2
I remained Goldmann’s secretary for about two years, from early 1958 to early 1960. At the time, my boss was, as I’ve mentioned, president of the World Jewish Congress, which he had helped to establish in the mid-thirties. The Congress was a worldwide federation of Jewish organizations created to fight for Jewish political rights, inform the world of anti-Jewish policies and crimes in an increasingly anti-Semitic period, and extend help to Jewish refugees wherever possible. After the war and mainly after the creation of Israel, the Congress was particularly active regarding the situation of Jews living in camps for displaced persons, in the Communist world, and in Arab countries, in addition to its global political mission.
Goldmann had also been elected president of the World Zionist Organization, whose aim, since its creation by Theodor Herzl, was to fight for the establishment of an autonomous Jewish political entity and, later, for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. After the creation of Israel, the World Zionist Organization became mainly active in helping immigration and early integration of immigrants in their new country. Combining those two positions as well as the chairmanship of the Jewish Agency, the executive body of the World Zionist Organization, made of Goldmann the most important Jewish leader in the Diaspora.
Working with Goldmann as a personal assistant meant spending half my year in New York and the other half in Jerusalem. In New York, I lived in various hotels, mostly at the Alamac, on Broadway and Sixty-seventh. The Alamac was already well past its prime when I became a resident. The hotel’s glory days extended through the twenties; I was told that Babe Ruth had once lived there (but, I wondered, without daring to ask, who the hell was Babe Ruth?). I still remember that it is in my room at the Alamac that I read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which I loved and which made quite a splash at the time because of its criticism of the Soviet regime.
In New York, I responded to a growing number of dinner invitations from Jewish families that had unmarried daughters and thought that Goldmann’s secretary, an Israeli with a French accent to boot, was a young man with a future. Nothing came of it, except that I found the film Marjorie Morningstar — a satire of the 1950s about “Jewish American Princesses” — quite familiar. I also discovered Yorktown, the German district, around East Eighty-sixth Street, with its restaurants and dance halls. I vaguely remember that the girls there were coarser in behavior than my partners in Paris, but then a few Manhattans made everything look fine.
My daily secretarial duties were light: answering some of the letters addressed to Goldmann and meeting people who requested his support. I vividly remember some of the persons who regularly gravitated around him: his secretary Vera; the president of Hadassah, Rose Halprin — who, each time she was annoyed by something, bought a new hat; Sam Haber, who had performed miracles in helping the DPs in postwar European camps; the fawning Leon Dulcin, who couldn’t have been more subservient to Goldmann at this early stage of his career and later turned against him in a most despicable way: as we shall see, he opposed Goldmann’s burial among the great figures of Zionism. I also met there the Haaretz correspondent Amos Elon, a future friend, and the ubiquitous Joe Golan, Goldmann’s very able emissary in any kind of somewhat covert international mission. Goldmann paid me $500 a month, which in New York in the late fifties was just enough to get by for somebody like me. In Israel, though, it was a fortune.
In the spring we moved from New York to Jerusalem. Jerusalem in those years was a real backwater. Only the Jewish half of the city belonged to Israel, while Jordan ruled over the Arab part, including the Old Town. For Israelis, there was no access to the Jordanian sector that comprised the most important religious site of Judaism, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, dominated by two magnificent mosques built on the site of the Jewish temple. Since 1949, Jerusalem had been the capital of Israel; it didn’t much alter its sleepy nature.
Goldmann stayed at the King David Hotel, the best in the country. I lived in rented rooms and took my meals at Pension (Hilde) Wolf (?) on Kikar Salameh, where, day in, day out, I met the other three or four regular guests: the scholar of Islamic art Leo Mayer, the historian Yakov Talmon, and two other university professors. The university itself, after losing access to its buildings on Mount Scopus, moved to a temporary location in town, the exiguous facilities of the Terra Santa monastery.
