The Arab–Jewish struggle ...is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands.44
Despite manifestations of anti-semitism in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pro-Jewish opinion in England had in fact been evident since the seventeenth century: Sir Henry Finch published his World’s Great Restauration or Calling of the Jews in 1621; in 1840 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, declared that ‘There exists at present among the Jews dispersed over Europe a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine’45 — an early expression of the view that the ‘dispersed’ Jews constituted a nation, with the concomitant suggestion that they therefore deserved statehood. The prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity) wrote of the Middle East in his novel Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847), while the theme of Jewish re-awakening permeates George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1874–1876), as surely as it becomes the leitmotiv of Judith.46
Also, whether or not the British, in 1917, needed to woo Jewish support worldwide for the continuation of the world war, that war had been preceded in 1914 by the remark of Herbert Samuel that ‘Perhaps the opportunity might arise for the fulfillment of the ancient aspiration of the Jewish people and the restoration of a Jewish state’.47
Previously, locations other than Palestine had been mooted as a possible ‘home land’: in 1903, Joseph Chamberlain (the Colonial Secretary) and Lord Lansdowne (Foreign Secretary) had suggested Uganda as a destination;48 other possibilities under consideration were Mesopotamia, Western Australia, British Honduras and British Guiana (all within the British remit) and Brazil, Mexico and Texas.49 Balfour himself, as prime minister in 1903, had been involved in the offer of Uganda, a proposal sometimes referred to as the ‘first Balfour Declaration’.50 But Theodor Herzl, having considered the alternatives of Argentina and Palestine, had no choice but to opt for the ‘restoration’ of the Jewish state in Palestine: ‘our ever-memorable historic home’.51
In 1921, the year following the commencement of the British administration in Palestine, Winston Churchill, who had just become Colonial Secretary, declared:
It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national centre and a national home to be re-united and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine... they shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism...There really is nothing for the Arabs to be frightened about...No Jew will be brought in beyond the number who can be provided for by the expanding wealth and development of the resources of the country.52
There is a telling clue in Herzl’s 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State, as to the strategic importance of a Jewish homeland in Palestine: ‘We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’.53 Herzl was perhaps recognising what would come within a couple of decades to be called ‘geopolitics’ — the relations between states based on geographical location — which in our own time has provided us with ways of understanding strategies relating to the balance of power in regions such as the Near and Middle East. As early as 1915, the British prime minister H. H. Asquith had referred to ‘the carving up of the Turks’ Asiatic dominion’,54 and, as the Ottoman empire crumbled as a side-effect of the First World War, distribution of lands previously under Turkish rule became a priority for the victors.
It has been argued that Britain had no strategic benefit, at the time of the original Mandate, for undertaking it.55 And in 1945, perhaps in an effort to sustain the argument for British withdrawal, Churchill said he was ‘not aware of the slightest advantage that has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task’56 — a position not inconsistent with his view of the situation over twenty years earlier (quoted above).
Nevertheless, Palestine represented an important — if not vital — land bridge to Arabia and India, and in the same year that saw the ‘carving up’ of the Ottoman Empire, the military correspondent of the Manchester Guardian newspaper opined that ‘the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire ... depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state’.57 A. J. Sherman’s observation, that ‘British occupation of Palestine was undertaken in full awareness of geopolitical realities’58 cannot be easily dismissed: it leads us towards the essential element which is familiar to everyone today: oil. In 1921 a British government minister had foreseen this: ‘while, in present circumstances, Palestine was of no real strategic value, it was desirable to keep it. Who knows, maybe one day oil would be discovered there’.59 With the increasing awareness of oil exploration in Iraq in the 1930s by companies such as the IPC consortium of British Petroleum, Shell and Gulbenkian, geopolitics entered a crucial phase, which Durrell effectively introduced into Judith: Judith’s father had been working on a turbine which the Jews (soon to become Israelis) might turn to advantage:
“Oil is what we have in mind,” said the Professor. “It is also what the Nazis had in mind; they had plans for the Rumanian oil-fields which would have been helped by this idea. By the same token, the British, Americans and Arabs would all be profoundly interested.” (p. 60)
And when Judith and Aaron argue about the intensity of the Zionist drive towards statehood and the significance of the United Nations vote on partition, oil again features as a factor in the geopolitical debate:
“And what of the Arabs?” she said harshly. “They will torpedo your vote. You know they will. Who is going to sacrifice good oil to their displeasure?”
“The risk is there — we must take it. It is the only way.”
“It will end with a massacre.”
