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| …I remember in 1967 some Arab propagandist, when the shooting war began, bragging that their soldiers would soon be sitting in the cafes of Tel-Aviv. The image seems to have been spawned by the behavior of the officers in the German army that rolled into Paris in 1940 and enjoyed themselves sitting, eating and drinking in the cafes of Paris which was now theirs by conquest.
And it was an odd wish, I thought, because Tel-Aviv was built on wasteland outside of Jaffa, never developed by the Ancient Ones at all. I mean, I could understand some Arab moaning for the house he was born in when his parents chose to flee the fighting. But this was daydreaming about real estate and property his people never built. He was dreaming of sitting in the cafes of Tel-Aviv as conquerors – not weepy refugees returning to the old sod that had been in the family’s ancestral homestead since the beginning of time… |
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