THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JANUARY 7th, 1956

NINEPENCE

The R i s e o f M . P o u j a d e : Confusion Worse Confounded C o m m u n i s t s i n t h e A . E . U . : The Coming Elections to the Executive I m p r e s s i o n s i n G e r m a n y : II : Munich and Radio Free Europe. By Douglas Woodruff T h e J e W S i n E n g l a n d : The Tercentenary of their Resettlement. By Roland Hill R u b r i c s R e f o r m e d : A Guide to the Decree Cum Nostra. By Lancelot C. Sheppard T h e M i n d o f M a x P i c a r d : Language and the Flight from Reality. By Stanley Godman C r i t i c s ’ P a g e : The Brook-Scofield Hamlet, by Robert Speaight ; The Film of Richard III, by

Maryvonne Butcher ; Christmas on the Air, by M. W. Stephen B o o k s R e v i e w e d : The Pastoral Letters o f Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard ; A Mozart Pilgrimage,

by Nerina Medici and Rosemary Hughes ; Nuno Gonsalves, by Professor Reynaldo dos Santos ; Story o f a Year, by Raymond Postgate; Between Two Empires, by M. D. R. Leys; Achilles His Armour, by Peter Green ; God and My Right, by Alfred Duggan ; The Siege, by Jay Williams ; Sunset at Noon, by Jane Oliver f Love o f Our Neighbour, by Albert Pie, O.P. ; Christianity and Freedom ; Red-Letter Feasts fo r Catholic Schools, by P. Flynn ; and Manners at Mass, by V.G.L. Reviewed by Edward Quinn, Anthony Milner, Erica O’Donnell, J. J. Dwyer, Hugh Dinwiddy and

Anthony Woollen. R e v i e w o f R e v i e w s : The Heresy of Anti-lntellectualism.

SHARPENING TENSION

H OW far has the Government gone over these last few years in an attempt, which many people told them was doomed to failure from the start, to secure the genuine friendliness o f the politicians and soldiers who rule in Egypt ? Certainly a very high price has been paid. The Cyprus trouble is a direct result of one part of the price, the departure from Suez. The obviously premature and probably tragic Declaration of Sudan Independence is a second part. But these things interest the Egyptians much less than Britain’s attitude towards Israel, where we are not prepared to try to give satisfaction. We have, however, apparently given a considerable quantity of relevant military gifts, and it is the shipments of these which the Government has to explain. If it explains that it was anxious to keep the Egyptians looking towards Britain, it is all too plain that they have already successfully looked elsewhere.

The Middle Eastern policy o f Britain has never been more difficult to frame and conduct, and today’s Ministers are chiefly deserving of sympathy for what they have inherited from predecessors who consistently, from Balfour onwards, misunderstood and underrated the intensity of Arab and Moslem feeling about the forceful introduction, first of a Jewish colony, but soon o f a Jewish State in their midst, with no guarantee that a third stage was not intended to bring an expanding Jewish State. When we ask fundamentally why the policy was ever attempted, the true answer is one very galling to the Arab people, that they had been subservient to the Ottoman Turk for so many centuries that even those who became their allies, providers and protectors in the over their heads. It was a policy feasible enough, provided there was no local public opinion, and provided the protecting Powers could, in the fashion of the ancient Romans, choose and support certain rulers and groups, giving them an interest in the strength of the connection. But public opinion has come to count for more in each decade. Nothing, indeed, has stimulated its growth more than the Jewish question.

The Jews, sensing a growing threat, have had to extend military service in Israel to the very heavy length of over three years, with all that that means in taking young men from productive work and making them a charge on the other producers in the country. The price for asserting sovereignty is generally heavy in the modern world, and it was an over-ambitious decision o f the Zionist leaders, forced through by violence against Britain in the belief that a sovereign State could very rapidly increase its population and its strength.

That policy involved the mass expulsions of Arabs, which added fuel to the flames, and made it difficult for would-be peacemakers to persuade the Arabs to look at the whole question in simple human terms, to listen to those who say that whatever mistakes were made in the past the only humane and civilized course now is to think in terms o f individuals, not of States or religions. The reply is that this is asking too much of human nature ; that there is no peace without justice, and that justice requires that the dispossessed shall return to their lands and that the interlopers shall go away again.

If this is how the picture looks to Arab eyes, the Russians