East by Middle East
Manor, F.S.
"East by Middle East" - Late at night I went to sleep. It was a tiny room with a window facing a blank wall. It was half-dark in there even on the brightest day. There was no electricity in the house, only gaslight. I had...
...She might have calculated that in time I might tear myself away from Poland...
...There are the native-born Israelis who have known three aggressive wars waged by the Arabs with the explicit purpose of annihilating the Jewish state and its people...
...2. The second area of instability—especially in view of the efforts at an Egyptian-Israeli understanding, an initiative that at the time of writing is still ticking over—is President Sadat's modus operandi...
...Sadat went back on this agreement, claiming that the Egyptian army must have the right to deploy anywhere on Egyptian soil...
...How do you explain this...
...France is a very centralized country...
...He is the author of numerous books, including The Century of Total War, The Opium of the Intellectuals, and, most recently, Plea for Decadent Europe, which will be published in America by Gateway Editions this fall...
...In the United States there is a tendency for Jews to vote for the Democrats and for another category of people to vote for the Republicans...
...Millennia rather than centuries meet here in a perpetual clash of incongruities, the most striking mark of this beautiful land...
...Those who have crawled through the old Syrian bunkers on the Golan Heights, bunkers that were almost literally withinspitting distance of old, established Israeli villages, those who have looked at the Israeli Mediterranean shore from the old Jordanian forts on the West Bank, cannot but be filled with dismay at the fatuity of the President's words...
...Thirty-nine families with 135 children occupy the barren land...
...There was no Israeli cabinet minister, official, academic, or farmer to whom I spoke who had not had a close brush with death, not because of the violent times in which we live, but because he or she was Jewish...
...You must show that it is not possible to increase the minimum wage without affecting all wages, and that an increase in the minimum wage will make it more difficult for enterprises to hire new workers...
...One Arab mayor spoke to us of a new confederation encompassing Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip...
...But to explain that to people who have no idea how a free economy functions is difficult...
...candidate in science at the famous Weizmann Institute and a social worker active among the disadvantaged children of the Oriental community to which she belongs...
...valid in this country that since time out of mind has been the bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa...
...I knew that it was my fault...
...First, the Communists have been saying that if they come to power they will respect the traditional freedoms of the French...
...It is possible to explain these things quietly to students...
...Of course, it can all be wasted if people will not be rational," an Israeli engineer concluded his briefing...
...Having seen this spring the friendliness of the south Lebanese farmers and soldiers as they crossed into Israel through the "good fence," and having heard in what was allegedly peacetime the PLO gunfire directed from the Beaufort castle at Lebanon's Christian villages, I fail to understand the dogmatic attitude of Washington, which in the Middle East as in Africa appears so desperately anxious to placate what obviously are implacable forces...
...Alpert's had convinced her that all the hopes she had placed in me had been foolish...
...And soon there was nothing left to say...
...Doctors who had examined her had agreed that she suffered from anemia, but it wasn't the kind of anemia that necessarily killed...
...We are surrounded...
...She lived next door to a friend, a young man who was in the last stages of consumption and could last another six months at best...
...Many people I know told me: "Yes, certainly the program of the Left is bad, is inflationary, and in a certain way I would prefer a government victory...
...Aron: There are a lot of reasons for this...
...First, I would say that the French people are very politicized...
...But how can one reconcile this rational solution with the ambitions of Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, ambitions recklessly encouraged by the Carter administration...
...We looked at the magnificent Beaufort castle across the Israeli-Lebanese border...
...A week later Mr...
...Aron: Yes and no...
...Strangely enough, she had formed a friendship with a woman in Otwock who was also consumptive and with whom she was more open and talkative...
...She put out the lamp and grew immediately silent...
...She had apparently swallowed a number of sleeping pills and had sunk into a kind of coma...
...Thus, nine centuries after the collapse of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Crusaders' castles continue to play an important strategic role...
...It was a lovely landscape: the mauve Moab hills in the distance, the spring grass, flowers clustered under the trunks of olive trees...
...They will be disbanded," the mayor said firmly, and I wondered...
