BIRTH OF A NATION
Mayer, Milton
Birth of a Nation PROMISE AND FULFILL* MENT: PALESTINE, 1917-1949, by Arthur Koestler. Macmillan. 335, pp. $4. Reviewed by Milton Mayer THE JEWS who began—around 1880—to clamor for the...
...They may not have known—most of them—just why they were Jews or why they had to on being Jews, but they, knew not their being Jews was no acci-lent, that in Egypt there was no assimilation, that wherever they fere they would live and die as fews...
...It has one grievous failing: it neither asks nor answers, "Why...
...The Arabs did not, in the end, stay in line...
...Love's young dream has been betrayed all over the world, not by the Tories, the Conservatives, the Reactionaries, the Fascists, and the Nazis—he never expected anything of them— but by the liberals, the radicals, the revolutionaries, and the Marxists...
...He sees that they were chosen, but by whom and for what purpose he does not ask...
...It is clerical-ridden, but the author hopes that the rising generation will succeed in secularizing it...
...It is not, however, a religious state, because clericalism is not the same as religion...
...It was built by an elite, over 50 years, who, instead of fleeing Eastern Europe "to the flesh-pots of America, went to the desert" and became a "voluntary proletariat...
...Koestler doesn't ask—he is not yet interested in God, though he has just about exhausted every other .alternative—and so his story is the story of Palestine only in so far as that story can be separated from the why of the Jews...
...This was the Jew who thought that he had no mission but to lose himself...
...There is no evidence that they have obeyed the commandments any better than the Gentiles have...
...In the end, the politics failed...
...But his general impartiality is, by this very token, even more striking...
...Why...
...The horror was not the Arabs' fault, the Jews' fault, England's fault, or anyone's fault...
...And he already sees what he calls the "deterioration of human material," with the advent of the thousands, soon to be hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions, who came to Palestine in the latter day without a religious ideal, a national ideal, or any ideal—but only because there was no place else to go...
...he did not succeed...
...Israel does not remember why it was chosen, and even the Jews who would not try to "adjust" in Egypt have done it in Israel...
...His psychology was as bad as his theology...
...Promise and Fulfillment is tops, magnificently documented and magnificently impartial...
...They did not want to fight for England, or even for Palestine...
...On this last point, the reader has to watch his step in only one place, the author's treatment of the British Labor Government, particularly of Foreign Minister Bevin, and its betrayal of the Jews...
...The Bible is its textbook, not its prayer-book...
...And so, flaunting their Judasm (which, with all its shortcom-mgs, is not as bad as concealing it), they demanded a home...
...This was the "assimilationist" Jew, who tried to "adjust," that is, to lose himself in one or another of the modern Egypts to which he had been taken or driven...
...The Jews were promised their homeland "if ye obey my commandments...
...Its population is homogeneous culturally and even, in large measure, economically...
...the British sacrificed the Jews exactly as cruelly as Hitler did, but where Hitler at least pretended a principle, the British followed what they thought was expediency to keep the Arabs in line for empire and against Russia, Germany, and then Russia again...
...It just had to happen, because men and governments everywhere, in any crisis or imagined crisis, sacrificed justice and mercy to the necessity of politics...
...But there was another kind of Jew who could not be a Zionist, and this was the Jew, common in America and England, but still more common in Germany, who regarded being a Jew as an accident and an unfortunate accident...
...The Zionist never made this moral mistake...
...The author was once a Commu-nist...
...And this is the reason why Israel, like Rome, Russia, and America, will fall...
...He glimpses—just glimpses—the question: "After all, there is no other example in history of a community which has been chased round the globe quite as much, which has survived its own death as a nation by two thousand years, and which, in between autos-da-fe and gas cham-hers, kept praying at the proper season for rain to fall in a country on which they had never set eyes, and drinking toasts to 'Next year in Jerusalem' during the same astronomical stretch of time, with the same untiring trust in the supernatural...
...The author is a brilliant reporter and a brilliant writer, and this is a brilliantly written book...
...But it is not, and for reasons which he himself discloses...
...Partly by omission, Koestler reveals that the new Israel is not a Jewish state at all, but a state of persons called Jews...
...Why the Jews, why their perpetuation, why their uniqueness...
...He dreamed the Marxist dream when he was young, and he has never fully awakened...
...II As modern history...
...His archangel is necessarily now his archdevil...
...To Koestler, the Labor betrayal is even worse than the Tory betayal, and the explanation is found outside the book and inside the author...
...1 Koestler's story is the story of their homecoming...
...Koestler sees the new Israel as a laboratory in which man may find the solution to his political problem...
...Reviewed by Milton Mayer THE JEWS who began—around 1880—to clamor for the restitution of Palestine and who called themselves Zionists were certainly wrong in supposing that what a world of bloody and bitter nationalism needed was still another bloody and bitter nationalism.' The Zionist movement, from the start, was irreconcilable with world brotherhood and, of course, with the subsequent movement for world government Jews who would settle for nothing less than world brotherhood could not be Zionists...
Vol. 14 • May 1950 • No. 5
