Henry Adler
LETTER FROM ISRAEL
From the sea, it's a delicate low line, like the brush work in
a Japanese print. Nearer, the low tawny hills with purple shadows.
The Carmel is a magnificent amphiteater and where Elijah preached
to the worshippers of Baal are pretty white villas. North, the gleam
of the river Kishon where Barak defeated Sisera. Now, beautiful, grey,
shiny, stand the giant containers of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,
universal as God, whose pipes run from Kirkuk near the site of the
civilizations of Babylon and Sumer which rose and fell with the Tigris
and Euphrates. The tugs have Hebrew inscriptions and in the cafes
one hears the swift staccato, rather Gaelic-sounding, tongue which has
evolved in a few years from a classical language. This is the sliver of
land on the map which your fingernail can cover, legendary and real,
actual and incredible, the stage of the Biblical saga and of a small
ferocious war fought with tanks and tommy guns between the descend–
ants of Ha'Ibri and the Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites, Babylonians,
Assyrians and Egyptians. By ship, you come from Marseilles, once the
last outpost of the civilized world centered in the Mediterranean, past
the site of the Latin civilization and Crete from which Minoans took
their culture to become the Philistines at Gath. From the air you see
the cobalt sea frilling at the khaki summits of the submerged moun–
tains which are now the Greek islands, and you cross the fangs of
Anatolia where the Hittites now live. At Athens airport, Jew and
Egyptian pass on their way to planes for Lydda and Cairo. This Mid–
dle Sea was the world's hub, junction, circus. Races are mixed, history
is tangled, eivilizatons are fused. In this Piccadilly Circus of the na–
tions, the terms East and West seem to have no meaning.
Certainly Israel does not know what they mean. In Tel Aviv
the normally quiet sea is whipped into breakers when the Nile floods.
And there are khamsin days when the desert wind blows from South
Arabia like a breath from a boiler room, lowering in a cloud black as
doom, weighting the limbs so that people walk as if drugged. The land
is like an unlocalized stage setting in which scenes from times most
distantly remote from each other are juxtaposed by the relics turned
up by the plough: Effigies of that Babylonian Baal and Ishtar, later
