March 1992, Page 24, 25, 70, 71

Seeing the Light

Holy Land, August 1929

By Vincent Sheean

For years before 1929 I had thought of making a journey to Palestine. I had long had an exaggerated admiration for the Jewish people, and invested them with all the characteristics of poetic insight, intensity of feeling, and loftiness of motive which seemed to me lacking in the generality of the so-called Christians. This attitude was a kind of anti-Semitism turned wrong side out, I suppose-a product, perhaps, of the extraordinary experience in which I first made the acquaintance of Jews as a freshman in college-but it was, whatever its nature, strong enough to make me gravitate towards the Jews of my acquaintance and submit with eagerness to the influences they (whether they wished to do so or not) could not help exercising. . .

And on a more practical plane I firmly believed in the thesis Romain Rolland set forth at length in a part of Jean Christophe: that the Jews of Western Europe and America constituted the one international layer of culture, through which everything good in literature, music and art spread from nation to nation and slowly tended to give the Western world a closer relationship between its parts. I was, in short, as thoroughgoing a pro-Semite (if there is such a word) as you could have found anywhere. . .

Forgiveness was what it seemed to me the Christians had to ask of the Jews-and the only thing they had a right to demand. The more I read of the history of the Jewish people the more I was ashamed of the behavior of the Christians. The literature of anti-Semitism was nonsense, abounding in the silliest accusations it was possible for minds clouded by hatred to invent (ritual murder, the "protocol of the elders of Zion," conspiracy of the Jews to conquer the world, etc., etc.).

The literature that recorded the facts was a different affair altogether: the story of a race forever driven and oppressed, surrounded by superstitious hatreds until it was forced to live as the traveller lives on a desert journey, alert and aware of death. Even with the decline of superstition in the 19th century, when legal disabilities were removed from the Jews in most civilized countries, a social prejudice remained, the legacy of 2,000 years. . . In fact, the motives that turned me towards Palestine were not altogether those of interest or curiosity: there was also a perceptible element of militancy, a desire to strike some kind of small blow against race hatred, to help, somehow or other, to ecraser l'infame. . .

My old friend Hillel Bernstein. . . was not a Zionist himself, but he knew enough of the Zionist organization to be aware that it sometimes sent writers to Palestine to contribute articles to its own publications. It was Bernie's idea that I might get some such contact, with enough of an advance on it to make a stay in Palestine possible. He pointed out that Zionism was a controversial question, even among Jews, and that it would be well to make some stipulation about it-that I would not write political propaganda, that a description of the country and the Zionist colonies would have to be enough. . .

Walled Jerusalem in the early days was as Arab as Cairo or Baghdad.

By an appointment made through Bernie I went to see the editor of The New Palestine, a Zionist publication, and told him what I wanted to do. I suggested that I could do a series of articles on life in the Jewish colonies (my plan being to live as a colonist for a while if possible), and that these articles would have to be noncontroversial and nonpolitical, as I could not bind myself in advance to adopt any particular attitude towards the larger questions. I added that so far as I knew the problems at issue I was already sympathetic to the Zionist views, as I had been for years; but that I could not engage future opinions.

"Propaganda's No Good"

The editor was friendly and polite, but he seemed to regard all his formulation of attitude as unnecessary. "Don't you worry about that," he said. "We don't want people to write propaganda. Propaganda's no good anyway. How much do you want?"

The simplicity of the business delighted me. In 15 minutes it was all arranged. . .

Jerusalem enchanted me from the beginning. . . The city was beautiful, particularly when seen from above-a small jewel of a city, white roofs and domes serried in order up and down hills beneath a startlingly clear sky. By day the sky was burning blue, and by night it was so clear that the stars seemed within reach. The Austrian Hospice, where I lived. . . was deep-walled, silent and cool on the hottest days, peaceful in the midst of turmoil. There was a mosque just behind it, and the call of the muezzin used to wake me at unearthly hours until I grew accustomed to it. There were, in fact, mosques everywhere, and Islam's call to prayer haunted the still air of an evening, so that I could scarcely see a photograph of the roofs of Jerusalem afterwards without hearing the long cry of the muezzin as a part of it.

That was, probably, the first impression I received of walled Jerusalem in the early days: that it was an Arab city. It was as Arab as Cairo or Baghdad, and the Zionist Jews (that is, modern Jews) were as foreign to it as I was myself. I had expected this, of course. I knew that the Old City had not been changed, that the large Zionist population of Jerusalem (an actual majority) lived in new quarters outside the walls, and that Palestine was still predominantly an Arab country. But a fact on paper has not the same effect as its physical configuration. Two days in Jerusalem gave me a clearer perception of the fact than I could have received from a volume of statistics. I had enough political experience to realize that such things as these must determine feeling and action, and from my second or third day in Jerusalem I began to wonder if all was as well between the Arabs and the Jews as I had been led to believe. I knew nothing; but anybody could see, in a half an hour, that here were the physical elements of a conflict. . .