“That we can face up to as the worst extremity; but we sabras60 are not going to stretch out our little white throats to the Arab’s knife. But we know that in the longest run we must live with them, cooperate with them. At the moment British oil interests won’t let us. That’s the point.” (p. 134)
The Mandate, officially approved on 22 July 1922 by the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations), came into force on 29 September 1923, although the British had been in occupation of Palestine, militarily and administratively, since July 1920, in the wake of General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917. The Mandate empowered Britain to govern Palestine, with explicit responsibility to support the establishment of a Jewish national home, while (an echo of the Balfour Declaration) safeguarding the rights of the existing population. It also provided for the introduction of self-government, which both Jews and Arabs would reject. It has been argued that these three imperatives were incompatible,61 and, given the increasing suspicion and hostility between the indigenous population and the newcomers, it seems that the impossibility of carrying out the terms of the Mandate may have contributed substantially to the ambivalence and lack of clear direction on the part of the British. ‘One senior official ...estimated that the British had never in fact had a policy for Palestine, “nothing but fluctuations of policy, hesitations ...no policy at all” ’.62 Durrell had given an indication of his own feelings on this point in The Alexandria Quartet when his character Pursewarden, based in Egypt, says, in relation to British activity in the Middle East as a whole, that ‘it is neither coherent nor even a policy — at any rate a policy capable of withstanding the pressures which are being built up here’.63
Today, with growing momentum towards long-deferred statehood for the Palestinians, it is perhaps surprising that partition was not on the table as a condition, rather than an option, from the beginning: as David Fromkin observes,
Since the Balfour Declaration contained no geographical definition, Churchill’s advisers concluded that Britain could fully reconcile and
fulfil her wartime pledges by establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine west of the Jordan and a separate Arab entity in Palestine east of the Jordan.64
While partition remained unacceptable to both parties, and particularly to the Arabs, it was the only possible means of carrying out the terms of both the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate.
There are two points in Judith where Durrell seems to have nodded — to have condensed the historical events of two or three years into a much shorter timescale. For example, there are two references to the Jewish strategy of referring the questions of the Mandate and partition to the United Nations — one by Professor Liebling (p. 61) and one by Aaron (p. 130). However, both these statements were made in early 1945 according to Durrell’s chronology, and although the United Nations had been mooted since 1942 and came into existence in October 1945, it did not hold its first assembly until January 1946. No doubt, if Durrell had revised Judith for publication, such anachronisms would have been corrected, as, perhaps, would have been the fact that both Liebling and Aaron employ the same expression: ‘to bounce’ the British out of Palestine and into the United Nations.
But the most glaring example of a ‘seacoast of Bohemia’ error is in Durrell’s depiction of the Syrian, Daud, as a ‘prince’ and Daud’s references to the ‘King’ of Syria: since 1936, Syria had been a republic, although its independence was only recognised internationally in April 1946. Again, this would no doubt have been noticed if Durrell’s typescript had been submitted to his principal publishers, Faber & Faber; I have preferred to let it stand.
However, in the final version of Judith, one element just before the anticipated Arab attack confuses the reader, since it places one event just before another, which, in strict chronology, it should succeed. I have therefore transposed chapters 26 and 27 in order to maintain the chronological unfolding of events.
Another writer who studied the Palestine crisis in depth was Leon Uris, whose novel Exodus (1958) predates the earliest drafts of Judith by four years, and which was filmed by MGM in 1960. There is no evidence that Durrell was familiar with either the book or the film; the fact that the same note is struck in both books indicates their authors’ familiarity with the commonplaces of the situation: ships landing illegal immigrants, people necessary to the Zionist cause being concealed in crates, gun-running (and the British attempts to prevent such activities) and the importance of oil as an economic necessity. The action of some refugees, on reaching land, to kiss the sacred ground, appears in both novels; the close childhood relationship of Aaron and Daud is also prefigured in a Jewish–Arab friendship in Exodus, but with a happier outcome.
Exodus, which is based on an actual incident, also puts the difficulty of the Jewish task firmly before the reader: ‘Some people are out to resurrect a nation that has been dead for two thousand years’.65 Uris reminds us that ‘the British were caught in a tangle. They were as far away from a final answer on the Palestine problem as they ever had been’.66 He was as alert as was Durrell to the geopolitics of the region: as one British official says, ‘The only way we are going to hold the Middle East is by building a powerful Jewish Palestine. I don’t speak of Jewish interest but I speak of British interest’.67
The continuing crisis in Israel-Palestine remains a topic of concern and interest, especially in Britain, where the problem may be said to have started. The screening in 2011 on the UK’s Channel 4 of The Promise, written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, which commutes between a ‘Judith’ scenario of 1947–1948 and the present day, harshly emphasises the perennial nature of the conflict.
Naturally, the situation continues to be a central element in the thinking of Jewish writers, not least of whom is Amos Oz, who has described his own experiences of the 1948 conflict in his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2005), and, more cynically, in novels such as A Perfect Peace (1985). Oz favours a ‘two-state solution’ which involves partition:
Israel is the only homeland of the Israelis.... At the same time, I regard Palestine as the legitimate and rightful homeland of the Palestinians. As it seems that Israelis and Palestinans cannot share their homeland, it must be divided between them....The conflict between Israel and Palestine is ...a tragic collision between right and right, between two very convincing claims.68
Immigration: the kibbutzim
The situation became acute not only because the Mandate envisaged a form of what today we would call ‘power sharing’ (similar to that between nationalist/republicans and loyalist/ unionists in Northern Ireland) but also because the Arabs realised that the huge increase in the number of Jewish immigrants threatened their own existence in the disputed land.
