In Search of a Future
by .
Doubleday, $3.00.
A timely hook about the Middle East, a travelogue in which fact and description are interwoven with a thoughtful commentary. Mr. Hindus, writing “about land and people” and only incidentally about cities and politics, presents the following thesis: —
The backwardness of the Middle East, the abysmal misery of the fellah, constitute a growing threat of upheaval. This condition cannot improve under the existing feudal system of land ownership, with its primitive agricultural methods. But a “workable blueprint” for regeneration of the Moslem lands is afforded by the reclamation projects and scientific farming which have regenerated Palestine — by the whole program, in fact, of Jewish development. Reclamation of the soil and uplifting of the peasantry are the crucial necessities “Dressing up [these] countries with foreign loans while leaving the fellah to his agonies is like putting rouge on the checks of a cancerous patient.” If the West merely props up the stagnant status quo, the East will eventually step in as champion of the fellah, and the area will be lost to Communism.
Mr. Hindus’s book is a forceful appraisal of Middle East realities, and his message an important one.