One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  That was the way to work, quietly and unobtrusively, without giving offense to anyone. It appeared that there were not merely dealers, but persons of wealth who had fine homes with objets d’art which they were happy to show to an American expert. In this polyglot city were Jews and Gentiles from all parts of the world; there were innumerable social sets, military, official, commercial, religious, and just plain idle rich who liked the climate and had fled here to get away from the war. Once you had drunk coffee with them, or visited their homes, they would pour out stories of the mess the world was in—and particularly this small corner which had been “promised” to too many different people.

  It wasn’t as easy to meet the Arabs as the Jews. The Arabs kept to themselves, and few of them aspired to be thought of as cosmopolitan or sophisticated; they had peculiar notions and customs, which called for special tact. But Lanny’s stepfather in Marrakech had obtained for him a letter of introduction to a Moorish rug merchant who had established himself in Jerusalem and become a financial supporter of the Pan-Islam movement. Lanny called upon him in his fine shop—Laurel staying at home, since in the Muslim world the ladies do not take part in business or political discussions. Lanny managed to down a cup of what in that world is called coffee, a very sweet and thick brown paste, and told this gentleman about his researches into Moorish architecture and archeology, his father’s former activities in the New England-Arabian Oil Company, and, more especially, his stepfather’s researches into Mohammedan literature and practices bearing upon religious healing.

  This black-bearded merchant, who wore a red fez and a white linen robe in his shop, was immensely interested to meet a Nazrany—a follower of the Prophet of Nazareth—who had actually read the words of Allah’s greatest prophet and understood them. Lanny told how he had met Adolf Hitler, whose propagandists had succeeded in making him something of a hero to the Mohammedan world; and how the Führer had taken him to his secret retreat on the top of the Kehlstein, near Berchtesgaden, and there had revealed his great admiration for the Arab camel driver who had known how to found a religion and make it stick for a dozen centuries. Lanny, of course, said that he was not a political person of any sort, but a lover of peace and a student of mankind’s great teachers and prophets through the ages. He knew that Mohammed had recognized both Moses and Jesus as God-inspired, and had advocated a union of the entire Semitic world, including the Jews. Why could it not even now be brought about, the swords beaten into plowshares and the tanks converted into tractors?

  The rug merchant opened up and told the grievances of his race against both Jews and Christians. Afterward he told his friends about this just and considerate Frankish person—this name meaning not that Lanny had lived most of his life in France, but that the Muslims still remembered the Crusaders; through a freak of language, Frankish and frank meant the opposite. But the son of Budd-Erling was both, and the merchant invited him to his home to meet his friends—all men, of course. Later, when the friendship had become established. Laurel was invited to meet the ladies, and so had an interesting story about women under a religious system which allowed four wives to every man who could afford such a luxury. What did these women think about the world that was forever at war and forever demanding that their sons be thrown into the slaughter pit? Like all the other women whom Laurel had met—in America, England, France, Germany, China, and the Soviet Union—she found them convinced that it was the evil nature and intention of other peoples and governments which made it necessary for the sons of women to be armed and drilled.

  VI

  After a couple of weeks the travelers moved down to Tel-Aviv. This was an even more interesting city, for here were the intellectuals, the specialists, and professional men who were providing plans for the building of a new-old nation. Architects and engineers, scientists, agriculturists, teachers—trained mostly in America—they were alert, full of enthusiasm, and all had political and social ideas to impart to friendly guests. They were too polite to ask how it came about that an art expert could bring his wife on a holiday jaunt through or into a war zone. No doubt they knew enough about America to take it for granted that the son of a great airplane manufacturer would enjoy special privileges. Anyhow, here the couple were, and they wanted to see everything and listen to everybody’s ideas, and nothing gives more pleasure to the propagandist type of mind.

