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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STRICT 'Israel Revisited' Answer to What New Nation Is Like By BILLY ROSE Early in 1949, my missus and I took a trip around the world, and one of the countries we got to see was Israel. At the time, many of the streets of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem were still criss-crossed with barbed wire, and the roads leading through the hills of Judea were littered with burned-out trucks. Nevertheless, thanks to an old Chewy and a pair of even older legs, I managed to see most of this tir.y country, and when I left it a few weeks later I was pretty ex-. ex-. cited about what I bad seen. When we got back to New York, my old boss, Bernard M. Baruch, asked me to put my enthusiasm in my pocket and try to estimate Israel's Is-rael's chances of survival in this highly competitive world. I told him that one swing around the globe wasn't enough to make an economic econo-mic expert out of a Broadway jumping-jack, jumping-jack, but that I had come away from Israel Is-rael with the general gen-eral impression that its people were (a) intelligent, (b) ijji,....i)j.i..,lV,,.,VWt how this soft-spoken and hard-headed gentleman from Georgia had come to write such an incisive and insightful commentary on the complicated com-plicated events now shaping up at the far end of the Mediterranean. 1 GOT TO THINKING about it and, as I hunch it, the answer is triple pronged: First, McGill is an Irishman, which means that while he has a lively sense of justice in-general in-general he has no axiom to grind about Israel in particular. Second, he is first, foremost and fastidiously fastidious-ly a newspaperman, avaricious for facts but plenty leary of special-pleading special-pleading propaganda. And third, he has a long record as . a fighting Southern liberal, and once he's gotten got-ten his facts straight he's not one to by-pass those touchy areas where even angels fear to tiptoe. When I finished reading "Israel "Is-rael Revisited," I was, of course, tickled to find that McGill's conclusions jibed with mine, hut thafs neither here nor there. The important thing is that, without pulling any punches, punch-es, he has written a booh about this controversial little country which one can read without prejudice or without suspecting suspect-ing the author of same. Here, at last, is a meticulous and Meaningful answer to the often-asked question, "What's Israel really like?" classed as good objective reporting. Most of the favorable stuff was too favorable obviously the work of men who were out to make as good a case for the new nation as possible. possi-ble. And as for the dissenters well, as was to be expected, most of them sounded as if they were carrying a 2,000-year-old chip on their shoulders. Recently a copy of a new booh by Ralph McGill" Israel Revisited," Re-visited," published in Atlanta, Ga last month by Tupper and Love showed up on my desk and I began to thumb through it out of a sense of duty. But what started as duty quickly became compulsion, for McGill, editor of one of the South's most trustworthy papers, The Atlanta Constitution, had obviously obvi-ously gone to Israel with an open mind and crammed it with facts and figures before making it up. I've met Mr. McGill once or twice, and before 1 was halfway through his book I found myself wondering tough as nails, and BiIly Eose (c) prepared to work like all get-out get-out to make a go of their new lives. "A business or a nation with those qualities usually" gives a good account ac-count of itself," said Mr. Baruch. SINCE MY VISIT, I've heard nothing to change my snap appraisal ap-praisal of Israel's chances. On the other hand, I've read darned little the subject which could be |