In Jerusalem, I was much busier than in New York, with meetings and the vast correspondence that reached Goldmann from all sides. I also had the occasion to make new acquaintances such as the always welcoming and friendly Itzhak Navon, Ben-Gurion’s “political secretary,” and, decades later, president of Israel.
3
Goldmann was a brilliant negotiator and he certainly wasn’t shy in expressing his opinions. As a negotiator, he contributed greatly to the success in September 1952 of the Reparations Agreement among Germany, Israel, and the Claims Conference of Jewish Organizations, by establishing warm personal relations with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, as he later did with chancellors Erhard, Brandt, and Schmidt. He negotiated with the king of Morocco, with the Soviets, and, of course, with the State Department. Before most Israeli politicians, he also understood the need for peace with the Arab world and the plight of the Arabs in Israel.
In 1958, the Arab “citizens” of Israel were still under a military administration and brazenly discriminated against as potential enemies. This became tragically clear in October 1956, at the beginning of the Sinai campaign, when a curfew was imposed on all Arab villages in the country. Information about the curfew had not reached the inhabitants of Kafr Kassem, who returned from the fields after the curfew was already in force. Instead of being warned, they were shot at. About fifty of the villagers were killed, including ten women and seven children. The officers in charge were put on trial and sentenced to lengthy jail time, but soon pardoned and set free. In fairness, it should be added that a duty to disobey illegal orders became part of Israeli legislation as a result of this event.
Goldmann helped the few groups in the country that supported these second-class citizens, particularly the left-wing Mapam party. He regularly contributed funds to keep the Mapam English-language periodical New Outlook, edited by Simcha Flapan, afloat. I didn’t know much about Israeli Arabs and Palestinians more generally (the term “Palestinians” was not yet in use). At that time, like hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews, I believed in the official version of the events: After the United Nations’ decision to partition Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, in November 1947, the Arabs of Palestine unleashed violence in opposition to the partition plan. As the fighting turned against them, they fled of their own initiative, encouraged to do so by their leaders, who promised a quick return with the victorious Arab armies.
Very few Israelis admitted in those years — and for several decades — that in quite a number of cases, it was the Israeli army that forced the Arabs to leave, probably on orders from the top: tens of thousands of Palestinians were the victims of a brutal military expulsion. During the following years, many Arab villages in the country were forcibly evacuated, often destroyed, and when reoccupied by Jewish inhabitants, they received Hebrew names.
My first real awareness of the fate of Israeli Arabs occurred on the occasion of a trip that took Goldmann (and me) to several Arab villages in the area along the armistice line with Jordan, called “the small triangle.” One image remains in my mind as a perfect expression of abject submission and humiliation. We drove to the mayor’s office in one of the villages. The mayor and his aides received us with coffee and sweets. Two portraits were hanging above his desk: on one side, that of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl; on the other side, that of the founder of the state, David Ben-Gurion.
Despite such brief moments of “awareness,” we were all — I mean Ashkenazi (“white”) Israeli society — unconscious or semiconscious racists, not only regarding the Arabs, but mostly in our attitude toward the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants arriving from North Africa a
nd, in lesser numbers, from Iraq and Yemen. The mizrahiim (Orientals) often spent years in transit camps (Maabarot) in miserable conditions. They were deemed best suited for menial labor, cleaning the homes of the upper classes, voting “the right way” and adding manpower to Israeli infantry units. At the time, it never occurred to me to see things differently, and I don’t think that Goldmann spent much time worrying about such a disastrous social situation, although these immigrants had been brought to Israel under the auspices of the Jewish Agency, over which he presided. In part, their integration was in his purview as well.
Our “racism” toward Oriental Jews ultimately led to dire consequences for Israeli politics. These consequences first appeared in 1977, when Begin — the political leader who for years had appealed to the “Orientals” and thus restored their dignity as citizens and who by then represented almost half the population — won the elections. The Ashkenazi left didn’t learn its lesson, and in the elections of March 2015, Netanyahu came in ahead by appealing, once more, to the by now traditional supporters of the right: the voters of Oriental background.
