It is Durrell’s ability to create strong images both of concrete realities — such as the ambience of the kibbutz — and of emotional states that lifts Judith from a reportage to a work of suggestive and imaginative fiction. (Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, had said that his manifesto The Jewish State was not written ‘in the irresponsible guise of a romantic tale’,19 and Durrell was equally true to his craft in avoiding excess in the portrayal of the parallel love stories.) His ‘political’ background made it possible to include elements in the storyline, such as the unsuccessful blockade with which it opens, Günther Schiller’s meeting with Grete and his subsequent suicide, the encounter between the childhood friends Aaron and Daud, and the threat of deportation to Cyprus, all of which are linked thematically and organically to the situation in Palestine at that time.
It is remarkable that such themes and narrative devices recur in Durrell’s work: in The Avignon Quintet, for example, the wife of the psychiatrist Schwartz (as in the case of Schiller and Grete) is sent to Buchenwald, and his subsequent sense of guilt leads to his suicide. Another recurring feature of Durrell’s writing is his insistence that the story never ends, or that it may have multiple endings. In a memorandum to Paramount, he suggested that ‘my own story ends here, but there is no reason why one could not continue it along the lines already discussed’. And the novel ends with an ambiguity: ‘Or so it seemed’. Similarly, The Alexandria Quartet had closed with the penultimate sentence ‘Once upon a time’, and The Avignon Quintet ends with an ‘opening’: ‘the totally unpredictable began to take place!’ Such was Durrell’s interest in improbability and relativity that he resisted any definitive conclusion to anything he wrote.
The political context: Palestine, 1920–1948
Specific events such as the United Nations vote in favour of partition (29 November 1947) and the British military and administrative withdrawal from Palestine (14–15 May 1948) provide the pillars on which the personal fortunes of Durrell’s characters rest.
Despite two notable exceptions (discussed below) where Durrell seems to have nodded, his scenario for Judith is accurate in two very important respects: its portrayal of the political situation towards the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, and its awareness of the tensions between Arabs and Jews which had built up over the previous half century. As a former British diplomat and government functionary, with extensive experience in the Levant (Egypt, Cyprus and the Dodecanese) in addition to his observations of the Cold War while stationed in Yugoslavia, Durrell was in pole position to employ this experience in the service of a novel which would incorporate both a love story (in fact, two) and the elements of a political thriller.
An introduction of this kind is necessary because, as Albert Hyamson noted, writing shortly after the British withdrawal, his own account of Palestine under the Mandate would be for
the guidance, instruction and also warning of those to whom the welfare of Palestine present and future is of account, necessary as an assistance in dissipating the fog of propaganda in which the whole subject is shrouded and has been for the greater part of the past generation.20
The fact that little has changed, in the more than sixty years since Hyamson wrote that, underlines the need for readers today to appreciate the unhappy background to Judith.
The following pages therefore indicate the political context within which Judith is set, and the reasons for Durrell’s not merely providing political and religious tensions as background (as he had recently done in the Quartet) but bringing that context into the novel as a character in its own right. In fact, the points of history, from the inception of modern Zionism in the 1890s to the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917 and the start of the British Mandate (from the League of Nations) in 1921–22, are matched meticulously by Durrell and woven into the fabric of the story which binds together Judith, Aaron, Grete and David; the Jewish Agency; the Haganah; and the impending vote at the United Nations to authorise the partition of Palestine.
In weaving together the crucial elements in the history of Palestine — the Zionist pursuit of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs’ resentment at being displaced from their ancestral lands, and British frustration at the impossibility of implementing the terms of the Mandate — Durrell captured the ironies, injustices and ignominies of that history. The personal quests of Judith, for the fulfilment of her father’s scientific work, and of Grete, for her lost child (a feature also of Justine Hosnani in the Quartet) are set within the brutal period when the inevitability of British withdrawal from Palestine and the equally inevitable Arab–Israeli conflict not only brought to a head these three strands of history, but predicted and, indeed, precipitated the Middle East crisis which persists to this day. Given that the film of Judith (and the serialisation of the supposed excerpts from the filmscript) appeared in 1966, there is an uncanny prescience of the Six Day War that would erupt slightly more than a year later.
The role of Major Lawton in Judith and the episode in which Colonel Macdonald makes arms available to the kibbutz (‘A Gift for Ras Shamir’, pp. 261–263) highlight the ambivalence of both British policy and personal affiliations which runs throughout the period of the Mandate, and they also make clear the fact that the Mandate itself was based on what at best can be described as a misconception, and at worst as a series of deceits and betrayals. The founding document of the conflict was the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, a statement by the British Government that it supported ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, while also guaranteeing ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. One might therefore assume that Britain wished to see Jews and Arabs living in co-operation, harmony and mutual respect. There were, however, several other factors which not merely complicated the fulfilment of the project and flawed the ground of the Mandate, but actually created a situation impossible of resolution.
