The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  Three days later, Mr. Butler answered this attack. There was even more laughter, and a better humored less personal tone; it was felt that in the duel-debate, Mr. Butler had therefore won. Mr. Butler pointed out that when Mr. Gaitskell was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1951, dollar reserves poured away, and the only step Mr. Gaitskell took was to save $40 million in cheese imports. “This marvelous roaring lion is a miserable little mouse who could only gnaw at a bit of cheese,” said Mr. Butler of Mr. Gaitskell, who sat and smiled sportingly while the House rocked with laughter at the joke. “Socialists, sir,” said Mr. Butler, addressing the Speaker, “are connoisseurs of incompetence.” In turn, Mr. Attlee and Mr. Gaitskell, sitting with their feet on the Ministerial table, joined in the mirth; as three days before; Sir Anthony Eden and Mr. Butler, slouched in the same privileged way, had laughed when they were discomfited.

  At last came the long awaited day when Parliament was to discuss the case of Burgess and Maclean. The House adjourned itself, in order to become a sort of hearing-not-deciding body, and settled down in attentive seriousness, to learn the inside dope on this mystery. Many people had wondered about the possible results, but perhaps no one had foreseen that this day would turn into a triumph for the House of Commons, which reaffirmed itself, on the basis of a stale story of treason, the absolute upholder of civil liberties, and of the sanity and sanctity of law. It was a great day, although the tone was one of mourning, and speakers on both sides of the House repeatedly declared their sadness at having to deal with such a matter as the treason of Englishmen.

  Nothing new was said about Burgess and Maclean; either there are no revelations or the revelations are still considered dangerous by the Security Service. What was new to our ears these days, and thrilling to hear, was the steadiness and justice of those who spoke, the absence of panic or exaggeration, the quiet insistence on legal processes as opposed to trial by suspicion. McCarthyism so repelled the English that they take special care not to be infected by it.

  Mr. Macmillan, the Foreign Secretary, opened the discussion and it was brilliantly his day; his grave dispassionate manner set the style for all that followed. And he made clear at once the questions of principle which concerned the House more deeply than Burgess and Maclean. “Action against employees, whether of the State or anybody else, arising from suspicion and not from proof, may begin with good motives, and it may avert serious inconveniences or disasters, but judging from what has happened in some other countries, such a practice soon degenerates into the satisfaction of personal vendettas or a general system of tyranny, all in the name of public safety. . . . It is not fair to bring in an atmosphere of today when judging events of the 1930's . . . How can the interests of security be maintained without damage to our traditional liberties? At what point do reasonable and necessary security measures become the repugnant attributes of the police state? . . . for it would indeed be a tragedy if we destroyed our freedom in the effort to preserve it.” (Cheers, from both sides of the House.)

  Uniformly, although less eloquently and unreservedly than the Conservatives, Labour speakers rejected any form of witch-hunting. But several days before this discussion, using the immunity of the House, a Labour M.P. had named a private individual, Mr. H. A. R. Philby, as being the man who warned Burgess and Maclean of impending arrest. By doing so, the Labour M.P., Lt. Col. Lipton, aroused profound and vocal distaste on both sides of the House; he became a sort of villain in the piece. His action was regarded as McCarthyism. The Foreign Secretary took great pains to remove from Mr. Philby any shadow of suspicion, and was approved for doing so. But Lt. Col. Lipton was unrepentant, and spoke again, again refusing to disclose sources, but casting suspicion, and this behavior outraged the House. A Conservative back bencher, speaking after Lt. Col. Lipton, said, “We must have constant and difficult decisions to make as to how far any action is justified on suspicion. After listening to the honorable and gallant Member [Lt. Col. Lipton], one is at least quite clear where he stands on that. He is in favor of acting on suspicion, of smearing on suspicion, by directing public suspicion on to an individual against whom nothing at all has been proved. We must leave it to his own conscience to straighten out what that may cost in personal suffering to the wife, children and friends of the person involved.”

  This one instance was the only whiff of McCarthyism in the whole handling of the Burgess and Maclean debate; three days after the debate, Lt. Col. Lipton printed a retraction and apology to Mr. Philby in the newspapers; and there lies, quickly moldering, the shape of an injustice which Americans know too well.