I personally liked Goldmann, yet I wasn’t very happy with a job that didn’t require initiative, even though it paid well (during the Israeli part of it). In Jerusalem, I was busy, but that wasn’t enough. I was waiting, though without any clear idea for what. During my free time I regularly took the bus to Tel Aviv, and although I couldn’t be counted as a member of the local bohemia, the fact that I could pay for treats (even for dinners) gave me access to its headquarters, the Kassit coffeehouse on Dizengoff Street. I have to admit, however, that I was never invited to shake hands with the greats of that establishment: Nathan Alterman (a national poet of sorts); the flag bearer of the Israeli bohemia, the writer Dan Ben Amotz (whose specialty was to shock the bourgeois); and the writers and journalists Haim Hefer, Amos Kenan, and a few others. After all, standards had to be kept.
During one of these stays in Tel Aviv, in the spring of 1959, I met Hagith Meiry. She was a young pianist who had actually studied in Paris at the École Normale de Musique with Magda Tagliaferro during my last year at the embassy. I had heard of her porcelainlike beauty from several Israelis and also from her boyfriend, the painter Avigdor Arikha, with whom I was on excellent terms. I took him out for lunch dozens of times, and in return he promised that once he was anointed king of Israel, he would appoint me prime minister. In Paris, though, he never introduced me to Hagith.
Hagith put an end to their relationship and returned to Tel Aviv in early 1959. Avigdor soon followed in the hope of bringing her back. It is then that the three of us met for dinner, as Avigdor expected my support in urging her to return to him and with him. I wasn’t convinced, and Avigdor left for Paris without Hagith. She was indeed beautiful in a fragile kind of way, and quite perceptive. I told her the story of my aristocratic descent, as I had told it to many girls before her and always with great success: Schiller, in his play about Wallenstein (the greatest Austrian military leader of the Thirty Years’ War), called him der Friedländer, as Wallenstein came from Friedland in the Sudeten area, from where my mother’s family stemmed. Hagith was not impressed. “Isn’t Friedländer your father’s name?” she asked. She was an only child. Her parents, Meir and Rivka, were Russian Jews who had arrived in the country several decades beforehand. Her father was a high official in the new Israeli administration: director general of the State Controller’s Office.
We got married in London in August 1959, in great secrecy, to avoid the news reaching Avigdor, as he threatened suicide in the near-daily letters he was sending to Hagith. The passage of time would make things easier. Avigdor, incidentally, was convinced his entire life that I was responsible for Hagith’s separation from him; he avoided me like the plague and we never met again. Of course, I had to say goodbye to the premiership that he had promised me …
Hagith and I left for New York in the fall, as I had to return to work for Goldmann. Incidentally, Goldmann and his wife Alice invited us for dinner at their New York apartment to celebrate our marriage. On that occasion we met a remarkable representative of the early Central European Zionism, Hans Kohn. Kohn was part of a group of like-minded intellectuals (Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Simon, Arthur Ruppin, and a few others) whose main political aim was to achieve peaceful relations between the Jewish community and the Arab population of Palestine within a binational state. The creation of the Brit Shalom or “Peace Alliance” movement followed, but remained without any political influence. Whether the ideals of Brit Shalom had a chance, whether they would have ever encountered an adequate response on the Arab side, we can only guess. The history of Arab-Jewish relations became, as we know all too well, one of deepening conflict.
Marriage excluded my previous kind of back and forth between New York and Jerusalem; we would stay in Israel and I would look for some job in the country, a plan that turned decidedly more urgent once Hagith became pregnant. As melodramatic as this may sound, for me our son Eli’s birth in July 1960 was a revenge — a revenge against fate.
4
Feet on the desk, soles facing me, Shimon started talking about a biography of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese republic, his latest discovery. The year was 1960 and Shimon Peres was vice minister of defense. The boss, the “old man” (ha-zaken), as they all called him, was Prime Minister and Minister of Defense David Ben-Gurion.