Not least of these was another document, secretly agreed upon between the British and French governments and known as the ‘Sykes–Picot Agreement’, which made similar promises to the Arabs in respect of the same land area. As a Royal Commission of inquiry into the Palestine situation reported in 1937:
Under the stress of World War the British Government made promises to Arabs and Jews in order to obtain their support. On the strength of those promises both parties formed certain expectations ...An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.21
George Antonius, the principal apologist for the Arab cause prior to the Second World War, referred to the Sykes–Picot Agreement as ‘a shocking document’:
It is not only the product of greed at its worst, that is to say, of greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity: it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing.22
The Commission, whose report would be suspended until after the Second World War, recommended partition of the country, on which Antonius commented:
Forcible eviction [of settled Arabs] or subjection to a Jewish state ...runs counter to the lessons of history, the requirements of geography, the natural play of economic forces, and the ordinary laws of human behaviour.23
As I shall discuss below, it was an early example of ‘geopolitics’, but in this case, taken together with the Balfour Declaration, it meant that the British right hand was unaware of what its left-hand counterpart was trying to exploit.
At the same time, the fact that the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration were mutually exclusive points not only to a lack of foresight by the British (during a time of acute anxiety as far as the conduct of the world war was concerned) but also to a level of incompetence, if not of dishonesty. As Jonathan Schneer remarks, ‘the Balfour Declaration was the highly contingent product of a tortuous process characterized as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy’.24 As a Palestinian commentator has recently written: ‘
on what basis did the British believe that they were entitled to promise to the Zionists land that belonged to others?’25
Even though the Balfour Declaration had avoided saying that Palestine would become the home of the Jews, but stated, rather, that a home would be established in Palestine, Balfour himself and Lloyd George (the prime minister at the time of the Declaration) told Winston Churchill (at that time Colonial Secretary) in 1921 that ‘by the Declaration they always meant an eventual Jewish State’.26 In the following year, a British White Paper aiming to clarify the situation stated that
When it is asked what is meant by the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole but the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.27
Whether or not British policy — or lack of it — for the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was based on the strategies of war, on imperialist imperatives, or on a genuine sense of philanthropy, it is incontestable that British support was vital to the Zionist cause, and, as Sir Henry Gurney (the last Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government) put it, ‘The undertaking given by Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine represented the only attempt made by any nation in history to help the Jews’.28
The ambivalence and apparent lack of policy on the part of the British administration was due in part to the fact that many in the army were pro-Arab, despite acknowledging their admiration for Jewish endeavours and the fact that an Arab attack on Jewish settlements would most probably be overwhelming. At the same time, the Jewish Agency, set up in 1922 under the terms of the Mandate (and the organisation responsible for ‘springing’ ‘Judith Roth’ from Germany), had become ‘an undisguised alias for the Zionist Organization’,29 while ‘under the authority of the Jewish Agency, the Jewish community in Palestine had created its own virtual state within the superstructure of British administration’.30
This state-within-a-state, tolerated by the British, had an undercurrent of violence in its vigilance against Arab attack, but also in its own occasional attacks on British installations, including the bomb blast at the British headquarters, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed eighty officials. Under the aegis of the Zionist Organisation (forerunner of the Jewish Agency), a paramilitary defence organisation called the Haganah, was instituted in 1920, ‘because Britain failed to defend them [the Jews] effectively during the pogroms of that year’.31 In the 1930s, the Haganah ran parallel to two other armed groups, the Etzel (known by the British as ‘Irgun’), led by the future prime minister Menachem Begin, and Lechi, better known as the ‘Stern Gang’, led by Avraham Stern, composer of its anthem, ‘Anonymous Soldiers’. Another member of Irgun was yet another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who was one of those who sanctioned the assassination of Lord Moyne (the British minister of state in Cairo) in 1944.
That the British military turned its back on many instances of arms smuggling is indisputable; members of the armed forces may well have preferred the Arabs to the Jews (‘I wish the Arabs would come and wipe the whole lot out’ was the view of one soldier),32 but it was considered necessary for the Jews to be armed in preparation for the Arab onslaught that would follow British withdrawal. ‘Arms acquisitions, training and even manoeuvres had been winked at as long as they were reasonably discreet.’33 In 1937, Churchill was unequivocal: ‘To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army’.34 In Judith, Durrell, as already mentioned, even went so far as to show a British officer donating arms, ammunition and other equipment to Ras Shamir on the eve of the Arab attack, a detail which he most likely derived from the well-known fact that ‘especially towards the end of the Mandate there were numerous cases in which weapons, ammunition and other material were “lost” from military stores’.35 The less palatable side of Haganah activity is also to be found in Judith, when Aaron declares proudly:
“Another big trouble this afternoon at the Jaffa gate with fifteen killed. Six British, my dears, and two Jews. All the rest Arabs. Tonight they are going to have a go at the Haifa factory.”