When I came to Jerusalem the British had been in possession of the city for more than 10 years. The Palestine Mandate, under which Britain was to administer the country in trust for the establishment of a Jewish national home, had been in operation for seven years, but the Zionist immigration policy had slowly made progress, so that by the time I arrived in the country there were no longer 10 Arabs for every Jew, but only about six-the figures given being, roughly, 750,000 Arabs to 150,000 Jews. . .

For two or three weeks I made every effort to avoid the signs of trouble. . . I absorbed what I could, listened to everybody, and wrote (on this subject, that is) nothing. I had no intention of writing a word about the country until I had had at least three or four months to observe it. I could not foresee how agitated those three or four months were going to be.

On July 9th I had my first mild jolt. An Arabic newspaper on that day announced that I had come to Palestine and added, carrement, that I was in the pay of the Jews.

There were other comments, but this was the one I attended to carefully. Was I in the pay of the Jews or was I not? If not, why did the statement make me angry? And if I was, what then? It took me about half an hour to see that I must either make up my mind to be, as the Arabic newspaper said, "in the pay of the Jews," and to accept any comment that might be made on the subject, or else to break my connection with the Zionists altogether and go my own way.

My diary (which was kept very full, too full, in Palestine) records the results on Thursday, July 11th, in these words:

. . . Although I've always said I would not allow my opinions to be influenced, how can I be sure? After all, I have already taken an advance of $500 and expect $1,500 more! All this appears under an entirely different light here. I finally decided that I couldn't do it. I wrote to Weisgal, both in New York and in Zurich, and told him I didn't want any more money and would take no engagement for any Zionist subsidiary. I made it clear that I must write and speak as I please. This relieved my feelings somewhat, although God knows how I shall get along without that money. What's worse is that if I can't write a couple of articles that will suit the Zionists' book I'll have to give back the five hundred I've already received. . .

In three weeks I had already acquired serious misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionist policy. I still knew nothing about the Arabs of Palestine, but I could see them all around me everywhere, and if my long experience in political journalism had taught me anything, it was that one people did not like being dominated or interfered with in its own home by another. These things seemed to me plain, beyond argument. What I wanted to hear was what the Zionists were doing. . . Their comments on the Arabs took a form that seemed to me invariably stupid, in Palestine or elsewhere: the form of underrating the opponent. Your ordinary Zionist would say, in so many words: "We don't have to worry about the Arabs. They'll do anything for money. "I knew no Palestine Arabs, but unless they were far different from the Arabs I had known in Morocco, Iraq and Persia, this could not be the truth. . .

As I retrace, with the aid of my old diary, the steps by which I altered my first opinions of the Zionist experiment, I see that the thing presented itself to me throughout as a practical problem. The steps were small ones, each determined by a fact. For larger ideas-for a consideration of what the whole thing might mean-I had to wait until I had left Palestine behind; no "long view" was possible in that embittered country. I had arrived on June 25 with a genuine sympathy, however ignorant or romantic, for the Zionist effort. Between June 25 and July 9 I was a little disquieted by the physical configuration of the problem, by the sight and sound of the Arab country in which Zionism was making its effort. On July 9 I received a jolt of a personal nature, and as a result broke my connection with the Zionists and resumed my freedom: all this without consciously turning against the Zionist idea. During the next week I went to Tel Aviv and the colonies, talked, talked, talked, and listened even more. I saw Jewish islands in an Arab sea: that was what I saw. And on the whole the Jewish disregard for the Arabs seemed to me (from their own point of view) perilous in the extreme. I could not believe that the Arabs of Palestine were so different from other Arabs that they would welcome the attempt to create a Jewish nation in their country.

After July 17, therefore, I made some attempt to find out what the Arabs of Palestine were like. I remained in touch with the Zionists, visited Tel Aviv, continued to read Zionist literature and talk to Zionist friends. But I no longer tried to ignore the fact that Palestine was, by the overwhelming majority of its population, an Arab country. It seemed to me important to determine for myself what were the bonds between this population and the land it inhabited. If the bonds were slight-if the Arabs of Palestine had been mere squatters for 13 centuries-it would still be feasible for the Zionists, by purchase, persuasion and pressure, to get the Arabs out sooner or later and convert Palestine into a Jewish national home. Zionists had pointed out, in conversation and in writing, that the Arabs and plenty of land to go to all around Palestine: Syria, Iraq, Transjordan and Arabia Deserta were all Arab countries. What bound the Arabs of Palestine to Palestine?

