ABSTRACT
The king david hotel, in which I stayed, was crowded with visitors who had booked their rooms for the Independence Day festival, and I had to move out for a night. I was invited to stay with a young lawyer and his family, and I was glad to make their acquaintance and to see how such young people lived. Their apartment seemed to be typical of the newer apartment houses—modest, comfortable and with plenty of light and space. (I do not remember, however, seeing one with an elevator.) Since the wife as well as the husband had to be away during the day, they had managed to have a maid—which seemed easier than at home—who came in to do the housework and to be with their little girl. Both husband and wife were old Palestinians, whose families had been there for seven generations. They had found, on comparing notes, that her forebears had been there two years longer than his. Her great-grandfather had been the founder of the first Hebrew-language paper published in Palestine, as well as of the first Jewish settlement established outside Old Jerusalem. I was becoming more aware of these old Palestinians than I had been on my previous visit to Israel. I met quite a number of them, including a handsome Sephardic lady who told me that her family had come straight from Spain to Palestine in the sixteenth century. When a Palestinian has told you about his lineage, he sometimes adds— though she did not—"Mayflower." These natives, I felt, 339were the bottom rock on which the new state had been based. They are quite self-assured and as indigenous to their country as are the people of any other. They have never had to adapt themselves to another culture. They do not seem to have been influenced by the Arabs, and although the British let them down and have not been especially beloved, they learned from them, in the days of the Mandate, a competence in English and in military training. They speak foreign languages with a Hebrew accent, which is not at all the same as a Yiddish one. I remembered that Frances Gunther (the former wife of John Gunther)—who I was sorry to find had died since my earlier visit—had believed herself to be descended from David, and when I mentioned this I was told that there were even Israeli royalists who also thought themselves the descendants of David and asserted, like all royalists, that the problems of the country could be much more easily solved by a monarchy.
