The Blessed Land

''Here so far away in these barren hills, the merging point of a hundred civilizations in its thousands of years. Of all the earth , why this place, this street, this wall, this church? Romans and Crusaders and Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Assyrians and Babylonians and British in the city of the maligned Hebrews. It is holy, it is sacred, it is damned. ''

The passage above is from the 1958 novel Exodus by Leon Uris which I am currently reading. The Exodus, some blatantly anti-Arab propoganda aside, offers a compelling tour-de-force into the history of the Jewish people and the birth of Israel. I would sincerely recommend everyone read this book. I think the book holds some answers and makes us understand why the Jews and Israel act or react the way they do and have recently done. I am not condoning anyone's actions but I now understand better than I did earlier. The insecurity, the fear, the anger, the need for action, the fierce desire to survive: none of it is misplaced. Almost all of it understandable.

The events of the recent weeks along with reading the Exodus has recalled an interesting albeit fictional situation which Tom Clancy created in his book titled ''The Sum of All Fears''. In the book which has the Arab-Israeli conflict at its centre, the Palestinian Arabs ''wisen up'' and create a sit down non violent protest by the hundreds on Temple Mount, blocking the chief Rabbi from accessing the holy site. When coerced by the Israeli police to give way, they begin chanting ''we shall overcome'' and refuse to budge. What follows is an incident comparable to hundreds of incidents that actually occured in India prior to independence, where the Israelis lose face and more importantly the moral high ground. Of course, this is a near impossibility in the current scenario in the middle east. Its much easier to pull a trigger than chant chants.

Thank heavens for Gandhi.