The Unknown Messenger

"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” These words conclude George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and are considered by many to comprise one of the finest conclusions to any work of literature. Eliot’s point is that while many dream of being linked to important achievements (as do the characters in Middlemarch), it is often the good deed done out of duty that truly lends moral significance to one’s life.

With this in mind, we may examine one story of an unhistoric act of kindness. Indeed, one might say that this act is so unhistoric, we do not know to this day the name of the person who performed it. Yet that act is also, in a sense, profoundly linked to a newsworthy event of the last month.

In the 1940s, George Deek, a member of a large Christian Arab family, worked at an electricity company in Jaffa, where his family had lived for generations. He was friendly with his Jewish co-workers and even learned how to speak Yiddish from them. Then, in 1948, as the Jewish state came into being, he was informed by Arab leaders that his family should flee. He was told that if they remained, they would be massacred by the Jews, and that only several days would be needed to crush the nascent state. George and many of his siblings fled to Lebanon, and from there throughout the world. Today, there are descendants of George’s siblings who are still considered refugees by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and who, like other Palestinians, are denied the rights of citizenship in Arab countries in which they have been living for generations.