But now that we know that Exodus is largely mythos, that the best archaeologists in the world have sifted all through the Sinai and Canaan and no evidence exists that there was ever any flight from Egypt, and no conquest of the Promised Land. So why the ultraorthodox denial of science and reason? Why the flat-earth insistence on the literal meaning of ancient words never meant to be taken literally? Could it be that the incessant questioning has led to the abandonment of the mythos source and the application entirely of logos, after all the very language of dialectic - and questioning? Has logic tied itself in a Gordian knot and the more it picks at it the tighter the knot becomes?
Modern secular Israelis, in other words the vast majority of Israelis, are embarrassed when you ask them about the ultraorthodox. In the car Bruno adds on at least thirty mph before he finishes his rant against them. The former are irked that they have to pay for the latter “studying” away their adult lives and not working; that they don’t have to join the military (although always vote for war)26; that they have a virulent birth rate; that they behave with an arrogance that they are not only the chosen ones but verily chosen among the very chosen. Politically, although they only make up a tenth of the population, in a proportional representation system they have a disproportionate - and generally intransigent - role to play. Ironically, in view of recent Jewish history, the default position of the religious-right on most issues would not embarrass Mussolini. Certainly the images ones sees of them on Israeli TV, the images of hatred on screwed-up faces as they throw bricks at plasma TV screens, or abuse at fire-fighters trying to rescue an imprisoned woman, are directly comparable to the baying mobs of Muslim maniacs in Pakistan or Iran. Bruno calls them Judeofascists, no better than Islamofascists, but Bruno is young and inexperienced and throws words like fascist around with no experience of what they stand for. But he does tell me the rather shocking fact that the children of the ultraorthodox do not have to be educated in any subject expect religion, again at the state’s expense; no science; no languages; no arts, nothing except religion. Is it any wonder that they behave as adults like Islamic fundamentalists when they are schooled at madrassah seemalikes?
Mark Twain was twenty years older than Sigmund Freud. When they met in Vienna in 1898, Mark Twain was sixty-two. As an admirer of the Jewish intellect one imagines our man was on good behaviour in the presence of the pinnacle, but unfortunately no record of their conversation exists. We can be sure, however, that they agreed that religion was a man-made and not a divine phenomenon, and one made to satisfy primitive survival yearnings in an unpredictable world an awfully long time ago. In fact, Freud thought that religion27 was a neurosis that bordered on insanity, and that the yearning for a personal, male and above all immortal god was “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, and to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity, it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals would never be able to rise above this view of life.” One hesitates to add to the same paragraph as Sigmund Freud, save to observe that in the time spent in Israel I have yet to see a haredim laugh, or even smile. I have been with Vedantic gurus, and the Dalai Lama, wise men all, and they dance through the bliss of life and take you dancing through the bliss with them.
(Talking of Freud reminds me of Carl Gustav Jung - why do they always crop up together? It was Jung who pointed out the central paradox in every personal God belief system: if you could logically prove there is a personal god there would be no need for faith, yet faith is what hold these monotheistic religions together. For Jung religion actually prevented spiritual experience as it reduced the transcendent to a man-made concept.)
And talking of dancing bliss, I wish Mark Twain could have stumbled across this gem of a story and I wish I could see him shake his head and wonder. I’m sure a version of it would have found its way into Pudd’nhead Wilson as a counter-story. We start with Exodus 12:15, which for no clear reason instructs that for seven days “ye shall eat unleavened bread” and ends by threatening transgressors: “thy soul shall be cut off from Israel.” It’s not as simple as no bread for the week as the rabbis have taken it to mean no pasta, no peanuts (eh?), no cereals, no burger buns, no cakes, no biscuits, no couscous, no pizza, no pitta, no rice, no beans, no pulses, no whiskey. No bakery or supermarket is safe from patrolling rabbis. Many restaurants find it easier just to shut for a week. Secular Israelis, at least the ones I met, either take a holiday abroad for a week or use up the bread, etc in the freezer and eat what they like at home all week.
Now then, one way or another the State of Israel cannot help but be a large holder of leavened products in its schools and hospitals and barracks and, well everywhere, including all the embassies abroad. It is clearly impractical to dump them or sell them so the government and the rabbis have come up with this ingenious wheeze. A Gentile buys all these tons of government-held stock for a week for a nominal sum on option, then at the end of the week lapses his option. Result: legal niceties and religious purity preserved and one cooperative goy slightly richer. For many years this was a Mr. Moghrabi, an Arab lawyer28 from East Jerusalem. One year, a jesting journalist did a background check and found out that he was partly Jewish and on the female side. Pandemonium! Rushing-around rabbis tying themselves in knots, frantic digging in the Exodus archives for a loophole, much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth - and sadly, no more delicious story for Mr. M. to dine out on.
***
Enough religion already. The Excursionists left Tiberias the following morning and the caravanserai “jogged along peacefully over the great caravan route from Damascus to Jerusalem and Egypt, past Lubia and other Syrian hamlets and came at last to the battle-field of Hattan.”
