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Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949 QUOTES

Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949 QUOTES

1 " Leaving controversial issues aside, the first and main purpose of this book may be summed up by a phrase of Laplace: “If we were able to make an exact catalogue of all particles and forces which are active in a speck of dust, the laws of the universe at large would hold no more mysteries for us”. On a medium-sized school globe the State of Israel occupies not much more space than a speck of dust; and yet there is hardly a political, social or cultural problem whose prototype cannot be found in it, and found in a rare concentration and intensity. The very smallness of this country of about three-quarters of a million souls makes it easy to survey trends which in other nations appear confused and diluted by size. The fact that it so often was in the past, and is again in the present, in the focus of global conflicts and passions, makes the speck of dust glow in a phosphorescent light. The fact that it is a State of Jews, and of Jews of the most conscious and intense type, makes the microscopic processes in this microscopic country reflect laws of universal validity: for Jewry is not a question of race—“it is the human condition carried to its extreme”. "

― Arthur Koestler , Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949

2 " Israel’s rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. "

― Arthur Koestler , Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949