By the Rivers of Babylon
Page 47
It was ten P.M. in New York. The Arab and Israeli delegations had assembled in the Conference Building of the United Nations. Status reports out of Baghdad and Jerusalem had been circulated every fifteen minutes. The most recent teletype reports had finally brought encouraging news to the assembled delegates.
Someone broke out a bottle of arak and it was passed around. There wasn’t much talking in the meeting room, but as the tension eased, a feeling of confidence, even friendship, was developing between the two groups gathered there. An Arab delegate made a toast. Soon everyone was proposing toasts, and the arak and sweet wine flowed.
Saul Ezer, a permanent delegate of the Israeli Mission to the UN, reflected that this was probably the most congenial group of advance personnel he had ever seen at a conference. The arriving delegates from Israel and the Arab countries would land on very fertile ground. He got up quietly and went to a telephone in an adjoining office. He dialed a midtown hotel and rebooked the Israeli peace delegation.
Shear-jashub lost sight of the aircraft and turned his donkey east, across the mud flats, back toward Ummah. It had been a strange interlude in the timeless, changeless life of the Euphrates.
A remnant had again returned from Babylon, and a remnant had again chosen to stay behind. Shear-jashub imagined there would he great feasting in Jerusalem, but for Ummah there would be uncertainty. If Ummah did not survive, however, the communities in Baghdad and Hillah would. And if they did not, Jerusalem, or some other place, would. One day, God would cease His testing of His children, and then all the scattered remnants could return to the Promised Land, safe in the knowledge that they of the Diaspora were not needed outside of Zion to insure that their blood would survive.
In the distance, the sun came over the mounds of Babylon. Shear-jashub lifted his head and sang out in a clear voice that carried across the desolate plains and rolled across the Euphrates and into the ruins of Babylon: “And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they he lacking, saith the Lord.”