He told me how the general had abandoned his horse and entered on foot, in deference to the holiest shrine of three religions. Somewhere out to the east, Lawrence, at the head of the Arab Revolt, was moving toward his own treasure: Damascus.
Over the years, he had seen it all: both world wars; the Mandate between them; the rise of Zionism; the utterance of the Balfour Declaration; the creation on a Franco-British map of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. He had seen dictators and monarchs come and go, rise and fall, as the Jews pursued their single goal of, one day, a nation of their own. He had not only seen it all, he had been at the epicenter. He had met the generals and the giants, Roosevelt and Churchill.
Several times, the dragon popped her head around the door to object that it was time for his nap, but he waved her away. What struck me was his tolerance. He had fought all his life for his dream yet seemed to hate no one, not even Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who so admired Adolf Hitler and wanted every Jew on earth dead. He had huge forbearance for the Palestinian Arabs, whose language he spoke perfectly. The only people he had no time for were the fanatics of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. At their mention, he sneered and shook his white-clouded head.
The British, for so long the unwilling army of occupation, he liked, even though he had helped form the Haganah, the Palmach, and the Mossad to outwit and outmaneuver them.
I could have filled ten notebooks, but I just sat and listened to an old man who was sixty years of living history and who had seen it all. Finally tired, he indicated that he needed his sleep. I went to fetch the dragon, who glared at me and escorted him to his sleeping quarters. At the door, he turned and said, “Good-bye, young man. I hope you have been interested. And stay lucky.”
I had been indeed. Fascinated. I was shown out and walked to the gate. It was dusk. An Egged bus came by. I waved, and it stopped and took me on to Eilat as darkness fell. David Ben-Gurion died six years later, at the age of eighty-seven. He was one of the greatest men I had ever met.
EILAT
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As recently as 1945, what is now the huge port and vacation resort of Eilat hardly existed. It was a motley collection of shacks with orange-crate furniture, clinging to the water’s edge opposite the bigger Jordanian port of Aqaba, captured by Lawrence in 1917.
The early settlers and pioneers must have been tough as boots. There was nothing there, but they began to build and to plant. Among the earliest to arrive were Dr. and Mrs. Fay Morris from Manchester. He had flown with the RAF in the war, qualified as a doctor, and emigrated with his young wife. By 1968, both were pillars of the community, but lived modestly in a house they had built themselves.
The previous summer, the Israelis had swept across Sinai as General Israel Tal and his elderly British tanks pushed Nasser’s forces back to the Suez Canal. That three-day conquest, although fought along the northern rim of Sinai, brought the entire triangular peninsula under Israeli control. And that included the Sinai Bedouin, to whom Dr. Morris had been appointed official medical officer. The Egyptians, who had always treated the Bedouin contemptuously, had never accorded them a doctor.
Because Sinai is girt on the west by the Suez Canal, which runs down to become the Red Sea, and on the east by the Gulf of Eilat and the Gulf of Aqaba, which also run down to become the Red Sea, and along the north by the Mediterranean, it is virtually an island. And the Bedouin seldom cross water.
From their desert wilderness, the Bedouin have watched the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the armies of Islam cross and recross their land, in conquest or in defeat. Later came the Crusaders, Napoleon’s legions, Allenby’s British Tommies, and the Israelis.
The Bedouin have witnessed them throughout the centuries. The marching and the fighting were mainly along the northern rim, up by the Mediterranean. The hinterland was always theirs. And their policy was always the same: to withdraw into their deserts of sand and rocks, to not interfere, to not take sides, to watch, and to survive. After July 1967, the Israelis were the first people to treat them decently.
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.