Damascus: Jewel of the Orient
383
slippers, a sash, and a princely gallabiya that the tailor claimed
he had just finished for a Syrian pasha.
Storing my souvenirs at the Amawi, I took a bus to our
consulate. Its distance from the heart of the Syrian capital impressed me as being symbolic of the distance I felt our officials
maintained from the soul of Syria. They were trying hard to
do a thorough job of understanding the Arab and fostering
good will, but they were limited by many handicaps: (a) they
were Anglo-Saxons from far-off America; (b) they were essentially transients in the land; (c) they counted a great deal
on local Syrians for data and interpretation—and every Syrian
had his own axe to grind. Objective reporting is unknown
among the highly emotional and partisan Arabs. The Americans I met were extremely friendly and hospitable. But I could
not help feeling that officially we were far removed from the
realities of Arab life and Arab psychology—a feeling that I
found equally applicable to our legations all over the Middle
East.
Our American officials' general anti-Zionist, pro-Arab attitude that I met in the Arab world impressed me as not a
conviction arrived at intellectually, but a matter of policy dictated by State Department dogma, resulting among other
things from the fact that we had invested enormously in Middle East properties and depended on the good will of the Arab
world for forty per cent of our oil. I felt that if substantial deposits were discovered in the Negev our State Department attitude would be modified overnight.
THE WOMAN WHO WORE NO VEIL
MY ARMENIAN friend and guide had dropped a hint the
day before, when I asked him about the subject, that he knew
of a beautiful Iraqi woman—a radical leader named Victoria
Naasan "who wears no veil." The only clue he could give me
was that she usually dined at a restaurant just off Damascus's