...At Christmas in Ismailia, President Sadat agreed to Mr...
...People who were born in Israel have a feeling of being suffocated," Sonja said...
...She added that she was still optimistic...
...One could not traverse them other than in convoys guarded by British troops...
...Tyrrell: In light of freedom's condition in Eastern Europe I should have thought a large number of voters would have feared for their freedoms when confronted with the prospect of Communists in government...
...and 3) the socialists are bringing to power the Communists, and even if they are able to expel the Communists after a certain number of months or years, in the interim the Communists would have conquered a part of French society...
...Tyrrell: Why is it that such a large percentage of Frenchmen vote, some 85 percent in this election, while such a small percentage of Americans vote...
...All over the region one sees castles of the Crusaders, who in their architecture skillfully blended the then highly developed western military building technique with the architectural innovations of the Byzantines...
...So much military construction had been going on in southern Lebanon over the past few months that the PLO had to import building materials from Eastern Europe, and indeed most of the fortifications were built under the direction of Yugoslav and East German military engineers...
...Let me contrast this vignette with a different experience...
...Perhaps it is a complex that we think so much about borders, about security, because we know that as long as the security areas remain in our hands we shall be safe...
...When President Carter and Prime Minister Begin speak of security, they are discussing two different concepts...
...In the UN statistics these refugees have multiplied like the proverbial loaves and fishes...
...The rule of law, such issues as juvenile delinquency—these are the daily ingredients of a law officer's life, in Israel as in any other western democracy...
...She had been prescribed injections and a diet of liver which she ignored...
...He told us of thousands of political prisoners, of grim concentration camps in the desert, of a colonial structure wherein every official, including policemen above the rank of corporal, had to come from Jordan proper...
...One man with a Katyusha rocket-launcher standing on this hill could cause a frightful havoc down below," our lieutenant guide remarked professionally...
...We drove in a minibus with Hebrew lettering all over it and stopped in Nablus, a prosperous-looking city all white with fresh paint...
...How, in the light of the rapid development of weapons technology over the past decade, can one now talk with such unconcern about turning back the clock and returning to a situation that even 11 years ago was fraught with great dangers...
...What follows is the text of their conversation, which took place at the offices of the magazine L'Express...
...Our guide, an Israeli lieutenant, his naked pistol stuck in the waistband of his trousers, busied himself with books relating to his Ph.D...
...Everybody in France knows the importance of who's in power in Paris...
...The mayor was certain that the refugees would be absorbed by the peace-loving West Bank population...
...Forty years later, travelling through the West Bank was not very different from travelling through any Mediterranean country...
...There would be a common market and open borders between Israel and the new federation...
...In 1978, one searched for a camera shop in Nablus as one would look for film in Bloomington, Indiana...
...Under these circumstances, there can be no question of continuity, nor of certainty as to his intentions...
...an people be rational...
...I asked her if she wanted to accompany me to the synagogue to hear the blowing of the ram's horn, and she replied: "What for...
...So you meet a very large number of people who are still devoted to the cause of the Left, who are voting for the Left, and who would tell you that Communist participation in the government poses no threat to our freedoms...
...The Sinai has belonged to Egypt only since 1906, when the British decided that it was required for the defense of the Suez Canal...
...The only uniformed arm of law-and-order we saw was a solitary Arab policeman on traffic duty...
...I was afraid lest she die in the night...
...Aron: Yes, I prefer that to the opposite...
...There was little traffic: only an occasional truck carrying West Bank produce to Jordan, sedately rumbling in the middle of a road on which, 40 years ago, only a heavily armed British patrol would have dared to venture...
...In the two days that I spent with Gina, Genia and I became so friendly that we kissed when I left...
...But the polls were wrong, or the people changed their minds at the last minute...
...Here was yet another mixture of traditions: a military tradition that had lapsed for two and a half millennia (it was a Jewish garrison that around 500 B.C...
...Aron: Yes, there is a large amount of truth to it...
...If the West Bank is to be demilitarized, what will happen to the PLO armies, equipped with sophisticated Soviet weapons, now deployed in Lebanon and Syria...
