Word: arabized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pioneers from Europe who settled it. Starting from scratch on a barren, rock-strewn hilltop, they wind up, two years later, with a self-sufficient agricultural community supporting 300. Another novelist might have made this the whole show (having fitted in the appropriate love affairs and local Arab color), but for Koestler it is only a beginning. By the time he is through, and for all the occasional flashes of narrative brilliance, many readers will feel that they have read not so much a novel as a kind of polemical White Paper...
...Arab side is given with understanding and perfunctoriness. Various shades of British opinion in Palestine are flashed, from outright anti-Semitism to militant pro-Zionism. And the Jews range from turn-the-other-cheek scholars to Stern Gang bomb heavers. In the end, Joseph, the hero, is converted to terrorism, but the conversion is not convincing...
...phase of the whole matter which is often glossed over, according to Crossman, is the fact that "Palestine is a tremendous, model socialist experiment. Socialism is dynamite--if it is aided, every Arab feudal regime in the Middle East is doomed. The Arab politician knows this all too well...
Curiously enough, he added, the Arab masses regard Jewish settlement as "the symbol of Western oppression, and leaders are thus able to exploit a hatred for British imperialism to keep out the Jews...
Jouncing in & out of wadis (valleys) in a locally built truck, the Mallowans scouted for Chaldean 600 B.C. tells (mounds) near the Habur and Jaghjagha rivers. To her consternation, Mrs. Mallowan was drafted as a gynecologist by the Arab women. Reports amateur gynecologist Mallowan: "The commonest gesture is an expressive rubbing of the abdomen. This has one of two meanings: a) acute indigestion, b) a complaint of sterility. Bicarbonate of soda does excellent work in the first case and has attained a somewhat surprising reputation in the second...