Farewell Palestine

MY mother kept a diary. It was a Victorian diary, and the last pages of each year had the funeral heading: "Deaths

within the year "; and there, with the date of each demise, "Uncle Chambers," 'Joseph Clarke" (the coachman) and " Rook " (her dog) rubbed shoulders with Disraeli and the Emperor Napoleon III. From her I inherited the fun of keeping a diary. But modern diaries have no special pages for "Deaths within the year." So I've always made one for myself ; and with 1950 now passing into history,-I've just been reading my obituary list for the twelve months.

This is the entry for April 24th. "Palestine. Ave argue Vale." For on that day Palestine died. It was a geographical death after a long illness. Already, two years before, on May 15th, 1948, part of Palestine had become the new sovereign State of Israel. On April 24th this year the remainder of the country was annexed by the new Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. And, with that, the Palestine so many of us had known and loved became no more. (Indeed— who knows—in 'another hundred years our Palestine may be remem- bered only as we remember Phrygia and Pamphilia and Jerome Napoleon's ephemeral kingdom of Westphalia.) To me the passing of Palestine was, as it were, the death of an old friend. And my feelings are, I am sure, those of many like myself who, in fair weather or foul, may-be as soldiers, may-be as civilians, knew Palestine as a home. None of us will ever forget her.

September 19th, 1917. I'm writing in the troop train for Palestine. I'm on a wooden seat and the windows are broken ; but anything is better than Kantara with its glare and its sand in everything and the smell of those incinerators.

September 20th, 1917. Rafa. I found the battalion, full of Salonika malaria, in the sandhills. I walked. My kit followed on a battalion camel 1 They tell me that for sheer bloodiness there is nothing like a route march in the sand.

December 6th, 1917. I'm writing behind the wall of a mosque called Nebi Samwil, right on the top of a hill. And I've seen Jerusalem ! It's about six miles away and the outline of domes and minarets and towers was quite clear. The Turks are still there. But we are hot on their heels. It's been a thrilling day. . That was how I and thousands of others in uniform came to unknown Palestine thirty-three years ago.

After the Turks were beaten, I saw little of the country for four years. Then I returned—with my diary—as a civilian.

March 14th, 1921. We got out of the Kantara train at Belah.- It was dark. We drove to the War Cemetery. Those ordered rows of British gravestones were terribly moving in the stillness of the !tail- light. Then up came the sun over the hills to the East. And on we went in the car. Life had begun to move for another day. Sheep and goats meandering along the sandy roads; camels every- where; and the smoke from the villages climbing up like ropes to the clear blue sky. Gaza first ; then Beersheba ; then up the Hebron Road. But Jerusalem was tantalisingly long in coming. And then suddenly, raund a corner past Bethlehem it burst on us in full majesty. The Haram the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of -Olives; and behind the grey walls, the tumble of -domes and towers and minarets. It was lovely.

At Easter, in 1924, I was back again in Jerusalem sharing a cellar dormitory in the Austrian Hospice with four young Austrian pilgrims. At night we used to go on the roof and talk "Hitler." By day we followed the celebrations of Holy Week, and I saw "the Washing of the Feet" in the courtyard outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and, in the Rotunda within, shared in the wild excitement of the ceremony of the "Holy Fire." It was another great visit.

From 1926 to 1931 -I came back every year as a visitor ; and every year there was something new to see. More trees growing on the stony hillsides and in the malarious plains ; more orange groves pushing deeper and deeper into the sandhills along the coast ; more roads and better roads ; and more new buildings everywhere, and telephones, too, and a proper water-supply for Jerusalem piping its steep way through the Judean Hills from the plain below. Expansion was the rule of the day, and Palestine—slowly in some parts and hectically in others—was reshaping herself.

I saw the. Samaritan Passover on the Mountain of Blessing above Nablus. I celebrated the Feast of Candles—the Hanuka—in a tiny Jewish hotel in Affule. I danced the Horah in the freedom of Rehovoth. I had Turkish baths in Jaffa. I slept four in a room at Amman with two Syrian corn-merchants and a German optimistically trying to sell razor-blades to the Bedouin. I god- fathered a Christian Arab baby in a village near Bethlehem and at its christening precariously carried it (naked) and two candles (lit) round a home-made font. I saw an eclipse of the moon at Nablus and beat gongs and kettles with the best of them to chase the devil away. I had an arithmetic -lesson in Arabic at the Arab Higher College in Jerusalem. I bathed in the Jordan. I paddled through Hezekiah's subterranean conduit, which the King cut through the Jerusalem rock from the Pool of Siloam to the Virgin's Well. I slept a night in the Jewish communal settlement of AM Harod, under Mount Gilboa. And I saw the dawn of 4 Christmas Day from the roof of the Austrian Hospice in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem.

I made many friends. Fellahin, who travelled with me and gaped at my odd Arabic. Young Jewish settlers hitch-hiking to their new homes, telling of their old homes back in Germany and Poland and Rumania. Monks of all denominations—in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Nazareth, and in St. George's Church at Lydda, where our British patron saint is reputed to be buried. Endless shopkeepers in the bazaars, who remembered my face and the presents I had bought for home the year before. Habitués of the Vienna Café in the Jaffa Road, Jerusalem, where intellectual Jewry played chess very well and talked politics very loud. And all the time I talked and talked in English or German, or French or my Arabic. They were great days.

There was a gap in my visits from 1931 to 1936 and then I was back again. But this time as a sober Government officer—a Public Information Officer ; and there was a total Arab strike with " troubles " all over the country and daily communiqués to the Press, and more telephoning than I had ever before done in my life.

Nineteen thirty-seven started better, and that spring, for months on end, I ate my lunch in the- hills round Jerusalem among the spring flowers. But then the year went sour ; and 1938 was the same—worse " troubles " and telephones and communiqués and Press correspondents. 1939 was worse. More " troubles " and new problems. Then World War II; and the relief of an Arab-Jewish détente—a truce, as it were, and anyhow a cessation of "troubles."

And for the Public Information Office a new life and a lot of new work. We had travelling cinema-vans for the Arab villages, with open-air performances after the sun had gone down. The villagers were our audiences ; but—and this was ominous—what they liked best were the bangs of the guns going off on the sound-track. As fill-ups for the cinema-van programmes we made films describing local enterprises. The best was the right and the wrong way to pick olives—and as the actors were all local villagers—and very good they were, too—the pictures were hysterically received and always -got encores. Then, too, there was any amount of public speaking about the war—mostly to Jewish audiences; and, as ordinary office routine,, the ticklish twice-daily preparation of the "news bulletins" for broadcasting in English, Arabic and Hebrew. It was ticklish. For during those years—truce or no truce—Palestine was smoulder- ing and the veiled peace was thin—too thin to disguise the under- tones of local animosities. After 1945, life gradually became beleaguered for one and all, and political murder stalked the country. Controls slipped and finally vanished ; and on May 15th, 1948, the British mandate over Palestine ended.

Our make-up as human beings has two great assets—the ability to remember and also the ability to forget. There was much that happened in Palestine between 1917 and 1948 to regret—and forget. But there is much more to remember. Palestine. Ave atque Vale.