Missing Israel's New Tide

...The question, however, really should not be answered in technical terms, but by reference to history, faith and spirit, to what Maurice Samuel calls in the title of his first chapter, "The Shock of Self-identification...

...June 1967 was such a honeymoon for Diaspora Jews and Israelis...

...It would be useless to recall how little Israel desired the Six Days War, and equally futile to issue statistics showing how well the Arabs are treated in Israeli controlled territories...

...The two claims to Palestine, it would appear, are mutually exclusive, so the claim that is stronger in fact, in law, and in history must prevail...

...on the contrary, it was their understanding that by means of a program of massive immigration the Jews would rapidly convert themselves into a majority throughout the whole area visualized in the League of Nations mandate then being framed...

...They have already entailed a profound spiritual readjustment for Israel and its citizens, and they will eventually compel a similar reappraisal by the Western powers, including the United States...

...While his answer is not recorded, it would be easy to construct a number of technical explanations he might have given...

...Will it do any longer to base a Middle Eastern policy on a doubtful Transjordanian entity (a British imperialist invention if ever there was one) and a Russian-controlled Egypt seeking to expand east of Suez...

...Samuel recalls that after the first Arab riots of 1920 it was Sir Herbert Samuel, the Jewish High Commissioner, who not only amnestied the young nationalist leader Haj Amin el Husseini but appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem...

...Please forgive us for winning," they seem to say...

...Samuel cites the Arab refusal in 1922 to set up a Legislative Council consisting of 12 Arabs and three Jews (i.e., a permanent Arab majority...

...The new prejudices (like the old) are fed not by facts but by phobias...

...The same story was repeated in 1948 when a partition proposal would have awarded some three-quarters of historic Palestine to the Arabs, leaving the coastal strip to the Jews...

...This new reaction to "dominant" Israel, expressed most vociferously by the New Left (both Jews and gentiles), has not unnaturally produced a defensive reflex among Israelis and their Zionist supporters...

...After three military confrontations, Jewish moderates are again proposing a form of shared sovereignty on the basis of a negotiated return of the newly acquired territories, and it is hardly surprising that a large and increasing number of Israelis are beginning to feel that once and for all appeasement must end and realism must begin...

...And what self-respecting Israeli, having newly earned the right to the name of "Israel," would consider changing it to "Philistia" to make it more acceptable to the new Arab citizens...

...Who will not shudder at the thought of a second Cyprus in Palestine...

...and more particularly, "Please forgive us for reoccupying those parts of the historic Land of Israel—including Jerusalem—which were illegally seized by Egypt and Transjordan after they invaded Palestine in defiance of the United Nations resolution of 1948...

...He recalls, for instance, the letter of Emir Feisal (later King of Iraq) to Judge Felix Frankfurter in 1919, and Feisal's agreements with Chaim Weizmann in Paris that same year...

...These documents make it clear that at that time the Arabs laid no claim to sovereignty over any part of the historic Jewish homeland...

...It is therefore good after all to have in Samuel's new book a timely reminder of some facts concerning recent and less recent history...

...General de Gaulle, sensing the latest change in the very identity of the Jewish people, has switched to a completely new anti-Semitic lexicon...

...staff officers just back from Vietnam with the question, "How did you do it...

...If he subsequently became the leading spirit in the massacres of 1929 that saw a large number of the Jews in Hebron murdered, and then was able to give a helping hand to Hitler in his policy of annihilation of the Jews, the Jewish moderates have themselves to blame...

...When General Weizmann arrived in Washington on a visit shortly after the war, he was greeted by tired U.S...

...These are political facts, and no United Nations resolutions or Russian threats are likely to change them...

...I suppose that all nations eventually reach such a moment of truth?the United States sometime at the beginning of the 19th century, the Irish at the beginning of the 20th, the Russians at the end of World War II after sustaining two terrible invasions by Germany, and the African peoples throughout that Continent in the last 15 years...

...We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home," wrote Feisal...

...We may assume that Jacob surprised himself on that extraordinary morning when it is said he fought with the angel and prevailed, and as a result received the name Israel —signifying triumph, strength and dominion...

...The former had long been the culture heroes of the sick, the alienated, and the lost (witness the novels of Malamud and Bellow) : It was something new to no longer be the dangling man passed over by the military but the darling of the Pentagon...

...Reviewed by HAROLD FISCH Professor of English, Bar-llan University Honeymoons, even where the happiest marriages are concerned, are soon over...

...The best solution he can offer is a bi-national state with shared sovereignty either on the basis of a federation or a complete fusion of the two peoples...

...When Samuel, now a somewhat elderly Zionist, comes to look at the present and the future he is not as helpful as when he looks at the past...

...Samuel has evidently not understood that there is a new tide in the affairs of his people, and his pessimistic view of an inevitable Arab majority in the territory of a future "Philistia" will sound odd to Israelis currently savoring the reality of a solid Jewish majority (66 per cent) within the entire zone of western Palestine over which Israel's sovereignty now extends...

...Would it not be better to concentrate on the more stable elements of the Middle East, with Israel securely and immovably planted in their midst...

...Instead of the cringing, helpless, pusillanimous son of Jacob pictured in the old-fashioned version, we now have the image of a dominating, over-assured, arrogant chosen people riding roughshod over the rights of others less chosen than they...

...Surely an important lesson emerges from the history of Jewish-Arab relations during the past 50 years, and it is this: Any solution on the basis of shared sovereignty or partition is unworkable...

...Feisal later changed his mind, and the Arab nationalist movement grew and flourished on the basis of a (hitherto unknown) claim to Arab sovereignty over Palestine, partly because of the policy of appeasement practiced by both the Jews and the British...

...the Jews, a strange people, accepted...