I wanted to begin by welcoming everyone who hasn't seen this blog before. I know that I did a miserable job, for the most part, of keeping you fully updated on what we did and especially how I and Legacy Keshet responded to the war this summer. I hope that I can do a better job this year, though preferably not about any wars.
Then I wanted to clear up some confusion about the phone number. In fact, I was right the first time; when dialing from the States, it is not correct to dial a '0' before the area code. Therefore my number, from the States, is 011-972-52-xxx-xxxx. From Israel (and thank you to the half dozen people who replied within a few hours) the number is 052-xxx-xxxx. Fill in the blanks by checking your email. As another point about contact, to those of you with Gmail especially: add http://gidklio.blogspot.com/atom.xml to your Web Clips section to be alerted of when I make a new post.
Now I can move on.
We were supposed to have read Exodus and O Jerusalem!, one book fictional and the other not, before leaving for Israel. Though they didn't suggest it, the office should have advised us to read O Jerusalem! first in order for to review that era of Israeli history. Naturally I didn't realize this until I was halfway through with (and completely absorbed in) the Uris. He does a good job of having characters represent the different types of people in the mix of pre-Israel Israel. But there's a blurring between the qualities of each character and the role he is supposed to represent. Part of this, I think, is because there's such a blurring between the fictional characters and the historical people on whom they are based. Some of this I discussed with Mom. Why should Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah who died of pneumonia, have been rewritten as the fictional Harriet Saltzman who was killed when a British-driven truck ordered by the fictional Gen. Haven-Hurst ploughed into the room of the fictional Zionist Settlement Society? Why is Haganah Haganah but Irgun is Maccabees?
Then there are the more minor points, like how the kibbutz Shoshana was founded "at a point where the Jordan River flowed into the Sea of Galilee." Well...was the course of the river reversed at some point? I'll tell you: I was there; the Kinneret is freshwater, the Dead Sea saltwater. The river flows south. And every time I came across this description--two, three, four times--I kept questioning my basic knowledge of the geography. We also find several very peculiar things in this book. I encourage anyone who has a different edition from the one shown below to find, in III:18, the mention of the "Palmach manual" and its page numbers. I can't speak for any other edition, but in this one something is mentioned as being on page "four-forty-four" of the manual. Naturally, 444 is also the page of this passage. I'm interested to find out whether some editor was getting his kicks changing Uris' text according to the printing of the edition.
Another unsettling feeling was that of the Maccabee/Irgun reprisal methods. But that's only because for the rest of the book Uris presented the group from the 'terrorist' viewpoint. Then suddenly they come along and use the collective punishment method that see
ms to be the only effective way to prevent Arab infiltrations. For example the village closest to a breach in the Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline, or to a spot from which riotous Arab gangs congregated, would be razed. The method ensures that it's in the locals' interest to crack down on the anti-Jewish attacks. Villages that had settled down early enough to have a concept of 'authority' were able to avoid this fate; they also tended to be the ones that realized, like Kammal's Abu Yesha before it became his son's, that the only way to raise the quality of life of the Arabs was to let Jewish innovation bring them up. Find a copy of the book and read II:7 (p. 227 in the paperback Bantam), II:12 (253) about the Mufti's ability to incite the illiterate masses against--you guessed it--the Jews.
Are the Jews and their tactics from the era of 40 years before 1948 different than the Arabs and theirs of the 40 years before now--the entire length of the history of the Palestinians? Well, yes, and it's now clearer to me than it ever has been. The Jews grasped at a plan than gave three disconnected land chunks and no Jerusalem; the Arabs balked at a plan that would have created a Jewish state. The Jews built a system of hospitals, schools, and roads, brought back unusable land for agriculture, organized symphony orchestras and produced literature. The Arabs realized that exploiting the refugee problem would be their only way to persuade the world of the justice of their side of the argument, and luckily for them Arafat was just the kleptocrat who could convince the world. It's not about the land and it's not about negotiating for peace. It's about them wanting to destroy Israel.
"Why not find a nice Jewish community in...Wyoming or Nova Scotia? I'm sure Puerto Vallarta would be lovely...."
Yes, I'm sure it would. But why drive hours to visit your grandmother when there are plenty of nice ladies living on your block?