  To Lanny this was a holiday, to be compared only with his visit to Yenan in Red China. For the past decade, with that single exception, he had been obliged to conceal his real beliefs and feelings, to avoid the people he liked and associate with those whom he despised. But here he was in the company of young Socialists, men and women who were working all day and studying or discussing modern ideas most of the night. They were building the New Jerusalem—not in England’s green and pleasant land as William Blake had called for, but in their own racial heritage, the Promised Land of their history and their religion. They were combining the very oldest and the very newest in culture, the messages of their ancient prophets with the tools and techniques of modern science. They had a nation in their hands, and were shaping it and seeing it grow day by day.

  Co-operation was their keynote. One young couple got into the car with the Americans and shepherded them on another drive to the Dead Sea. Their goal was one of the Kibbutzim, the collective farms, which had been established in that most unpromising region, twelve hundred feet below sea level and with a climate hotter in summer than Arizona. More than a hundred persons had come here, pledged to carry out their biblical formula of making the desert blossom like the rose. The soil was saturated with alkalis and had to be washed before anything would grow in it; by prodigious labor they had diverted the waters of the Jordan to this purpose, and now were planting bananas, and also growing carp in ponds which the river filled for them. The members of the co-operative got no wages, but lived like the early Christians, having all things save women in common. Half their members worked in the potash plant near by and brought their wages to pay the interest on the debt incurred for building materials and tools.

  The co-operatives had ancient Hebrew names, and this one was Bet Haarava, which means “House of the Wilderness.” Lanny and Laurel sat at one of the long wooden tables in the communal dining hall and partook of a lunch consisting of buttermilk, whole wheat bread, and the young onions and radishes which are the first fruits of any agricultural enterprise. He pleased his hosts by quoting those immortal words of the Prophet Isaiah, which have long had their place in Socialist textbooks. He and Laurel told about what they had seen in Yenan, where the same kind of young people were trying the same communal life; only it was a cold climate, and the Chinese were living in caves, and did not have plentiful water. The texts they quoted were not from Amos and Isaiah, but from their founder, Sun Yat-sen, and their ancient philosopher, Wang An-shih. There had been some twenty thousand workers in Yenan, and Lanny was told that there were already thirty thousand in the agricultural co-operatives of Palestine.

  VII

  Wherever you talked with these people, in the meeting places of the workers or the drawing-rooms of the well-to-do, there was never any difficulty in guiding the conversation to international and interracial affairs. The world was being rent by the most dreadful of all wars, and the task of keeping this nascent nation alive through the storm was one which engaged the attention of every man and woman in it. The Jews were in a state of agony over what was happening to their brethren in Central Europe; fugitives were continuing to put in appearance, telling ever more frightful tales—the most merciless slaughter of a race in recent times and perhaps in all history. To save as many as possible was the desire of every Jew, and it was hard indeed for them to face the fact that the British government and military would not permit them to admit and care for the refugees.

  According to the so-called Balfour Declaration, issued before World War I, the Jews were to be permitted to establish their homeland in Palestine. Why had the British backed down and violated this pledge? The a
nswer was written plain for all the world to read—written in a substance that was thick and black and greasy, and very difficult to erase. Every Jew, and also every Arab, knew that the oil from the great Mosul field, British-owned, was pumped through a pipe-line across the deserts of Transjordan to the port of Haifa, on the Mediterranean near the top of Palestine. To that port came a constant stream of tankers, and the oil was essential to the operation of the British Navy, the British Merchant Marine, and even British industry at home.

  Jewish immigration had stirred up the Arabs and led to the forming of the Arab League and the financing of a swarm of agitators, calling for united action by the seven states which made up the Arab world. First Mussolini and then Hitler had taken up this cause, proclaiming themselves near-Muslims and friends of all followers of the Prophet. That, no doubt, was why Adi Schicklgruber had taken the son of Budd-Erling up to his mountain hideout and there informed him that he considered the onetime camel driver the greatest man who had lived, prior to Adi himself. Anything whatever that would cripple the British Empire and enable Adi to get down to the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles ahead of Stalin!