  The Prime Minister in closing the debate, repeated the key-note of the entire discussion. “British justice over the centuries has been based on the principle that a man is to be presumed innocent until he can be proved guilty. Are we going to abandon that principle? Perhaps, worst of all, are we going to make an exception for political offenses?” There was no laughter that day.

  Within a day, the House was back to normal at Question Time, that excellent first hour when Cabinet Ministers must answer large and small inquiries about their duties. An honorable gentleman (Conservative) wanted to know what the Minister of Works was doing about the starlings in Trafalgar Square, those loud delightful birds which deposit filth on the Nelson Column and the passers-by equally; was the Minister doing anything to scare the birds away? The Minister said no humane and effective way could be found, although research was continuing. They had under construction a device called an ultra-sonic vibrator. (Laughter on both sides of the House.) Another honorable gentleman said that Birmingham had a device for scaring starlings which would scare any M.P. but left the starlings unaffected. (More laughter.)

  The English are very proud of their Parliament, and week in, week out, century after century, they have pretty good cause to be.

  Weekend in Israel

  THE NEW REPUBLIC, October and November 1956

  The beach runs the whole length of Israel. It is wild, golden, and dangerous. Now on a hot Friday evening after-sundown bathers are still lolling in the strong soupy breakers, while behind them along the shore front the citizens of Tel Aviv eat, drink and listen to a variety of hand-made music. The cafes and restaurants are all open and noisy, with shirt-sleeved singers delivering Hebrew love songs and shirt-sleeved violinists playing what sound like Hungarian jigs and the customers babbling busily in many tongues.

  This is apparently a classless society. Everyone dresses alike, in cotton shirts, in cotton dresses, everyone looks comfortable if far from stylish, and everyone looks very much at home. If you have the price of admission you can go anywhere; and everyone must have the price of admission to something enjoyable, for all pleasure places are crowded and envy seems an unknown emotion. There is an aristocracy, I am told, the workers on the communal farms, the kibbutzniks, who are the poorest members of the State, are considered the top aristocrats. After that there is a small world of early settlers who feel a pride of precedence, but no one else minds or notices this private satisfaction. And the intellectual, in Israel, is honored. On the other hand, first names alone are used, manners are affable pioneer style, no one is really rich, no one is in want, and life is universally hard.

  Hard but good, they would say, and all theirs. They look happy, which is perhaps the biggest surprise of all. There are eagle-faced “Yemenites licking ice-cream cones, Nordic giants in shorts gobbling shashlik on sticks, young khaki-dad soldiers, male and female, joking on benches beside ruminative old men wearing Orthodox side-curls, glamor girls with Hollywood hairdos dancing at an outdoor cafe where, remotely, old ladies in shawls eat whipped-cream pastries and gossip about grandchildren. The people of Israel come from 62 nations and the first thing they had to do was learn Hebrew so they could talk to each other. (Only the children speak Hebrew with perfect ease.) But here they are, a fantastic mixture, and they have made themselves into something new on the face of the earth.

  On Saturday morning, the Sabbath, I went to the Gaza Strip. In a foreign count
ry you should always study the speciality of the place. In Greece, ruins; in Italy, churches; in England, Parliament. In Israel the speciality is survival; the obvious place to see that is along the frontiers, where they are surviving actively all the time. Isaac, the driver, called for me at eight in the morning. In Poland, in 1937, Isaac was a medical student; then he became a soldier in the Polish Army and was later captured by the Russians. In due course he escaped from the Russians and so, by devious routes, via China, he arrived in Israel 14 years ago; too late for medicine but not for the good life. Isaac, in his assured tough-guy way, speaks six languages. It is par for Israel.

  Even at this hour it is hot, and even at this hour we discuss current events. Isaac's views on world politics are crisp and disabused. The Arabs have the oil. No claim Israel can make on the good sense or conscience of the world matters a hoot. Israelis will if necessary fight for their country to the last man, woman and child; they have no other choice and no other desire. They can only rely on themselves; that is the way things are. The Arabs have the oil. Isaac is not alone in this viewpoint.

