The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  Don Kishote is haunted by the glimpse of Shayna Matisdorf, hurrying away down the Jaffa Road sidewalk in a blue satin dress, perhaps his last sight of her ever; for who can say she will return from Canada, once she tastes the good life of North America? Pasternak carries with him the picture of Yael in Fink’s Bar, elegant as a movie queen, her bosom and her underwear slightly showing, ignoring him and playing up to Moshe Dayan. And Zev Barak, almost hallucinating with fatigue, gets incongruous flashes of Queenie in the Growlery, Queenie out in the dark amid the flashing fireflies, the lilacs, and the roses…

  Only Benny Luria’s thoughts are professional and triumphant. Benny reflects with soul-deep pride that they are walking to the Western Wall now because the air force won the war in three hours, or if the truth were known, in the seven minutes of his squadron’s first strike. Such at any rate is his bird’s-eye view of the Six-Day War, and such it will always be.

  Barak breaks the silence, gesturing at the shut-up Arab houses. “These people are a tragedy.”

  “Why?” inquires Benny.

  “Because their way of life is ended.”

  “I don’t follow you. They must accept that we’ve returned to stay, that’s all,” says the aviator. “After that we can live in peace together, and they can enjoy all the benefits of being Israelis. Where else will Arabs ever live the way they can here?”

  “You dream,” said Pasternak.

  “I do not. The Arabs have lost. It’s irreversible,” says the aviator. “With the Arabs in the Land we’ll sooner or later get along. Against the outside Arab countries we can hold out forever.”

  “The Arabs have not lost,” speaks up Kishote. “We’ve only come through the Jeradi Pass.”

  Their footsteps echo as they go tramping down worn old stone steps. After a while Barak says, “If he understands that much, Sam, let’s groom him for Ramatkhal.”

  “By all means.”

  “Sam, I’m serious.”

  “You think I’m not?”

  “God forbid,” says Yossi. “Me, Ramatkhal? What for? So for four years the Jerusalem Post can call me pisher?”

  “Don Kishote as Israel’s Chief of Staff,” says Pasternak. “It fits. It figures.”

  “Now you dream,” says Benny Luria. “An outsider like Yossi? Just because he got a pat on the back tonight from Dayan? Forget it.”

  “It can happen,” says Barak.

  “There’s the Wall,” says the lieutenant.

  The flashlight beam shines high on the giant Herodian stones behind many bulldozers, parked in a long alley piled with rubble. Two soldiers are patrolling the alley, and at one end beyond the bulldozers there is an armed jeep. In fitful moonlight through scudding clouds the Wall appears almost deserted, except for a cluster of bearded black-clad pietists swaying in prayer. Far from them one plump little man in shirt sleeves and a big fedora hat leans his forehead on the stones.

  “What’s happening here, Sam?” Barak gestures at the bulldozers.

  “Clearing a plaza so the Wall can breathe, and Jews can come to worship by the thousands, not a few at a time.”

  “We’ll hear about this in the UN.”

  “It’ll be done before the UN can say anything.”

  The shirt-sleeved man walks away from the Wall with bent head, climbs into the jeep and takes off the hat. White wings of hair and a bald pate catch the moonlight.

  “By God, the Old Man,” says Pasternak in a hushed tone.

  The jeep disappears in the gloom. A generation goes, a generation comes, Barak thinks. Two weeks ago people were clamoring for B.G.’s return as Prime Minister. Tonight he is a fading figure of the past, lost in Moshe Dayan’s penumbra. “I’ve known him all my life,” he says, “and only once before have I seen him wearing such a hat, at the funeral of Chaim Weizmann.”

  None of the others speak, and after a moment Barak says, “I’m going up on the Temple Mount.”

  The lieutenant says, “Sir—”

  “It’s all right, Lieutenant. I remember the way well. I should have gotten there during the war, but with one thing and another I didn’t. I won’t be long.”

  Something in his voice causes Pasternak to gesture at the lieutenant. Barak climbs the old stairway to the top. The two mosques loom before his eyes, close and huge. Only a few Israeli soldiers pace the broad empty plaza, and a cool breeze brings the scent of freshly cut grass. Well, here he is, here where the priests of the two destroyed Temples served the Lord God for a thousand years, and here where the Dome of the Rock stands, as it has stood for thirteen hundred years, over the fabled place where Abraham offered up Isaac. Har Ha’bayit b’yadenu? Or does Don Kishote have it right, and have we just come through the Jeradi Pass? So Zev Barak, born Wolfgang Berkowitz, wonders as he walks out at last on the holy ground which it was his fate not to win.

