Universal Dependencies - English - LinES

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This is what has held the Jews together for thousands of years.

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'I like them,' says my wife.

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'They're so lively, so childlike.'

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'You might find them a little hard to live with,' I tell her.

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'You'd have to do everything their way, no options given.'

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'But they're cheerful, and they're warm and natural.

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I love their costumes.

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Couldn't you get one of those beautiful hats?'

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'I don't know whether they sell them to outsiders.'

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When the Hasid returns to his seat after prayers, I tell him that my wife, a woman of learning, will be lecturing at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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'What is she?'

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'A mathematician. '

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He is puzzled.

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'What is that?' he asks.

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I try to explain.

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He says, 'This I never heard of.

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What actually is it they do?'

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I am astonished.

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I knew that he was an innocent but I would never have believed him to be ignorant of such a thing.

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'So you don't know what mathematicians are.

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Le Monde gloated over this reversal.

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On July 12, after the raid, Israel was accused of giving comfort to the reactionaries of Rhodesia and South Africa by its demonstration of military superiority and its use of Western arms and techniques, upsetting the balance between poor and rich countries, disturbing the work of men of good will in Paris who were trying to create a new climate and to treat the countries of the Third World as equals and partners.

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Rhodesians and South Africans, said Le Monde, were toasting the Israelis in champagne.

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But European approval of the raid would endanger the plans of France for a new international order.

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On July 4-5, again before the rescue, Le Monde had reported without comment wisecracks made by Amin in a speech at Port Louis.

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Addressing the OAS, Amin had provoked laughter and applause among the delegates by saying that the hostages were as comfortable as they could be in the circumstances surrounded by explosives.

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'When I left,' he said, laughing, 'the hostages wept and begged me to stay. '

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This broke everybody up.

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We step into the street and my friend David Shahar, whose chest is large, takes a deep breath and advises me to do the same.

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The air, the very air, is thought-nourishing in Jerusalem, the Sages themselves said so.

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I am prepared to believe it.

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I know that it must have special properties.

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The delicacy of the light also affects me.

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I look downward toward the Dead Sea, over broken rocks and small houses with bulbous roofs.

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The color of these is that of the ground itself, and on this strange deadness the melting air presses with an almost human weight.

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Something intelligible, something metaphysical is communicated by these colors.

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The universe interprets itself before your eyes in the openness of the rockjumbled valley ending in dead water.

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Elsewhere you die and disintegrate.

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Here you die and mingle.

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Shahar leads me down from the Mishkenot Sha'ananim, which stands on a slope and faces Mount Zion and the Old City, to the Gai-Hinnom (Gehenna of tradition), where worshipers of Moloch once sacrificed their children.

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He leads me from the Gai-Hinnom up to an ancient Karaite burial ground, where you can see the mingling for yourself.

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It acts queerly on my nerves (through the feet, as it were), because I feel that a good part of this dust must be ground out of human bone.

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I don't know that Jerusalem is geologically older than other places but the dolomite and clay look hoarier than anything I ever saw.

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Gray and sunken, in the thoughts of Mr Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses.

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But there is nothing in the brilliant air and the massive white clouds hanging over the crumpled mountains that suggests exhaustion.

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This atmosphere makes the American commonplace 'out of this world' true enough to give your soul a start.

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The municipality has turned the Gai-Hinnom into a park.

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The Wolfson Foundation of London has paid for the planting of gardens, and Arab kids are kicking a soccer ball in the green bottom of the valley.

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East Jerusalem toughies of fourteen are smoking cigarettes and stiffening their shoulders, practicing the dangerous-loiterer bit as we pass.

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Shahar is bald, muscular, and his shirt is ornamented with nags, horseshoes, and bridles, a yellow print on dark blue.

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Amusing, since he's a writer and a thoughtful man, anything but a tout.

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So we look into ancient tombed caverns and the niches into which corpses once were laid.

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Now truck fenders are rusting there, the twentieth century adding its crumbling metal to the great Jerusalem dust mixture.

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You can be absolutely sure, says Shahar, that the Prophet Jeremiah passed this way.

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Right where we are standing.

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I find in Elie Kedourie's Arabic Political Memoirs facts unknown to most about American diplomacy in the late forties.

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Certainly I didn't know them.

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In the Middle East and probably elsewhere, the United States relied heavily on management consultants and public-relations experts.

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The American firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton lent one of its specialists, Miles Copeland by name, to the State Department, where he was in 1955 a member of a group called the Middle East Policy Planning Committee, the main purpose of which was, in his own words, 'to work out ways of taking advantage of the friendship which was developing between ourselves and Nasser.'

