Judith

Editor’s Introduction

Judith is an adventure story which is both romantic and tragic, embracing twin love affairs, and it is also a political drama of considerable poignancy which contains resonances even for the geopolitics of today.

This Introduction sets the scene in 1940s Palestine, on the eve of British withdrawal from the League of Nations Mandate (under which it administered Palestine from 1922 to 1948), with the impending invasion of the newly created state of Israel by its Arab neighbours. It describes the genesis of the novel, and the many elements in Lawrence Durrell’s mind as he was writing it, as well as explaining the discrepancies between the novel and the film of Judith, released by Paramount Pictures in 1966.

The Genesis of Judith

Following the appearance in 1957 of Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet, and the republication of the Quartet as a single volume in 1962, Lawrence Durrell rapidly became one of the most celebrated and controversial novelists not only in the English-speaking world but also throughout Europe, thanks to translations of the Quartet into French and German.¹ On the strength of this acclaim and notoriety, Durrell was approached in 1960 by Twentieth Century — Fox to write a screenplay for a film about Cleopatra, on which he worked throughout that year and 1961, although he eventually withdrew from that project, and is not named in the film credits.

Then, in September 1962, he was in Israel, researching the background for another film, Judith, which would feature Sophia Loren in the title role. Little is known of the circumstances in which the film’s producer, Kurt Unger, commissioned the script from Durrell for Paramount Pictures; their correspondence appears to have been lost (it does not exist in either of the major Durrell archives) so that, as in the case of Cleopatra, we cannot establish precisely Durrell’s reasons for withdrawing from the film project, except to say that he was dissatisfied with the changes in the storyline made by subsequent writers.²

Durrell worked on the first draft of Judith in late 1962 and early 1963, before meeting Sophia Loren. ‘A sweet creature, great dignity and style’, he recorded.³ Although he lost interest in the film studio’s revisions to his storyline, he went so far, in August 1964, as to visit Israel again during the shoot, where he and Loren made a short travelogue for CBS Television. ‘I acted her off her pretty little feet’, Durrell wrote.⁴ Given the nature of the political and paramilitary context of Judith, it is worth noting that Moshe Dayan, who, as Israel’s Minister of Defence, facilitated the CBS feature, had in 1939 been imprisoned by the British for his part in illegal arms importations by the Haganah (see below).

As with so many of Durrell’s finished works, Judith began as a sketch, the substance and detail of which would be amplified and enhanced as the project developed. After his preliminary reconnaissance in Israel, Durrell wrote to a friend, ‘Just finished tracing the border without anything to boast about’.⁵ As I discuss below, this was typical of his method of constructing a story, prior to elevating it from a basic idea to a higher level of literature.

In the first draft of Judith, the central character, Judith Roth, is a distinguished scientist in her own right, who has been ‘sprung’ from Germany by the Zionists, in order to work on papers by her late father, a Nobel Laureate physicist. Loren objected to the characterisation, telling Durrell ‘I am not an intellectual’, asking instead if Judith could be portrayed as a simple ‘woman of the people, not a doctor type’.⁶ As a result, Durrell completely rewrote the story, making Judith into a refugee/survivor of the concentration camps who has been married to a Nazi Colonel, Günther Schiller. Schiller is now aiding the Arab preparation for the impending attack on the new-born state of Israel.

It is significant, from the point of view of this publication of Judith, that Durrell approached the storyline and the text in a quite different manner from that of Cleopatra. The extant versions by Durrell of Cleopatra are written in the conventional screenplay format: ‘stage’ directions describing atmosphere and movement, followed by dialogue:

Open slowly on the dark town: palm trees, shadows, a waning moon. The camera enters a room in the palace through curtains stirred by the dawn wind, moves across the strange arabesques of tessellated floors towards a huge bed of fantastic design.

⁷

The text of Judith, by contrast, is written descriptively, and, while the dialogue is dominant, it is integrated into the narrative in a novelistic style. In the absence of any full treatment for the scenario of Judith, we can assume that, while, in the scenario for Cleopatra, Durrell was suggesting the way the director might use the camera’s eye, in Judith he was employing the eye of the reader to achieve his effect.

As a result — it seems — of Loren’s intervention, Durrell had, by the end of 1963, written two versions of Judith, the second replacing Judith the scientist with Judith the victimised mother in search of her child by Günther Schiller. A copy of the second version is held in the archives of Paramount Pictures, and it is presumably from this text that the later scripts were derived. The Durrell archive at Southern Illinois University also contains a document labelled ‘Judith. Palestine 1947’, indicating that Durrell was actively involved in the early stages of the film treatment(s), with perceptive remarks as to the political situation, such as the following:

Jerusalem: The holy city is like a symbol of the Palestinian political situation. The Arab and Jewish community sharing the town, each believing that it will be liberated in the near future for its own people. The Jews have always considered Jerusalem as their capital but they know that the Jordanian Arabs will try in every way to take this city from them.

Durrell includes a note at the end of this document:

We must keep in mind from the very beginning of the story the need of creating a sequence to show the threat hanging over the future of the emerging country. The threat, as will be made clear in the end, is the surrounding Arab States which are opposed to the creation of an independent Jewish state.

⁸

The film of Judith, directed by Daniel Mann, starred Sophia Loren in the title role, with Peter Finch as Aaron Stein and Jack Hawkins as Major Lawton.⁹ It is significant that Paramount succeeded in securing the services of both J. P. Miller and John Michael Hayes as screenwriters. Miller, who was principally a playwright, won an Emmy nomination for Days of Wine and Roses (1958). He worked on five versions of the script for Judith between 1 March and 9 July 1964. Hayes had previously worked with Alfred Hitchcock, one of his most notable scripts being Rear Window (1953), for which he received an Oscar nomination, followed by To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. He then went on to earn a second Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Peyton Place. Hayes took over the script from Miller on 1 August 1964 and continued with it (another five versions) until 12 March 1965.

A curious anomaly is the fact that the story was serialised (two months after the release of the film) in Woman’s Own magazine as ‘The Epic Story of One Woman’s Torment’, but differs in several details from the episodes in the film (and the film contains elements that are not included in the story).¹⁰

As late as 1972 — that is, after the publication of his next major novel sequence, Tunc and Nunquam — Durrell was still contemplating publication of Judith.¹¹ We do not know at what stage he decided to merge the first two versions of the novella into one story, splitting the Judith character into Judith (still a scientist) and Grete (the wife of Günther Schiller) and introducing the character of David as Grete’s lover, to balance the relationship between Judith and Aaron Stein. This development almost certainly came after the release of the film of Judith in January 1966. Durrell’s title for the expanded novel was ‘Double Scenario’. This was presumably a working title, intended to indicate that there were now two storylines: that of Judith (as in the first version) and that of Grete, who replaced the ‘Judith’ of the second version. It is an unwieldy title, and I have therefore preferred to retain ‘Judith’ as the title of this expanded novel. The typescript (which was most likely prepared by a professional typist) contains some anomalies, which Durrell clearly did not have the opportunity to correct. Some of these have been silently corrected; others are discussed below.