Shabtai Teveth, my journalist friend from Paris days, introduced me to Peres. When “Sabi,” very close to the Israeli defense establishment, heard that I was looking for a new job, he simply called Shimon (the widespread use of first names among people at all levels of a workplace or simply in social contacts was very much part of Israeli culture during those years, and remains so to this day, a remnant of a long-gone pioneer mentality and of American movies).
Once again, I got the job, and this time, my title was even grander than before: “Head of the Scientific Office of the Vice Minister of Defense.” The title didn’t mean much in my case and it didn’t take me long to understand this. My predecessor, however, Shalheveth Freier, for ten years scientific attaché at the Israeli embassy in Paris (whom I had not met there), was a remarkable and influential individual — and an eccentric as well. He supposedly lost his job — though I am convinced this belongs to legend — for throwing an ashtray at Shimon’s head. Whatever disagreements there were between Shalheveth and Shimon, they certainly were linked to the one crucial project both were involved in at that time: the building of a nuclear reactor and assorted installations in Dimona near Beersheba, in the northern Negev Desert. Why I, of all people, was chosen to replace Shalheveth, I never found out.
Although I liked to spend time there during my work with Goldmann, let’s admit it: Tel Aviv in those days was an ugly city with its back to the sea. Many of its houses had not been repainted for years and the closer you came to the shore the more decrepit the façades appeared, as if afflicted by some form of leprosy. On average, though, the hotels and restaurants offered better fare than in Jerusalem, theater life was expanding beyond the iconic Habimah, and there was a first-rate philharmonic orchestra. We lived at my wife’s parents’ place, a large enough apartment on Rothschild Boulevard in a relatively genteel part of town, but even there, as all over, we were in the Levant.
The Ministry of Defense, located in the center of Tel Aviv in an area called HaKiryah (the City), which we shared with the army headquarters, did not look more impressive than its surroundings: merely a set of rectangular, two-story buildings (the army headquarters could boast of five stories) as nondescript as thousands of housing projects emerging all over Israel to offer cheap lodgings to the waves of new immigrants. The heart of our ministry was a little house with an ivy-covered façade; Peres’s office occupied the ground floor while the “old man” ruled on the second (and top) floor. I never saw Ben-Gurion but quite often got a glimpse of his most faithful and secretive aide, Haim Israeli, shuttling up and down the stairs. As for Shimon’s office,
it was run with remarkable efficiency and good spirits by Israeli’s downstairs counterpart, the affable Avraham Ben-Yosef.
An intense feeling of mission and empowerment animated Shimon’s inner circle; it did not, however, exclude tensions and rivalries. I’ve since forgotten the details of internal squabbles, which were generally about the allocation of budgets and the enforcement of power boundaries, except for the fact that the notoriously most difficult individual among those very difficult individuals was the man in charge of the actual building of Dimona, Colonel Manes Pratt.
Pratt had the reputation (justified or not) of being an engineering genius, a stellar administrator, and (justified) a very unpleasant person. Getting on his bad side didn’t make life easy. Peres was the only one able to handle Pratt, which he did as he handled other department heads, by mastering the essential technical aspects of the highly complex tasks each of them was dealing with and also perfectly grasping the general picture with its manifold financial and political ramifications. All in all, he had an unusual ability to maintain the modicum of peace necessary for the rapid progress of work (except in Shalheveth’s case, manifestly). In that sense, Peres, younger than most of his main acolytes, proved to be an outstanding leader with one formidable asset: Ben-Gurion’s full support.
There I was then, inside the holy of holies of the Israeli defense establishment, included in a project surrounded by rumors but so secret that, in 1960, even Foreign Minister Golda Meir did not know the crucial details I was privy to (she would soon have to face some of it, to her distress).
When Memory Comes Page 6