Army engineers built a freshwater pipe from Eilat through El Arish and right across to Suez. They installed taps and troughs every couple of miles. And the water was free, in a land where water is life.
At first, the Bedouin thought there must be a trap, but the taps were unguarded, and slowly they began to come by night, refill their camels, their bellies, and their goatskin bags. Then first contact with Arabic-speaking officers was made. They were offered medication for their many ailments and infections. That was where Dr. Morris came in. He set up clinics at specific oases, and slowly his patients appeared.
Many of the sufferers were female and the miseries were mainly gynecological. It was out of the question for him to examine a Bedu woman, not because he was Jewish, but because he was male. So an army nurse would go into the tent, shout through the flap what she had found, and he would shout back the treatment.
The Bedouin replied in kind. You never see the Bedouin unless they allow you to, but they see everything. Each time a group of Egyptian commandos landed on the Sinai shore, the nearest Israeli army post would be alerted. Duly ambushed, the Egyptians would be disarmed and sent back, but never killed. It was almost a formality.
Through Dr. Morris’s offices, I was allowed to accompany an Israeli army group in a command car on a two-day tour of Sinai. It was wild and bleak, a mighty ocean of football-sized boulders that would break most suspensions, interspersed with patches not of fine sand but of red-hot gravel. At two oases, we took coffee with Bedouin, while the women crouched out of sight inside the camel-hair tents.
Today it is so different. Right down the eastern coast is a chain of scuba-diving holiday resorts, from Taba Heights to Ras Mohammed. There are tourist visits to the ancient monastery of Saint Catherine, right in the center of the desert, marking the spot where Moses is believed to have been given the tablets with the Ten Commandments. Back in 1968, the monks had hardly seen an outsider for years.
Finally back in Eilat, I repaired to the beach bar of Rafi Nelson for a very cooling dip in the gulf and a long, cold beer. Among those at the bar was one Yitzhak “Ike” Ahronowitz, who spoke perfect English because he had studied in America. He had also been captain of the Exodus, the refugee ship turned back from the Palestinian coast by the British Royal Navy in 1947. He was still only in his mid-forties.
I had been too young to recall 1947, but I knew it had been a powerfully emotional incident and had generated Leon Uris’s explicitly anti-British novel and the film that followed in 1960, which I had seen. I asked him if he shared Mr. Uris’s feelings. He thought it over.
“Well, your navy officers were obeying their orders. And they were bastard orders.” He grinned and raised his beer in mock toast. “So you were bastards, but at least you were polite bastards.”
A few days later, I wished good-bye to the Morrises and took a bus north to Jerusalem.
JERUSALEM
I will defy anyone to visit Jerusalem for the first time and not be fascinated by the antiquity of that maze of ancient streets and shrines revered by the world’s three greatest religions.
Since the departure of the British and the inconclusive outcome of the 1948 post-independence war, the Old Quarter of East Jerusalem had been closed to the Jews while available to Muslims and Christians. Now it was open to all.
I played the tourist, staying at a humble boardinghouse, wandering the streets and alleys where fifty generations of worshippers and warriors had been before me. From the Via Dolorosa to the hill of Golgotha, from the Dome of the Rock to the Mosque of Al Aqsa, to the Wailing Wall and all that was left of the Temple of Solomon after the total sacking by the Romans, I just wandered and gawped. After three days, I was invited to take tea at the King David Hotel.
I had heard of it. Once the headquarters both of the British Mandate government and the army HQ, the King David Hotel was one of the more modern landmarks of the city, and though the damage of the bombing of 1946 was largely repaired, the scars were still visible. My reading before arriving had taught me the bare outlines.
On July 22, 1946, agents of the ultra-Zionist Irgun organization had eluded the pretty sketchy security measures and driven a van into the underground stores-delivery area. From the van, milk churns packed with 350 kilograms of explosives had been unloaded and scattered round the basement and nightclub.
When they went off, ninety-one were killed and forty-six injured, mostly civilians. If the Army HQ at one end of the building was the target, the bombers placed the device at the other end, hence the civilian casualties.
Twenty-eight British died, including thirteen soldiers, but they were well outnumbered by forty-one Arabs and seventeen Palestinian Jews. I mention this only because of what happened to me later that week.
For years, controversy raged as to whether a telephoned warning had ever been made, or, if made, received, and if received, disregarded. But the bombing was denounced by David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah, yearning for both the British Mandate to end and independence to arrive. In their view, the British were going to leave anyway, as soon as the newly born United Nations in New York made up its mind.
Mr. Ben-Gurion had just told me in Sde Boker, his desert retreat, that the real struggle would come after independence, when the Arabs launched themselves at the new Israeli state to snuff it out. To that end, the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, the purchasing agency outside the country, and Haganah inside the Mandate were trying to smuggle in both fighters and weapons under the noses of the British, who might choose to look the other way or not. Thus the King David Hotel bombing, which poisoned relations, was regarded by the calmer heads as completely counterproductive.
