[LINK] "The Innocents Abroad"

[rfmcdonald]

Some days ago, the very interesting 'Aqoul had an extended analysis of Mark Twain's 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad. Israeli nationalists, people who justify the Zionist settlement in the Levant by saying that no one lived there, look, Mark Twain said so, have fundamentally misread the point. He was not writing sociology; he was writing humour.

The Innocents Abroad tells the tales of the legendary American writer's long trip across Europe and the Near East in the late 1860s. He wrote a series of diary-based articles based on the journey. These ultimately became the book. The travel humor is alive and well today, and not especially outdated, and relates well to the ups and downs of modern tourism. The work, however, is also oft-quoted these days by some Israel supporters, hence Netanyahu's literary excursion.

Twain's account of his desultory Holy Land visit is usually used to demonstrate the minimal presence and/or general backwardness of Palestinian Arab life in the recent past of the area (today: Israel, Jerusalem 2.0, the West Bank, and Gaza with its uncomic Strip). In standard Israeli/Zionist nationalist lore and Paul Newman filmography, the once neglected land is transformed in the 20th Century by the manifestly-destined and returned True Owners from its sleepy grimy primitive empty form into a more clean and civilized place of, well, recurrent terror and strife. (OK, the latter negative reality is not part of the idealized lore.)

[. . .]

To use "The Innocents Abroad" in polemics is thus a bit weird. Pro-Israel partisans employing this book to denigrate Palestinian Arab presence and history is like using "This is Spinal Tap" as a rock music guide. Or challenging Sarah Palin's intellect by running a Saturday Night Live sketch.

In Twain's denigrating portrayal of the Holy Land, based on a hot summertime excursion into what are today still the more arid and lesser populated subareas, he was willfully exaggerating ugliness, emptiness, and hopelessness. His primary aim was not anthropology or demographics but to deflate religious Americans who manifest literalist Biblical sentimentalism and credulity.

Besides, the people who claim that he saw nothing there somehow managed to miss a passage.

For even critics of the misuse of Twain's travel-log in the Palestine debate tend to miss one brief but very revealing passage in Chapter 49. There, Twain momentarily takes in a significantly large expanse of Palestine territory in a different direction from where he is traveling:

The view presented from its highest peak was almost beautiful. Below, was the broad, level plain of Esdraelon, checkered with fields like a chess-board, and full as smooth and level, seemingly; dotted about its borders with white, compact villages, and faintly penciled, far and near, with the curving lines of roads and trails. When it is robed in the fresh verdure of spring, it must form a charming picture . . ..

This little passage about a large expanse viewed as pleasant even in its off-season is forgotten by reader and writer alike. It hardly fits the themes of no-habitation, neglect, or ugliness that are otherwise portrayed. Nor does it fit the image of a complete cynic doing the observation.