For The Telegraph, I specialized in Arab and Israeli subjects. When President Nasser moved troops into Sinai in May 1967, and uttered his menacing “Ahlan wasahlan” welcome in Arabic, another Holocaust appeared imminent. The anxiety was global, overwhelming. The Israelis would not sit waiting to submit to extermination, I put it to John Anstey. If you know so much about it, he said, you’d better go out there. On a specially chartered aircraft were men with skills that might be needed, including a team of orthopaedic surgeons. Next to me sat a freelance demolitions expert from Rhodesia, and behind was the actor Topol.
A howling siren broke the country’s eerie silence. At the time, there was no way of knowing that the Israeli air force had destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, and the war was effectively won. No way of knowing either that the Israeli government had urged King Hussein of Jordan to stay out of the fighting. Shelling West Jerusalem and committing his Arab Legion to war, the king compelled the Israelis to respond, in effect handing them the West Bank and responsibility for the future of its Palestinian inhabitants. This misconceived tactic put in place the Israeli occupation and the cut and thrust it gives rise to. The decisive role of the individual in determining the course of history could hardly be demonstrated more clearly.
In Jerusalem, a colonel drove me out on the Bethlehem road. In the back of the jeep was James Cameron. This most celebrated British war correspondent was holding a bottle of whisky. A few dead Arab Legion soldiers lay where they had fallen. A shell had landed through the roof of the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem. In the nave, cloudy with smoke and dust, stood an archbishop. By the time I emerged, James Cameron’s empty bottle was rolling on the floor and he had passed out. Later in the fog of war somewhere near Nablus, I encountered Martha Gellhorn, instantly recognisable, her hair perfect, and wearing immaculate pressed denims in keeping with a lifetime spent reporting from battlefields. And later still, in the huge refugee camp of Aqabat Jaber thousands of Palestinians were already abandoning their homes, their livestock and in some cases relations too elderly to walk down to the bridge and over to Jordan. They hadn’t seen an Israeli, but seemingly the Arab threat to massacre Jews had reversed into fear of being massacred. The panic was collective. All were heading for a worse life but I was unable to persuade a single one of them to stay.
In the small hours I was cabling my copy in the military censors’ office in Jerusalem when a white-faced and shaky James Cameron stumbled in. The censor, a studious young lieutenant, did not change expression as he read what was largely make-believe. Passing it, he commented, “Not one of your best pieces, Mr Cameron.”
On a calm and beautiful summer afternoon, I drove towards the Syrian front, the obvious next battleground. Kibbutz Gonen was shelled intermittently in the night, and I was pleased to find that I could sleep through it even though not in a shelter. In the morning I passed a grove of eucalyptus trees, and under cover was a battery of heavy artillery. The sight and the sound of the barrage was impressive. The ground shook. Watching spellbound, I could not help thinking that Hélène and Eric Allatini and the boys from the Springer orphanage would not have gone to their deaths if guns like these had been there to defend them. At the foot of the Golan Heights a company of soldiers were praying, swaying as Jews do. In the field the formation on the move looked familiar and I recognised fire and movement, exactly as we had done it at Pickering. At one point, I took shelter in a signals truck. The Major inside had been in the Red Army and was taking down the fire orders spoken in clear and in Russian on the other side. The coordinates gave away the position of the guns, and aircraft then took them out. They were still shelling civilian targets, which could only maximize bad feeling. At the end of the day, I reached the Syrian trenches. A copy of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet in Russian lay on the ground. I pocketed it. Appointed for political reasons, the officers had long since fled to Damascus. The men had evidently fought bravely to the end. Wandering by myself in the abandoned town of Quneitra, I came across a brand-new tank with less than ten kilometers on its dial and instructions in Russian. A Paisley scarf was on the seat, and I pocketed that too.
