For others, it is the Palestine account that stands out. That account was translated into Hebrew, and published in Israel as a self-standing book: Pleasure Excursion to the Holy Land. It inspired parts of Leon Uris’s 1958 bestseller, Exodus. In his 1973 Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, Shmuel Katz used excerpts taken from Innocents and the impressions of European travelers to argue that Palestine was a wasteland prior to the arrival of European Zionist pioneers. Ruth Peters did the same in her 1984 book From Time Immemorial (157-61); as did Benyamin Netanyahu in his 1993 A Place Among the Nations (38-41), which was updated in 1999 and retitled A Durable Peace; as did Alan Dershowitz in his 2003 The Case for Israel (23-24). The pastiches from Twain in Dershowitz and Netanyahu contain many of the same ellipses, grammatical anomalies, and spelling page-citation errors as in Peters, though neither author cites Peters as a source for his Twain quotes.
Twain, a former riverboat traveler and a devotee of the California lake that shall not be named is, unsurprisingly, unawed by the waters of the old world. “It is popular to admire the Arno,” Twain writes of the river that runs through Florence, Italy (177). “It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines.”
No surprise also that he is unimpressed with the rivers Albana and Pharpar in Damascus, the river Jordan, and the Sea of Galilee, but in this case his disdain takes a sharply different direction. In Italy, he pokes fun at the Italians and their water, and in the process of comparing Como unfavorably to Tahoe, he digresses on the savagery of Diggers. In Palestine, by contrast, his rumination on the Sea of Galilee and Tahoe takes place amid a portrayal of Arabs as Diggers.
Like those near Tahoe, the Indians near the Sea of Galilee provoke thought of extermination (352): “They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes the white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.” Of his visit to the plain of Jezreel, he recalls (411): “We met half a dozen Digger Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and fluttering their rags in the wind, and carrying on in every respect like a pack of hopeless lunatics.”
After reading “Grimes”—his nickname for the travel-guide author William C. Prime—extol the Madonna-like women of Nazareth, Twain sets the record straight (400). “That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from Palestine for ages. Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find beauty in the Indians, and to Grimes to find it in the Arabs.” Of the daughter of a bedouin sheikh near Galilee, Twain remarks (354), “She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.” After complaining that “squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias,” Twain notes that some relatively prosperous Tiberias women “wear their dower strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head to the jaw—Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or inherited. Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been very kindly dealt with by fortune. I saw heiresses there worth, in their own right—well, I might venture to say, as much as nine dollars and a half. When you come across one of these, she naturally puts on airs. She will not ask for bucksheesh.” The refusal of the woman to ask for “bucksheesh” (roughly, tips expected for any service, no matter how small) exasperates him (378-9). “She will not ask for bucksheesh. She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all. Some people cannot stand prosperity.” He tells us nothing of the verses recited by the woman and throughout the Palestine-leg of his tour refrains from asking his dragomans (guide-translators) to facilitate in conversation with local inhabitants.
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