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Tag Archives: Arabs

What Could’ve Been among Jews and Arabs

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on What Could’ve Been among Jews and Arabs

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Arabia, Arabs, Chaim Weizmann, conflict, Felix Frankfurter, Hamas, history, Homeland, Iraq, Israel, Israel-Palestine, Jews, letter, middle east, Middle East History, Palestine, peace, Prince Feisal Husseini, Syria, Zionism, Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference

King Faisal of Iraq

Paris, March 3, 1919.
DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER:

I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper.

We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.

The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other…

I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) Feisal. 3rd MARCH, 1919.

__________

A letter sent from Feisal Husseini (above, center), then King of Syria and later Iraq, to United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (pictured below).

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Felix Frankfurter

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“Jerusalem” by James Fenton

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arabs, Christians, Israel, James Fenton, Jerusalem, Jews, Muslims, Poem, poetry, religion

Jerusalem

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
And the interrogation will not die
For there is no eternal city
And there is no pity
And there is nothing underneath the sky
No rainbow and no guarantee –
There is no covenant between your God and me.

It is superb in the air.
Suffering is everywhere
And each man wears his suffering like a skin.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed.
This is the cistern where all wars begin,
The laughter from the armoured car.
This is the man who won’t believe you’re what you are.

Israel 2006 1228

This is your fault.
This is a crusader vault.
The Brook of Kidron flows from Mea She’arim.
I will pray for you.
I will tell you what to do.
I’ll stone you. I shall break your every limb.
Oh, I am not afraid of you,
But maybe I should fear the things you make me do.

This is not Golgotha.
This is the Holy Sepulchre,
The Emperor Hadrian’s temple to a love
Which he did not much share.
Golgotha could be anywhere.
Jerusalem itself is on the move.
It leaps and leaps from hill to hill
And as it makes its way it also makes its will.

Israel 2006 1296

The city was sacked.
Jordan was driven back.
The pious Christians burned the Jews alive.
This is a minaret.
I’m not finished yet.
We’re waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
What was your mother’s real name?
Would it be safe today to go to Bethlehem?

This is the Garden Tomb.
No, this is the Garden Tomb.
I’m an Armenian. I am a Copt.
This is Utopia.
I came here from Ethiopia.
This hole is where the flying carpet dropped
The Prophet off to pray one night
And from here one hour later he resumed his flight.

Israel 2006 3987

Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
Yes, I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
I cry Impure from street to street
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.

I am your enemy.
This is Gethsemane.
The broken graves look to the Temple Mount.
Tell me now, tell me when
When shall we all rise again?
Shall I be first in that great body count?
When shall the tribes be gathered in?
When, tell me, when shall the Last Things begin?

Israel 2006 4034

You are in error.
This is terror.
This is your banishment. This land is mine.
This is what you earn.
This is the Law of No Return.
This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine.
This is my history, this my race
And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone.
These are the warrior archaeologists.
This is us and that is them.
This is Jerusalem.
These are dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I’ll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home.  You have destroyed my home.

Israel 2006 3729

__________

“Jerusalem” by James Fenton, as printed in his Selected Poems.

The photographs were taken in and around Jerusalem in the winter of 2005.

The picture below is of yours truly at the Western Wall of Solomon’s Temple. It’s out of focus because of the day and time in which it was taken: evening on the Sabbath, so the sun was getting low and the photo had to be snapped in a hurry, before the Rabbinate would see us and have a chance to tell us to put our cameras away.

Jerusalem

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