I was taking tea with friends on the upper terrace when I was invited over to be introduced to someone. I found myself facing the black eye patch of General Moshe Dayan, defense minister and architect of Israeli tactics for the Six-Day War. We talked for half an hour.
I had always presumed he lost that eye to a bullet, but he explained to me how it had happened. Before the Second World War, he had been on patrol with the British Zionist Orde Wingate, who designed and taught the principle of guerrilla warfare in that part of the world.
Wingate was a strange one, a Christian with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament and a conviction that God Himself had given the Holy Land to the Jews. Hence the Zionism. His skills in guerrilla warfare were such that Churchill later plucked him from the Middle East to form and lead the Chindits behind the Japanese lines in Burma.
On that patrol, Moshe Dayan had been staring at an Arab position through field glasses when a stray bullet hit the other end of the lens. It was the eyepiece being rammed back into the socket that blinded him.
I had one last interview set up via my contacts. I wanted to talk to Ezer Weizman, the founder of the Israeli Air Force and another revered figure after the IAF’s performance during the war of 1967. By then he was transport minister, and I turned up as agreed the next day at the ministry.
He came bursting out, late, in a tearing hurry and having completely forgotten about our interview. The only way of achieving it was to do it on the drive back to Tel Aviv, but he did not intend to drive; he wanted to fly and the airfield was only minutes away.
“Do you mind flying?” he asked. I knew he had once flown British Hurricanes with the RAF in Egypt during the Second World War, so I mentioned that I also had my RAF wings. He stared, then grinned.
“Right, you can be my copilot,” he said, and barked an order at the driver. His ministry attendant looked horrified.
I presumed he would be flying in a multiseat staff aircraft, but his chosen transport was a very small high-wing monoplane of the Cessna/Piper variety, although Israeli-made. We were strapped in, he did the preflight checks, and we took off. Almost immediately, the rising thermals from the Judean Desert caught us and the airplane began to rock and twist in the up-currents.
The interview would have to be conduc
ted through face masks to be heard above the roar of the engine. He climbed to about 5,000 feet and set course for Sde Dov, the military airport outside Tel Aviv. So I asked him how he had established the now-mighty IAF.
He explained that as independence approached back in 1947, he had been charged to find and buy some serviceable fighter planes. The Mossad LeAliyah Bet traced a few to Yugoslavia, then recently liberated from German occupation and under the rule of the former guerrilla Marshal Tito.
Tito may have been a Communist, but it did not matter. He needed the foreign currency and the Haganah was anti-imperialist. The deal was done. There were four of them, abandoned by the Germans, still in maker’s grease, stored in their original crates. An Israeli team went north to assemble them. He and his three other pilots followed. Rather strangely, they were four young Jewish fliers at the controls of four Messerschmitt Bf 109s in full Nazi insignia.
Thus they flew south, refueled secretly in Turkey, and arrived over Tel Aviv on the day of independence and of the launch of the Arab war to snuff out Israel. They arrived, virtually flying on vapor, to be told that a squadron of Egyptian Air Force fighters was coming north over Ashkelon. There was no time to land and refuel. They turned south, to find King Farouk’s British-built Hurricanes coming toward them. Thus the first dogfight over Israel was between Egyptians in Hurricanes and Jews in Messerschmitts.
Up to this point, Ezer Weizman had been gesticulating copiously, but now he took both hands off the control column and raised them, fingers spread, to demonstrate how he had led the attack, with Benny Katz from South Africa as his wingman.
The monoplane promptly flipped over, and the Judean Desert went to the top of the windscreen. He didn’t seem to mind. As we began to dive upside down, I thought it wise to drop my notepad and pencil and grab the joystick. When she was back on an even keel and heading for the coast, I suggested he resume control. But he just shrugged and went on, with more copious hand gestures, explaining how they had scattered the Hurricanes, which turned back to Egypt, and landed at what is now Ben-Gurion Airport but was then a grass strip.
He took over again as we came to land, shut the engine down, jumped out, gave me a cheery wave, and shot off in his ministerial car. The ground crew let me examine his personal black Spitfire, a superb model, then I took an Egged bus from the main gate of the air base back to downtown Tel Aviv.
CONFESSION
My last night in Tel Aviv on that visit was spent at a pub down an alley running down the side of the Dan Hotel toward the sea. It was owned and run by a very feisty lady, a Romanian redhead, also called Freddie.
There was a crowd around the bar that I was invited to join, including, I think, Moshe Dayan’s daughter Yael and her husband, a former tank commander called Dov Zion. In deference to my ignorance of Hebrew, they very politely switched to English, and the conversation moved to where I had been and what I had seen. That included the King David Hotel.
Every one of them had been involved in some way in the independence struggle twenty years earlier, and half at least had been in the Haganah or the Palmach. As the British had then been the occupiers, I expected some hostility, but there was none.
There were anecdotes about smuggling consignments of small arms under melon cargoes past British roadblocks, and all of them were at pains to tell me that the British were divided into two types, so far as they were concerned.
