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...Aviv, right near Kikar Dizengoff (Israel's Broadway and Third Avenue rolled into one, but like nothing so much as a glorified Davis Square). There was also a nice number in the Super-Sol in Jerusalem, although I would like to point out that the Supermarket on Ibn Gvirol in Tel Aviv would have made the point about Israel's plastic culture after the Six-Day War much more tellingly. The obligatory Bedouin shots (you can almost hear the travelogue voice-over "And here these strange people of the desert...") had some nice colors too. And the last long sequence...
...very much on time and place, the deepest patterns of a society. Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler constructed cyclical, organic theories of history. All civilizations, they said, passed through similar stages of growth and decay and eventually perished, whether from internal or external wounds. The 14th century Berber historian Ibn-Khaldun prefigured the idea by concluding that history repeatedly moves through the same cycles. According to Ibn-Khaldun's theory, a youthful, growing society is animated by asabiyya, the spirit of social solidarity found in what he called "the desert aristocracy." But as the society becomes more "civilized," the cohesive...
...Ibn-Khaldun, and later, like-minded prophets, did not calculate that the cycles could be broken, that history could simply veer off in another direction. As Journalist-Critic A.J. Liebling noted, Ibn-Khaldun's determinism was refuted by "the vigor of Renaissance thought, the technological advances and the discovery of the New World...
Surely one of history's greatest bargains, ranking with the legendary purchase of Manhattan for $24, is an obscure contract negotiated in 1933. For a loan of exactly $170,327.50, Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud granted the Standard Oil Co. of California a 60-year, exclusive concession to 320,000 sq. mi. of desert. So huge were the oil reserves when finally discovered, and so large the investment needs, that SoCal could not exploit them alone. It took on co-venturers, forming the Arabian American...
Feisal is the third of more than 40 sons of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, a tough Moslem chief who created the kingdom of Saudi Arabia by subjugating and uniting desert tribes and kingdoms. As a boy, Feisal was taught to read the Koran by private tutors, became an expert horseman and joined his father's military campaigns. In 1931, after Ibn Saud had consolidated his kingdom, Feisal was named Foreign Minister and began to travel extensively in Europe and the U.S. After his father died in 1953, Feisal's oldest brother Saud became King; but he proved inept...