Sinai at all times is a stricken landscape of rock. The Mitla Pass was an enormous junkyard of wrecked Egyptian vehicles. At the Suez Canal I witnessed the Israelis sending the Egyptian army home. An Egyptian doctor was supervising the operation. He entered the name of each man in a large notebook and made him press his thumb on an ink-pad and then again next to his name. These were fellahin, farm children who had not learnt to write. Fifty at a time, they were conveyed in barges across the canal. On the Egyptian side was a clubhouse protected by high wire fencing. In that arid setting, the watered green grass of this privileged place caught the eye. Half a dozen officers were lounging out there in deckchairs with drinks in their hands, and behind them up against the wire fence were thousands of Egyptian mothers come to search and scream for their sons.
For the Soviet Union, this defeat of their Arab clients was embarrassingly public. Soviet spokesmen and apologists retaliated with a campaign to smear Israel as the aggressor and Arabs as its victims. As a result of this inversion of reality, people who a moment before had been agonizing over the crimes Arabs were about to commit on Jews now agonised over the crimes Jews had no intention of committing on Arabs. The Two Minutes Hate is George Orwell’s phrase in 1984 for manipulations of public opinion dependent on politics rather than fact. Staying in the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv, I happened to witness another guest, the photographer from one of the leading London dailies, taking a young Israeli waiter down to the beach after breakfast and making him kneel on the sand, hands behind his back in the fake posture of an Egyptian prisoner being brutalized. Amos Elon, by now an old friend, told how he had been in a jeep with Avram Joffe, a well-known General. When they came under fire, the General refused to duck and after a bit exclaimed, “Isn’t war boring?” Looking to the future, Amos and his wife Beth had already concluded that Israel had to avoid more boredom by handing back the West Bank and Gaza.
Soon returning to London, I was invited to speak to a meeting of Jewish writers. One of them was Harold Pinter, who came up to me in a spirit of wild triumphalism, boasting that the Jews had really shown Arabs what’s what. What then changed his mind? On occasions when we met in later years, he couldn’t resist coming right up to my face to tell me that Israel was nothing but a pawn of the United States and ought to be dismantled. Triumphalism had reversed into denigration. Who knows how many millions like him did not have the information or the intelligence to realize that they were caught by propaganda, repeating smears that other more artful people wanted them to repeat. A moment was to come when Nadira and Vidia Naipaul were dining with Antonia and Harold Pinter. He asked Nadira if she had made friends since arriving in England. She mentioned my name. Saying that he wouldn’t listen to any such thing, he stormed out of the room in a rage, only to pop his head round the door and bark, “Besides, he’s a Zionist.” Here was another person I could deprive of a meal, and in his own house. (An astonishing life-force, Nadira put an end to Bron Waugh’s fantasy about me as an undeserving Welsh-Jewish dwarf. When we met in the Naipaul flat, Bron was embarrassed; he had a way of punctuating his conversation with a laugh more like a cough, with no mirth in it. But he asked me to review a book for his Literary Review, and then another, and another, until I was receiving letters from him with the words “gratitude” and “admiration” underlined.)
Granny Wooster summoned me to Paris for a debriefing. We had a couple of sessions in her flat in the Rue de Surène. Unite The Impossible, her doctrine, accorded very well with the wishful view that there was nothing much to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, superpowers in the process of becoming alike. The doorbell suddenly rang, and Paulette showed in two priests. Mitzi listened to their pitch and wrote them a cheque for a thousand pounds. Bowing low, they backed out like the courtiers they were, whereupon I said that if she was giving money away, the Israeli Air Force could do with
it. Her face went black with anger. She shook. Was I telling her how to spend her money? She became almost hoarse. Jewish nerves were driving her rage, as they drove Pinter’s, and now drive innumerable Jews and Israelis to seek the integration and acceptance that escapes them, in extreme cases subscribing to Arab and Muslim nationalism directed against themselves.
The contrasted lives of Palestinians under Israeli and under Arab rule was a worthwhile subject for a book, I thought, and I spent much of the next few years researching in the field what was published as The Face of Defeat. My friend from Nazareth, Atallah Mansour, was an indispensible help, introducing me to everyone who was anyone in the West Bank. Another helper was Israel Stockman, who had grown up among Palestinians and spoke Arabic as they did. His special study was the village of Sinjil, a name which he said was a corruption of Saint John. Surely a high-level intelligence agent, he made it his business to intercede with Israeli authorities on behalf of Palestinians. Armed only with a walking stick, he was welcomed everywhere and took me along with him.
