Free Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz Page B

short step to the kind of self-induced blindness which consists of disregarding the existence of the country’s Arab population or discounting their importance (on the dubious grounds that ‘they have created no cultural assets here and have not developed the Land’). Many of those who returned to Zion wanted to see the Arab inhabitants as a kind of mirage that would dissolve of its own accord, or as a colourful component of the biblical setting, or at best as natives who would drool with gratitude if we treated them kindly. (In time, Naomi Shemer was to express this state of mind with terrifying, transparent simplicity by describing East Jerusalem in terms of:
    .. the market place is empty / And no one goes down to the Dead Sea / By way of Jericho ..Meaning, of course: the market place is empty of Jews, and no Jew goes down to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho. A revelation of a common and characteristic way of thinking.)
    This is also what some of my teachers taught me when I was a child: after our Temple was destroyed and we were banished from our Land, the gentiles came into our heritage and defiled it. Wild desert Arabs laid the land waste, destroyed the terraces on the hillside that our ancestors had constructed and let their flocks ravage the vegetation. When our first pioneers came to the land to rebuild it and be rebuilt by it and to redeem it from its desolation, they found an abandoned wasteland. True, there were a few uncouth nomads roaming around in it, and here and there a filthy cluster of primitive hovels.
    Some of our first arrivals thought the Ishmaelites ought to return to the desert from which they had crept into the Land, and if they refused - ‘Arise and claim your inheritance’, like those who ‘conquered Canaan in storm’ in the prophecy of Saul Tschernichowsky: ‘A melody of blood and fire ... I Climb the mountain, crush the plain, All you see - inherit’ (Tschernichowsky, ‘I Have a Tune’).
    Most of the first settlers, though, loathed blood and fire and kept faith with the Jewish heritage and the principles of Tolstoy, and therefore they sought ways of love and pleasantness, for ‘the Bedouin are people like us’ (!) So we brought light into the darkness of the tents of Kedar, we healed ringworm and trachoma, we paved roads, we built and improved and let the Arabs share in the benefits of prosperity and civilisation.
    But they, being by nature bloodthirsty and ungrateful, listened willingly to the incitements of strangers, and they also envied us our possessions and our industry, and lusted after our houses and womenfolk, which is why they fell upon us and we were compelled to repel them with the revolt of the few against the many, again we held out our hand in peace, and again it was refused, they fell upon us again, and thus the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness goes on unto this day. (It should be stressed that this primitive, simplistic depiction was not universal, though it was popular and current among the Zionist settlers. Many of the best minds inside and outside the Labour movement, from A.D. Gordon to Ben-Gurion and from Brenner and Martin Buber to Moshe Shertok, had a far more complex understanding of the situation.)
    Moreover, the question of our attitude to the Arab population provided from the very beginning the meeting-point for two extreme and opposed trends of thought: revisionist nationalism and ‘Canaanism’ (which, incidentally, had grown up on the soil of Revisionism). Many years before the surprising and ironical meeting of Uri Zvi Greenberg and Aharon Amir in the ‘Committee for the Greater Land of Israel’, the ‘Canaanites’ and the nationalists had met in their common view of the Arabs as the reincarnation of the ancient Canaanites, Amorites, Ammonites, Amalekites, Jebusites and Girgashites. Both the romantics and the counter-romantics wanted to paint the present in the colours of the biblical period. Admittedly, their conclusions were