Durrell’s writing styles

Throughout his career as a novelist, Lawrence Durrell wrote on two levels: intense, passionate, intellectual novels such as The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1959), and lighter, less serious, more easily written (and more easily read) stories, which he disparagingly referred to as ‘pot-boilers’. In fact, the chronology of his published work indicates that, in most cases, the ‘serious’ and the ‘lighter’ works alternated, as if, having completed a demanding undertaking such as the Quartet, he turned to story-telling which allowed him to continue in the obsessional writer’s craft without trying to reach for the literary stars.

In 1937, Lawrence Durrell was living in Corfu, and had already published his first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, and, under the pseudonym of ‘Charles Norden’, his second, Panic Spring; and he had written the novel which he later regarded as carrying the first sound of his true voice, The Black Book. (The pseudonym was used because Pied Piper of Lovers had not met with critical acclaim.) Having attracted the enthusiastic support of Henry Miller for The Black Book, Durrell wrote to him:

My double Amicus Nordensis. He is a double I need…You see, I can’t write real books all the time…Once every three years or more I shall try to compose for full orchestra. The rest of the time I shall do essays, travel-books, perhaps one more novel under Charles Norden. I shall naturally not try to write badly or things I don’t want to: but there are a lot of things I want to write which don’t come into the same class as

The Black Book

at all.

¹²

To which Miller forcefully replied:

Don’t…take the schizophrenic route!…You must stand or fall either as Charles Norden or as Lawrence Durrell. I would choose Lawrence Durrell if I were you…If, as you say, you can’t write REAL books all the time, then don’t write. Don’t write anything, I mean. Lie fallow…Why couldn’t you write all the other books you wish as L.D.? Why can’t L.D. be the author of travel books, etc.?

¹³

As a result of this retort from Miller, Durrell did ‘kill off’ his double, and continued to write the travel books, essays and novels under his own name: his memoir of Corfu, Prospero’s Cell (1945), was his next major prose work, and if we examine the chronology of his prose publications thereafter, the alternation of ‘real’ books and lighter stories becomes clear: Cefalù (later republished as The Dark Labyrinth) in 1946, Reflections on a Marine Venus (‘a companion to the landscape of Rhodes’, 1953), and Bitter Lemons (about his years in Cyprus during the Enosis crisis, 1957) led up to the appearance between 1957 and 1959 of the work with which his name is most frequently associated, The Alexandria Quartet.

Of his works up to this point, The Dark Labyrinth is the least demanding: a didactic novel on a programmatic basis, with each character confronting his or her personal destiny within the framework of a Cretan labyrinth. When he was writing it, Durrell told Miller, ‘I have deliberately chosen a cheap novel formula…A rotten book but with some small lucid moments and one or two good lines’.¹⁴ Readers of Judith will readily see that not only does this novel have ‘some small lucid moments’ — some of them of great beauty and, usually, poignancy — but that the Durrell hallmark of memorable phrases and acute insights is, though to a lesser extent than in his ‘real’ books, present throughout, in his commentary — sometimes cynical, always with a wry humour — on the behaviour of his characters.

Durrell’s view of The Dark Labyrinth as ‘a rotten book’ is so self-deprecatory as to be absurd, especially when it has in fact been very highly regarded by the critics. This, and other books in the ‘cheap novel formula’ were, in fact, the product of what Miller had foreseen as his ‘fallow’ periods. Judith — unpublished until now — was written in the difficult years for Durrell between the completion of the Quartet and his struggle with its successor, the twin novels Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), which were drafted in parallel with Judith under the working title ‘The Placebo’. In these ‘fallow’ years, during which he was preoccupied with the ill-health of his wife, Claude, he also produced his translation of the nineteenth-century Pope Joan by the Greek author Emmanuel Royidis, and most of his ‘Antrobus’ sketches of diplomatic life as he had observed it while working at the British Embassy in Belgrade, then the capital of the Yugoslav Federation.¹⁵ Yugoslavia had also given rise to his 1957 novel of espionage and suspense, White Eagles over Serbia — another example of his capacity for a storyline which grips the reader without making exceptional literary demands.

In fact, almost all Durrell’s novels combine the dual elements of what Kipling called ‘the game’ and ‘the quest’, as exemplified in his Kim, which Durrell himself called his ‘bedside book’. The ‘game’ involves a secret which must be discovered in the book’s dénouement, and the ‘quest’, which runs parallel to the public ‘game’, is the individual’s pursuit of self-knowledge. The reader’s attention and loyalty are sustained by the author’s capacity to entwine the two within a single narrative structure.

G. S. Fraser (a wartime contemporary of Durrell in Egypt), who wrote the first major study of Durrell’s work, recorded that ‘the Wodehousian humour of the Antrobus stories, the Buchanesque thrills of White Eagles over Serbia, have helped to keep the pot boiling. Durrell, with typical versatility, was working when I visited him in Corfu on the script and general advice for an American film, a documentary one, about the voyages of Odysseus’. In relation to Judith, Fraser remarked, ‘this was obviously a hastily novelized filmscript and one wondered even whether Durrell, who had written the script, had himself done the novelizing’.¹⁶

The level at which the author can pitch his narrative depends on many factors, such as the basic material of the plot — which, as in the case of Judith, might be quite deeply researched — and the evolution of the characters as the writing progresses. But it also depends on the author’s emotional and material circumstances: financial and other necessities might dictate the composition of a ‘pot-boiler’ when the writer would prefer to pursue a more intimate and introspective line of enquiry (even though that would still demand a clear storyline). And the reverse might be the case, as it was with Durrell after the success of the Quartet, when he started to address the twin themes of Judith while considering its potential as a filmscript.

Not only might Durrell denigrate the literary value of one of his minor works, but he was also capable of reducing his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, to its basic elements, referring to it as no more than ‘sex and the secret service’. In the simplest terms, this reduction accurately reflects the twin themes of the ‘quest’ — the search by several of the characters for the meaning and practice of love — and the ‘game’, the web of conspiracies, political and religious movements and chicanery which provides the context in which that idea of love is tested and pursued.

When writing Tunc and Nunquam, Durrell noted that the ‘irresistible book themes are Quests, Confessions and Puzzles’¹⁷ and in doing so he expressed the elements which constitute the framework within which his — and any other author’s — characters act out their lives. Whether in a Proust or an Agatha Christie, quests, confessions and puzzles provide the author with the momentum of the book and the reader with the reason for continuing to read it. They are the writer’s stock-in-trade, and Durrell emphasised this in referring to what he called ‘the minor mythologies’,¹⁸ the genres of popular literature which have been consigned by critical prejudice to the status of ‘lowbrow’. But the creation of an art-literature rests on the foundations of a much more popular genre: the telling of a compelling story, and Judith is such a story.

One of the most striking features of Lawrence Durrell’s writing, on any level, is his innate absorption of the context and his ability to bring it vividly to life. When writing Judith he conducted extensive research, as was his practice with any work which depicted actual events.

