J4 THE QL'ESTIOS Of- PALESTINE most widely read man o f letters produced in this country— will know this about him. W ilson was particularly interested in the Jews, H ebrew , and the O ld Testam ent; when he turned sixty, he wrote in an essay on the Jews that “ the culture o f no other people [than the English, and then the Am erican Puritans] seems so deeply to have been influenced by these [the phrases and visions o f the Hebrew Bible],” ” and his study o f Hebrew as well as his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls testify to the spccial hold on him o f the Jews and Judaism. One can have no problem with such an attitude, o f course, except when Israel is in question. Black, Red, Blond and Olive includes a long, rambling section occasioned by W ilson’s visit to Israel. The piece is episodic and given in diary form as a random sampling o f his impressions in Israel, most o f them triggered by his reading of H ebrew literature and his interest in Judaism. A t one point, he comments on the terrorism by which the stale came into being, and how there might have been something reprehensible about the whole business. He sees that terrorism “ was the result o f the Nazi persecutions and o f the policy o f the British,” but adds disapprovingly that in Israel “ the terrorist habit has been established" and with it an “ element o f moral fanaticism .” Nevertheless, Wilson does pursue the matter far enough to remark “ that the Israelis, in relation to the A rabs, have shown certain signs o f returning to the callous intolerance o f the Israelites in relation to the people they dipossessed.” A bout the fact of dispossession, Wilson appears to take no particular position, except as in the Bible, that it happened. This might suggest a certain historical neutrality on his part toward the occurrence o f dispossessions here and there in the world, even though we cannot fail to rem em ber that as he writes, Wilson is in a placc where the dispossession and intolerance are actually happening. W e realize that he is not speaking about the Bible when, a sentence or so later, he delivers the following description: So the position of the Arabs in Israel— especially as one sees them in the country— is rather like that fierce but still I