  Now the issue was being decided by war, and all the Jews with whom Lanny talked wanted the Allies to win; but there were a few who could not see very far and hated the enemy who was nearest to them. The British were here, governing in their rather cold impersonal way. In order to keep from driving the Arabs to frenzy and causing them to destroy the pipe-lines, British officials had to keep Jewish refugees from pouring into Palestine. These refugees came in wretched rubs, likely to fall to pieces in the first storm; the passengers would try to get ashore, even by swimming; and what a hideous thing to send them back to sea with no destination—and after having caught a glimpse of the land which the Lord their God had given them!

  So a wartime truce was being broken, and there was an underground war between the British troops and a Zionist organization called the Irgun. Some refugees were always getting in, and the Arabs took note of that, and their agitators fanned the flames of hatred. A complicated situation indeed! Lanny Budd talked to these different kinds of people and heard their arguments; he did not try to answer, but said that it was all very complicated and troubling to a foreigner. A young Jewish engineer, no fanatic but a man of science, compared it to the situation between the Indians and the white settlers on the American continent. The Arabs were a primitive people, ignorant and helpless, with a culture many centuries out of date; the Jews brought machinery and machine techniques, and modern knowledge of a thousand sorts. Was it not in the interest of progress that they should replace the inferior culture?

  Lanny assented, but pointed out that the Americans had come to be troubled in conscience over the way they had treated the Indians, and that you could not do in the twentieth century what your forefathers had done in the sixteenth and seventeenth. To this the Jew answered that his people were prepared to grant the Arabs full political rights and all the benefits of education. The trouble was, the Arabs didn’t want to be educated, at least not in modern ideas; they were content to have their children sit on a dirt floor and scratch fleas and learn to recite texts out of the Koran which had no remotest relationship to modern life.

  Lanny, trying to draw the man out, said that he had seen Jewish boys at school in Poland under precisely the same conditions, only the book from which they were learning was the Talmud instead of the Koran. Yes, that was true, the other admitted; but modern Jews had a different sort of education and the Palestine they built would be different from the old.

  There were at the time about a million Arabs in Palestine, as against a half-million Jews; therefore, in a democratic state, the Arabs should have been able to keep control. But when you talked to the Arabs you found they were afraid of the superior ability and aggressiveness of their rivals; the Jews could talk faster, think faster, act faster. Moreover, they had money coming in from the outside world, and money was power; just as it was buying up the land, so it could buy up elections, and the control of public opinion. The Arabs felt that the immigration that was going on was an artificial thing, and was unfair; a few more years of it, and the Arabs would be a minority, reduced to the status of laborers and serfs.

  VIII

  So ran the arguments, pro and con. Most of the young Jews Lanny met were Socialists where they were not Communists, and one and all they pointed out that political affairs did not work out in modern states as they had formerly. Give Palestine self-government, and wait a few years for the issues to be clarified, and you would not find Jews voting against Arabs, you would find propertyless Jews and Arabs voting against well-to-do Jews and Arabs. That was true everywhere, as soon as the people began to realize their true interests. In New York you didn’t find Jews voting against Gentiles; in Detroit and Chicago you didn’t find Negroes voting against whites; all over the North you found New Deal Jews and Negroes and whites voting against reactionaries of the same races.

  But the trouble was, you couldn’t tell that to the Arabs: few of them had ever heard of either Socialism or the New Deal. The Arabs held it as their creed that everything was predetermined by Allah, and that there was no use trying to change anything. They lived under a primitive tribal regime, in which the sheiks and their relatives and friends absorbed all the surplus value and left the masses hungry, ragged, and sunk in superstition. All that immense wealth which the British and American oil companies paid for drilling and pipe-line concessions went to kings and shahs and regents, and was spent for palaces and motorcars, jewels and banquets; the toiling masses got little or no benefit from it. Here in Palestine the British were just, but entirely capitalist-minded, and they left the rich to go on exploiting the poor as they had done from ancient times in spite of all the scolding of their prophets.

