The online Palestine Report – guess about its impartiality – interviewed Bethlehem’s Mayor Hanna Nasser. It noted that in the 1948 war his family lost properties. Of course outside of the mere mention of the war there is no indication that it was an aggressive Arab war aimed at the extinction of Israel – a goal that Arabs are hard-put to repudiate even in name only so many years later.
The mayor is quoted as saying What makes good walls are good neighbors. This obviously is what he believed to be a clever reference to Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall which contains the line Good fences make good neighbors. Equally as obvious he did not read the poem. The poem is about two old neighbors old friends who are walking along the boundaries between their property as they do each year picking up the rocks stones and tree branches that have fallen over time.
Oh just another kind of out-door game One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines I tell him. He only says Good fences make good neighbors.
The poem then goes on to explain that the poet’s friend walking beside him said he adopted the good fences expression from his father.
He will not go behind his father’s saying
And he likes having thought it so well…
Mayor Nasser might do well to read the entire poem since the problems Jews have with the Palestinians do not involve apples or pines nor are the Arabs good neighbors. In fact it might do many of the Palestinians a great deal of good if they spent their time reading Robert Frost who wrote of the simple virtues and honest lives of Americans rather than devote their reading to bomb-making manuals.
