THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE 35 picturesque, pathetically retarded people, cut off from the main community but presenting a recurrent problem. In a large Arab town like Acre, the squalor of the swarming streets inspires in an Israeli the same distaste that it does in the visiting Westerner. For the Jew, who takes family relations so seriously and who, in Israel, has labored so carefully with the orphans from Poland and Germany, and the children of the illiterate Yemenites, the spectacle of flocks of urchins, dirty, untaught, diseased, bawling and shrieking and begging in the narrow and dirty streets, inspires even moral horror. If the restrictions imposed on marriage by the ancient rabbinical law are considered by many too rigid, the facility of divorce for the Arabs, which, together with their nomadic habits, encourages the father of a family simply to abandon his offspring and move on to take a woman in another place, must be felt to be an evil far worse. It is not that a certain contempt for the Arabs is not natural for anyone trained in the West, nor is it that any ruthlessness of Israel is not matched by the rather stupid obstinacy of the Arab refugees in Jordan, who have refused offers of U .N .R.W .A. to accommodate them in other localities and continue to insist on returning to their villages and farms in Israel. I am occupied here solely with bringing out the operation in Israel of a certain Jewish tendency toward exclusiveness— I shall deal later on with the converse of this, the life-giving elements of the Jewish tradition— as a limiting and sometimes destructive influence. With regard to the Arabs that Wilson describes here, Jewish exclusiveness does not seem like much o f an evil. In his brief portrait of them, the Arabs are seen as totally disgusting and unattractive: the reason for their poverty seems less important than its appearance, although the facts about Arabs in Israel would not have been hard for Wilson to get hold of. A s for his remarks about the A rab and his sense o f fam ily, these can only be understood as one would understand remarks about “ O ri­ entals” not having the same regard for human life that “ w e" do. In other words, A rabs don't care for children, they don't feel love or anger, they are simply quick-breeding animals. The “ certain contem pt" felt for Arabs extends to finding the Arab Palestinian “ stupid" in his obstinacy about being accom m odat­