  We collected three others, an old man who is a Tel Aviv journalist, a young Englishwoman who is a social worker, and a young government guide. We drove south while the weather became more and more like a giant hair-drier. Presently, Isaac pointed to a low range of dunes a mile or so to our left: the Egyptian frontier, the Gaza Strip. The road now took on that classical emptiness and air of waiting which belong to all dangerous roads in war. Isaac remarked irritably that he hated this road, and took a pistol from the glove compartment. I said, “Surely not in broad daylight?” ‘Those bums sometimes come over and shoot from right behind those bushes,” said Isaac, nodding at the thin, hopeful beginnings of eucalyptus trees planted at the roadside.

  At a cross-roads, also tediously empty, the rear axle broke. The problem now became less one of unfriendly Egyptians and more one of sunstroke. Presently an army patrol, sunburned and eating grapes, arrived in a command car. Two soldiers jumped out, making room for four of us; Isaac remained with them to guard our car. The army drove us merrily to a frontier kibbutz called Ein Hashelosha. A kibbutz is a communal farm, built from scratch by a group of people who have decided to join together in this way of life. They own nothing, they earn no money; they live by the immense sweat of their brows, building themselves places to live and play, rearing their children, caring for their cattle, tilling the fields. Tilling the fields is the miracle here because this is the Negev, the southern desert of Israel. Life in the end depends on a pipeline of water.

  These kibbutzim are the only places I know where a daily practical effort is made to follow the teachings of Christ. That statement is calculated to annoy both Jews and Christians, but I think it is true. There are, consequently, not many of us who could manage to live on a kibbutz.

  Ein Hashelosha is five years old and was founded by Jews from Argentina and Paraguay. A towering, stout, blond man escorted us around the premises; he looked, as they all do, like a hard-working poor farmer, dressed in faded shorts and shirt, sandals, a crushed canvas hat. He came from Buenos Aires. As we passed the small cement houses and wooden shacks, the scattered mess of farm machinery and building materials, the barbed-wire barricades and watch-towers, all hard, hot, and harsh, I said, “It must be quite a change for you.” “More or less,” said he.

  We walked away from the huddle of dingy buildings and barns, across the sand to their outer fortifications, a system of slit trenches and dug-outs built around the water reservoir. It was intelligently planned and well made. The frontier is a mile off, over open farmland, ideal tank terrain. At night automobile headlights shine on the fields around them; there are two walls of barbed wire to enclose the buildings; men go to work in the fields, night and day, in pairs and always armed. They have to add regular sentry duty to their already backbreaking farm jobs.

  And night after night Egyptian marauders, trained and armed men, penetrate their land. The night before we came, 70 meters of aluminum irrigation pipe were stolen: you have to see the burning land to know that anything to do with water is vital. The same night after we left, there was shooting in the fields. It is a permanent, nagging harassment; the purpose is to exhaust the people and disrupt the work. In conditions of perfect peace, life on this place would be an endurance contest. It seemed beyond endurance to have one's men shot at, one's children endangered, one's crops burned, one's precious animals and equipment stolen. Were they ever able to rest and be happy? “When it is time to fight, we fight,” said the man from Buenos Aires. “When it is time to dance, we dance.”

  The fortifications had impressed me, but not for military reasons. Surely they realize what they are up against? “We will handle up to tanks,” said the big man. “After that, our army will take care.”

  This simple statement sounded like a heroic poem, considering who said it and where it was said. The plain facts are that the Egyptians alone have more than 500 tanks—Shermans, Centurions, Stalins and the new Russian medium tanks. The Israelis have only Shermans and a few light French tanks which are really self-propelled guns. The Israelis obviously do not tell the exact amount of their inferior equipment, but it would be safe to guess something near a hundred tanks in all.

  The Egyptians have 350 new MIG fighters, 30 to 40 English World War II bombers, which are still effective here, and 30 to 40 Ilyushin jet bombers. Against this array, as really modern planes, the Israelis have 24 French jet Mystère fighters, and the promise of 24 more jet fighters from Canada. They have nothing at all that can touch the Russian Ilyushin bombers, no planes that can fly high enough, no anti-aircraft guns that can reach so high into the sky. It will take seven minutes for Egyptian bombers to fly from their fields to Tel Aviv.