Durrell’s knowledge of the Levant enabled him to create scenes redolent of specific times and places. Given greater consideration, it is likely that he would have deepened the characterisation of Judith, Aaron, Grete and Lawton, to match the charming and sympathetic caricature of Isaac Jordan with which the novel opens. But the main players in this adventure represent positions which had become somewhat institutionalised in the course of the Mandate situation: Judith as a scientist with a Zionist mission; Aaron as the speaker of the leitmotiv ‘Israel must get itself born’; Grete seeking her child and her warmongering husband; Lawton the reluctant soldier, caught between personal feeling and military duty. Lawton, in fact, in his hesitant performance of that duty, and his pathetic wooing of Grete, shows us that, besides being a political and human fiasco, the playing out of the last years of the Mandate was a great drama, which Durrell captures in both the general and the specific.

It is Durrell’s ability to create strong images both of concrete realities — such as the ambience of the kibbutz — and of emotional states that lifts Judith from a reportage to a work of suggestive and imaginative fiction. (Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, had said that his manifesto The Jewish State was not written ‘in the irresponsible guise of a romantic tale’,¹⁹ and Durrell was equally true to his craft in avoiding excess in the portrayal of the parallel love stories.) His ‘political’ background made it possible to include elements in the storyline, such as the unsuccessful blockade with which it opens, Günther Schiller’s meeting with Grete and his subsequent suicide, the encounter between the childhood friends Aaron and Daud, and the threat of deportation to Cyprus, all of which are linked thematically and organically to the situation in Palestine at that time.

It is remarkable that such themes and narrative devices recur in Durrell’s work: in The Avignon Quintet, for example, the wife of the psychiatrist Schwartz (as in the case of Schiller and Grete) is sent to Buchenwald, and his subsequent sense of guilt leads to his suicide. Another recurring feature of Durrell’s writing is his insistence that the story never ends, or that it may have multiple endings. In a memorandum to Paramount, he suggested that ‘my own story ends here, but there is no reason why one could not continue it along the lines already discussed’. And the novel ends with an ambiguity: ‘Or so it seemed’. Similarly, The Alexandria Quartet had closed with the penultimate sentence ‘Once upon a time’, and The Avignon Quintet ends with an ‘opening’: ‘the totally unpredictable began to take place!’ Such was Durrell’s interest in improbability and relativity that he resisted any definitive conclusion to anything he wrote.

The political context: Palestine, 1920–1948

Specific events such as the United Nations vote in favour of partition (29 November 1947) and the British military and administrative withdrawal from Palestine (14–15 May 1948) provide the pillars on which the personal fortunes of Durrell’s characters rest.

Despite two notable exceptions (discussed below) where Durrell seems to have nodded, his scenario for Judith is accurate in two very important respects: its portrayal of the political situation towards the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, and its awareness of the tensions between Arabs and Jews which had built up over the previous half century. As a former British diplomat and government functionary, with extensive experience in the Levant (Egypt, Cyprus and the Dodecanese) in addition to his observations of the Cold War while stationed in Yugoslavia, Durrell was in pole position to employ this experience in the service of a novel which would incorporate both a love story (in fact, two) and the elements of a political thriller.

An introduction of this kind is necessary because, as Albert Hyamson noted, writing shortly after the British withdrawal, his own account of Palestine under the Mandate would be for

the guidance, instruction and also warning of those to whom the welfare of Palestine present and future is of account, necessary as an assistance in dissipating the fog of propaganda in which the whole subject is shrouded and has been for the greater part of the past generation.

²⁰

The fact that little has changed, in the more than sixty years since Hyamson wrote that, underlines the need for readers today to appreciate the unhappy background to Judith.

The following pages therefore indicate the political context within which Judith is set, and the reasons for Durrell’s not merely providing political and religious tensions as background (as he had recently done in the Quartet) but bringing that context into the novel as a character in its own right. In fact, the points of history, from the inception of modern Zionism in the 1890s to the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917 and the start of the British Mandate (from the League of Nations) in 1921–22, are matched meticulously by Durrell and woven into the fabric of the story which binds together Judith, Aaron, Grete and David; the Jewish Agency; the Haganah; and the impending vote at the United Nations to authorise the partition of Palestine.

In weaving together the crucial elements in the history of Palestine — the Zionist pursuit of a Jewish homeland, the Arabs’ resentment at being displaced from their ancestral lands, and British frustration at the impossibility of implementing the terms of the Mandate — Durrell captured the ironies, injustices and ignominies of that history. The personal quests of Judith, for the fulfilment of her father’s scientific work, and of Grete, for her lost child (a feature also of Justine Hosnani in the Quartet) are set within the brutal period when the inevitability of British withdrawal from Palestine and the equally inevitable Arab — Israeli conflict not only brought to a head these three strands of history, but predicted and, indeed, precipitated the Middle East crisis which persists to this day. Given that the film of Judith (and the serialisation of the supposed excerpts from the filmscript) appeared in 1966, there is an uncanny prescience of the Six Day War that would erupt slightly more than a year later.

The role of Major Lawton in Judith and the episode in which Colonel Macdonald makes arms available to the kibbutz (‘A Gift for Ras Shamir’, pp. 261–263) highlight the ambivalence of both British policy and personal affiliations which runs throughout the period of the Mandate, and they also make clear the fact that the Mandate itself was based on what at best can be described as a misconception, and at worst as a series of deceits and betrayals. The founding document of the conflict was the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, a statement by the British Government that it supported ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, while also guaranteeing ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. One might therefore assume that Britain wished to see Jews and Arabs living in co-operation, harmony and mutual respect. There were, however, several other factors which not merely complicated the fulfilment of the project and flawed the ground of the Mandate, but actually created a situation impossible of resolution.

Not least of these was another document, secretly agreed upon between the British and French governments and known as the ‘Sykes — Picot Agreement’, which made similar promises to the Arabs in respect of the same land area. As a Royal Commission of inquiry into the Palestine situation reported in 1937:

Under the stress of World War the British Government made promises to Arabs and Jews in order to obtain their support. On the strength of those promises both parties formed certain expectations…An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.

²¹

George Antonius, the principal apologist for the Arab cause prior to the Second World War, referred to the Sykes — Picot Agreement as ‘a shocking document’:

It is not only the product of greed at its worst, that is to say, of greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity: it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing.

²²

The Commission, whose report would be suspended until after the Second World War, recommended partition of the country, on which Antonius commented:

Forcible eviction [of settled Arabs] or subjection to a Jewish state…runs counter to the lessons of history, the requirements of geography, the natural play of economic forces, and the ordinary laws of human behaviour.

²³

As I shall discuss below, it was an early example of ‘geopolitics’, but in this case, taken together with the Balfour Declaration, it meant that the British right hand was unaware of what its left-hand counterpart was trying to exploit.

