“The Love of Shaul” – A novel by Eli Amir

“In any case, in my own eyes, all the unnecessary actions that we are sometimes pushed to take without great wisdom, are also clearly a result of the strategic position taken by the Arabs of the Land of Israel and of the Arab world in general from the beginning: that there is no room for Jewish revival in the Land of Israel. And – after the Jewish state was established – there is no remedy for it but its extinction. I have no doubt that if the Arabs had been given permission and capability – even today, after the peace with Egypt and the Madrid Conference – the State of Israel would have been destroyed. Anyone who wishes to deny it today is in my eyes naïve or intentionally deceiving. After all, we are the only people today and the only country that even today there are those who are plotting to destroy them, and they are not ashamed to talk about it.  After all, it is inconceivable that someone would plot today to destroy any other country and another people in the world. But when things are said about the Jews, it is still as if it were normal that there should be someone in the world contemplating and plotting it, and in this world it is accepted as a kind of necessary evil for some reason. Because the Western world is comfortable not seeing that in radical Islam – and perhaps not only the extremist one – jihad, i.e., the war of the commandment against the infidels, is an existential strategic situation, in which the truces are purely tactical. Anyone who denies this represents in my eyes the epitome of naivete or blatant insincerity. But in the Western world, there will always be a country or political body that will be comfortable ignoring it as long as it is possible, to do business with radical Islam and make money. Money. Money. The sweet money. The father of the forefathers of impurity and purification.

And yet, as a businessman, who does not forget all of this, I also believe in the power of a good economy and economic cooperation, to eventually raise up a generation that will not know the hatred of its ancestors, and will have something to lose in the new economic and political reality that will be created, and slowly – under no circumstances, not quickly, certainly not in my day, and not long afterwards – the peace of hearts will also come. For the time being, we must be practical and make do with the peace of the practical approach.  Which is certainly better than a constant state of war.”

(Excerpt from Chapter 27 of the novel “The Love of Shaul”, by Eli Amir, published in year 1998. Translation from the original Hebrew by Jaime Kardontchik)

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Written 30 years ago and, still, so timely today, in year 2025.

Eli Amir was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and emigrated to Israel when he was 13 years old, swept together in the massive migration of 130,000 Iraqi Jews in 1950-1951, that ended abruptly 2,500 years of Jewish civilization in the Mesopotamia.

His first novel, “Scapegoat”, published in 1983, was an autobiography describing his rise as a young boy from the muddy encampment tents for new immigrants, hurriedly set up to receive the large wave of refugees from the Arab countries and Europe immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and their encounter with a different culture, that had been developed by the Jews who had emigrated earlier to the then Palestine. It was an encounter between the Jewish refugees who had just arrived “by circumstances” with nothing, except for broken hearts, and the Jews who had come earlier to Palestine “by choice”, not as refugees, to build a new world and re-build themselves with self-confidence, and that had just emerged victorious from a bloody and exhausting war of independence. The young country had no natural resources and the wave of mass immigration doubled its population in mere three years between 1948 and 1951. Bridging between these different worlds was an incredibly difficult task that left profound scars for many years. “Scapegoat” became a recommended reading in high-schools in Israel.

Amir’s novel “The Love of Shaul”, published in 1998, is a mature perspective of the conflicts generated within the Israeli society, brought about by the different historic experiences of the Jews coming to Israel from Europe and the Arab countries. It is related by Shaul – the son of a seventh generation of Sephardi Jews living in Jerusalem. The short excerpt published in this article – although very timely with actual events today, in year 2025 – is completely atypical, a type of political manifest that popped up suddenly from nowhere in the middle of the plots that represent the real – and incredible humanely described – individual stories in the book. The unexpected conclusion (chapter 40) of Shaul’s love story, left me very sad and troubled: Was Romeo still waiting for his Juliet to come back after thirty years since their love affair? Was he carving a path of self-destruction? Or is it only my imagination and interpretation of this last chapter of the book, not necessarily shared by other readers?

In another matter: the details with which Eli Amir described in his novel the computer revolution and the role of the Silicon Valley, and even the small details about life in Sunnyvale (my hometown!) and Stanford, left me speechless.