fear that the Zionists who write both from Israel and this country (Letters, 3 January) `do protest too much'.
Let us agree that it is a gratuitous insult to compare Israelis with Nazis. It would be an insult to compare most Germans, too. But Zionists really must not expect to have it both ways. If Israel is a country which has achieved the Zionist ambition of allowing Jews to be like other people, then it follows that they can be equally as nasty as Germans or Arabs—or indeed as the British, who have committed their share of atrocities in their time (many would say they are doing so now, by proxy, in Biafra).
During the war, when stationed in what was then Palestine, I had a dear 'adoptive aunt' at whose house I often stayed. Her brother, a leading Zionist who became the first president of Israel, was often quoted to me (a non-Zionist Jew) as saying that he wanted the image of the gentle Jew, born for suffering, to be erased. The Jews must have their own land where they would behave like
other people. He would not be satisfied till a Jewish murderer was hanged by a Jewish ex- ecutioner.
Leaving aside the merits of such an ideal, it must be said that the Zionists have achieved their aim. The majority of Jews are still nice people. But this has not prevented incidents like Deir Yassin, where Arab villagers were thrown to their deaths down a well, or Qibya. where the houses were set on fire and the escaping villagers were shot down at their front doors. It is simply no use expecting the Arabs not to compare such events with Nazi atrocities. Any differences are too subtle for the victims to detect.
I had a visit recently from a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (also an oc- casional contributor to your letter columns. The SPECTATOR is clearly much read out there). He told me with great sadness that what the Jews have lost in Israel is their an- cient `rachmanuf (compassion). No one can doubt that if ever a war had a definite beget- ter, it was Nasser's closure of the Straits of Tiran with its accompanying bombastic challenge to the Israelis to 'come on'. But all the mutual recrimination in the world does not alter the fact that once there were miserable refugees, now there are miserable Arab refugees. The sum total of human suffering remains the same. No amount of blinkered argument by the George Gales or the Zionists will alter this tragic fact.
Previous page
