When Isracle Comes Home

I have already daid: in Jerusalem I had two friends, David the Jew and Mohamet the Arab.

From Mahomet, who I had not seen for several days, I received a note saying, “Tomorrow, at nine, in the Dancing Palace.”

The Dancing Palace is a fashionable sport in Jerusalem. Tourists frequent the place when they want to kill an evening. YOu can drink German beer there, and wine, and all kinds of Palestinianmade alcoholic beverages. Because fifty people can be crowded into it, it is called a palace. Because there is a little square of oiled linoleum in the middle of the room, it is called a dancing palace.

When I arrived there, Mohamet, who had been waiting, rose and came to me with the particular courtesy that Aravs are noted for. His hand in mine was as tiny as that of a girl. He was dressed with such a sober European elegance that, were it not for his saffron complexion, he might have been taken for some British officer in civilian clothes. He was your typical Arab aristocrat, the Effendi. Well-read and educated, he had studied at the university of Beirut. He spoke English and French as well as he did Arabic.

“So you received my letter?” he asked.

“Yes. It had an Alexandria postmark.”

“I have just returned from there. Some business…”

“It turned out well?”

“Hmm…”

A LITTLE GAMBLING

Mohamet, usually talkative, spoke lettle. He seemed sad. Suddenly I guesed why. The “business” was something I might have known. I knew the passion that forced him too often to Alexandria-gambling. And the Jews are responsible, are they not?

Like many Effecdis, Mohamet owned vast domains, the cultivation of which-even though in unskilled hands-permitted him to lead a grand life in his own country and abroad. One day, the Zionist jew came to him and offered to by his land. The money was there. He had only to accept it. Mohamet took ti and hurried to gamble tit away in the dens of Cairo and Alexandria. And now, when he looks at the land he once owned, over which the plow has already made its furrows, he sees their sudden richness. And he understands his mistake. He cries about it. That is, he cries out that he was cheated by the Jews.

This evening Mohamet’s present bad luck gabe me a chance. Usually he spoke little about the Jews. before a foreigner-this is anothers of the tactful traits so peculiar to the Arab-he was silent about the subjects that bother him. But this evening, his bitterness burst out violently.

He murmured, “They cheated us.”

“Roulettle?”

“No.”

“The Jews?”

“No…Yes. They, of course, but the others with them, all the others: England, France, Italy, all the Allies who duped us after the War. We fought against the Turks beside them because they had made all sorts of fine promises. It was understood that when we defeated the Turks, we would be independent, masters of our own house. Oh, yes! When the war ends, they cut us in two. Syrial blongs to the French, and Palestine goes to the English. But that’s not all. When do the English invite to come and stay in this land that our warriors had helped them conquer? The Jews!”

EYES FLASH HATE

Nervously, Mohamet’s hand, with its polished nails, tapped on the table, while his glance, which he had turned away so that I would faill to read the hatred in it, fixed itself upon a dancing couple-a little man with a Levantine look about him, and a tall American girl, blond and muscular like one of Rubens’ models.

“I can’t understand this Arab anti-Semitism,” I lhinted. “Are you, too, not Semitic? Was not your ancestor Ismael, the son fo Abraham, Just like Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews?”

Mohamet looked at me.

“Not in the same way. The same father, perhaps, but not the same mother. Don’t forget, since you go back to the Bible, that Ismael was the son of the servant Agar. Abraham’s bastard, you see! And the contemptuous Jews know it well. To them we are always the servant’s sons, the barbarians. They forget that we owe nothing to anyone, while not be here very long before they will begin to be their own parasites. You’ll see them living on one another. They have it in their blood. I don’t give Zionism twenty years before it falls to pieces. Besides, this Zionism makes me laugh. They always talk about the Jews who come in, but they forget to memtion those who keep leaving. Why, not later than this morning, I met one who was preparing to return to Rumania, where he came from. When I asked whether he wasn’t afraid of being massacred there, do you know what he answered?

