To Jerusalem and Back QUOTES

41 " and he defends Israel against the charge that it is the instrument of American imperialism "

42 " However, the Arabs themselves have put Israel into a position in which she is “condemned—militarily and economically—to depend not on the governments of the imperialist states but on the Jewish minorities of those states, who to a large extent support the politics of those states. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

43 " President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

44 " What is entirely genuine in Kollek, without admixture, is his love for Jerusalem. Not even his detractors deny it. Christians and Arabs may not accept the rule of Israel, but they are satisfied with the Kollek administration. I am told that without Arab votes Kollek would not have been re-elected. People jokingly speak of him as one of the Arab politicians. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

45 " makes his day to greet the aged Greek Patriarch. It does a lot for me, too, I must say. The Patriarch is ancient, densely bearded up to the eye sockets, faltering a little as he walks toward us. He kisses Kollek on both cheeks, and with warmth. He sits in a comfortable chair to the left of his throne. We are served coffee and seven-star Greek brandy. The conversation, in French and English, is lively. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

46 " Sartre says, “Those who claim that the Arabs started the war, that they are criminals, forget to consider the situation of the Palestinians, the absolutely insufferable situation of the Palestinians. They also forget that the Arabs from the beginning have been led by British maneuvers to take a negative attitude toward Israel, an attitude which has persisted since 1948, when an idiotic war was provoked. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

47 " Nasser didn’t want them resettled; he kept them rotting in refugee camps and used them against Israel. The British did not create the Arab-Jewish conflict, though they may have aggravated it. If the Arab states did not deliberately exploit the Palestinians for political purposes, then the kindest interpretation of their conduct is that they were utterly incompetent. It is true that Israel might have done more for the refugees, over the years. The efforts made to indemnify those who had lost their lands and homes were far from adequate. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

48 " But this might have been construed to mean that what the Nazis had done to the Jews resembled what Zionism had done to the Arabs—a parallel no sane person would agree to. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

49 " In the 1969 interview, Sartre, whose attitudes are generally shared by the European left, sympathizes with Israel. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

50 " Arab demands for self-rule in Jerusalem will eventually have to be taken into account. Kollek is certainly aware of this, and my guess is that he is prepared to consider reasonable proposals for a shared administration. The Arabs know that there is no meanness or arbitrariness in him. He has shown by his fairness that coexistence is possible and desirable. He is Israel’s most valuable political asset. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

51 " Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country. People feel the pressures of enemies as perhaps the psalmists felt them, and sometimes seem ready to cry out, “Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

52 " Still, almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

53 " Y is convinced that Israel has sinned too much, that it has become too corrupt, and that it has lost its moral capital and has nothing to fight with. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

54 " Sartre agrees but also resists, shifting his argument. The Egyptian fellah is not a full citizen, either. He is illiterate; therefore citizenship is beyond his reach. Only “certain powerful groups against which the Egyptian government has tried to fight” enjoy full citizenship. Below them there is no category that has political rights. Having said this, he admits that, “The problem of the minorities is very often solved in the Middle East by massacre.” Sartre excuses the Jews from the charge of colonialism; if they were colonialists and imperialists, he would be constrained by his logic to call for their extermination, for in his lengthy introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth he exhorts oppressed backward people to fall upon their exploiters and murder them. Only by killing can the victims of imperialist exploitation achieve freedom, self-respect, and manhood. They must shoot down their white oppressors and redeem themselves by bloodshed. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

55 " These words put an end to the peaceful morning. At the north there swells up the Russian menace. With arms from Russia and Europe, the PLO and other Arab militants and the right-wing Christians are now destroying Lebanon. The Syrians have involved themselves; in the eyes of the Syrians, Israel is Syrian land. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

56 " IN AN obscure journal, an article by Professor Tzvi Lamm of the Hebrew University charges that Israel has lost touch with reality.* Lamm’s view is that although the Zionist idea in its early stages seemed more dreamlike than practical, it was soberly realistic. Its leaders knew just how much power they had—or had not—and adhered closely to their goals. They were not hypnotized and paralyzed by their own slogans. Jewish leadership, and with it Israel as a whole, later became “autistic.” Autism is defined by Lamm as “the rejection of actual reality and its replacement by a reality which is a product of wish-fulfillment.” The victory of 1967 was the principal cause of this autism. Israelis began to speak of the West Bank of the Jordan as “liberated” territory. “The capture of lands aroused … a deep, sincere, emotional response to the territories … and to the historical events that took place in them: the graves of our patriarchs and matriarchs, paths along which the prophets once trod, hills for which the kings fought. But feelings cut off from present reality do not serve as a faithful guideline to a confused policy. This break with reality did not necessarily blind men to the fact that the territories were populated by Arabs, but it kept them from understanding that our settlement and taking possession of the territories would turn our existence as a state into a powerful pressure that would unite the Arab world and aggravate our insecure situation in a way previously unknown in our history. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

57 " Sartre is saying, then, that non-Jews in Russia are hostile toward Jews because Jews could go to Israel if the government allowed them to emigrate. But he is also saying that the Jews are oppressed and wish to leave, and therefore they are not loyal Socialists and good Soviet citizens. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

58 " Zionism, Professor Lamm argues, is different from other kinds of nineteenth-century nationalism in that it did not originate in order to bring people back to a national homeland. “It arose in order to establish sovereignty, and hence a national home, for Jews without a home … it was a rescue movement to save a people in a critical situation by concentrating it within one territory, and allowing it to take its political fate in its own hands. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

59 " Perhaps the Jews have themselves created such expectations. Israel has made extraordinary efforts to be democratic, equitable, reasonable, capable of change. It has, in fact, transformed its Jews. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back

60 " The position taken by Foreign Minister Maurice Jobert in the October War of 1973 was that the Palestinian Arabs had a natural and justified desire to “go home.” I expressed, politely, the hope that the other attitude, the revolutionary one, would not be abandoned. "

― Saul Bellow , To Jerusalem and Back