At the same time, the fact that the Sykes — Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration were mutually exclusive points not only to a lack of foresight by the British (during a time of acute anxiety as far as the conduct of the world war was concerned) but also to a level of incompetence, if not of dishonesty. As Jonathan Schneer remarks, ‘the Balfour Declaration was the highly contingent product of a tortuous process characterized as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy’.²⁴ As a Palestinian commentator has recently written: ‘on what basis did the British believe that they were entitled to promise to the Zionists land that belonged to others?’²⁵

Even though the Balfour Declaration had avoided saying that Palestine would become the home of the Jews, but stated, rather, that a home would be established in Palestine, Balfour himself and Lloyd George (the prime minister at the time of the Declaration) told Winston Churchill (at that time Colonial Secretary) in 1921 that ‘by the Declaration they always meant an eventual Jewish State’.²⁶ In the following year, a British White Paper aiming to clarify the situation stated that

When it is asked what is meant by the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine as a whole but the further development of the existing Jewish community, with the assistance of Jews in other parts of the world, in order that it may become a centre in which the Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.

²⁷

Whether or not British policy — or lack of it — for the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was based on the strategies of war, on imperialist imperatives, or on a genuine sense of philanthropy, it is incontestable that British support was vital to the Zionist cause, and, as Sir Henry Gurney (the last Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government) put it, ‘The undertaking given by Britain to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine represented the only attempt made by any nation in history to help the Jews’.²⁸

The ambivalence and apparent lack of policy on the part of the British administration was due in part to the fact that many in the army were pro-Arab, despite acknowledging their admiration for Jewish endeavours and the fact that an Arab attack on Jewish settlements would most probably be overwhelming. At the same time, the Jewish Agency, set up in 1922 under the terms of the Mandate (and the organisation responsible for ‘springing’ ‘Judith Roth’ from Germany), had become ‘an undisguised alias for the Zionist Organization’,²⁹ while ‘under the authority of the Jewish Agency, the Jewish community in Palestine had created its own virtual state within the superstructure of British administration’.³⁰

This state-within-a-state, tolerated by the British, had an undercurrent of violence in its vigilance against Arab attack, but also in its own occasional attacks on British installations, including the bomb blast at the British headquarters, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed eighty officials. Under the aegis of the Zionist Organisation (forerunner of the Jewish Agency), a paramilitary defence organisation called the Haganah, was instituted in 1920, ‘because Britain failed to defend them [the Jews] effectively during the pogroms of that year’.³¹ In the 1930s, the Haganah ran parallel to two other armed groups, the Etzel (known by the British as ‘Irgun’), led by the future prime minister Menachem Begin, and Lechi, better known as the ‘Stern Gang’, led by Avraham Stern, composer of its anthem, ‘Anonymous Soldiers’. Another member of Irgun was yet another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who was one of those who sanctioned the assassination of Lord Moyne (the British minister of state in Cairo) in 1944.

That the British military turned its back on many instances of arms smuggling is indisputable; members of the armed forces may well have preferred the Arabs to the Jews (‘I wish the Arabs would come and wipe the whole lot out’ was the view of one soldier),³² but it was considered necessary for the Jews to be armed in preparation for the Arab onslaught that would follow British withdrawal. ‘Arms acquisitions, training and even manoeuvres had been winked at as long as they were reasonably discreet.’³³ In 1937, Churchill was unequivocal: ‘To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army’.³⁴ In Judith, Durrell, as already mentioned, even went so far as to show a British officer donating arms, ammunition and other equipment to Ras Shamir on the eve of the Arab attack, a detail which he most likely derived from the well-known fact that ‘especially towards the end of the Mandate there were numerous cases in which weapons, ammunition and other material were “lost” from military stores’.³⁵ The less palatable side of Haganah activity is also to be found in Judith, when Aaron declares proudly:

“Another big trouble this afternoon at the Jaffa gate with fifteen killed.

Six

British, my dears, and two Jews. All the rest Arabs. Tonight they are going to have a go at the Haifa factory.”

“I don’t see why you sound so elated,” said the doctor with a little shudder. “It’s horrible.” He looked suddenly chastened, like a scolded puppy, and nodded in agreement, his face grave again. “The horror is not of our making, alas!” he said in a different tone. (p. 30)

The pro-Jewish or pro-Arab feelings of the British must also be seen in the context of the imperative within the Mandate, that nothing should jeopardise the Arab population. It has been said of the first High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel (himself a Jew), that ‘as a Jew and a liberal Englishman he would be ashamed…if it turned out that the establishment of a Jewish state involved injustice towards the Arabs’.³⁶ At the same time, as the Arab apologist George Antonius put it,

In face of the abominable persecution to which Jews in Central Europe are nowadays subjected, it is not only desirable but also urgent that room be found for the relief of the greatest possible number…[But] The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.

³⁷

One of the most poignant elements in the story is the apparent indifference of the British military towards the impending, inevitable, Arab — Israeli conflict. ‘The army could not avoid taking a position in favor of one side or another, and it was clear enough in Palestine its sympathy was with the Arabs.’³⁸ When Judith is being escorted by Aaron to the kibbutz after her arrival in Haifa, their truck is searched by an army patrol. Aaron protests that the army is not doing enough to protect Jews from Arab attack. ‘You want us to be eaten by the Arabs’, he says. ‘Personally, I don’t care who eats who’, the sergeant retorts (p. 33). And when Judith meets Rebecca Peterson at the kibbutz, she asks, ‘But don’t the British keep the peace?’ to which Peterson replies:

When it suits them. I think they would be rather glad if their Arab friends wiped out the kibbutzim; we are an embarrassment to them. On the Lebanon side we are well protected because we control the crown of the mountain and the settlements are spread out along it — good defensive positions with steep cliffs the other side. On this side, alas, it is not so good because the Syrians are astride the crown and we are down in the valley. (p. 43)

Not only does Durrell thereby create a sense of insecurity, of a peaceful and beautiful valley surrounded by latent, and soon-to-be-explicit, hostility, but he represents the reality of kibbutzim, such as both the real and the fictional Shamir, with an air of pathos that immediately wins the reader’s affection and sympathy. This becomes particularly effective when Grete is introduced to the children’s quarters, and experiences the various psychological weaknesses which are the facts of life carried within these future builders of Israeli society.