  And though the Israelis have intense confidence in themselves and can mobilize 250,000 men and women within 36 hours, the Arab League, according to Israel military intelligence (which is apt to be correct), have 340,000 men under arms at this moment. It should be remembered that Israel is only 14 miles wide in the center, has an enormously long and difficult-to-protect frontier, and five other hostile states besides Egypt to reckon with.

  Meantime, the farmers at Ein Hashelosha and at all the frontier kibbutzim build their small sandbagged fortifications and plan, without fuss, to defend them if necessary.

  I dined that night with a young Army major and his wife. They live outside Tel Aviv in a small bungalow, very American, in a row of bungalows where prams and tricycles clutter the front lawns and everyone has the same little grassy, flowery back garden to sit in the cool of the evening. They are native-born Israelis; it is difficult to describe them, but they are nearer in manner and appearance to Americans than to any European people, yet they are not American at all. They have a kind of freedom and simplicity that goes with a young nation, a natural ease, but they are quieter, more earnest than Americans. They are given to using their minds, and their command of languages is, as usual, a marvel. We ate a picnic supper in the garden; the children, aged four to six months, slept in the house beside us; the pretty, young mother passed plates and discussed war. It was, I think, a typical Israeli evening party.

  They feel, they say, “the tension.” Since Nasser has grabbed the Suez Canal they think the Arab-Israel war is postponed. But because like everyone else in Israel they believe Nasser will get away with this grab, they feel the war is only postponed and has now become inevitable. Nasser can use extra time to train his air and tank crews in their new Russian equipment and the Suez triumph will soothe Egyptian nationalism and keep the Egyptian populace happy, proud and excited temporarily. However, as there is no real bread for the Egyptian or any Arab people, there will have to be more circuses. Perhaps Nasser will partition Jordan first, as a minor circus. Israel is certainly the great show. All they can do is make guesses about Nasser's timetable. Israel's turn will come next spring, perhaps?

  New Jersey is the same size as Israel, although New Jersey has four times Israel's population. The border
ing states are New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Connecticut, and their combined population is equal to the population of Israel's neighbors, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan—about 28 million people. But one cannot think of oneself, sitting in one's garden in the suburbs of Trenton, the children sleeping in the house, and discussing with friends calmly (for one must be calm, what else is there to be?) the fact that New Jersey is alone, cannot feed itself, is terrifyingly outnumbered, does not own the minimum of defensive arms, while there—encircling it—are the four neighbor states, rich, well-armed, able to buy more arms, and proclaiming their hate, determined to destroy New Jersey, boasting of their sacred mission to rid the North American Continent of citizens of New Jersey. No, there is no way to transfer oneself into the Israelis’ position. But one can at least understand that these young Israeli parents, in their Tel Aviv suburb, would with reason feel “the tension.”

  The sharav has arrived. The sharav is the hot wind from the desert. It is quite as nasty as reported; one feels both murderous and tearful. In this weather I went with six other sufferers, by taxi, to Jerusalem. Jerusalem the Golden is a grievous disappointment. Perhaps the Old City, over there behind the great wall, is lovely; I do not know; I cannot go and see. The total Arab blockade of Israel extends to foreign tourists. (But poor Arabs shuffle through the Mandelbaum Gate in the Old City, every day, to cross into Israeli Jerusalem, to get free treatment at the Israeli Hadassah Hospital.) Jerusalem is not only a disappointment but also a relatively unsafe frontier; to be shot at from the walls of the Old City, when walking home from dinner, is not unusual. I had not come to see Jerusalem but to get transport to a kibbutz on the near-by Jordan border. This kibbutz was briefly famous because a hand grenade had been thrown into their children's house.

  A tall, lean, relaxed, ugly ex-Pole, who has lived there for 20 years, showed me, without comment, the open bathroom window through which the grenade had been thrown, the hole in the hall floor, and the startling fragmentation of the grenade, which had pocked all the surrounding walls and doors. Luckily the doors were closed into the bedrooms where 12 small boys slept. Any one of those sharp flying fragments of red-hot metal could have killed, blinded or maimed a child.