hundred yards from the shore, to small boats, which were maneuvered perilously between the rocks by muscular Arabs, whose lexicon consisted mainly of juicy oaths and imprecations, in which the Arab language happily abounds.

Was this Eretz-Israel, the land of our fathers, David Green asked himself (as recounted by Bracha Chabas). The scene meeting his eyes, ears and nostrils was distasteful to the point of loathing. The smells were evil, the guttural sounds of the Arab language an offense to the cultured ear. The town was dirty, the shops devoid of windowpanes, the whole place a lusty cacophony of noises. It was upsetting that there were no Jewish workers in the port. The Jews of the town, oldtimers as well as new immigrants, lived among the Arabs.

The young man from Plonsk was quite unprepared for all this. It came as a tremendous shock, and Ben-Gurion never quite recovered from it. Later in life he more or less learned several languages. He was apt to tell people that he had learned Spanish for the sole purpose of reading Don Quixote in the original, but he never even tried to learn Arabic, a language much more closely related to Hebrew than French or German are related to English. During his first ten years as Prime Minister of Israel, when more than ten per cent of the voters were Arabs, he never once visited an Arab town or village, never once received an Arab delegation. During an official visit to Upper Nazareth, a new town built by his Ministry of Defense for the express purpose of keeping in check nearby Arab Nazareth, he pointedly refrained from visiting the Arab town whose voters heavily contributed to the majority of his government in Parliament. Last year, when the Grand Old Man started a conversation with some left-wing Arab deputies in the Knesset, it created such a sensation that no one even pretended to listen to the unfortunate speaker of the moment, an event duly recorded by parliamentary correspondents.

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