My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel Read Online Free Page B

Peninsula. But in Palestine there is no cogent national identity. There is no mature political culture. In these distant parts of the Ottoman Empire, there is no self-rule and no Palestinian autonomy. If one is a proud subject of the British Empire, it is quite understandable that one would see the land as a no-man’s-land. As a land the Jews may legitimately inherit.
    Yet I still ask myself why he does not see. After all, Arab stevedores woke him at dawn and carried him ashore in the rough wooden boat. Arab peddlers passed him in the Jaffa market. Arab staff attended to him in the Jaffa hotel. He saw Arab villagers from the carriages along the way. And the Arab residents of Ramleh and Lydda. The Arabs in his own Thomas Cook convoy: the guides, the horsemen, the servants. The Baedeker guide to Palestine states emphatically that the city of Ramleh is a city built by Arabs, and that the white tower of Ramleh is an Arab tower.
    As I observe the blindness of Herbert Bentwich as he surveys the Land from the top of the tower, I understand him perfectly. My great-grandfather does not see because he is motivated by the need not to see. He does not see because if he does see, he will have to turn back. But my great-grandfather cannot turn back. So that he can carry on, my great-grandfather chooses not to see.

    He does carry on. He gathers his fellow pilgrims and they board the train to Jerusalem. The Jaffa–Jerusalem railway was laid down by a French company only a few years earlier, and the engine is a modern steam engine carrying modern cars with comfortably upholstered seats. But as thrilled as he is by the signs of progress he sees embodied by the new train, he is even more impressed by the landscape. Through the wide windows of the French-made cars he sees the remains of the ancient Hebrew city of Gezer (but he does not see the adjacent Palestinian village of Abu Shusha). He sees the tombs of the heroic Maccabeans in Modi’in (but not the Palestinian village of Midia). He sees Samson’s Tsora (but not Artouf). He does not see Dir-el-Hawa, and he does not see Ein Karem. My great-grandfather sees the ancient glory of the twisting gorge leading to Jerusalem, but he does not see the Palestinian peasants tilling the craggy terraces of the Jerusalem hills.
    Two things drive Herbert Bentwich: a vivid historical memory coupled with a belief in progress, and a longing for the glory of the past that gives rise to determination to pave the way for modernization. Yes, he is committed to Russian Jewry groaning under the tsar’s tyranny. He never forgets the victims of the 1881–82 pogroms in the Ukraine and the victims of the recent Romanian persecutions. But what really captivates him is the Bible and Modernity. His real passions are to revive the prophets and to put up telegraph lines. Between the mythological past and the technological future there is no present for him. Between memory and dream there is no here and now. In my great-grandfather’s consciousness, there is no place for the Land as it is. There is no place for the Palestinian peasants who stand by their olive and fig trees and wave hello to the British gentleman dressed in fine linen who is absorbed by the biblical landscape he sees through the train windows.
    As I follow the train on its climb up to Jerusalem, I think of Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps, the French consul general in Egypt who devised a detailed plan to connect the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean with an artificial waterway. He then raised the money to carry out his vision by founding a general stock company. Within ten years the Suez Canal was dug, at a horrendous human cost, and Lesseps proved to the nineteenth century that there were no limits, that in this age of reason anyproblem could be solved. No mountain was too high for rational progress.
    Herbert Bentwich is not French but British, and though his personality is not Cartesian but Tory, the de Lesseps spirit affects him, too. He believes there