I have been on a number of battlefield tours in Europe and Africa and wish there was one here: the site where was fought the decisive battle that regained Jerusalem from the crusaders, and was indirectly the beginning of the end of the crusades altogether. Time for a Mark Twain history lesson, this one factually accurate. The date is 4 July 1187.
Here the peerless Saladin met the Christian host and broke their power in Palestine for all time to come. There had long been a truce between the opposing forces but Raynauld of Chatillon broke it by plundering a Damascus caravan, and refusing to give up either the merchants or their goods when Saladin demanded them.
This conduct of an insolent petty chieftain stung the Sultan to the quick, and he swore that he would slaughter Raynauld with his own hand, no matter how, or when, or where he found him. Both armies prepared for war. Under the weak King of Jerusalem was the very flower of the Christian chivalry. He foolishly compelled them to undergo a long, exhausting march, in the scorching sun, and then, without water or other refreshment, ordered them to encamp in this open plain.
The splendidly mounted masses of Moslem soldiers swept round the north end of Tiberias, burning and destroying as they came, and pitched their camp in front of the opposing lines. At dawn the terrific fight began. Surrounded on all sides by the Sultan’s swarming battalions, the Christian Knights fought on without a hope for their lives. They fought with desperate valor, but to no purpose; the odds of heat and numbers, and consuming thirst, were too great against them.
The doom of the Christian power was sealed. Sunset found Saladin Lord of Palestine, the Christian chivalry strewn in heaps upon the field, and the King of Jerusalem, the Grand Master of the Templars, and Raynauld of Chatillon, captives in the Sultan’s tent. Saladin treated two of the prisoners with princely courtesy, and ordered refreshments to be set before them.
When the King handed an iced Sherbet to Chatillon, the Sultan said, “It is thou that givest it to him, not I.” He remembered his oath, and slaughtered the hapless Knight of Chatillon with his own hand.
Two touches Mark Twain left out were that Salah al-Din had his army light bush fires upwind of the Christian soldiers to make their thirst worse, and then had his water camels bring fresh water from the Sea of Galilee hal
f a mile away and empty their water vessels onto the ground to increase the Christian anguish29. Twain might also have mentioned that relations between Christianity and Islam never recovered from the carnage of the crusades. The site of the battlefield is still as he described it, “a grand, irregular plateau, that looks as if it might have been created for a battle-field”. It is now irrigated around the edges and growing almonds and olives on the higher ground, where Salah al-Din encamped, and below newly planted citrus groves, all in uniformly neat rows, rather as the Christian host might have stood.
***
Actually there was another battle at Hittin, much more recent and far less significant, but one that in its tiny way helps explain the Israel that is today. It was fought between Jews and Arabs on 17 July 1948 - fought is probably too strong a word as after the initial round of firing by the Israelis the Arabs fled across the valley to Jordan and the Israelis walked into an abandoned village.
After finishing retracing the Excursionists’ tour around the Holy Land I am planning to finish this book with an epilogue called “Dear Sam”, a journalist-to-journalist letter to Sam Clemens, about what happened to the Holy Land after he left it, what he would find here now, and what on earth anyone can do about the holy mess that various rabbis, imams, priests, dictators, generals, scoundrels, foreign governments and NGOs have managed to make of it. For now, as we are about to enter the West Bank, please bear with me as I summarize as succinctly as possible events that led up to this second battle at Hittin - and to the birth of Israel and the crisis of Palestine.
When Mark Twain was here there were around five thousand Jews in this Syrian part of the Ottoman Empire - mostly body-snatchers and mostly in Jerusalem, but also in Safed, Hebron and as he had just seen, in Tiberias. Fifteen years after his visit here the Orthodox Church30 in Russia instigated anti-Jewish pogroms and these coincided with the birth of political Zionism, the desire of the diasporic Jews to return to the lands of their Bible. The Russian Jews fled to the Holy Land and settled in country very much as Mark Twain described: “There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country... The only difference between the roads and the surrounding country, perhaps, is that there are rather more rocks in the roads than in the surrounding country...
“We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds - a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we saw only three persons - Arabs, with nothing on but a long coarse shirt like the ‘tow-linen’ shirts which used to form the only summer garment of little negro boys on Southern plantations... A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.”
By the turn of the century the Jewish population had doubled to twenty thousand and as the Zionist message spread throughout the Diaspora it had doubled again by the outbreak of the First World War. During that war their hosts, the Ottoman Turks, decided to back the losing German side, and when it was clear that they would lose not only the war but the remains of their empire the British, French31 and Russians met secretly to carve it up among themselves. This was far from being the most glorious episode in the history of the British Empire as it had already promised the Arabs an independent Greater Syria if they helped the allies defeat the Turks in Arabia, and it was about to promise the Jews an independent homeland in the self same space - clearly incompatible and expedient promises it had no intention of honoring.
The League of Nations then deemed the area best run by the British and the French and thus was born the Mandate era. The French were given what would become Syria and Lebanon and the British what would become Israel, the West Bank, Jordan and Iraq. Thus although the Syrians wanted one large independent country the British divided it up into mini-Syrian pieces; and although the Iraqis wanted to stay loosely and tribally federated the British told them they were one country and foisted the ex-King of Syria on them after the French had kicked him out of Damascus.
