Koestler on Palestine

THIEVES IN THE NIGHT (357 pp.]--Arthur Koestler--Macmil Ian ($2.75).

It can never be said of Arthur Koestler that he picks the easy ones. In his powerful anti-Communist novels (Darkness at Noon, Arrival and Departure) and non-fiction (The Yogi and the Commissar) this tough-minded graduate of Europe's concentration camps sprang hip-deep into the great moral problems of our time. At 41, ex-Communist, now-Socialist Koestler is easily the top intellectual argufier writing today. Still picking the tough ones, he has now written a novel about Palestine and the Jews who claim it as their home. Thieves in the Night will not add a cubit to the stature of Koestler the novelist. But Koestler the acrobatic controversialist is at home in Palestine.

The time chosen by Koestler is 1937-39, a tense period when many Jews turned from the conference table to armed terrorism. Koestler tells the story of a typical Jewish commune and the 25 pioneers from Europe who settled it. Starting from scratch on a barren, rock-strewn hilltop, they wind up, two years later, with a self-sufficient agricultural community supporting 300. Another novelist might have made this the whole show (having fitted in the appropriate love affairs and local Arab color), but for Koestler it is only a beginning. By the time he is through, and for all the occasional flashes of narrative brilliance, many readers will feel that they have read not so much a novel as a kind of polemical White Paper.

Witness-Box Characters. Koestler starts with loaded dice. The very qualities that make Thieves in the Night first-rate Jewish special pleading make it also unsatisfying as fiction. Every character is part of a carefully arranged witness-box cast, and the arrangement is too deliberate ly designed to give both sides of the story. It is almost as if the author didn't quite trust his Zionist approach to stand on its own feet.

His hero, Joseph, is half-English, half-Jewish, and he is made ambivalent enough to see the worst in his adopted people, yet understand and sympathize with their supposed illness. ("But Jewry is a sick race; its disease is homelessness, and can only be cured by abolishing its homelessness.") He can thrill mentally to their achievements in Palestine and at the same time deplore the human product of their experience:

"... I have watched them ever since they arrived--these stumpy, dumpy girls with their rather coarse features, big buttocks and heavy breasts, physically precocious, mentally retarded, overripe and immature at the same time; and these raw, arse-slapping youngsters, callow, dumb and heavy, with their aggressive laughter and unmodulated voices, without traditions, manner, form, style. . . .

"This of course is exactly what our philosophy and propaganda aims at. To return to the Land ... to liquidate the racial inferiority complex and breed a healthy, normal, earthbound race of peasants. These Hebrew Tarzans are what we have bargained for. So why am I frightened of them?"

The'Arab side is given with understanding and perfunctoriness. Various shades of British opinion in Palestine are flashed, from outright anti-Semitism to militant pro-Zionism. And the Jews range from turn-the-other-cheek scholars to Stern Gang bomb heavers. In the end, Joseph, the hero, is converted to terrorism, but the conversion is not convincing.

The net impression left with the reader is of an ultimate canceling out of whatever Koestler sets up, either as argument or character prop. Viewing the weak fictional fagade, neutral readers as well as pro-and anti-Zionists are apt to find themselves wishing that the job had been done as straight journalism.

The Author. Budapest-born Arthur Koestler lives on a sheep farm in North Wales, is now staying at the tiny Left Bank Hotel Montalembert, where he has rewritten his play Twilight Bar (a flop in the U.S., it never reached Broadway) for a Fans performance. He refuses to identify himself as a Zionist, says he doesn't approve of terrorism but can understand the Jews' bitterness and despair. To write Thieves in the Night he drew on two years of banging around in the Near East (20 years ago) as a correspondent for a German paper. He took out Palestine citizenship then, spent nine months in Jewish communes in Palestine last year as a refresher. Says he: "It is idiotic to compare British politics in Palestine with the Nazis. It is not a matter of ill will but of muddling, timidity and lack of a farsighted policy. I believe commonsense, morality and political expediency all point to partition as a solution. If they do it quickly the damage can still be repaired, but time is running out."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.