  Such was the East, which Rudyard Kipling had said would never meet the West, but he was turning out to be a poor prognosticator. Right here in the land of Canaan East and West were meeting every hour, and the whole community was in turmoil caused thereby. They were meeting in China, and in India, and even in the far Pacific islands, where black men and brown were getting to know GI’s, and riding in tractors and jeeps, and having their thoughts turned upside-down by radios and phonographs and motion pictures. The new was replacing the old because it had more intelligence, because it could understand the old, whereas the old could not understand the new—or if it did it became the new. That was a world process, and the only problem was to keep the old from destroying the new by sheer physical force and animal cunning—something which had happened in Italy, Germany, and Spain.

  Lanny and Laurel could observe the fires of fanaticism smoldering in this tiny stretch of land and ready to burst into flame at the slightest breath. Wandering about in the Mosque of Omar, supposedly built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, they had observed the Moslems at their prayers and had stopped to watch; they had observed that the worshipers were becoming restless, casting side glances at the strangers and muttering to one another. The dragoman had nudged the couple and whispered that they should move on. Under the British law they had a right to be there—with big canvas overshoes on their feet, so as not to pollute the sanctuary; but the Moslems believed that their prayers were rendered ineffective by the presence of unbelieving dogs, and if the dogs had insisted upon staying, they might have started a jehad, a holy war, that January afternoon.

  It was the same when you went out into the country and met the desert Arabs—black, filthy, and covered with gunnysacking almost falling off them in rags. Lanny and Laurel met a band of them, a wedding procession escorting a thirteen-year-old girl; they were dancing singing, shouting in excitement. The tourists thought it would be safe to stop and watch this scene; but instantly the band forsook their child bride and surrounded the motorcar, screaming for baksheesh. Hafiz had warned them never to give anything, for the crowd would only clamor for more. They must reply sternly, “Imshi!”—which means literally, “It is nothing,” and is presumably the Arabic equivalent of
the American “Nothing doing.” Laurel was frightened, and both of them did their best to appear fierce; but Lanny had to start the car and pretend that he meant to run over these wild people before they would give way. Again it was the East; to the nomads another form of bargaining, in which generosity is taken for weakness and regarded with contempt.

  IX

  The two explorers had been sent not merely to observe these phenomena, but to advise what should or could be done about them; and so, each night before they slept, they spent an hour discussing what they had seen and what they made of it. The longer they stayed, the more clearly they realized the complexities of this problem. It would be hard indeed to persuade the Arabs to dwell in amity with the Jews in a democratically controlled state; also, there were many Christians, Roman Catholics, Eastern or Byzantine Catholic, Armenian, Coptic, and even some Protestant sects who were scarcely less unwilling. Jerusalem was the Holy City of all these groups; they had their shrines here, and the trouble was, so many of them wanted the same shrines, and to decorate them with their own kind of tinsel and jewels, and perform their own kind of exclusive rites in front of them.

  The founders of all these groups had been men of peace and worshipers of one God, whatever name they gave him. Lanny never failed to remind the Mohammedans that their Prophet had recognized both Moses and Jesus, and he reminded the Christians that Jesus had told his disciples that the Gospel must be published to all nations; He had taught love and forbearance, and His commands were read in all the churches. But, alas, it is far more difficult to hunger and thirst after righteousness than it is to repeat a formula or to wear a charm or to make a magical sign on your chest or forehead. He had said that when you prayed you should enter into your closet and shut the door and pray to your Father in secret; but, again, it is so much easier to let some priest do it for you, and to drop a coin in a collection box for his hire. St. Paul had warned that the letter killeth, and the spirit giveth life; but it is so hard to be kind and just, and so easy to bury yourself in the study of ancient texts, and to become learned in the interpretations of this or that church father, or pope, or learned doctor of the law.