By the time of the Second World War all these artificial borders, shifting alliances in shifting sands, broken promises and imperial hidden agendas, continued mass emigration of both Jews and Arabs into the now more affluent Holy Land and the rise of recognizable Arab nationalism brought many an imperial chicken home to roost. Eighteen months after the war, the British, having managed to betray and upset all sides equally, threw their hands up in the air and handed the whole mess over to the newly created United Nations.
We are now only thirteen months away from the second battle of Hittin. The UN proposed two more or less equally populated states: Israel and Palestine. The Israelis accepted it reluctantly; the Arabs rejected it whole- heartedly. It was to be the first of a series of disastrous decisions that the Arab side, in various guises, was to make over the next sixty years. Two months after the UN declaration, in early 1948, the Arabs attacked and in the period up to Israel’s Declaration of Independence in May 1948 a series of skirmishes brought Israeli gains with every skirmish.
It wasn’t until after Israel’s declaration that the real War of Independence started. Five armies from Egypt, Syria, Transjordon, Lebanon and Iraq attacked Israel from all sides. In retrospect it seems they were more interested in grabbing land for themselves than helping establish Palestine - and this is exactly what Jordan did. The Arab side had a five to one numerical advantage, but they also had three decisive factors working against them. Firstly, unlike the Jews, they were not fighting for their long promised homeland and indeed for their very survival. Secondly, much as we love the Arabs we have to say they are not much good at soldiering - maybe that’s why we love them. Thirdly, their leaders were more interested in stabbing each other in the back than stabbing the Israelis in the front. In fact, these same leaders, by ordering the resident Arabs to flee until the imminent and certain victory would enable them to return, were also largely - but not wholly - responsible for the massive refugee crisis which the war brought on: about seven hundred thousand Arabs fled the future Israel and six hundred thousand Jews fled from their surrounding Arab countries as retribution followed defeat.
The decision to invade Israel had been a disaster. The Arabs ended up with less territory than when they started the war, while Israel had increased hers by over thirty per cent and now had contiguous territory. There was still no Palestine. They had lost half of Jerusalem. They had created one and a half million refugees, the Arab half of which now number four million and are still stateless. Eighty-five per cent of the Arabs who were in what would become the new Israel had fled or were ethnically cleansed. Four out of the five hundred Arab villages were sacked or re-inhabited by Jews. Only Jordan won anything, and that was only because it colonized over half of what was supposed to be Palestine, the West Bank.
By 18 July 1948 the Arabs at Hittin had already largely lost heart. An Arab soldier’s account in the Palestine Study Journal says that “we saw the Jewish armored unit advancing... we were too few and had too little ammunition. During the first Jewish attack we retreated to the village and with the few remaining villagers we fled north.” The descendants of the village are now seething in Lebanon, ignored by Israel, forgotten by the Arabs. The village itself is a pile of rubble with only the minaret just about standing; wild mulberry, fig and eucalyptus trees, and random cactus plants grow around it. A small nearby stream supports aquatic plants. Butterflies flutter around, blissfully unaware of early dramas. Ironically, one can say only to oneself, the old village of Hittin has probably never looked prettier.
***
A few hours later, barely halfway through what must have been an exhausting day of sightseeing, the Excursionists found themselves on top of Mount Tabor. “Tabor rises some fourteen hundred feet above the surrounding level, a green, wooden cone, symmetrical and full of grace - a prominent landmark, and one that is exceedingly pleasant to eyes surfeited with the repulsive monotony of desert Syria. We climbed the stee
p path to its summit, through breezy glades of thorn and oak. The view presented from its highest peak was almost beautiful.”
Today there’s a single-track road that does the climbing up the steep path and it is so precipitous that the tourists’ buses have to stay in a car park at ground level 2,000 feet below and decant their pilgrims into a caravanserai of minibuses. We are still actually only 1,600 feet above sea level; the Sea of Galilee is some 700 feet below sea level.
In Twain’s time there was precious little to see on top of Mount Tabor. “There is nothing about Tabor (except we concede that it was the scene of the Transfiguration,) but some gray old ruins, stacked up there in all ages of the world from the days of stout Gideon and parties that flourished thirty centuries ago to the fresh yesterday of Crusading times. It has its Greek Convent, and the coffee there is good.”
***
Things have perked up on Mount Tabor these days. One does not like to be picky, but biblical scholars now place the Transfiguration - the moment when Peter, James and John saw Jesus transfigured in a vision to standing alongside Moses and Elijah - as being on nearby Jebel Jermuk rather than on Mount Tabor, which was first referenced several hundred years after the event. At that time Mount Tabor was going through its most illustrious period, with an enormous Byzantine church dedicated to the Christ Transfigured and two smaller out-riding churches dedicated to Moses and Elijah - an unusual New Testament/Old Testament juxtaposition. For several hundred years Tabor attracted pilgrims from all over Europe, and its glory was only terminated after the above-mentioned Battle of Hittin. The next day the victorious Saracens marched the same few miles as Mark Twain had done, climbed up the same steep path and sacked and slaughtered all before them.
Innocence and War Page 17