The Israelis I knew had no wish to be ruling Palestinians. Unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, however, would signify that Arabs pay no penalty for going to war and so might as well do it again and again in the hope of winning one day. Sure enough, Yasser Arafat, the new leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was sending small numbers of guerrillas, fedayin in Arabic, on night operations against Israel. General Uzi Narkiss was prepared to take me over the area along the river Jordan where skirmishing occurred, and I intended then to go on to Amman. Well before dawn on the day we had arranged, I got a telephone call that everything had been called off. All the same, I went down to the Allenby Bridge, where I could hear gunfire at Karameh on the other side. The crossing was closed. One other would-be traveller to Amman arrived, an American in a Brooks Brothers suit and buttoned-down shirt. He produced a laissez-passer signed by President Johnson. When the astonished Jordanian officer let him through – and me with him – this man for the first time revealed that he spoke fluent Arabic. By way of thanks, I invited this probable spy to dinner but he never turned up.
For the first time Palestinians on their own had engaged Israelis in battle, however small the scale. Yasser Arafat, still an unknown quantity, took the credit. On a hillside with olive trees somewhere near Irbid, I heard him address some of his men. Standard mass-produced radicals of that era, other Westerners present were repeating to one another the maxim of Chairman Mao that power came from the barrel of a gun. Put another way, bullies with bouffant hair and designer flak jackets were inciting young Palestinians to march towards gunfire and death in battle, while they themselves were safe in some television studio or the offices of The Guardian or Le Monde, consciously or unconsciously misrepresenting reality to suit the Soviet political line. I was in Amman in the Black September showdown of 1970 when King Hussein’s soldiers shot some 5,000 Palestinians. Women from Baqaa, a sprawling refugee camp outside Amman, set off shouting that they were going to Mousa Dayan, as they arabised his name. Some hundreds of fedayeen sought refuge in Israel. In pre-civil war Beirut I interviewed several leading Palestinians, among them Ghassan Kanafani whose writings are variations on the theme of hopelessness.
Again correspondent in the 1973 war, I was back on the Golan Heights when the Iraqi armoured division came into action. The tank commanders put into practice exactly what the Frunze Academy had taught them, their positioning and maneuvering were so predictable that ninety minutes later the tanks were burning hulks. At one point, I came across an Israeli tank whose track had hit a rock and needed repair. The officer was the man lying on his back under the tank at work with the spanners, while the crew stood around smoking. A citizens’ army like that tends to win its wars.
I decided to take a day off in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, and there I found that Nick Tomalin reporting for The Sunday Times had had the same idea. “You have made the editor laugh,” he once commented on a piece I had written when he was editing a glossy magazine. At lunch, he said we would learn more about the war in the capital than by standing in the front line ducking at the sound of explosions. The very next day, he drove with colleagues to the Golan. They got out of the car in a display of the bravado that he thought so little of. Because he remained in his seat, Nick was killed by a Syrian heat-seeking missile.
By sheer luck, I was at the right spot on the Suez Canal when Israeli engineers arrived out of the desert and in a matter of minutes threw across a pontoon bridge. The tanks rumbled over, and leaning out of the turret of one of them was Ariel Sharon. He was not wearing a helmet, and in my memory the combination of his blond hair and a white shirt gave him the look of a man enjoying himself at a sporting occasion.
Walking along the Nile, I had a conversation with a man who was fishing, in which I asked what he thought of Nasser. By way of an answer, the man flicked out his hand, palm down in the habitual gesture of contempt. It’s understood, I think, that Nasser had done great harm to his country when he might have done good. It appeared impossible to admit this disaster, indeed parties of schoolchildren are taken round the military museum in Cairo that presents as victory a war that finished with Israeli tanks closing on Cairo. In their culture, the dread of shame is so strong that it enforces denial of reality. Mistakes are inadmissible, and repetition therefore takes the place of correction.