  Historical Notes

  The tale is told. The curtain is down.

  In writing a novel of Israel, one can be historically accurate to only a limited extent. The fog of battle, after forty-five years, still hangs over the scene. Serious Arab sources translated into English are as yet few. By comparison the Israeli material is copious, especially in Hebrew, which I speak and read. However, the events are too recent and too raw to be treated in cool perspective by participants, Arab or Israeli, or even by historians. The history narrated by The Hope has been the product of painstaking comparison of sources, weighing of possibilities, and interviews with persons involved in events, who often differ widely about “what really happened.”

  Artistic license is defined by Webster’s Ninth as “deviation from fact… by an artist or writer for the sake of the effect gained.” In historical fiction, invented characters often occupy offices or posts that were filled, at the time of the story, by actual persons to whom they bear no resemblance whatever. This happens in The Hope, but I trust Israelis so supplanted will judge that I have wielded responsibly the license of the novelist. Except for personages recognizable to most Israelis who know their history—David Ben Gurion, Yigal Yadin, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and so on, who always appear under their right names—I avow that there are no portraits of actual living persons in the story, and any guesswork about the “real” identity of imaginary characters is mere gossipy nonsense.

  To Israelis the War of Independence, the Suez war, and the Six-Day War were each epics in themselves; but to bring to life Israel’s struggle to survive, I found that the three wars had to merge in one swift tale of no outsize length. The artistic imperative was to compress, simplify, clarify, and hardest of all, to omit. Israeli readers will be far more aware of this, of course, than the general public for fiction.

  In Talmudic learning, two phrases keep recurring: shanuy b’makhloket, “still in controversy,” and tsorikh iyyun, “needing further study.” Most major events in The Hope fall under one or the other heading. A few specific notes follow, for those readers who are interested to separate fact from fancy in The Hope.

  PART ONE: INDEPENDENCE

  The Latrun battles, the “Burma Road,” and the story of Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus are all matters of history, but the supplanting of real persons by fictitious figures starts right here.

  Colonel Shamir’s number two was not the imaginary Sam Pasternak, but Colonel Chaim Herzog, who became a general, then a popular military historian, then Israel’s envoy to the UN; and he has recently completed two distinguished terms as President of Israel. The raffish phantom Pasternak bears not the slightest resemblance, of course, to the illustrious Chaim Herzog. Pasternak enters the story at the start purely to animate the plot.

  The narrative of the Burma Road is much simplified in this version. Herzog, Shamir, and the Harel Brigade commander, Amos Horev, were the main movers in creating the road which relieved and saved Jerusalem. The newspaper stories filed by the thrilled foreign correspondents who rode with the convoy are paraphrased. The death of Marcus and the transport of his body to America, escorted by Moshe Dayan, for burial with military honors
at West Point all happened. The chartering of a horse-carrying airplane was a fact.

  The Altalena episode is preserved in angry amber of Israeli controversy. Having searched the existing records, I have given a spare account, as clear and simple as I could make it. An Israeli consultant warned, “The Altalena is a minefield. Why not leave it out?” But nothing is more characteristic of Israeli life and politics than the Altalena affair; it shows the other side of the coin in this unique little nation’s troubled if heroic beginnings.

  Moshe Dayan’s dash through Lod and Ramle and the episode of the Terrible Tiger happened as I tell it, though of course fictional characters ride in the Tiger.

  The Roman road in the Negev, and its use by the commando battalion in General Allon’s thrust to El Arish, are factual. As the War of Independence was winding down, Ezer Weizman, now the President of Israel, and other pilots did shoot down five Royal Air Force fighter planes that intruded into Israeli airspace from Egypt. The incident brought a war threat from the British government, as described.

  PART TWO: SUEZ

  The farcical love scenes in Paris play in counterpoint to the political farce of the Suez war “scenario” cooked up there by the ministers. Those preposterous diplomatic doings really happened; that is the only reason for believing them. The account in the novel closely follows the available records.

