84
American support for Israel has, until recently, been unwavering and largely uncritical,85 and this has created a climate of public opinion in which the world has seen the Israelis as the ‘victims’ of history and the Arabs as the aggressors. Antonius went on to say that
The fact must be faced that the violence of the Arabs is the inevitable corollary of the moral violence done to them, and that it is not likely to cease, whatever the brutality of the repression, unless the moral violence itself were to cease.
86
Since it was impossible to persuade Arabs and Jews to sit at the same table for discussions, co-operation was out of the question, as was the long-term goal of a binational state. The manifest sympathy for the Jewish problem, precipitated by the revelation of the Holocaust, served to occlude the position of the Palestinian Arabs. The 1948 attempt by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq to stifle the infant state of Israel, followed by those of 1967 and 1973, reinforced the world’s view that Israel was a vulnerable state which deserved support. It was only with the recalcitrant move by hardliners in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 that public opinion began to accept that there was a Palestinian side to the problem which had been neglected, perhaps because it had not been articulated as effectively as the Israeli side. As Amos Oz has said,
the wars we led in 1948, 1967 and 1973 were a matter of life and death. Had we lost those wars, Israel would not exist today. By contrast, the Lebanon War was optional… [it] was not a matter of life and death.
87
The intensity of mutual fear and repulsion is expressed graphically in two declarations: in 1928 Chaim Shalom Halevi said of the Arabs: ‘They hate us and they are right, because we hate them too, hate them with a deadly hatred’;88 while in 1944 the Nazi-oriented Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, urged: ‘Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion’.89 Such expressions make explicit what is only slightly diminished by diplomatic manoeuvres such as the Camp David Accords engineered by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 between Egypt’s President Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Begin. Anyone who witnessed, during the Six Day War, King Hussein of Jordan saying of the Jews, ‘They will be our enemies until the end of time’ will appreciate not only the depth of Arab feeling but also the inevitable fact that reciprocal Jewish feeling would be expressed with equal force by Israeli statesmen such as Benjamin Netanyahu.
As General (later Field Marshal) Montgomery said in 1939, ‘the Jew murders the Arab and the Arab murders the Jew. This is what is going on in Palestine now. And it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability’.90 He was wrong only in his fifty-year forecast. Again, there are geopolitics at stake, as Robert Fisk has pointed out:
The 1948 war threw up extraordinary portents of other, later, Middle East wars — of events that we regard as causes of present danger but which have clearly been a feature of conflict in the region for longer than we like to imagine.
91
One need not make any exaggerated claims for Judith as a work of great literature: its origins as a film project indicate that it belongs with a collection of Durrell’s writings (‘a lot of things I want to write which don’t come into the same class as…) at a level slightly lower than his major works. But its continuing relevance to the painful situation in the Middle East today makes it a compelling example of Durrell’s ability to write a story which also conveys an enduring sense of hope and tragedy.
1 Justine was shortlisted for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1957, and its sequel, Balthazar, won the prize in 1959.
2 Cf. Gordon Bowker, Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), pp. 306, 313.
3 Quoted in Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrelclass="underline" A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 533.
4 Quoted in ibid., p. 540.
5 Quoted in ibid., p. 532.
6 Ibid., p. 533; and MacNiven, e-mail to the editor, 10 October 2011.
7 L. Durrell, ‘1st Cleopatra treatment’, c. 1960, in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/13/5.
8 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/17.
9 The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported on 20 August 1964 that ‘The countries of the Arab League will ban all films starring Sophia Loren unless she withdraws from a picture being made in Israel about a Jewish refugee’.
10 Woman’s Own, 26 February–2 April 1966.
11 Letter from Juliet O’Hea, Durrell’s agent at Curtis Brown, to Durrell, 26 June 1972.
12 Ian MacNiven (ed.), The Durrell — Miller Letters 1935–1980 (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 81.
13 Ibid., pp. 84, 86.
14 Ibid., p. 186.
15 Miller also advised Durrell not to waste time on the ‘Antrobus’ stories (quoted in MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, p. 571). Durrell had written to Miller: ‘I didn’t send you Esprit de Corps; thought you mightn’t find it funny. I had to pay for the baby’s shoes somehow and wrote it in a very short time’ (Durrell — Miller Letters, p. 306).
16 G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrelclass="underline" A Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 40.
17 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/19/8; cf. Lawrence Durrell, Nunquam (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 52.
18 Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Minor Mythologies’, Deus Loci, NS7 (1999–2000), pp. 11–20.
19 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 1.
20 A. M. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate 1920–1948 (London: Methuen, 1950), p. v.
21 Quoted in A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948 (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 13.
22 George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939), p. 248.
23 Ibid., p. 404.
24 Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab — Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 369.
25 Dawoud El-Alami in Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami, The Palestine — Israeli Conflict (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), p. 144.
26 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (London: André Deutsch, 1989), p. 520.
27 Quoted in Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 36.
28 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 237.
29 Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 116.
30 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 29.
31 Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 376.
32 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 87.
33 Sherman, Mandate Days, pp. 151–152.
34 Quoted in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 451.
35 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 61.
36 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, tr. Haim Watzman (London: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 192.
37 Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. 403, 411.
38 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 193.