Quotes from Saul Bellow

Between Sartre and any given problem in politics there has always stood the United States. There are in the world two superpowers, but only one has seemed to him positively evil. When he discussed the Middle East, his first concern as a friend of Israel was to dissociate Israel from American interests.

By now I have gone many miles toward the promise of sleep, but I reach my destination blindingly wide awake. My state therefore is something like a state of insomniac illumination.

However, the Arabs themselves have put Israel into a position in which she is "condemned—militarily and economically—to depend not on the governments of the imperialist states but on the Jewish minorities of those states, who to a large extent support the politics of those states.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open.

What is entirely genuine in Kollek, without admixture, is his love for Jerusalem. Not even his detractors deny it. Christians and Arabs may not accept the rule of Israel, but they are satisfied with the Kollek administration. I am told that without Arab votes Kollek would not have been re-elected. People jokingly speak of him as one of the Arab politicians.

makes his day to greet the aged Greek Patriarch. It does a lot for me, too, I must say. The Patriarch is ancient, densely bearded up to the eye sockets, faltering a little as he walks toward us. He kisses Kollek on both cheeks, and with warmth. He sits in a comfortable chair to the left of his throne. We are served coffee and seven-star Greek brandy. The conversation, in French and English, is lively.

Sartre says, "Those who claim that the Arabs started the war, that they are criminals, forget to consider the situation of the Palestinians, the absolutely insufferable situation of the Palestinians. They also forget that the Arabs from the beginning have been led by British maneuvers to take a negative attitude toward Israel, an attitude which has persisted since 1948, when an idiotic war was provoked.

But this might have been construed to mean that what the Nazis had done to the Jews resembled what Zionism had done to the Arabs—a parallel no sane person would agree to.

Arab demands for self-rule in Jerusalem will eventually have to be taken into account. Kollek is certainly aware of this, and my guess is that he is prepared to consider reasonable proposals for a shared administration. The Arabs know that there is no meanness or arbitrariness in him. He has shown by his fairness that coexistence is possible and desirable. He is Israel's most valuable political asset.

There's this sense, you know: the impossibility of life, the provisional character and everything, the impossibility of finding anchorage, the insecurity, the hand to mouth existence, the terrible things that life does to you, and well, of course, growing is monotonous, so I try not to grow too much.

But I think I have made myself clear. We are as ignorant of fundamentals as human beings ever were. Self-respect demands that we appear to be "with

Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country. People feel the pressures of enemies as perhaps the psalmists felt them, and sometimes seem ready to cry out, "Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth.

Wilhelm thought, Why does it have to be me and my life that's discussed, and not him and his life? He would never allow it. But I am an idiot. I have no reserve. To me it can be done. I talk. I must ask for it. Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice. Why do I allow it?

Y is convinced that Israel has sinned too much, that it has become too corrupt, and that it has lost its moral capital and has nothing to fight with.

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces.

These words put an end to the peaceful morning. At the north there swells up the Russian menace. With arms from Russia and Europe, the PLO and other Arab militants and the right-wing Christians are now destroying Lebanon. The Syrians have involved themselves; in the eyes of the Syrians, Israel is Syrian land.

Zionism, Professor Lamm argues, is different from other kinds of nineteenth-century nationalism in that it did not originate in order to bring people back to a national homeland. "It arose in order to establish sovereignty, and hence a national home, for Jews without a home … it was a rescue movement to save a people in a critical situation by concentrating it within one territory, and allowing it to take its political fate in its own hands.

Perhaps the Jews have themselves created such expectations. Israel has made extraordinary efforts to be democratic, equitable, reasonable, capable of change. It has, in fact, transformed its Jews.

The position taken by Foreign Minister Maurice Jobert in the October War of 1973 was that the Palestinian Arabs had a natural and justified desire to "go home." I expressed, politely, the hope that the other attitude, the revolutionary one, would not be abandoned.

Rescue is the true aim of Zionism—not the "liberation" of the Promised Land but the rescue of the Jews, repeatedly threatened with annihilation.

Ove godine proputovao sam pola svijeta i vidio sam toliko ljudi - ?ini mi se da sam vidio svakoga, osim mrtvih. A njih sam možda i tražio.

A clear plan relieves you of the torment of choice.

What he does argue is that Israel has for many years demanded that the Arab world recognize a legitimate Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael, but Israel did not, after the Six Day War, declare that it recognized the rights of a Palestinian entity.