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In 1947 Copeland had been sent to Damascus ('by whom is not stated,' Kedourie says) 'to make unofficial contact' with Syrian leaders and 'to probe for means of persuading them, on their own, to liberalize their political system.'

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Spreading democracy over the world, the Americans first fought rigged elections in Syria, but the old corruption continued despite all their power and money could do.

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Frustrated, the Americans decided for the best of reasons, as always, to make a heavier move:

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'The American Minister at Damascus decided to encourage a military coup-d'etat, so that Syria might enjoy democracy,' Kedourie writes.

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This was not considered particularly bizarre; other American ambassadors and ministers in the Arab world were entirely in favor of 'genuine' revolution to overthrow old landowners, rich crooks, and politicians.

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'What was wanted was an elite to underpin the rulers, themselves in turn supported and buttressed by a population which presumably understood, approved, and legitimated the aims of such an elite.

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Whoever knows the Middle East will agree that such a quest was the political equivalent of the search for the philosophical stone.'

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Failing in Syria, the Americans went to work in Egypt.

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Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA 'met a number of officers who were involved in the conspiracy which led to the coup-d'etat of 22 July, 1952.'

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The Americans wanted the new regime to make the populace literate, to create 'a large and stable middle class a sufficient identification of local ideals and values, so that truly indigenous democratic institutions could grow up.'

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Gliding into a new political realm, the Americans arranged for loans to the Egyptian government.

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They believed that genuine democracy was now on its way.

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James Eichelberger, a State Department political scientist who had been an account executive for J Walter Thompson, one of the world's largest advertising and public-relations firms, 'was sent to Cairo where he talked with Nasser and his confidants and produced a series of papers identifying the new government's problems and recommending policies to deal with them.'

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One of these papers, written by Eichelberger himself, was translated into Arabic, 'commented upon by members of Nasser's staff, translated back into English for Eichelberger's benefit.'

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This document, called 'Power Problems of a Revolutionary Government,' went back-and-forth, according to Mr Copeland, 'between English and Arabic until a final version was produced.

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The final paper was passed off to the outside world as the work of Zakaria Mohieddin, Nasser's most thoughtful (in Western eyes), reasonable deputy, and accepted at face value by intelligence analysts of the State Department, the C.I.A. and, presumably, similar agencies of other governments.'

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Who would have thought that a former American account executive could write:

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'The police should be politisized, and should become, to whatever extent necessary, a partisan paramilitary arm of the revolutionary government'?

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This is Leninism, neat, with neither ice nor bitters.

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Or, 'The nerve center of the whole security system of a revolutionary state (or of any state) lies in a secret body, the identity and very existence of which can be safely known only to the head of the revolutionary government and to the fewest possible number of other key leaders.'

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It was Jefferson who said that the tree of liberty must occasionally be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

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We must now believe that the same romantic conviction has been alive somewhere in the offices of J Walter Thompson.

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The United States is, after all, the prime revolutionary country.

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Or was Mr Eichelberger simply an executive with a client to please and a job to do a pure professional?

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Or is there in the world by now a natural understanding of revolution, of mass organization, cadres, police rule, and secret executive bodies?

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This is a shocking suspicion.

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Of course the paper written by Mr Eichelberger and his Egyptian collaborators states that the purpose of the Nasser seizure of power was 'to solve the pressing social and political problems which made the revolution necessary.'

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To solve problems, to help, to befriend, to increase freedom.

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To strengthen America's position, and at the same time to do good;

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to advance the cause of universal equality;

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to be the illusionless tough guy on a world scale;

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to be a mover and shaker, a shaper of destiny or perhaps, surrendering to fantasies of omnipotence, to be the nation-making American plenipotentiary, at work behind the scenes and playing confidently even with Bolshevik fire.

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And what problems were solved?

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Nasser solved no problems.

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Mr Kedourie doubts that he needed 'to call on the resources of American political science for such lessons in tyranny?

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What does remain most puzzling,' he says, 'is why it was thought that the imparting of such lessons could advance the interests of the United States, or even contribute to the welfare of the Egyptian people.'

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For an American, the most intriguing question is this:

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Whence the passion for social theory among these high functionaries of the advertising world?

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How did executive types ever learn of such things?

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Reading The Sound and the Fury last night, I came upon words in Compson's thought that belonged to E E Cummings and the thirties, not to the year 1910.

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'Land of the kike home of the wop,' says Compson to himself when he buys a bun from a small Italian girl.