In the 1970s and 1980s I travelled pretty regularly in Arab countries. Whenever Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians were in the news, Marty Peretz of The New Republic was liable to ask me for an article about it. Arafat and those around him were practised politicians and the puzzle was that they persisted in taking decisions certain to degrade further those they claimed to be representing. An editor in New York, a stranger, a lady, wrote to point out that I was in the habit of saying in different ways the same thing about the Arabs, namely that they had the kind of society that kept renewing their troubles without ever resolving them. This repetitive process of self-harming keeps Arabs and Muslims from doing justice to themselves. In the Middle East I’d encountered fighting, power plays, leadership, decisions, movements of opinion, that were truly irrational but there had to be a logic to it. After some correspondence, this editor commissioned The Closed Circle.
One obstacle to research was the prejudice and ignorance of the British authorities. A first experience of it was discouraging. A hush-hush interview in Athens with Colonel Grivas of EOKA fame led me to believe that this grizzled but theatrical old man was sincere when he talked of invading Cyprus again. I flew to Nicosia to test this out with Archbishop Makarios. This most suave of heads of state was well informed and soon he was explaining how he blocked Communism by sending the children of the rich to Soviet universities and the children of the poor to American universities. I thought I ought to report Grivas’s imminent invasion to the British High Commissioner. Caustically this grey eminence opened the conversation with the rebuke that after ten minutes in Cyprus every passing journalist thought he had the key to the troubles. I apologised for wasting his time and left at once. The day my piece appeared in the Telegraph Grivas’s men did invade, shot down Makarios’s helicopter and killed the pilot. For years afterwards, in Greek eyes I was the secret service agent responsible for all this.
Commissioned to write a profile of Mu’ammer Gaddhafi after he had seized power, I was actually in the Libyan Embassy when the Foreign Office rang through with the advice not to give me a visa. The cave paintings of the Tassili plateau in the Sahara close to the Algerian-Libyan border are one of the world’s wonders, and in 1983 I arranged with Franz Trost, a desert explorer, to go there. Candida was my travelling companion. Counting duplicates for us both, I had to obtain thirty-six permissions from Algerian ministries. We began in Algiers. My father-in-law Harold, by then retired from the Foreign Office and in a new position as Provost of Eton, provided us with a letter of introduction to the British ambassador. We were invited to dinner in the embassy. Over the first course, the ambassador said t
hat he had previously been stationed in Beirut, where he and his wife had been friends and great admirers of Yasser Arafat. During the Israeli campaign in Lebanon the previous year, he wanted us to know, they had stood on the embassy roof shaking their fists at Israeli aircraft overhead and screaming that they were Nazis. That comparison is the touchstone of prejudice. Abandoning half-full plates, Candida and I asked for a taxi and left. Harold, I can say in his favour, never reproached us.
The silence of the Sahara is pure. We had an Algerian guide (who offered to buy Candida for the right number of camels) but otherwise were alone on the plateau. The night sky is an entertainment of shooting stars. A year later I returned, this time with Jessica. Franz escorted us down the Algerian-Moroccan border to Tamanrasset. On a day in December when it was a freakish fifty degrees in the shade, we were searching for the battlefield where in the fifteenth century a Moroccan army performed the military feat of crossing the desert to surprise and conquer the Songhai Emperor. There were no other vehicles within the hundred or so miles all the way to Gao on the river Niger, when a police car suddenly appeared and gave Franz a parking ticket costing much the same as one in London.
Published in 1989, The Closed Circle coincided with the end of the Cold War. Freed from the embrace of the rival super-powers, Arabs and Muslims had the chance to make of this independence whatever they could. Nasser, the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, Haj Amin al-Husseini the Mufti of Jerusalem, their successors and rivals and mimics, had ideological borrowings from Communism or Nazism, sometimes putting in place an amalgam of both. In practice, these turned out to be more pretexts for killing more people. Conducive to authoritarianism, the centuries-old Arab state structure easily absorbed modern features like one-party rule and just as easily stifled civil rights, equality for women and whatever else might induce change.
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