In 1914, Jews constituted less than one-ninth of the population of Palestine (85,000 out of a total of 690,000), the vast majority of whom were immigrants. By 1920, despite the fact that the Jewish proportion of the population had decreased, some Arabs had begun to attack Jewish property.69 From 1923 onwards, immigration — technically under a quota system administered by the British — increased significantly, with many Jewish refugees from anti-semitism in Russia and eastern Europe. As Durrell shows us in the case of the ‘Ras Shamir’ kibbutz, Jews acquired land from Arabs, and formed agricultural settlements, helping to create the impression that they were industrious and enterprising, in contrast to the lazy and indifferent Arabs. At that time, Churchill said that
Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell — a handful of philosophic people — in the wasted sun-scorched plains.70
As the Director of Education in the British administration commented:
It is difficult not to sympathize with the majority, and the Jews do not tend to make themselves popular; but one feels too that the Arabs are a lazy and unenterprising people, and if they do lose ground they will do so largely owing to their own lack of effort.71
This is reflected by Durrell in the painful interview between Aaron and his Arab childhood friend Daud (pp. 166–169), in which Daud, with the backing of the British commanders in the Syrian army, demands the return of the valley of ‘Ras Shamir’. First, there is the fact that Aaron’s grandfather had bought the valley from the Syrians, as had the founders of so many other Jewish settlements. Secondly, there is the incontrovertible evidence of their success in creating a thriving agricultural community, as Peterson has already explained to Judith:
It took thirty years and about two hundred lives to drain what was stinking marshland and turn it into the richest valley in Palestine. The Arabs never did anything with it, and were glad to sell it off bit by bit — now, of course, they would like it back. (p. 46)
Although it was hoped that Arabs and Jews might live as neighbours, in harmony and partnership, this proved impossible in the light of Arab apprehension. In 1920 there were only thirty kibbutzim, with a total population of 4,000, constituting only 2.5% of the Jewish population in Palestine. Nevertheless, the kibbutzim
were guardians of Zionist land, and their patterns of settlement would to a great extent determine the country’s borders. The kibbutzim also had a powerful effect on the Zionist self-image.... The agricultural ethos prevailed as a patriotic symbol; the labor movement succeeded in identifying its rural, pioneering worldview with the entire Zionist movement.72
During the 1930s many more agricultural settlements were started, including fifty-three kibbutzim.73 Durrell’s portrayal of the determination at ‘Ras Shamir’ to succeed and to protect the Jewish people, evident in the characters of Aaron Stein, David Eveh and even the non-Jew Rebecca Peterson, is typical of this endeavour.
Durrell locates the kibbutz ‘Ras Shamir’ in the eye of the storm, in Upper Galilee, at the northernmost point of Palestine (the ‘Galilee Panhandle’), bordered on the west by Lebanon and on the east by Syria. In doing so he took liberties with the ‘real’ Kibbutz Shamir, which is close to the Syrian border
(as it was in 1948) and under the Golan Heights, which Israel sequestered from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and continues, controversially, to occupy. In Judith the children of the kibbutz remain within the compound, whereas in 1948 the children of Kibbutz Shamir were evacuated to the Haifa region.
Durrell also played with the orientation of Shamir, locating it, for ideological reasons, on, rather than near, the river Jordan, and below Mount Tabor, rather than Mount Hermon, which is close to the ‘real’ Shamir. He also embellished Shamir by locating it on the site of a Crusader fortress, of which many survive, especially in Syria, to this day. Ras is an Arabic word (rosh in Hebrew) meaning ‘peak’, or ‘head’, while ‘Shamir’ suggests ‘rock’ or ‘flint’. This emphasises the location of ‘Ras Shamir,’ nestling at the head of a valley between the hills that rise up on either side of the Jordan, underlining its vulnerability to attack as well as its religious significance on the Jordan.
Shamir was founded in 1944 by mainly Romanian immigrants who were members of the Marxist Zionist youth movement (whereas ‘Ras Shamir’, according to Aaron Stein, had existed for thirty years). In 1948 its co-ordinator of defence was a woman, Surika Braverman. If Durrell knew this, it may have prompted him to use the figure of Rebecca Peterson in confrontation with Major Towers before the Syrian attack. Although it was always vulnerable (and was the subject of Syrian assaults at a later date: for example, in 1974 three members of the kibbutz were killed during a terrorist raid), Kibbutz Shamir was not, in fact, attacked after British withdrawal in 1948, despite expectation that it would be one of the first kibbutzim to bear the brunt of any assault. Due to these expectations, the kibbutz was well fortified, on lines very similar to those depicted by Durrell in Judith.74 There is no record of Durrell having visited Kibbutz Shamir, although he was clearly aware of its significance.75