...He is a strong man with a good mind, but he is not one of the world's great workers...
...Even so, the convoys were regularly stoned and frequently ambushed...
...Aron: It was interesting...
...My leaving to take a room at Dr...
...Unlike an American film, the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations began in reverse: with a happy-end," Shimon Peres, the leader of the Israeli Labor Party and a former long-time defense minister, said to us...
...From below, Beaufort has the most dramatic silhouette of all the castles, but today it is a PLO stronghold...
...Had she given up her belief in the immortality of the soul...
...There are the European Jews here who either survived or escaped the Nazi holocaust...
...thesis...
...There are the Oriental Jews who had known centuries of pogroms and the contempt of Islam for infidels, and for Jews in particular...
...0 F.S...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...And yet they behave as if theirs were a wholly normal existence...
...What will happen to the West Bank moderates when 300,000 refugees now in Lebanon return to the West Bank...
...This makes it difficult for him to analyze various developments, and causes him to make decisions on the basis of moods rather than cool analysis...
...I want them to come here sightseeing...
...A man suffering from ten diseases cannot be cured of all of them in ten days," the Arab West Bank mayor said apropos these grandiose schemes...
...The dangers already are evident, in particular in the wake of the Israeli action in southern Lebanon...
...Indeed, as we looked at it from the Israeli side we could hear small-arms fire coming from the castle grounds and directed at the Christian centers just beyond the "good fence...
...We visited one of the new settlements on the West Bank: a few prefabricated huts clustered around a massive stone tower...
...After talking to us—a small group of Canadian newsmen—for some time with a lawyer's fluency and clarity of mind, the minister explained that he had to attend a cabinet meeting called to deal with such mundane matters as juvenile delinquency...
...We then proceeded towards the banks of the Jordan River, driving among olive groves and past lemon trees heavy with fruit, watching multicolored birds flit from tree to tree...
...We met in an Oriental cafe in a suburb of Tel Aviv where the jukebox was blaring, a cafe that had none of the sedate attributes of a Viennese coffeehouse, the replicas of which once dotted Tel Aviv's Allenby Street...
...The narrow road wound past Arab villages where people were busy at their appointed tasks...
...Some Arabs on the West Bank have come forward with highly rational proposals...
...So the settlements remain, despite Jimmy Carter's displeasure...
...it is difficult to explain them in a political meeting to a mass public...
...They live in barracks in an unfriendly wilderness, never certain whether the women and children who stay alone in the settlement during the day will not be ambushed and massacred...
...Or had she gained access to secrets denied the healthy...
...just as consistently, according to the polls, there was a majority of people who intended to vote for the Left...
...n Mount of Olives sheep were grazing under the k../ watchful eyes of two Arab shepherds, careful to keep the flock from straying among the tombs of the prophets...
...This was Algeria, or Morocco, not Vienna or Cracow, another pointer that 51 percent of Israelis come from Arab countries...
...And one wonders whether the dream of the city will ever come true...
...She sat there and waited for death...
...If it had not been for the Israelis the PLO ensconced at Beaufort would have long ago wiped out the Christian town of Marj Ayun...
...One merely has to recall the brief history of the "United Arab Republic" of Egypt and Syria which ended in a war and a lasting Egyptian-Syrian distrust, or the "federation" of Egypt, the Sudan, and Libya that also ended in a war, to realize how quickly the mood changes among the Arab leaders...
...In brief, a wife like my mother...
...A still larger number—some 70 percent—said they were very content with their own lives...
...I knew full well that playing around with women meant toying with lives, but I lacked the character and the strength to heed the voice of my conscience...
...In those years the Arab cities of what today is known as the West Bank were "no-go" areas—to borrow a recent Ulster term...
...In 1938, to stop here would have been sheer suicide...
...Thus an international border was created, and the Sinai was handed over to Egypt, then a British protectorate...
...The outcome not only frustrated French leftists, but leftists all over Europe...
...It was the government which tried to exploit this fear in order to win the election...
