“Another big trouble this afternoon at the Jaffa gate with fifteen killed.
Six
British, my dears, and two Jews. All the rest Arabs. Tonight they are going to have a go at the Haifa factory.”
“I don’t see why you sound so elated,” said the doctor with a little shudder. “It’s horrible.” He looked suddenly chastened, like a scolded puppy, and nodded in agreement, his face grave again. “The horror is not of our making, alas!” he said in a different tone. (p. 30)
The pro-Jewish or pro-Arab feelings of the British must also be seen in the context of the imperative within the Mandate, that nothing should jeopardise the Arab population. It has been said of the first High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel (himself a Jew), that ‘as a Jew and a liberal Englishman he would be ashamed…if it turned out that the establishment of a Jewish state involved injustice towards the Arabs’.36 At the same time, as the Arab apologist George Antonius put it,
In face of the abominable persecution to which Jews in Central Europe are nowadays subjected, it is not only desirable but also urgent that room be found for the relief of the greatest possible number…[But] The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.
37
One of the most poignant elements in the story is the apparent indifference of the British military towards the impending, inevitable, Arab — Israeli conflict. ‘The army could not avoid taking a position in favor of one side or another, and it was clear enough in Palestine its sympathy was with the Arabs.’38 When Judith is being escorted by Aaron to the kibbutz after her arrival in Haifa, their truck is searched by an army patrol. Aaron protests that the army is not doing enough to protect Jews from Arab attack. ‘You want us to be eaten by the Arabs’, he says. ‘Personally, I don’t care who eats who’, the sergeant retorts (p. 33). And when Judith meets Rebecca Peterson at the kibbutz, she asks, ‘But don’t the British keep the peace?’ to which Peterson replies:
When it suits them. I think they would be rather glad if their Arab friends wiped out the kibbutzim; we are an embarrassment to them. On the Lebanon side we are well protected because we control the crown of the mountain and the settlements are spread out along it — good defensive positions with steep cliffs the other side. On this side, alas, it is not so good because the Syrians are astride the crown and we are down in the valley. (p. 43)
Not only does Durrell thereby create a sense of insecurity, of a peaceful and beautiful valley surrounded by latent, and soon-to-be-explicit, hostility, but he represents the reality of kibbutzim, such as both the real and the fictional Shamir, with an air of pathos that immediately wins the reader’s affection and sympathy. This becomes particularly effective when Grete is introduced to the children’s quarters, and experiences the various psychological weaknesses which are the facts of life carried within these future builders of Israeli society.
From a reading of The Alexandria Quartet we can infer that Durrell himself had far greater sympathy for the Jewish cause than for the Arabs (his second and third wives were Alexandrian Jews), and the Quartet, anticipating what Durrell would write in Judith, features an episode of gun-running into Palestine — in this case aided by Coptic (Christian) Egyptians. Permeating Judith is the leitmotiv uttered by Aaron (‘Israel must get itself born’ — p. 88) and David Eveh (‘Israel must become a reality, a sovereign state’ — pp. 114–115); and, finally, with the UN vote in favour of partition, Major Lawton realised that ‘Israel had been born’ (p. 195). The prophetic dream of Theodor Herzl had come true: ‘The Jewish State is essential to the world; it will therefore be created…A State is created by a nation’s struggle for existence’.39 In The Alexandria Quartet, this geopolitical imperative is recognised by Nessim Hosnani, a (Christian) Copt, who fears the extinction of non-Muslims in his native Egypt. For him the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would represent a counterbalance to the extension of Islam: ‘if only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease’.40
But this development brought its own nemesis: as Rebecca Peterson says to Grete:
For so long we have been living in insecurity, dependent on the good will of strangers, on the charity of others…Now, all of a sudden, we exist on paper as a place called Israel. This is a momentous step forward, for we have now become a sort of world commitment. But you know as well as I do that if Israel were to be swallowed up by the Arab states, nobody would lift a finger to save her. At last, my dear, at last we are all alone with our own destiny. It depends on us whether the state can get itself born and fix itself among the other small nations. (p. 213)
The period of the Mandate saw the accelerating process of this conflict, in which ‘Two competing national movements consolidated their identity in Palestine and advanced steadily toward confrontation’.41 David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel 1948–1953 and 1955–1963, simply said, ‘Everybody sees the problem in relations between the Jews and the Arabs. But not everybody sees that there’s no solution to it. There is no solution!’42 As one commentator had said as early as 1905, ‘The two movements were destined to wage war until one defeated the other, and the fate of the entire world depended on the outcome of this struggle’43 — a view echoed continuously since then by observers such as Robert Fisk, author of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East:
The Arab — Jewish struggle…is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands.
44
Despite manifestations of anti-semitism in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pro-Jewish opinion in England had in fact been evident since the seventeenth century: Sir Henry Finch published his World’s Great Restauration or Calling of the Jews in 1621; in 1840 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, declared that ‘There exists at present among the Jews dispersed over Europe a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine’45 — an early expression of the view that the ‘dispersed’ Jews constituted a nation, with the concomitant suggestion that they therefore deserved statehood. The prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity) wrote of the Middle East in his novel Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847), while the theme of Jewish re-awakening permeates George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1874–1876), as surely as it becomes the leitmotiv of Judith.46