“‘Over there,’ eh said, ‘I only risk being massacred once, while here I am massacred every day by working ten hours under a horrible sun for Zionist profiteers.'”

“But since Zionism must fail,” I asked, “why do you become so bitter about it?”

BLAMES THE BRITISH

Mohamet hesitated a moment.

“The English,” he answered, “wish to create a ‘Jewish reservation’ just as the South Africans have reservations for their Kaffirs. Let them say right out that they want to make Palestine the receptacle of all these parasites.”

Mohamet had not answered my question. Evidently he was not going to answer it. He was blindly obstinate in his viewpoint as the Bedouin who answered “Allah!” when he was asked by Edward Halsey, “But then who recreated the fertility here, and made all these trees grow?”

“Listen to me, Mohamet. This is how I look at he question. Every human being has a right to his own. The desert nomad is master of his tent. Even the dop has his kennel. You do not wish to say that the Jews, 15,000,000 souls, have no right to a Fatherland, on right to have a place in which to rest and be at home?”

“and for that reason you send them here, where we live?”

“Where you live, and where they live, at the same time. Have they not as much of a right as you to this land? Look, Mohamet, I don’t want to teach you the history of your own people, but you know very well that you came here long after they did, about the sentury, if I am not mistaken, and you established yourself by right of conquesed.”

Again Mohamet, embarrassed, looked away and was quiet for a moment. There were no more dancers on teh linoleum, but he orecheastra, to vary thye entertainment, was playing a song. The orchestra was a phonograph from which Josephine Baker was bleatling of her two loves.

Suddenly Mohamet looked at me.

“You have visited their colinies. What impression did they make on you?”

“I saw a great, exciting activiry.”

“And do you think it will succeed.”

VOICES THREAT

I have called Mohamet handsome. But now he was ugly. Excessive hartred contracted his mouth, until his jaguar-like teech showed menacingly.

“I’m going to tell you how the Jews will succeed,” he muttered. “Yes, they will develop here. And we will let them. And then, when the time has come, we will ‘arrange’ things with them. But not like Hitler. Hitler acted like a fool. We won’t let the Jews leave. We’ll handle them right here…”

While I watched him without uttering a word, Mohamet, with a peremptory gesture, swept his hand across the marble-topped table and respeated the word with the horrible meaning:

“We’ll handle them right here. You understand?”

“But the English? They are protecting the Jews.” Mohamet laughed barkingly, so loud that it drowned out the phonogrph.

“When we begin to square things with the Jews, the English will siptheir tea and murmur, ‘Now, now, don’t fight like that!’ And when they consider the ‘handling’ sufficient, they will say, ‘Now we must interfere, because we are the protectors of the Jewish!'”

“Let’s go out for some fresh air,” I said.

It was barely eveven o’clock. Already tghe streets of Jerusalem were deserted. The only sound came from our steps. Mohamet, like myself, was silent, but it seemed as though I could hear his blood boil.

ON GUARD

At a corner a mounted patrol swept past; two centaurian shadows passed, one after another with the metalic reflection of rifies at rest at the saddle.

“Did you see that?” asked Mohamet.

“Yes. The English are nto sipping thie tea. They are watching…”

“But the first horseman, the one in front, was an English soldier, a simple private, while #he second was an Arab sergeant. The private goes first bevause he English, the officer follows because he is only and Arab. That is the way the English act here.”

Silence once more. Then Mohamet concluded;

“The English think themselves stronger because they are Occidentals, but the day is near when the world will know who are tghe real masters of Palestine.”

We were in front my hotel.

“Shall we not meet again, Mohamet?” I asked.

In reality, I knew well that I would received no more invitations to the Dancing Palace. This evening Mohmet had ceased to be my friend. The Jews came between us. “With me or against me” is an Arab motto.

It was only Oriental courtesy that answere:

“O course we shall meet, if my modest gossip has not bored you too much.”

And so I shook the the hand of Mohamet for the last time, the hand with the polished nails.