My acquaintance with the Arab world in general suggested that the answer would be found in Islamic religious feeling. . . I had never known a Muslim who did not regard the central doctrines of the Islamic faith with fierce, exclusive devotion. I had to find the religious connection between the Arabs and Palestine-and found it, of course, at five minutes' walk from the Austrian Hospice in the Haram Al-Sharif.

Haram Al-Sharif

The Haram Al-Sharif, occupying the traditional Temple Area of the Jews, was one of the great holy places of Islam, ranking immediately after Mecca and Medina. It also contained, as I discovered to my delight, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. I went there first on Thursday, July 18th. On that and succeeding days I had great difficulty getting beyond the one wonderful building, the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat Es-Sakhra). The Dome of the Rock was built over the great black Rock of Abraham's Sacrifice, which once upheld the Altar of Burnt Offerings in the Temple of Solomon. . .

The Dome of the Rock (usually called the "Mosque of Omar" by Western Christians, because of the mistaken belief that it was built by Omar the Conqueror) was not visited by Orthodox Jews because it was regarded by them as the holiest part of their Temple, and they feared to tread unwittingly upon their Holy of Holies. But Zionists-most of whom, in my experience, were without religious feeling-used to visit it as I did, out of an ordinary aesthetic interest. The Muslims had no objection to such visits. In this and in other respects the Muslims of Palestine were less jealous of their holy places than Muslims elsewhere. I had never been allowed inside a great mosque in Morocco or Persia, but the Haram Al-Sharif, a far holier place to the Islamic world, was open to me or to anybody else all day long.

A Significance Stretching Through Time

The same was true of the Mosque of El-Aska, once a Christian basilica, and one of the other parts of the Haram. It would be quite within the facts to say that the Haram Al-Sharif (Noble, or August, Sanctuary), in spite of the religious traditions that made it one of the three holiest spots of Islam, was treated as a public monument, like St. Peter's in Rome or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The more I learned about the tradition of the place, the more I was surprised at this. Not only did the Prophet Muhammad visit the place by night (miraculously translated there from Mecca), and ascend to Heaven from Abraham's Rock, but he will come there again on the Day of Judgment, when the Prophet Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad guard the ends of the bridge across the Valley of Jehoshaphat. These and other beliefs, some founded on the Qur'an and some mere folklore, invested the place with a significance stretching through time from the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion to the last moment contemplated for earthly existence in its philosophy. And nevertheless, so long as one took one's shoes off, it was all right to spend day after day in the place, and even to photograph it.

This being so, it was possible, at first, to assume that the Muslims of Palestine did not regard their holiest shrine with the extreme religious passion characteristic of Muslims elsewhere. The assumption fell in with the Zionist idea that the Arabs of Palestine were, on the whole, a careless and easy-going race. But I had strong doubts, just the same. . . It seemed to me more likely that what had happened to the Haram Al-Sharif was due to the Westernized character of life in Jerusalem: this place had fallen under so many different kinds of rule, had experienced such a mixture of invasions and such an assimilation of cultures, that its Muslim leaders were constrained by Western taste and manners to open their great sanctuary to the visits of the infidel. I did not believe that underneath this Europeanization of taste and manners was any slackening of the ardour with which Muslims everywhere regard a place sanctified by the Prophet.

Such considerations-divorced, that is, from current problems, and independently of the "incidents" that filled the newspapers every week on the subject-would have led me in any case to examine the question of the Wailing Wall.

The Wailing Wall was a segment of the southwestern wall of the Haram Al-Sharif. It was called by the Jews "Ha-Quotel ma-Aravi" (the Western Wall); by the Muslims "El-Buraq" (from the name of the Prophet's horse, which was tethered there); and by Western Christians the "Wailing Wall." It was a short stretch of wall with a pavement in front of it and had been chosen by the Jews centuries ago as a place of lamentation.

The idea of the Wailing Wall was an ancient one, but I was never able to find out why the idea was attached to this particular segment of the wall and not to any other. The idea was, briefly, this: God has seen fit to exile His people from their Temple, and has condemned them to a long period of disaster, to be ended when the Messiah comes to restore them to their rightful place; therefore His people lament and pray before the Temple wall, particularly on the high holy days of the religion, the Day of Atonement and the Day of the Destruction of the Temple.

