Notes from Ramallah, 1939

Rating:
Summary: Well Worth Reading But Seriously Flawed
Review: There is much positive to say about Nancy Parker McDowell's "Notes from Ramallah". The book is compiled from letters and journals written during the 1938-39 school year, when the author travelled to British Mandate Palestine and taught in a Friends School in Ramallah. The writing has a lively, contemporaneous quality that transports the reader back to that time and place.

The book is well worth reading for McDowell's marvelous portraits of 1939 Arab Palestine -- and many of the people and customs she encountered during her year long stay there. Her affection for her students, for the people of Ramallah and for their culture is obvious. She is also an incidental (and almost casual) witness to the Arab revolt against the British.

McDowell is clearly something of an adventurer. Without bombast or bragging, she nevertheless paints a lively self portrait of a young woman who was somewhat naive, but also strong, confident, and independent-- well before those qualities were truly in fashion among American women.

McDowell's treatment of the Arab-Jewish conflict, on the other hand, is disturbing. McDowell forthrightly acknowledges that, during her entire almost one-year stay, she has virtually no contact with Jewish Palestine. She expresses some passing curiousity about the Jews, yet she blithley and unquestioningly accepts the fact that ANY contact with the Jews would offend her Arab friends and would make her an object of suspicion. Accordingly, she has neither any understanding nor any "feel" whatsoever for the Jewish perspective on Palestine -- and she is remarkably untroubled by this.

McDowell likewise seems virtually oblivious to the obvious dangers already facing Jews in Europe. While she occasionally throws out a single sentence here and there about the need for Jews facing anti-Semitism to have some place to go, she seems to have no real understanding of how brutal the situation already was by 1939. (The Nuremberg Laws, which essentially deprived German Jews of citizenship and the right to earn a living, travel, etc., were enacted in 1935; Kristallnacht took place in 1938). Indeed, she eagerly travels to Nazi Germany just a few months prior to the outbreak of World War II, has no particular problem when her roomate decides to stay in that country and teach there, and congratulates herself for criticizing the Hitler regime in a presumably friendly enough "political debate" with some Nazi soldiers.

Thus the 22 year old McDowell has no real contact with Palestinian Jewry, their views, their claims or their history. She likewise demonstrates almost no feel whatsoever for the oppression facing Jews in Europe. Yet, even as she pays lip service to the notion that the Jews may need somewhere to go, she concludes (with no evidence or real argument) that sparsely populated Palestine is "too small" -- for further Jewish emigration. She thus would join her Arab neighbors and the British in barring the Jews from Palestine while offering them no real alternative -- except to stay where they are. (The European powers and the U.S., had earlier made clear there was no room for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.) It is almost as if she accepted the world's "not in my backyard" view of the Jewish problem as the "moral solution".

This sort of naivete might be forgiven in a 23 year old young woman, fresh out of college, on her first trip abroad and exposed to only one side of a multi-faceted and complex problem. But McDowell compounds the problem in her occasional annotations to the original text -- annotations presumably written within the last couple of years.

She notes, seemingly with disapproval, the Jewish rejection of the British 1939 "White Paper" which, on the eve of the Holocaust, bars further Jewish emigration to Palestine -- and consigns Palestinian Jews to permanent minority status (in other words, a replication, in many ways of the permanently vulnerable Jewish condition in Europe). She never acknowledges that the Holocaust, proved the Zionists right, if in no other way, at least in their notion that the Jews needed a place to go to be safe and to govern themselves.

She decries the lack of a Palestinian Arab state, yet she ignores the Arab rejection of the UN's mandated partition a decade later -- which would have created that very state in 1947! And she completely ignores generations of criminally negligent Arab leadership, from the Grand Mufti through today, that has not only suppressed alternate views within the Arab community, but repeatedly refused to take steps that could have led to viable statehood for Arab Palestine.

She decries Israeli occupation of Ramallah and other "territories" captured in the 1967 War, but nowhere acknowledges that it was Arab armies massed on every single Israeli border that provoked that war. She rightly condemns the brutal excesses of the Israeli occupation of those territories, but nowhere analyzes the treatment of area residents during decades of Egyptian and Jordanian rule. She never once discusses the continuing anti-Jewish violence, both organized and spontaneous -- violence that long predates the establishment of Israel itself -- as providing the Israelis with ample reason to be concerned about security.

So this is a book to be read and enjoyed for what it is -- a loving portrait of a largely vanished culture and a fascinating picture of pre-tourist travel -- steamships, old trains, unspoiled sights. I had hoped, as well, for a bit more insight, maybe a glimpse at the roots of a terrible, wasteful, tragic conflict -- but, for that, alas, one must look elsewhere.