From a reading of The Alexandria Quartet we can infer that Durrell himself had far greater sympathy for the Jewish cause than for the Arabs (his second and third wives were Alexandrian Jews), and the Quartet, anticipating what Durrell would write in Judith, features an episode of gun-running into Palestine — in this case aided by Coptic (Christian) Egyptians. Permeating Judith is the leitmotiv uttered by Aaron (‘Israel must get itself born’ — p. 88) and David Eveh (‘Israel must become a reality, a sovereign state’ — pp. 114–115); and, finally, with the UN vote in favour of partition, Major Lawton realised that ‘Israel had been born’ (p. 195). The prophetic dream of Theodor Herzl had come true: ‘The Jewish State is essential to the world; it will therefore be created…A State is created by a nation’s struggle for existence’.³⁹ In The Alexandria Quartet, this geopolitical imperative is recognised by Nessim Hosnani, a (Christian) Copt, who fears the extinction of non-Muslims in his native Egypt. For him the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would represent a counterbalance to the extension of Islam: ‘if only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease’.⁴⁰

But this development brought its own nemesis: as Rebecca Peterson says to Grete:

For so long we have been living in insecurity, dependent on the good will of strangers, on the charity of others…Now, all of a sudden, we exist on paper as a place called Israel. This is a momentous step forward, for we have now become a sort of world commitment. But you know as well as I do that if Israel were to be swallowed up by the Arab states, nobody would lift a finger to save her. At last, my dear, at last we are all alone with our own destiny. It depends on us whether the state can get itself born and fix itself among the other small nations. (p. 213)

The period of the Mandate saw the accelerating process of this conflict, in which ‘Two competing national movements consolidated their identity in Palestine and advanced steadily toward confrontation’.⁴¹ David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel 1948–1953 and 1955–1963, simply said, ‘Everybody sees the problem in relations between the Jews and the Arabs. But not everybody sees that there’s no solution to it. There is no solution!’⁴² As one commentator had said as early as 1905, ‘The two movements were destined to wage war until one defeated the other, and the fate of the entire world depended on the outcome of this struggle’⁴³ — a view echoed continuously since then by observers such as Robert Fisk, author of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East:

The Arab — Jewish struggle…is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands.

⁴⁴

Despite manifestations of anti-semitism in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pro-Jewish opinion in England had in fact been evident since the seventeenth century: Sir Henry Finch published his World’s Great Restauration or Calling of the Jews in 1621; in 1840 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, declared that ‘There exists at present among the Jews dispersed over Europe a strong notion that the time is approaching when their nation is to return to Palestine’⁴⁵ — an early expression of the view that the ‘dispersed’ Jews constituted a nation, with the concomitant suggestion that they therefore deserved statehood. The prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity) wrote of the Middle East in his novel Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847), while the theme of Jewish re-awakening permeates George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1874–1876), as surely as it becomes the leitmotiv of Judith.⁴⁶

Also, whether or not the British, in 1917, needed to woo Jewish support worldwide for the continuation of the world war, that war had been preceded in 1914 by the remark of Herbert Samuel that ‘Perhaps the opportunity might arise for the fulfillment of the ancient aspiration of the Jewish people and the restoration of a Jewish state’.⁴⁷

Previously, locations other than Palestine had been mooted as a possible ‘home land’: in 1903, Joseph Chamberlain (the Colonial Secretary) and Lord Lansdowne (Foreign Secretary) had suggested Uganda as a destination;⁴⁸ other possibilities under consideration were Mesopotamia, Western Australia, British Honduras and British Guiana (all within the British remit) and Brazil, Mexico and Texas.⁴⁹ Balfour himself, as prime minister in 1903, had been involved in the offer of Uganda, a proposal sometimes referred to as the ‘first Balfour Declaration’.⁵⁰ But Theodor Herzl, having considered the alternatives of Argentina and Palestine, had no choice but to opt for the ‘restoration’ of the Jewish state in Palestine: ‘our ever-memorable historic home’.⁵¹

In 1921, the year following the commencement of the British administration in Palestine, Winston Churchill, who had just become Colonial Secretary, declared:

It is manifestly right that the scattered Jews should have a national centre and a national home to be re-united and where else but in Palestine with which for 3,000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? We think it will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire, but also good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine… they shall share in the benefits and progress of Zionism…There really is nothing for the Arabs to be frightened about…No Jew will be brought in beyond the number who can be provided for by the expanding wealth and development of the resources of the country.

⁵²

There is a telling clue in Herzl’s 1896 manifesto, The Jewish State, as to the strategic importance of a Jewish homeland in Palestine: ‘We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’.⁵³ Herzl was perhaps recognising what would come within a couple of decades to be called ‘geopolitics’ — the relations between states based on geographical location — which in our own time has provided us with ways of understanding strategies relating to the balance of power in regions such as the Near and Middle East. As early as 1915, the British prime minister H. H. Asquith had referred to ‘the carving up of the Turks’ Asiatic dominion’,⁵⁴ and, as the Ottoman empire crumbled as a side-effect of the First World War, distribution of lands previously under Turkish rule became a priority for the victors.

It has been argued that Britain had no strategic benefit, at the time of the original Mandate, for undertaking it.⁵⁵ And in 1945, perhaps in an effort to sustain the argument for British withdrawal, Churchill said he was ‘not aware of the slightest advantage that has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task’⁵⁶ — a position not inconsistent with his view of the situation over twenty years earlier (quoted above).

Nevertheless, Palestine represented an important — if not vital — land bridge to Arabia and India, and in the same year that saw the ‘carving up’ of the Ottoman Empire, the military correspondent of the Manchester Guardian newspaper opined that ‘the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire… depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state’.⁵⁷ A. J. Sherman’s observation, that ‘British occupation of Palestine was undertaken in full awareness of geopolitical realities’⁵⁸ cannot be easily dismissed: it leads us towards the essential element which is familiar to everyone today: oil. In 1921 a British government minister had foreseen this: ‘while, in present circumstances, Palestine was of no real strategic value, it was desirable to keep it. Who knows, maybe one day oil would be discovered there’.⁵⁹ With the increasing awareness of oil exploration in Iraq in the 1930s by companies such as the IPC consortium of British Petroleum, Shell and Gulbenkian, geopolitics entered a crucial phase, which Durrell effectively introduced into Judith: Judith’s father had been working on a turbine which the Jews (soon to become Israelis) might turn to advantage:

“Oil is what we have in mind,” said the Professor. “It is also what the Nazis had in mind; they had plans for the Rumanian oil-fields which would have been helped by this idea. By the same token, the British, Americans and Arabs would all be profoundly interested.” (p. 60)

And when Judith and Aaron argue about the intensity of the Zionist drive towards statehood and the significance of the United Nations vote on partition, oil again features as a factor in the geopolitical debate:

“And what of the Arabs?” she said harshly. “They will torpedo your vote. You know they will. Who is going to sacrifice good oil to their displeasure?”

“The risk is there — we must take it. It is the only way.”

“It will end with a massacre.”

“That we can face up to as the worst extremity; but we sabras

⁶⁰

are not going to stretch out our little white throats to the Arab’s knife. But we know that in the longest run we must live with them, cooperate with them. At the moment British oil interests won’t let us. That’s the point.” (p. 134)

The Mandate, officially approved on 22 July 1922 by the League of Nations (the forerunner of the United Nations), came into force on 29 September 1923, although the British had been in occupation of Palestine, militarily and administratively, since July 1920, in the wake of General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917. The Mandate empowered Britain to govern Palestine, with explicit responsibility to support the establishment of a Jewish national home, while (an echo of the Balfour Declaration) safeguarding the rights of the existing population. It also provided for the introduction of self-government, which both Jews and Arabs would reject. It has been argued that these three imperatives were incompatible,⁶¹ and, given the increasing suspicion and hostility between the indigenous population and the newcomers, it seems that the impossibility of carrying out the terms of the Mandate may have contributed substantially to the ambivalence and lack of clear direction on the part of the British. ‘One senior official…estimated that the British had never in fact had a policy for Palestine, “nothing but fluctuations of policy, hesitations…no policy at all” ’.⁶² Durrell had given an indication of his own feelings on this point in The Alexandria Quartet when his character Pursewarden, based in Egypt, says, in relation to British activity in the Middle East as a whole, that ‘it is neither coherent nor even a policy — at any rate a policy capable of withstanding the pressures which are being built up here’.⁶³

Today, with growing momentum towards long-deferred statehood for the Palestinians, it is perhaps surprising that partition was not on the table as a condition, rather than an option, from the beginning: as David Fromkin observes,

Since the Balfour Declaration contained no geographical definition, Churchill’s advisers concluded that Britain could fully reconcile and fulfil her wartime pledges by establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine west of the Jordan and a separate Arab entity in Palestine east of the Jordan.

