ABSTRACT
This ambiguity extends to the political reaction of world Jewry to the Israeli victory. The problem of "dual loyalty" for the individual Jew tied to two nations was far more intimate before the Israeli victory. Seventy per cent of the land in Israel's part of Palestine, in fact, had been "Crown lands" owned by the British under the Mandate, taken from the crumbling Ottoman Empire, most of it in Negev, barren and uninhabited desert. In some measure, the one million Arabs now on United Nations Relief rolls, joined as they are by at least an equal number of Arabs caught in the net of the Israeli victory, potentially offer an acute case of "Left" or "Right" substance of Israeli politics. The Thermidorean reaction may have been inevitable in a state surrounded by enemies determined on Israel’s destruction, ruled by the same political apparatus since its founding, and for much of that time by one man as its hallowed national shrine.
