NEW JERUSALEM RISING

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19664, 26 August 1935, Page 4

NEW JERUSALEM RISING

! GROWTH OF TEL-AVIV. | CAPITAL OF MODERN PALESTINE. I j LATEST MOTOR-CARS—& CAMELS, j | Truly one half of the world does i not know how the other half lives, j How many in New Zealand, for exl ample, have heard of the new city of Tel-avlv, or, If they have heard, what is it to them more than a name? And yet this new city, of which perhaps the aptest description is the “new Jerusalem,” already has a population of 142,000 and It is growing all the time. The city is the new capital of Palestine, and it was of it and the country of which it is capital, that an Englishman visiting New Zealand said that he had never been more interested In anything in his life. He was Mr William Lyall Willis, manager and man-aging-director of Lyall Willis and Co., Ltd., London, and it would need a city out of the ordinary to stir Mr Willis to enthusiasm, for he is not new to the sights of the world. He has been round it 14 times in the course of business. “ Seven years ago,” said Mr Willis, “there were some 200 people In that district. To-day, as I say, they are building this new city, and already there are 142,000 people there. Jews from all over the world are pouring in at the rate of .1000 a week, and each has to bring £IOOO with him.” A Multiplicity of Languages. Everyone there, he said, spoke from four to six languages. That was understandable, for they were Jews from all over the world; and when one lived in a country surrounded, or partially so, by other countries it was natural to learn something of the language of those countries. He was seated in the restaurant of a hotel in the new city called the “ America." Waitress came to the table, served him, and passed on. At the next table she spoke German, at the next French, at the next Russian. “ Here." he said to her, as opportunity offered, “how many languages do you speak?" Said she, indifferently, “ Oh, six, seven, eight, I don’t know." Up until the present, the revenue, he said, had come from the sale of Jaffa oranges, which in his opinion were far the best oranges in the

world. “ From Port Said,’ he said, “you go up towards the town through miles and miles of orange groves.” But they did not intend to remain content with the sale of oranges. Palestine aimed at becoming the manufacturing centre for the Near East. Personally, he could see doubts about Ihe consummation of that ambition. Other countries in Central Europe were powerful manufacturing competitors. "You have to get outside England to realise how strong Austria. Czecho-Slovaicia and some others arc," Mr Willis said. “ Why, they undercut my quotes in some lines by 30 per cent." Nevertheless, Palestine had shown a surplus in its first budget of £2,000,000. j Country With a Future.

Palestine was under a British mandate and was a country with a future. Of the new capital, he spoke with animation. Appropriately enough, the two main streets, running right through the town, were called alter Balfour and Alleiiby, two names which meant much in Lhe emancipation of Jewry. j Though the new city was so modern, the old was curiously mixed with the new, and the East with the West Twentieth century life at one moment would bustle through these new thoroughfares; and suddenly the noise of the traffic would die away completely. The whole of the city would stop. 1 The visitor would wonder what could havo happened. One look out of a j window was sufficient. | Through the main street would be passing a caravan of perhaps 150 , camels, with the attendant Arabs, j Neither heats nor drivers, looked to right or left, but with tremendous dignity strode, loner, slow step by long, slow step, straight and unheedingly on. They came from the desert as they had. been coming since the time when, centuries before. Palestine stood for something different in the story.-of the world. They had come from desert routes which had been old when Moses led other Jews forth from the bondage; and Jaffa, their dcstina- ; tion, was Itself a name to stir tho ' imagination. For a time, said Mr Willis, it seemed that time had stood still. Then tiie caravan which had walked out of the past vanished, and motor-cars of the latest model rushed into the picture bringing us once more into the hurly-burly of the present. i