⁶⁴

While partition remained unacceptable to both parties, and particularly to the Arabs, it was the only possible means of carrying out the terms of both the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate.

There are two points in Judith where Durrell seems to have nodded — to have condensed the historical events of two or three years into a much shorter timescale. For example, there are two references to the Jewish strategy of referring the questions of the Mandate and partition to the United Nations — one by Professor Liebling (p. 61) and one by Aaron (p. 130). However, both these statements were made in early 1945 according to Durrell’s chronology, and although the United Nations had been mooted since 1942 and came into existence in October 1945, it did not hold its first assembly until January 1946. No doubt, if Durrell had revised Judith for publication, such anachronisms would have been corrected, as, perhaps, would have been the fact that both Liebling and Aaron employ the same expression: ‘to bounce’ the British out of Palestine and into the United Nations.

But the most glaring example of a ‘seacoast of Bohemia’ error is in Durrell’s depiction of the Syrian, Daud, as a ‘prince’ and Daud’s references to the ‘King’ of Syria: since 1936, Syria had been a republic, although its independence was only recognised internationally in April 1946. Again, this would no doubt have been noticed if Durrell’s typescript had been submitted to his principal publishers, Faber & Faber; I have preferred to let it stand.

However, in the final version of Judith, one element just before the anticipated Arab attack confuses the reader, since it places one event just before another, which, in strict chronology, it should succeed. I have therefore transposed chapters 26 and 27 in order to maintain the chronological unfolding of events.

Another writer who studied the Palestine crisis in depth was Leon Uris, whose novel Exodus (1958) predates the earliest drafts of Judith by four years, and which was filmed by MGM in 1960. There is no evidence that Durrell was familiar with either the book or the film; the fact that the same note is struck in both books indicates their authors’ familiarity with the commonplaces of the situation: ships landing illegal immigrants, people necessary to the Zionist cause being concealed in crates, gun-running (and the British attempts to prevent such activities) and the importance of oil as an economic necessity. The action of some refugees, on reaching land, to kiss the sacred ground, appears in both novels; the close childhood relationship of Aaron and Daud is also prefigured in a Jewish — Arab friendship in Exodus, but with a happier outcome.

Exodus, which is based on an actual incident, also puts the difficulty of the Jewish task firmly before the reader: ‘Some people are out to resurrect a nation that has been dead for two thousand years’.⁶⁵ Uris reminds us that ‘the British were caught in a tangle. They were as far away from a final answer on the Palestine problem as they ever had been’.⁶⁶ He was as alert as was Durrell to the geopolitics of the region: as one British official says, ‘The only way we are going to hold the Middle East is by building a powerful Jewish Palestine. I don’t speak of Jewish interest but I speak of British interest’.⁶⁷

The continuing crisis in Israel-Palestine remains a topic of concern and interest, especially in Britain, where the problem may be said to have started. The screening in 2011 on the UK’s Channel 4 of The Promise, written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, which commutes between a ‘Judith’ scenario of 1947–1948 and the present day, harshly emphasises the perennial nature of the conflict.

Naturally, the situation continues to be a central element in the thinking of Jewish writers, not least of whom is Amos Oz, who has described his own experiences of the 1948 conflict in his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2005), and, more cynically, in novels such as A Perfect Peace (1985). Oz favours a ‘two-state solution’ which involves partition:

Israel is the only homeland of the Israelis…. At the same time, I regard Palestine as the legitimate and rightful homeland of the Palestinians. As it seems that Israelis and Palestinans cannot share their homeland, it must be divided between them….The conflict between Israel and Palestine is…a tragic collision between right and right, between two very convincing claims.

⁶⁸

Immigration: the kibbutzim

The situation became acute not only because the Mandate envisaged a form of what today we would call ‘power sharing’ (similar to that between nationalist/republicans and loyalist/ unionists in Northern Ireland) but also because the Arabs realised that the huge increase in the number of Jewish immigrants threatened their own existence in the disputed land.

In 1914, Jews constituted less than one-ninth of the population of Palestine (85,000 out of a total of 690,000), the vast majority of whom were immigrants. By 1920, despite the fact that the Jewish proportion of the population had decreased, some Arabs had begun to attack Jewish property.⁶⁹ From 1923 onwards, immigration — technically under a quota system administered by the British — increased significantly, with many Jewish refugees from anti-semitism in Russia and eastern Europe. As Durrell shows us in the case of the ‘Ras Shamir’ kibbutz, Jews acquired land from Arabs, and formed agricultural settlements, helping to create the impression that they were industrious and enterprising, in contrast to the lazy and indifferent Arabs. At that time, Churchill said that

Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell — a handful of philosophic people — in the wasted sun-scorched plains.

⁷⁰

As the Director of Education in the British administration commented:

It is difficult not to sympathize with the majority, and the Jews do not tend to make themselves popular; but one feels too that the Arabs are a lazy and unenterprising people, and if they do lose ground they will do so largely owing to their own lack of effort.

⁷¹

This is reflected by Durrell in the painful interview between Aaron and his Arab childhood friend Daud (pp. 166–169), in which Daud, with the backing of the British commanders in the Syrian army, demands the return of the valley of ‘Ras Shamir’. First, there is the fact that Aaron’s grandfather had bought the valley from the Syrians, as had the founders of so many other Jewish settlements. Secondly, there is the incontrovertible evidence of their success in creating a thriving agricultural community, as Peterson has already explained to Judith:

It took thirty years and about two hundred lives to drain what was stinking marshland and turn it into the richest valley in Palestine. The Arabs never did anything with it, and were glad to sell it off bit by bit — now, of course, they would like it back. (p. 46)

Although it was hoped that Arabs and Jews might live as neighbours, in harmony and partnership, this proved impossible in the light of Arab apprehension. In 1920 there were only thirty kibbutzim, with a total population of 4,000, constituting only 2.5 % of the Jewish population in Palestine. Nevertheless, the kibbutzim

were guardians of Zionist land, and their patterns of settlement would to a great extent determine the country’s borders. The kibbutzim also had a powerful effect on the Zionist self-image…. The agricultural ethos prevailed as a patriotic symbol; the labor movement succeeded in identifying its rural, pioneering worldview with the entire Zionist movement.