The other-rank soldiers, many of them Paras, had nothing against Jews at all, having often been brought up with them in the streets of London, Birmingham, and Manchester. The soldiers had been fighting the Germans for four years before being posted to Palestine; some had seen the horrors of the concentration camps, and all just wanted to go back home to their wives and families.
They spoke neither Arabic nor Hebrew, and the Palestinians certainly spoke no English. So if there was any conversation, it was between the Diaspora Jews and the Tommies. It was friendly enough. Among the former guerrillas around the bar were several who narrated how consignments of Haganah weapons went past the roadblocks on a nudge and a wink, the melons undisturbed.
The anti-Semitic attitude came hot and strong from the Foreign Office, the civil servants and senior officer corps who rarely disguised their preference for the Arabs. I had heard it said before that more desert sand flows through the British Foreign Office than Lawrence ever saw.
But what really surprised me was that the Israelis’ real dislike was not for the British but for their own extremists, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. I could not detect one with a good word to say for them. The collective attitude seemed to be that the back-shooting of British Tommies by the extremists simply made the real job, preparing for the survival war of 1948, even harder.
But at the back of the group was one who stared at me constantly until it became quite uncomfortable. Finally, as drinks were being replenished, I felt a tug at my sleeve and it was the staring one.
“I must have a word with you,” he said. Close up, I realized he was not hostile but pleading.
“Not here,” he said, and drew me away to the far corner of the bar.
“I have to speak to you. I have waited twenty years. I have a confession to make.”
Normally when a journalist hears that someone wants to make a confession, his heart sinks. It is usually about some shoplifting years ago or a failure to report a spaceship landing in the garden last night. One looks around for an escape route. In this case, there was none.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you are British,” he said, “and you are a Gentile.”
I could not see the connection, but I nodded anyway. I would just have to listen to what he had to say. He took a deep breath.
“I was in the Irgun back then. I drove the truck into the King David Hotel.”
There was silence between us. The murmur around the bar was a distant backdrop. He was still staring at me, small, wiry, intense, with black, unblinking eyes. Still pleading. I did not know what to say.
“That’s it?”
“No, not all. I want you to believe me. I walked out of the basement and went to a café, a French one, right opposite. I used the public phone. I rang the King David exchange and asked to be put through to military HQ. I spoke to a junior officer. I told him there was a bomb.”
“And?”
“He did not believe me. He said it was impossible. Then he put the phone down. Twenty minutes later, it went off. But I tried. Please believe me, I really tried.”
Whether there would have been time to evacuate that enormous hotel in twenty minutes was a very moot point.
“All right,” I said. “I believe you.”
“Thank you.”
“One question from me,” I said. “Why do you not tell them over there?” I nodded toward the warriors around the bar.
“They would kill me,” he said. He might have been right, too.
I left Israel the next day. Back to London, to Ashford, to see my folks. Then back to the rain forests. Back to the killing fields of Africa.
OF MICE AND MOLES
Most of the British media have an ongoing problem with the various organs of the British intelligence community, typified by a seeming inability to work out which is which.
Basically there are three main organs. The least mentioned is, ironically, the biggest. This is GCHQ, or Government Communications Headquarters, situated in a vast doughnut-shaped complex outside the country town of Cheltenham. Its task is mainly SIGINT, or signals intelligence.
Basically, it listens. It intercepts and eavesdrops on Britain’s enemies and opponents, and sometimes even her friends, on a worldwide basis. In a quixotic throwback to the days of empire, it has outstations in various parts of the world, something even the American National Security Agency, immensely bigger and more generously funded, finds very useful. As a result, there is a constant sharing and interflow of “product” between the
two.
It is this unceasing information swap, the invisible but crucial collaboration between the two countries’ information gathering and security agencies, that constitutes the much-mocked “special relationship” and that includes a mutual trust and fellowship between the Special Forces as well. It has nothing whatever to do with notional, and often passing, friendships between politicians.
Alongside GCHQ is the Security Service, or MI5. Long ago, its mailing address was PO Box 500, London, so it is sometimes mockingly referred to as Box 500. Its task is in-country security against foreign espionage, foreign and domestic terrorism, and homegrown treachery. It maintains just a few postings overseas to liaise with other, friendly security agencies.
The one regarded as the more glamorous agency is the Secret Intelligence Service, usually referred to by a title it renounced years ago: MI6. There is often confusion between the Secret Service and the Security Service, let alone the swapping of their numbers and thus their functions. But everyone remotely concerned is universally described by those on the outside with another misnomer, that of “spy.”
The true spy is almost certainly a foreigner employed deep inside the clandestine fabric of his own country who is prepared to abstract his country’s covert information and hand it over to his real employers. The go-between is called an “asset,” and the full-time employee who runs him is his “handler.”
There is the relatively new nomenclature of “spook,” but I never, ever heard the word spy used within that world. Only the papers and TV ever use it, usually wrongly.
The Outsider Page 17