...I had light-mindedly broken up a match between two young people...
...Maybe it is the same everywhere: that the motive for voting is largely the way people look at the world, and does not involve abstract consideration of the advantages of this program or that...
...The smaller children were having classes on a sunbathed terrace as one of the women, a North American, explained their plans: 8 The American Spectator May 1978 They want to build a city here, with computers, electronic gadgetry, and, she emphasized, "non-polluting industry...
...He spends little time reading papers, The American Spectator May 1978 9 most information being fed to him orally by his staff...
...Even so, he said, such a federation would be indispensable, provided King Hussein was content with the role of a constitutional monarch, and would leave the people of each canton to look after their own affairs...
...The contents and the layout of the PLO's bases overrun by the Israeli forces bear out earlier intelligence reports that the PLO was getting ready for a new military offensive against Israel...
...One of these native-born Israelis is Sonja, a Ph.D...
...The Syrians are quite unpredictable, and they have a tank force bigger than that of all the European nations in NATO...
...One cannot dismiss the idealism of these people who were not refugees from East European pogroms nor survivors from death camps, but who came from comfortable North American homes or equally comfortable apartments in Tel Aviv and Haifa...
...The castles protected the Latin Kingdom's communications between Damascus and Jerusalem, and now stand in the very places that remain crucial for the defense of Israel...
...The attitude reminded me of the scene in Fiddler on the Roof...
...The shepherds on Mount of Olives could have been King David's contemporaries...
...I wanted to come to her bed at night...
...Tyrrell: I take it you are pleased about the government's victory over the Left in the election...
...Shelves upon shelves of books—Ottoman law, British common law, Israeli law, all equally F. S. Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...The Israelis cannot but wonder which is the true Sadat: the one who a year ago said he was willing to sacrifice three million Egyptians to recover Arab lands occupied by Israel...
...and beyond them, interspersed among the graceful houses, were the new monstrosities, the gleaming hotel towers, their artless white an affront to the soft pink of the city (Jerusalem has been built almost entirely of the local Judean stone of roseate hue...
...Even within the Rejectionist Front of the Arab states opposed to President Sadat's initiative there is the deep-seated antagonism between Syria and Iraq...
...The concept of a comprehensive settlement of all Middle East issues is a deceitful mirage befooling a Washington bureaucracy that has never been farther than the computer room...
...That night I had slept an hour or two...
...I had the feeling that whatever I said to her would constitute a burden...
...He excused himself, stacked his papers into his briefcase, and then, in what seemed a reflex gesture, reached for his pistol and put it atop his papers...
...At the moment, the women and children, and their men when they return from work, keep the man with the Katyusha away...
...In the distance shimmered the two cupolas, the silver cupola of the el-Aqsa mosque where President Sadat went to pray, and the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock...
...Let me begin with two of them...
...And I want the thousands of our people who every day go to work in Israel to continue working there...
...The government had three main arguments: 1) the Socialist-Communist program is a program of inflation, and it is absurd...
...At present one can define two basic areas of instability: 1. The inherent instability within the Arab world, where there is a constant changing of alliances, friendships, and enmities...
...Many people vote for the opposition for ideological reasons quite apart from any calculation of the consequences of a victory either for the Left or the Right...
...Ground and geography still have a crucial importance for Israel's defense even in these days of supersonic planes and missiles...
...The British then positioned two gunboats, one in the Mediterranean and one in the Gulf of Aqaba, and their surveyors drew a straightline between the two ships...
...Perhaps it is our complex, but this is our feeling, this is how we have been living here for the past 30 years...
...In a sense it is a success...
...God keep the King, but keep him far away...
...The Middle East is an area of inherent instability...
...She too couldn't live like her righteous forebears...
...Not that there is any great love lost between the West Bank Arabs and King Hussein of Jordan: The mayor spoke with bitterness of the Jordanian rule before the 1967 Six-Day War...
...This was no longer the Gina I knew but someone else...
...Once again, I was struck by the incongruity between the automatic rifle of the guard and the nonchalant manner of the woman driving away as if she still were a New Jersey suburban housewife going to the local supermarket...