⁷²

During the 1930s many more agricultural settlements were started, including fifty-three kibbutzim.⁷³ Durrell’s portrayal of the determination at ‘Ras Shamir’ to succeed and to protect the Jewish people, evident in the characters of Aaron Stein, David Eveh and even the non-Jew Rebecca Peterson, is typical of this endeavour.

Durrell locates the kibbutz ‘Ras Shamir’ in the eye of the storm, in Upper Galilee, at the northernmost point of Palestine (the ‘Galilee Panhandle’), bordered on the west by Lebanon and on the east by Syria. In doing so he took liberties with the ‘real’ Kibbutz Shamir, which is close to the Syrian border (as it was in 1948) and under the Golan Heights, which Israel sequestered from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and continues, controversially, to occupy. In Judith the children of the kibbutz remain within the compound, whereas in 1948 the children of Kibbutz Shamir were evacuated to the Haifa region.

Durrell also played with the orientation of Shamir, locating it, for ideological reasons, on, rather than near, the river Jordan, and below Mount Tabor, rather than Mount Hermon, which is close to the ‘real’ Shamir. He also embellished Shamir by locating it on the site of a Crusader fortress, of which many survive, especially in Syria, to this day. Ras is an Arabic word (rosh in Hebrew) meaning ‘peak’, or ‘head’, while ‘Shamir’ suggests ‘rock’ or ‘flint’. This emphasises the location of ‘Ras Shamir,’ nestling at the head of a valley between the hills that rise up on either side of the Jordan, underlining its vulnerability to attack as well as its religious significance on the Jordan.

Shamir was founded in 1944 by mainly Romanian immigrants who were members of the Marxist Zionist youth movement (whereas ‘Ras Shamir’, according to Aaron Stein, had existed for thirty years). In 1948 its co-ordinator of defence was a woman, Surika Braverman. If Durrell knew this, it may have prompted him to use the figure of Rebecca Peterson in confrontation with Major Towers before the Syrian attack. Although it was always vulnerable (and was the subject of Syrian assaults at a later date: for example, in 1974 three members of the kibbutz were killed during a terrorist raid), Kibbutz Shamir was not, in fact, attacked after British withdrawal in 1948, despite expectation that it would be one of the first kibbutzim to bear the brunt of any assault. Due to these expectations, the kibbutz was well fortified, on lines very similar to those depicted by Durrell in Judith.⁷⁴ There is no record of Durrell having visited Kibbutz Shamir, although he was clearly aware of its significance.⁷⁵

The Nazi attempt to destroy European Jewry, the Holocaust, created the huge wave of immigrants, both during the 1930s and the world war and its aftermath, which made the crisis so acute. This was, of course, totally unexpected. ‘It was never conceived by the British Government that Palestine would of necessity become the country of refuge for hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of desperate Jewish refugees, of all ages and conditions, with no place else to go.’⁷⁶ But, as David Ben-Gurion wryly observed,

Had partition been carried out [before the Second World War], the history of our people would have been different and six million Jews in Europe would not have been killed — most of them would be in Israel.

⁷⁷

The conditions in which these refugees travelled were indicative of both their determination to escape from persecution and their passionate desire to reach the new homeland. Tom Segev quotes the observations of one British officer watching the disembarkation of such a shipload:

They stepped ashore after long weeks of horrible crowding on the decks of barely serviceable vessels; the conditions were worse than on old-time slave ships…. Amazingly, he saw no misery among the passengers, only exultation. A strange light shone in their eyes. When the immigrants made out the cliffs of Mount Carmel and the blue mountains of Galilee, they would break out in song…ancient Hebrew melodies.

⁷⁸

Durrell captures it well, when Judith assists at a disembarkation where she meets Grete Schiller:

Now Judith had the chance for the first time of witnessing the different reactions of these arrivals. Some had thrown themselves on the ground, others were laughing and crying, others kissing the wet sand. Most of the refugees were wearing on their backs all the clothes they possessed. (p. 72)

Durrell himself had witnessed scenes similar to what he describes in chapter 9 of Judith, ‘Operation “Welcome” ’, in which ships dodged the British blockade of the Palestine coastline in order to set ashore their illegal human cargo. In 1946 he and his second wife, Eve, had travelled on a Greek naval vessel as part of a rescue of refugees from a sunken ship:

Eight of the refugees had died when the ship had run aground and sunk, but some eight hundred had reached land and were spilled about under the moonlight in a natural amphitheatre. The sight had a weird, ghostly unreality. Larry and Eve spent the next morning ashore, monitoring radio transmissions and talking to the refugees.

⁷⁹

One of the problems for assimilation of Jews into the state of Israel was the fact that they came from so many different backgrounds and cultures. Although Herzl had argued that the Jews were a cohesive entity for which the homeland would be provided (‘We are a people — one people’),⁸⁰ it had equally been argued that ‘There is no Jewish race now as a homogenous whole’, and that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be composed of ‘a polyglot, many-colored, heterogeneous collection of people of different civilizations and different ordinances and different traditions’.⁸¹

The state, Israel, would be a home not to a homogeneous people but to disparate peoples from sixty or seventy countries (the number varies in Judith), many of whom had no common language. As Amos Oz has written,

The Jews from ninety-six different countries of origin… shared a common literary, liturgical and cultural tradition [but]… One need spend only a couple of minutes on any street here to discover that there is no such thing as a Jewish race. Jews are not an ethnic group and the only unifying force is in their heads.

⁸²

Durrell, alert to the pathos and the macabre humour of the situation, addresses this in Judith, when he has Rebecca Peterson say of a neighbouring settlement:

Tell them from me that they are just a bunch of Glasgow Jews thriving on the sharp practice they picked up from the Scots. Tell them, moreover, that we honest lowland Jews from Poland, Latvia, Russia and Brooklyn hold them in massive contempt. (p. 44)

And the places from which they have come provide the names of their settlements: Brisbane, Brooklyn, Odessa, Calcutta, Warsaw, Glasgow…. Durrell may also have borrowed something of the same sense of heterogeneity from A Chair for the Prophet (1959) by his third wife, Claude Vincendon:

How in Heaven’s name could they expect a national alchemy to fuse and homogenize in an already overflowing melting-pot — Germans and Russians, Spaniards and Englishmen, and the hordes of street-arabs?

⁸³

In the late 1930s George Antonius pointed out a crucial defect in Arab self-promotion:

The Arabs have little of the skill, polyglottic ubiquity or financial resources which make Jewish propaganda so effective. The result is that, for a score of years or so, the world has been looking at Palestine mainly through Zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on Zionist premises.

⁸⁴

American support for Israel has, until recently, been unwavering and largely uncritical,⁸⁵ and this has created a climate of public opinion in which the world has seen the Israelis as the ‘victims’ of history and the Arabs as the aggressors. Antonius went on to say that

The fact must be faced that the violence of the Arabs is the inevitable corollary of the moral violence done to them, and that it is not likely to cease, whatever the brutality of the repression, unless the moral violence itself were to cease.

