Israel has been the Hebrew/Jewish homeland for thousands of years. But the Romans expelled large numbers of Jews into the dispersion known as the “diaspora,” and until the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the area was governed by a succession of Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, and the British.
We have an eyewitness account of what the country was like shortly before large numbers of Jews began to return early in the 20th century. The account is by Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain—who visited the Holy Land in 1867. He described the conditions there in his best-selling travelogue, The Innocents Abroad.
Twain’s full account is too voluminous to reproduce here. It describes poverty, filth, disease, bigotry, ignorance, and unpopulated desolation. Remember, this was when, according to Hamas and its leftist sympathizers, Palestine was “free.” (In fact, it was part of the Turkish Empire.)
In the part of his book that closes Twain’s visit to the Holy Land, he offers the following short summary:
“Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists—over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.
“Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour’s presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour’s voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
“Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
“Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is dream-land.”
* * * *
This presents quite a contrast from today’s Israel: open, modern, prosperous, and—apart from an overly-active judiciary—democratic. The Dead Sea region—the area of which Twain said “nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane”—is now a much-frequented resort area.
Like most other Americans, liberals used to celebrate the Israeli achievement, and many still do. But the voice of American liberalism has been largely displaced by the howls of the Far Left, and Leftist hostility to Israel grew when Israel’s electorate abandoned democratic socialism in favor of more conservative governments. Those conservative governments enacted free market reforms, which converted the country from a mere success story into an economic powerhouse. Israel is living proof of the superiority of free enterprise—which helps to explain Leftist hostility.