This idea of a place for lamentation outside the desecrated Temple grew stronger with the passage of centuries and the accretion of tradition. Most religious Jews believed that the old stones of the wall were actually the stones of Soloman's Temple. This was not archeologically correct; the oldest stones in the wall of the Haram were Graeco-Roman, of the period of Herod; but the original facts made no difference in religious belief. During these centuries the Western Wall had stood as a representation, a symbol or relic, of the Temple itself. Jews throughout the world who were unable to go there on the Day of Atonement, for instance, paid other Jews to do so for them, and for hundreds of years there had been a small population of religious Jews living in Jerusalem on Haluka (sacred doles, for praying).

Before the 19th century there was no record of trouble at the Western Wall; the Muslims made no attempt to prevent the visits of the Jews there, and a prescriptive right grew up, which was maintained under changing governments thereafter. The only records of an attempt to go beyond the original purposes of lamentation at the Wall were dated 1837 and 1912. In the first document the Egyptian governor of Jerusalem forbade the Jews to pave the area in front of the wall or to do anything else beyond "make their visits in accordance with the ancient custom." In the second document the Jews were forbidden to bring into the Wailing Wall area any of the "tools or instruments of possession," such as chairs, screens and the Ark (i.e., the furniture of a synagogue). The Muslim refusal to permit innovations was clearly based upon the fear that, if they did so, the Jews would soon have a synagogue at the wall of the mosque.

The advantages to political Zionism of making a test case of the Wailing Wall were obvious.

The triumph of Zionism at the end of the war brought a new element into the question. The Zionist Organization was not itself religious, although it possessed a religious (minority and opposition) right wing. Its membership professed a wide range of belief in such matters, from agnosticism to orthodoxy, and even included some Jews converted to Christianity; but considered as a whole it was a modern, Western, secular, political body. Still, the advantages to political Zionism of making a test case of the Wailing Wall were obvious. If the Zionists could get new rights at the Wall-better, if they could get absolute possession of the area-they could count on the adherence of a large number of religious Jews who had always been cold to the movement.

An attempt was made in 1919 to buy the Wailing Wall outright. The Zionists offered (through Sir Ronald Storrs) 80,000 pounds; the Arabs refused to sell. From that time onward, at intervals throughout the period of the British occupation and the League of Nations mandate, there were "incidents." There were "incidents" from the time I arrived in Palestine until I left, and the whole of the Palestine question (the national home for the Jews, the rights of the Arabs, the position of the British) came to be involved in them, so that the Zionist struggle was concentrated upon the Wailing Wall and the Arab resistance aligned before it. The question was no longer religious; it had become political and national as well. . .

There was never any question in my mind that the Jewish feeling about the Wailing Wall was profound and bitter. Jews who frankly confessed themselves to be without religious belief could not discuss the subject without getting excited. They did not think they could put petitions into crevices of the Wall (as Orthodox Jews did) and get them received by the holy spirit of the Temple; they did not want the Wall for themselves at all. But they felt that the Jewish nation in Palestine (as they conceived these minority settlements to be) ought to have possession of one holy place, the relic of the Temple (the only relic, as they somewhat loosely believed), and that the genuinely religious Jews, for the most part not Zionists, should have Zionism to thank for it. The Arabs, for whom they had contempt as an "uncivilized" race, to whom some of them referred as "Red Indians" and others as "savages," were in possession of a place that signified a greal deal to the Jewish world in general. The fact hurt the pride of all Jews, I believe, but oddly enough it was the young agnostics and unbelievers who were most bitterly offended and expressed themselves most loudly. What appeared in everyday talk in Jerusalem was what the Jewish Chronicle in London summed up with admirable precision: "The Wall has come to be regarded as a gauge of Jewish prestige in Palestine."

. . . On August 6th the new door from the Haram Al-Sharif to the pavement before the Western Wall was opened, and the Jewish press and public in Palestine took on a more agitated tone than ever. Mr. Vladimir Jabotinsky's "Maccabees"-young men who followed the Zionist revisionist leader- vied with their favorite newspaper, Doar Hayom (the Hebrew newspaper with the widest circulation), in expressing their vehement dislike for the Muslim authorities, the Palestine government, and the more moderate authorities of the Zionist Organization. The Muslims were so angry that not a Friday passed without some kind of minor "incident" at the Wailing Wall. The temperature rose throughout the first fortnight of August-you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.

To be continued next month.

Vincent Sheean was an international correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s and the author of many books, including Anatomy of Virtue and New Persia. The above is an excerpt from his 1934 memoir, Personal History © 1934, 1935, 1940, © 1969 by Vincent Sheean. Published by arrangement with Carol Publishing Group. A Citadel Press book.

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