⁸⁶

Since it was impossible to persuade Arabs and Jews to sit at the same table for discussions, co-operation was out of the question, as was the long-term goal of a binational state. The manifest sympathy for the Jewish problem, precipitated by the revelation of the Holocaust, served to occlude the position of the Palestinian Arabs. The 1948 attempt by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq to stifle the infant state of Israel, followed by those of 1967 and 1973, reinforced the world’s view that Israel was a vulnerable state which deserved support. It was only with the recalcitrant move by hardliners in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 that public opinion began to accept that there was a Palestinian side to the problem which had been neglected, perhaps because it had not been articulated as effectively as the Israeli side. As Amos Oz has said,

the wars we led in 1948, 1967 and 1973 were a matter of life and death. Had we lost those wars, Israel would not exist today. By contrast, the Lebanon War was optional… [it] was not a matter of life and death.

⁸⁷

The intensity of mutual fear and repulsion is expressed graphically in two declarations: in 1928 Chaim Shalom Halevi said of the Arabs: ‘They hate us and they are right, because we hate them too, hate them with a deadly hatred’;⁸⁸ while in 1944 the Nazi-oriented Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, urged: ‘Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion’.⁸⁹ Such expressions make explicit what is only slightly diminished by diplomatic manoeuvres such as the Camp David Accords engineered by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 between Egypt’s President Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Begin. Anyone who witnessed, during the Six Day War, King Hussein of Jordan saying of the Jews, ‘They will be our enemies until the end of time’ will appreciate not only the depth of Arab feeling but also the inevitable fact that reciprocal Jewish feeling would be expressed with equal force by Israeli statesmen such as Benjamin Netanyahu.

As General (later Field Marshal) Montgomery said in 1939, ‘the Jew murders the Arab and the Arab murders the Jew. This is what is going on in Palestine now. And it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability’.⁹⁰ He was wrong only in his fifty-year forecast. Again, there are geopolitics at stake, as Robert Fisk has pointed out:

The 1948 war threw up extraordinary portents of other, later, Middle East wars — of events that we regard as causes of present danger but which have clearly been a feature of conflict in the region for longer than we like to imagine.

⁹¹

One need not make any exaggerated claims for Judith as a work of great literature: its origins as a film project indicate that it belongs with a collection of Durrell’s writings (‘a lot of things I want to write which don’t come into the same class as…) at a level slightly lower than his major works. But its continuing relevance to the painful situation in the Middle East today makes it a compelling example of Durrell’s ability to write a story which also conveys an enduring sense of hope and tragedy.

1 Justine was shortlisted for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1957, and its sequel, Balthazar, won the prize in 1959.

2 Cf. Gordon Bowker, Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), pp. 306, 313.

3 Quoted in Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 533.

4 Quoted in ibid., p. 540.

5 Quoted in ibid., p. 532.

6 Ibid., p. 533; and MacNiven, e-mail to the editor, 10 October 2011.

7 L. Durrell, ‘1st Cleopatra treatment’, c. 1960, in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/13/5.

8 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/17.

9 The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported on 20 August 1964 that ‘The countries of the Arab League will ban all films starring Sophia Loren unless she withdraws from a picture being made in Israel about a Jewish refugee’.

10 Woman’s Own, 26 February–2 April 1966.

11 Letter from Juliet O’Hea, Durrell’s agent at Curtis Brown, to Durrell, 26 June 1972.

12 Ian MacNiven (ed.), The Durrell — Miller Letters 1935–1980 (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 81.

13 Ibid., pp. 84, 86.

14 Ibid., p. 186.

15 Miller also advised Durrell not to waste time on the ‘Antrobus’ stories (quoted in MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, p. 571). Durrell had written to Miller: ‘I didn’t send you Esprit de Corps; thought you mightn’t find it funny. I had to pay for the baby’s shoes somehow and wrote it in a very short time’ (Durrell — Miller Letters, p. 306).

16 G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 40.

17 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/19/8; cf. Lawrence Durrell, Nunquam (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 52.

18 Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Minor Mythologies’, Deus Loci, NS7 (1999–2000), pp. 11–20.

19 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 1.

20 A. M. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate 1920–1948 (London: Methuen, 1950), p. v.

21 Quoted in A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948 (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 13.

22 George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939), p. 248.

23 Ibid., p. 404.

24 Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab — Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 369.

25 Dawoud El-Alami in Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami, The Palestine — Israeli Conflict (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), p. 144.

26 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (London: André Deutsch, 1989), p. 520.

27 Quoted in Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 36.

28 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 237.

29 Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 116.

30 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 29.

31 Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 376.

32 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 87.

33 Sherman, Mandate Days, pp. 151–152.

34 Quoted in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 451.

35 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 61.

36 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, tr. Haim Watzman (London: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 192.

37 Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. 403, 411.

38 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 193.

39 Herzl, Jewish State, pp. 4, 78.

40 Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), p. 533.

41 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 6.

42 Quoted in ibid., p. 116.

43 Najib Azuri, quoted in ibid., p. 105.

44 Fisk, Great War, p. 448.

45 Quoted in Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 8.

46 Eliot’s character Mordecai argues: ‘The effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality…. There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity’ — George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1996), pp. 442–443. Eliot was also prescient in predicting, ‘We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs’ (ibid., p. 434).

47 Quoted in Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 125.

48 Cf. ibid., p. 112.

49 Cf. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 25.

5 °Cf. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 40.

51 Herzl, Jewish State, pp. 1, 30.

52 Quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 520–521.

53 Herzl, Jewish State, p. 30.

54 Quoted in Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 264.

55 Cf. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 4.

56 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 171.

57 Quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 270–271.

58 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 15.

59 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 199.

60 See Glossary.

61 Cf. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 139.

62 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 9.

63 Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, p. 473.

64 Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 504–505.

65 Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Bantam, 1959), pp. 19–20.

66 Ibid., p. 95.

67 Ibid., p. 174.

68 Amos Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. xii, 69.

69 Aggression between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers had existed as early as 1891: Cohn-Sherbok and El-Alami, Palestine — Israeli Conflict, p. 134.

70 Quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 523.

71 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 26.

72 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, pp. 249, 257.

73 Ibid., p. 379.

74 Haim Canaani (ed.), Shamir during the War of Independence (Kibbutz Shamir, n.d.).

75 Kibbutz Shamir has grown significantly in recent years, from a population of 600 in 2006 to 800 in 2009, of whom a quarter are children. Today it is one of the most advanced kibbutzim, engaged in the manufacture of optical equipment as well as in agricultural production.

76 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 90.

77 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 414.

78 Ibid., p. 230. See also Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 130.

79 MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, p. 333.

80 Herzl, Jewish State, p. 8.

81 The Liberal politician Edwin Montagu, in 1915, quoted in Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 146.

82 Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace, p. 53.

83 Claude, A Chair for the Prophet (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 9.

84 Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 387.

85 Cf. Fisk, Great War, p. 463.

86 Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 409.

87 Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace, pp. 46–47.

88 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 307.

89 Quoted in Fisk, Great War, p. 444.

90 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 442.

91 Fisk, Great War, p. 460.