guardsmen, legendary figures, watched. The presence of half a million Arabs was only dimly perceived in this picture, a minor obstacle, much as the Samaritans were looked upon as a source of nuisance to the Jewish settlers returned from Babylonian exile under Nehemiah and Ezra some 2500 years before.
It was the Palestine of the past, of the Bible, which was most real to new arrivals like David Green; to them, the Bible was alive. In a way quite incredible to foreigners, the Bible is for Zionists, and anyone who has been to an Israeli school, a book of today-not a book of religion, literature or even ancient history, but a book of intense topical interest, a book of reference-conscious or unconscious-in dealing with the most immediate questions. Arrivals like Ben-Gurion neither knew nor cared what had happened in Palestine since the last Jewish rebellion under Bar-Kochba in the first century. The victory of Islam, the Crusades, the Mongol invasion, the battles of Ibrahim Pasha and various local chieftains fighting Ottoman rule-all these, with the ruins and edifices they left behind, seemed irrelevant, even illegal, interruptions in the history of Eretz-Israel, the land of Israel. History, as taught today in Israeli schools, has very little to do with all these happenings. It follows the history of the Jews as seen through Zionist eyes, leaving Palestine with the destruction of the Temple and returning with the first aliyah. Ben-Gurion later took an active interest in the eradication of names connected with the in-between history, even in foreign transcription. Thus, visitors to Israel today see road signs in English saying "Yaffo" instead of Jaffa, "Lod" instead of Lydda, "Tsfad" instead of Safed, names which have been imbedded in European consciousness since early Christian or Crusader times.
Jaffa in 1905, not yet "Yaffo," was a picturesque oriental town. To anyone in love with the Orient it was enchanting. The harbor accommodated only small fishing boats. Passengers arriving from abroad were transferred, a few