...Gina no longer wanted to live...
...Had she lied earlier about her communications with the dead and now no longer sought to deceive me...
...or the one who said that if his visit to Jerusalem saved even a single Egyptian soldier from suffering a superficial flesh wound, he has accomplished his life's purpose...
...No wonder Israel is obsessed with security, a word heard at every discussion of the future of the Middle East...
...We have no other choice but to be optimistic...
...The tradition of learning, one that has endured since the scribes recorded the deeds of King David, continues to stir the Jewish soul even when clad in the martial trappings of Israeli officers...
...But there can no more be a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East than there can be between the United States and the Soviet Union, or between Moscow and Peking...
...The men work in the Israeli cities in the plain below...
...Suddenly, I awoke...
...Below, one could see the teeming plain where the bulk of the Israelis live...
...2) the sort of socialist society they want to construct would inevitably go in the direction of the Soviet system...
...Somewhere inside, the Polish Jews sensed that they were doomed...
...I lay awake thinking about Gina...
...There were no patrols on the road, no police forts along the ambush-prone curves...
...A Conversation with Raymond Aron France has just passed through one of the most important elections of the postwar period...
...But I would never, never vote for men like Giscard or Chirac...
...Consistently there was a majority of people wishing for the victory of the government...
...Second, the Communists would be a minority in any Socialist-Communist government...
...Tyrrell: Some economists have said that the intellectual defense of the capitalist system is too complicated to make in a political forum...
...At present, a war is going on between Algeria and Morocco...
...Raymond Aron is Professor of the Sociology of Modern Civilization at the College de France in Paris, and is a regular columnist for L'Express...
...The very old and very new are constantly juxtaposed in Israel...
...Looking out of his officewindow at the sabbath throng of Israelis, he said: "I want Israelis to continue shopping here...
...To the Israelis, security means their lives...
...Begin's proposal that the Sinai be demilitarized...
...And now we have the film...
...Manor East by Middle East A lesson in Middle East geography—and Israeli survival...
...Built by Fulk of Anjou in about 1140, the castle stands on the crest of a cliff rising steeply above the bend in the Litani valley where the river turns westward to reach the sea north of Tyre...
...One woman was getting into a late-model car to drive into town with her neighbors' and her own shopping lists...
...Is there any truth to this...
...Weak as she was, she had made up a bed for me on a cot in the same room where she slept...
...Although I didn't follow in the path of my pious parents, I had retained an ideal of a wife as my parents conceived it—a decent Jewish daughter, a virgin who after the wedding would serve if not one God at least one man...
...They know that their destiny is to a large extent determined by what happens in Paris...
...Some of the command posts, fighting positions, and arms caches captured by the Israelis were deeply dug in...
...Since my brother was a correspondent for an American newspaper, I had some connection with America...
...It is very easy for economists to explain why a minimum wage increases unemployment and hurts the real interests of the workers...
...During the years preceding World War Two, I was a foreign correspondent The American Spectator May 1978 7 in what then was British Palestine...
...The relation between France and Paris is unique, and the interest that the French people 10 The American Spectator May 1978...
...completely unfamiliar to me...
...Genia liked to talk...
...In the mayor's scheme, the West Bank and Gaza would be demilitarized...
...Yet a few miles to the south, on the Dead Sea, the Israelis expect to convert solar heat into enough cheap electrical power to meet the energy requirements not only of Israel but of much of the Middle East...
...He was bubbling over with enthusiasm at about the same time the PLO was working out the last tactical details of the murder of President Sadat's editor-friend, the hijacking of a Cypriot plane, and the bestial massacre of Israeli holiday travellers near the beaches of Tel Aviv...
...added to which, the combined air forces of Syria and Iraq are larger, and more modern, than the combined air forces of Britain and France...
...Immediately after the election R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., interviewed Raymond Aron, the renowned French philosopher and journalist who has spent more than a generation arguing against the European Left...
...I belonged to a generation which no longer believed in free will and which based everything on circumstances, ideologies, and complexes...