  The battle at Mitla Pass is an outstanding matter “still in controversy.” This version has been dramatized from comparison of several sources. The heroic jeep ride of Kan-Dror to draw enemy fire is a true story.

  Landing craft were actually brought overland from Haifa to Eilat, for resupplying Yaffe’s brigade in its march on Sharm el Sheikh. Structures along the railroad had to be demolished, but the incident of the Russian dairyman is fictional.

  The race between Raful Eitan and Avraham Yoffe to reach Sharm el Sheikh was in fact how the Suez war ended for the Israelis.

  A footnote: The changing operational code names of the British and French landings—OMELETTE, MUSKETEER, TELESCOPE—are the real ones that were used. First to last, this doomed “scenario” was haunted by an aspect of low comedy.

  PART THREE: MISSIONS TO AMERICA

  The Idi Amin episode is apocryphal. He actually received parachute training in Israel, and as Uganda’s dictator proudly wore the silver emblem. For obvious reasons, official Israeli sources shrug off the story that his jump was faked. I trust the reader finds the story entertaining and conceivably true, if of no historical value.

  The protracted struggle of Israel to obtain battle tanks, to match the masses of Soviet tanks supplied to Arab armies, is historical truth. President John Kennedy’s assurances to Golda Meir, as quoted word for word in the novel, are a matter of record; and the death of President Kennedy did come at a crucial moment of the Rabin mission to Washington.

  PART FOUR: SIX DAYS

  The War for the Water occurred as described.

  The narration of the Six-Day War is based on the best military and political records, and is offered as reliable. Dwight Eisenhower’s verbal message to Lyndon Johnson is factual. The MOKADE air strike, the armored dash to El Arish, the march into the Old City of Jerusalem, and the capture of the Golan Heights occurred as the book tells them. The debate in the United Nations, on which the political outcome of the war turned, is described with the cliffhanging drama that truly invested it at the time.

  To sum up: whatever fictional liberties have been taken in weaving the phantoms of my invention through real events, The Hope is presented to my readers as an honest account of Israel’s early history, as true and responsible as research could make it. As to whether the tale itself pleases, only they can judge.

  THE OTHER FELLOW

  One final word. In the dispassionate jargon of military planning and exercises, the enemy is usually color-coded Red, Orange, or Blue, at random. As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the West in World War II, General Eisenhower was wont to refer to the enemy with the neutral phrase, “the other fellow.” In The Hope the other fellow is, of course, the Arab world.

  The artistic aim of this tale is to plunge the reader into Israeli life in its early exciting years. The other fellow is but dimly discerned through a dense fog of mutual hostility and misperception, thickened by the dust and smoke of wars, terrorist raids, and cruel harm inflicted on both sides. Like my father before me I have been a lifelong Zionist, yet I pledge to my readers that there is no attempt in The Hope to caricature, distort, or defame the other fellow. On the contrary, though I have taken broad liberties in improvising conversations and speeches of Israeli leaders, it has been my care to ensure that there is no word attributed to an Arab leader which is not directly quoted from the historical record, or the journalism of the time.

  Moreover, I have felt that learning what I could about the other fellow was part of the undertaking. I despaired of studying Arabic, which I understand is a rich and brilliant language; but I have made it a point to read the entire Koran carefully, in the English translation recommended by scholars of Islam, as well as later Islamic literature. I have studied Arabic history, ancient and modern. I have learned much, in particular, from the writings of Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian Nobel laureate. I have had many searching talks with experts—Israeli, American, and Arab—and I believe I understand the historical underpinnings of the Arab-Jewish conflict. In a word, they amount to the resurgence of two nationalisms at almost the same moment of history.

  In this conflict I think I see sprouting seeds of Hope. But even to say that much is to go beyond a novelist’s task, and I leave the matter so, “shanuy b’makhloket.” This I will add, and with it close these historical notes: reconciliation in the Middle East can come if and only if Zahal, the Israel Defense Force, remains strong and stands guard through the long night of hostility, until the dawn of God’s peace. May it come speedily and in our days.

  Herman Wouk

  1987–1993

  Endnote

  1 BALAGAN. In modern Hebrew, mess, foulup, snafu, fiasco. A loan word from the Russian, used in Israel with extraordinary frequency.