To Jerusalem and Back QUOTES

1 " The free countries are curiously lethargic about their freedom. The credit of revolution is strong in Western Europe, while capitalism, especially in its hated American form, is held to be dying. Many exult over its approaching death. Tired of old evils, they long for "the new thing" and will not be happy until they've had it. Baudelaire writes, in one of his journals, that life is a hospital in which patient believes that he will recover if he is moved to another bed. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

2 " While Israel fought for life, debaters weighed her sins and especially the problem of the Palestinians. In this disorderly century refugees have fled from many countries. In India, in Africa, in Europe, millions of human beings have been put to flight, transported, enslaved, stampeded over the borders, left to starve, but only the case of the Palestinians is held permanently open. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

3 " But then, to its more severe leftist critics, some of them Jews, Israel is not the “democratic exception” it is said to be. The New Left sees it as a reactionary small country. Its de-tractors tell you how it abuses its Arab population and, to a lesser extent, Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Orient. It is occasionally denounced by some Israelis as corrupt, “Levantine,” theocratic. Gossip traces the worst of the Israeli financial swindles to the most observant of Orthodox Jews. I am often told that the old Ashkenazi leaders were unimaginative, that the new Rabin group lacks stature, that Ben-Gurion was a terrible old guy but a true leader, that the younger generation is hostile to North African and Asian Jews. These North African and Oriental immigrants are blamed for bringing a baksheesh mentality to Israel; the intellectuals are blamed for letting the quality of life (a deplorable phrase) deteriorate—I had hoped that six thousand miles from home I would hear no more about the quality of life—and then there is the Palestinian question, the biggest and most persistent of Israel’s headaches: “We came here to build a just society. And what happened immediately?” I speak of this to Shahar. He says to me, “Where there is no paradox there is no life. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

4 " Arabs are harvesting "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

5 " Arab boys singing their lessons. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

6 " The very Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded and wearing a skullcap, tells me that “the liberated territories” must be colonized and reclaimed by the Jews. The West Bank is Promised Land. For that matter the East Bank is, too. Professor Fisch, English by birth and dean of something or other at the new university in Beersheba, has no patience with the objections I offer. He tells me fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

7 " As we go up into the Via Dolorosa, we hear an exciting jingle. Arab boys are racing their donkeys down the hill. You "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

8 " As we go up into the Via Dolorosa, we hear an exciting jingle. Arab boys are racing their donkeys down the hill. You look for sleighs and frost when you hear this jingle-belling. Instead, there are boys stern and joyous, galloping hell-bent on their donkeys toward the Lions’ Gate. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

9 " For fifteen years the Soviet Union has been supporting the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East and all they have to show for it is the humiliation of their protégés and the capture and destruction of their equipment by Israel. The Arabs have shown no inclination toward Communist ideology and their oil continues to flow to the West. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

10 " He hikes up his trousers and squats, grinning to himself—both these Arabs find us amusing—and pours water from a green bottle over his toes, "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

11 " At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. They were killed. Everyone was killed. John somehow obtained Polish seaman’s papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus, "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

12 " joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, married, and had two children. His first wife died of cancer about ten years ago and he has married again. He says, “I ask myself in what ways my life has not been typical. For a Jew from Eastern Europe it has been completely typical—war, death of mother, death of father, death of sister, four years in disguise among the Germans, death of wife, death of son. Thirty years of hard work, planting and harvesting in the kibbutz. Nothing exceptional. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

13 " The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival—the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a few decades. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

14 " You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

15 " What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

16 " The search for relief from the uneasiness is what is real in Israel. Nationalism has no comparable reality. To say, as George Steiner says, that Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model can’t be right. The Jews did not become nationalistic because they drew strength from their worship of anything resembling Germanic Blut und Eisen but because they alone, amongst the peoples of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth. This right is still clearly not granted them, not even in the liberal West. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

17 " Last week, the novelist Amos Oz observed to me that Israel contains more different visions of Heaven than any outsider can imagine. Everyone who came over brought his own dream of Paradise with him. On Oz’s own kibbutz, people work hard until 2 p.m. Then they wash and rest and dress, and after lunch, many of them being Russian in origin, they read serious books and listen to music; they spend their afternoons and evenings gravely discussing Marxism. Their greatest pleasure is to talk in the old way about revolution and socialism and the future of mankind. The German Jews here often rest in a Kultur paradise, reading Homer and Plato and Goethe, and listening to Mozart. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

18 " In every quarter of the city, as in every community in Israel, there are armed civilian patrols that include students. Daily, before schools open in the morning, they are examined by parents for bombs. Arab students were asked to participate on the campus of the Hebrew University but refused. In my opinion it was a mistake to ask that they be part of such patrols. They are trying to avoid a charge of “collaboration.” The status of the Israeli Arabs is ambiguous anyway. They do and do not enjoy equal rights. They cause great uneasiness. More than once I have been told that the Palestine Liberation Organization would like to provoke riots in the Old City and the authorities fear that explosions like the one the other night in which six adolescents were killed may provoke them. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

19 " When Shahar begins his reply, he is at first mild. He does not agree with Abu Zuluf, he says. The Jews have not been inflexible and negative. Concessions are continually offered. They are rejected. The original U.N. partition plan of 1947 was turned down because the Arabs could not tolerate any Jewish state, not even a minuscule one. If a state was what they wanted, they might have had it years ago. They rejected it. And they invaded the country from all sides, hoping to drive the Jews out and take the wealth they had created. This country had been a desert, a land of wandering populations and small stony farms and villages. The Zionists under the Mandate made such economic progress that they attracted Arabs from other areas. This was why the Arab population grew so large. In Jerusalem, Jews had outnumbered Arabs and Christians for a very long time. Before they were driven out of the Old City in the late forties they were a majority. But this was how the world settled Middle Eastern business: "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

20 " It is so easy for outsiders to say that there are two sides to the question. What a terrible expression! I am beginning to detest "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back