...Although she was a leftist and I was considered a rightist, we were united by the same passion—to seize every possible, pleasure at any price before we vanish forever...
...She came each morning to visit and brought food she had bought for Gina...
...My having moved in with Sabina seemed to me even more than foolish...
...Together, the Israelis and Palestinians could accomplish wonders: joint research, joint development, joint business ventures...
...I had taken on so much work that I was constantly behind...
...Genia's brother was a doctor in Warsaw...
...The office of the Israeli Minister of Justice was very much like the office of any prominent lawyer...
...When one views the topography of Israel from the terrain, rather than from lofty editorial chairs or from the snug offices of cabinet ministers and secretaries of state haunted by the specter of another oil boycott, security quickly ceases to appear as an obsession...
...He was full of optimism...
...I had visited her during the Days of Awe—a sick woman alone in the woods and far from neighbors, from a store, and without a telephone...
...and although miracles did occur in this region, even the prophets of old would have found it difficult to turn these 300,000 refugees into a throng of 3.5 million—the UN figure...
...However, placed on the lowest shelf among the leatherbound law books, and within the minister's easy reach, lay a very businesslike pistol...
...guarded the strategically important Elephantine Island on the Nile, protecting the Egypt of the Pharaohs against incursions from the south...
...Even so, the mobile part of the electorate in the United States is larger than in France, where voting is to a large extent the expression of a traditional allegiance to a certain way of life or view of the world...
...Sabina was bending over me and her hair brushed my face...
...The entire country approximates a long border, a bridge, and it has always been \ so...
...Solar energy, powering industries that would exploit the minerals that abound in the Dead Sea, could turn the area into the Arab Jewish workshop of the Middle East and transform Jordan, today an impecunious pensioner of the Saudis, into an important industrial power...
...Tyrrell: Some very interesting polls came out before the election which showed that, though a majority of people were going to vote for the Left, an even larger majority did not want the Left to win...
...No other houses were in sight, only stunted trees and bushes asserting themselves in the unfriendly boulder-strewn soil, and one wonders why anybody would have called this the land of milk and honey...
...During the day she occasionally erupted in a wet cough but that night I didn't hear so much as a rustle from her...
...I generally wasn't inclined to marriage and even if I had been, it certainly wouldn't be to someone like Sabina...
...I should have admitted this to Sabina, but I saw that she was tired of flighty affairs and that she longed with all her womanly instincts for a husband, a home, and children...
...and the abiding ambition to be a Herr Doktor, Monsieur le Professeur, or a Cambridge Triple First (as is Abba Eban, Israel's former foreign minister...
...Third, the majority of French do not believe that the equivalent of the Prague coup is possible in Western Europe, in a country like France...
...But at the back of the minister's mind, indeed everybody's mind here, is the paramount concern with sheer physical survival...
...Added to which, she is a strikingly attractive young woman...
...They clear the stones around their settlement, they plant flowers and fragrant bushes outside the barracks, they dream of their non-polluting city...
...She toldme that doctors—her brother concurring—had given her a year to live...
...It is now surmised that the Tel Aviv massacre of March 11 was to be the opening shot of this offensive...
...She confided to me that Gina was hardly as sick physically as she assumed...
...This is the Israeli security fence through which Christian Lebanese come to Israel to work or to receive medical attention...
...Saudi Arabia feels menaced by Yemen...
...Indeed, this is one of the main weaknesses of a free society and a free economy...
...We know we are different from the others...
...I tried to carry on a conversation with her about the supernatural but she didn't answer...
...I didn't hear her breathing...
...Except for a solitary guard patrolling the settlement with an automatic rifle, there were no men around...
...To President Carter, primed by the State Department, security means the unimpeded flow of Arab oil...
...Our passage created no greater stir than a wave of hand from a naked child, or a short bark from a dog contesting the contents of a rubbish dump with an emaciated goat...
...I hoped to rouse a passion within her and to make her talkative one last time, but Gina said that she must sleep alone...
...There may be an accommodation that could gradually grow into an understanding...
...She had almost stopped talking...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