“I don’t see why you sound so elated,” said the doctor with a little shudder. “It’s horrible.” He looked suddenly chastened, like a scolded puppy, and nodded in agreement, his face grave again. “The horror is not of our making, alas!” he said in a different tone. (p. 30)
The pro-Jewish or pro-Arab feelings of the British must also be seen in the context of the imperative within the Mandate, that nothing should jeopardise the Arab population. It has been said of the first High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel (himself a Jew), that ‘as a Jew and a liberal Englishman he would be ashamed ...if it turned out that the establishment of a Jewish state involved injustice towards the Arabs’.36 At the same time, as the Arab apologist George Antonius put it,
In face of the abominable persecution to which Jews in Central Europe are nowadays subjected, it is not only desirable but also urgent that room be found for the relief of the greatest possible number ...[But] The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.37
One of the most poignant elements in the story is the apparent indifference of the British military towards the impending, inevitable, Arab–Israeli conflict. ‘The army could not avoid taking a position in favor of one side or another, and it was clear enough in Palestine its sympathy was with the Arabs.’38 When Judith is being escorted by Aaron to the kibbutz after her arrival in Haifa, their truck is searched by an army patrol. Aaron protests that the army is not doing enough to protect Jews from Arab attack. ‘You want us to be eaten by the Arabs’, he says. ‘Personally, I don’t care who eats who’, the sergeant retorts (p. 33). And when Judith meets Rebecca Peterson at the kibbutz, she asks, ‘But don’t the British keep the peace?’ to which Peterson replies:
When it suits them. I think they would be rather glad if their Arab friends wiped out the kibbutzim; we are an embarrassment to them. On the Lebanon side we are well protected because we control the crown of the mountain and the settlements are spread out along it — good defensive positions with steep cliffs the other side. On this side, alas, it is not so good because the Syrians are astride the crown and we are down in the valley. (p. 43)
Not only does Durrell thereby create a sense of insecurity, of a peaceful and beautiful valley surrounded by latent, and soon-to-be-explicit, hostility, but he represents the reality of kibbutzim, such as both the real and the fictional Shamir, with an air of pathos that immediately wins the reader’s affection and sympathy. This becomes particularly effective when Grete is introduced to the children’s quarters, and experiences the various psychological weaknesses which are the facts of life carried within these future builders of Israeli society.
From a reading of The Alexandria Quartet we can infer that Durrell himself had far greater sympathy for the Jewish cause than for the Arabs (his second and third wives were Alexandrian Jews), and the Quartet, anticipating what Durrell would write in Judith, features an episode of gun-running into Palestine — in this case aided by Coptic (Christian) Egyptians. Permeating Judith is the leitmotiv uttered by Aaron (‘Israel must get itself born’ — p. 88) and David Eveh (‘Israel must become a reality, a sovereign state’ — pp. 114–115); and, finally, with the UN vote in favour of partition, Major Lawton realised that ‘Israel had been born’ (p. 195). The prophetic dream of Theodor Herzl had come true: ‘The Jewish State is essential to the world; it will therefore be created ...A State is created by a nation’s struggle for existence’.39 In The A
lexandria Quartet, this geopolitical imperative is recognised by Nessim Hosnani, a (Christian) Copt, who fears the extinction of non-Muslims in his native Egypt. For him the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would represent a counterbalance to the extension of Islam: ‘if only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease’.40
But this development brought its own nemesis: as Rebecca Peterson says to Grete:
For so long we have been living in insecurity, dependent on the good will of strangers, on the charity of others...Now, all of a sudden, we exist on paper as a place called Israel. This is a momentous step forward, for we have now become a sort of world commitment. But you know as well as I do that if Israel were to be swallowed up by the Arab states, nobody would lift a finger to save her. At last, my dear, at last we are all alone with our own destiny. It depends on us whether the state can get itself born and fix itself among the other small nations. (p. 213)
The period of the Mandate saw the accelerating process of this conflict, in which ‘Two competing national movements consolidated their identity in Palestine and advanced steadily toward confrontation’.41 David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel 1948–1953 and 1955–1963, simply said, ‘Everybody sees the problem in relations between the Jews and the Arabs. But not everybody sees that there’s no solution to it. There is no solution!’42 As one commentator had said as early as 1905, ‘The two movements were destined to wage war until one defeated the other, and the fate of the entire world depended on the outcome of this struggle’43 — a view echoed continuously since then by observers such as Robert Fisk, author of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East: