After the Tall Timber Read online

  In the streets outside, a few helmeted civilians and some restless little boys kept telling one another to walk close to the walls and to run across streets leading toward Jordan. From several directions, there was the sound of machine-gun and mortar fire. In the early afternoon, three journalists walked into the government press office and were received with cheers. Accredited to Jordan, they had been stationed in the Old City, unable to file copy, for several days. When the Israeli troops came, they had simply walked across into the New City to file their copy there. Then they walked back again. It was announced that General Dayan had had tea on Mount Scopus that morning.

  Sometime in the course of Tuesday, an Army official called a meeting of intellectuals in an office in Tel Aviv. He had invited delegates from Rehovoth, from Technion, from the Academy, and from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (Because of the peculiar configuration of the shelling at that hour, the professors from Jerusalem were unable to attend.) He wanted to ask their advice on a number of questions, and to brief them on the progress of the war. The war was succeeding so far beyond the most optimistic expectations that there were problems that must be faced at once. The entire Egyptian Army had been mobilized at the front when the war began, but Israel had spent the tense waiting period retraining reserves and repairing machinery, and the Egyptian Air Force had been destroyed in the first hours of Monday morning. Apparently misled by the true reports over Kol Yisroel that many Israeli border settlements had been attacked, and by the false reports from the Voice of Thunder in Cairo that Beersheba had been taken and that Tel Aviv was in flames, King Hussein of Jordan—to the surprise and special regret of Israel—had entered the war by noon, and in the afternoon the Jordanian Air Force was destroyed as well. The Syrians, originally the country most rabidly committed to the immediate extermination of Israel, were apparently enraged by the reconciliation between Nasser and Hussein, whom Damascus was still determined to overthrow. Syria had entered the war by degrees throughout the day, and by nightfall the Syrian Air Force was destroyed.

  Fighting was going well on the ground on all fronts, and the problem was where to stop. Hussein, it seemed, was powerless to forbid the shelling of Jerusalem by Jordanian troops under Egyptian command, so it would be necessary for the Israelis to take the Old City. (The Rockefeller Institute, containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Army spokesman announced, smiling ironically at the particular stir of interest that this aroused in his scholarly audience, had already been captured.) It was clear that Jerusalem could not be divided again. Would it be a good idea to announce plans to internationalize the Old City before it was completely in Israeli hands? There was another problem, he went on: captured Egyptian documents, which had been translated only the night before, revealed that Nasser was far more seriously committed to the destruction of Israelis as Jews, and far more taken with the old Nazi programs, than had been supposed; plans, on the Nazi model, had been drawn up for the time after Israel’s defeat. The question was whether to release these documents. What Israel wanted from this war, after all, was a lasting peace with its Arab neighbors. The two primary obstacles to this peace were the problems of Jerusalem and the Arab refugees. These problems could be solved. What purpose would be served in humiliating an already defeated Arab people by revealing the plans its leader may have had for destroying civilians? The question was discussed, inconclusively, for some time.

  Finally, the spokesman raised a question that had been puzzling the administration: What had happened to Egypt’s missiles? Were the ones shown so often on parade merely dummies? He mentioned the other possibilities: mechanical failure, fear of a mythical superweapon at Rehovoth, or pressure from Moscow to avoid what would have been purely futile destruction of cities. This led him to another matter: the Russians were not famous for their loyalty to losers, and the Arabs had lost. Was there any point in approaching the Russians now—or, at least, the Rumanians, who had declared themselves in such moderate terms? Several professors of Russian descent expressed themselves emotionally on the prospect of a rapprochement with their native land, but the others seemed skeptical. Certain questions, the spokesman said, in concluding the discussion (several professors present had to return to their laboratories or their military units), would simply be resolved by events, but, he said, “We will settle for nothing but peace this time.”

  In the blacked-out living room of Professor David Samuel, on Tuesday, the second night of the war (which had ceased, after its first few hours of uncertainty, to seem, except at the front, anything like war in the movies), the members of the household were gathered: Professor Samuel; his wife, Rinna; Tally, a girl of eighteen, who had been studying for her baccalaureate examinations; Yoram, a boy of fifteen, who had been compulsively volunteering for every kind of service since the war broke out; and Naomi, a girl of three, who had slept on Monday night in the shelter, and who now went to bed making siren noises. Tally said that her English exam for the following morning had been cancelled—“obviously.” And Yoram announced that not only had he been put in charge of any fractures that might occur if his school were bombed but he was being called out that night for courier duty. “Well, if you think I relish the idea . . .” his mother began, and then simply advised him to change his undershirt. At nine, Professor Samuel left on some errand about which no one asked, and which was to occupy him until morning.

  Kol Yisroel reported, with the understatement that it was to display throughout the war, that fighting had now penetrated to the Egyptian side of the Sinai border. (In fact, Gaza had fallen, and soldiers were already beginning to find pairs and clusters of boots in the desert, which, they knew from the 1956 Sinai campaign, meant that the Egyptians were in barefoot rout.) The Jerusalem Post for the day, in mentioning the fact that casualties were beginning to come into Israeli hospitals, and that all of them were patient and brave, did not neglect to mention a soldier who, with one eye shot away and the other damaged, was as brave as the rest. He was a Jordanian legionnaire, the Post reported and he kept repeating the only Hebrew words he knew: “We are brothers. We are brothers.”

  Someone mentioned that a Hebrew idiom for Arabs is “cousins,” or “sons of our uncle,” and that although the connotation was slightly pejorative, it need not always be that way. Someone praised the bravery, in particular, of the Jordanian legionnaires.

  “I really think the reason we fight better is because we have no hinterland,” Yoram said. “We can’t swim to America. We simply have nowhere else to go.” He left through the blacked-out doorway and went into the moonlight, to begin his courier duty. “A perfect night for bombing,” he said, looking into the clear sky. But there were no alarms at all that night.

  On Wednesday morning, the casualties began pouring out of buses into the Kaplan Hospital, where the Rehovoth wives were waiting to work. Tally’s class at school was called to help out, and Professor Samuel remarked as he drove her to the hospital, “I don’t know what these girls are going to see there.” The wounded were silent, and as each stretcher was brought in it was immediately surrounded by many volunteers of both sexes, solicitous of the comfort of the wounded man. It turned out that among those critically wounded on the previous day was the son of the gynecologist who had had difficulty with the word “mortal” three nights before. “For us, you know, the Army, it isn’t an anonymous thing,” someone remarked. “To us, everyone killed at the front is a tragedy.”

  By nightfall, Kol Yisroel reported that the Israelis had taken Sharm-el-Sheik, the shofar had long been blown at the Wailing Wall by the chief rabbi of the military, and Meyer Weisgal, sitting in his own darkened house with his wife and a group of friends, was contemplating the offers of help for the Institute he had received from patrons and scientists all over the world. Later still, Professor Samuel (doubtless like many other professors at the Institute, and like citizens all over Israel) put away a pistol, which had served him in former wars (he had been in four of them: in 1939, 1948, 1956, and 1967), and with which he had been prepared to defe
nd his family—in that oasis of technology, in a nation of two and a half million—if the war had gone otherwise.

  The New Yorker

  June 17, 1967

  Originally titled “Letter from Israel”

  THE BLACK POWER MARCH IN MISSISSIPPI

  FOR THREE weeks in June, a civil-rights demonstration, under black leadership, and with local blacks in the overwhelming majority, passed successfully from the northern border of Mississippi to the state capital, crossing several counties whose most distinguished citizens had been blacks who died for civil rights. One of the triumphs of that demonstration—the James Meredith March Against Fear—was that none of the marchers were murdered. They were not, like the Selma marchers, protected by the federal government. They demanded protection from the state, and, with certain lapses along the way, they got it. For those weeks in June, Mississippians saw state troopers surrounding blacks not to oppress but to shield them, not to give them orders but to come to terms with their demands. With the support of federal law, and the authority of their own courage and intelligence, the black leaders required the government of Mississippi to deal with them—for the first time—as men. For this reason, if for no other, the march marked a turning point in the black’s relationship to the white community, North and South.

  From its beginnings, ever since Abolition, the civil-rights movement has been the child of Northern white liberalism. The Southern segregationist has regarded the black man as his child in a different sense. With the march, the movement proved that as long as the law prevents acts of violence against it from going unpunished, it can assume its own adult leadership—including responsibility for its own radical children. On this occasion, the children were the workers of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and the worried parents were the workers of SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Other members of the family were the understanding older relative, CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality); two rich, conservative older relatives, the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the National Urban League; and two industrious cousins, MCHR (the Medical Committee for Human Rights) and the Delta Ministry of the NCC (the National Council of Churches). The issues, but for their repercussions outside the state of Mississippi, would not have been issues at all. All branches of the movement were united in trying to develop political assertiveness where the need is great—among the black masses, too poor to afford the restaurants integrated by sit-ins, too ignorant to attend the colleges now open to them, too heavily oppressed to vote. The leaders, by marching in a state where they are hated by violent men, hoped to dramatize personal courage, and to inspire local blacks to take the physical and economic risks that still accompany a black’s registering to vote in Mississippi. For every large minority, the vote is the key to political power, and that SNCC’s rallying cry of “Black Power!” should have proved divisive—and even dangerous—is only the latest in a series of ironies that have beset that organization from the beginning.

  A campus offshoot of Dr. Martin Luther King’s SCLC, SNCC always comes to the national attention when it is on the brink of going out of existence. SNCC workers—young intellectuals who have tried valiantly to “speak to the needs” of a poor black community—drew the movement to the rural South, only to be outdone by better-organized and better-financed civil rights groups and by the federal government. SNCC leaders were subject to grinding pressures—personal danger, responsibility for lives, internal dissension—which seemed to wear them down. And it was SNCC leaders—whose awareness of the complexity of moral and social issues had always, characteristically, involved them in agonized conferences lasting several weeks—who came up with the simplistic “Black Power!” slogan.

  To the marchers, the meaning of the chant was clear: it was a rallying cry for blacks to vote as a bloc, to take over communities in which they constitute a majority, and to exercise some political leverage in communities in which they constitute a large minority. The local black audience—full of affection for the young radicals but all too conscious of what the power realities in Mississippi are—virtually ignored the chant as bravado. White Southerners heard the challenge to white supremacy and braced themselves. And Northern liberals, already bored or disaffected by tensions in the movement, heard only the overtones; a mob chanting anything, and particularly a spondee followed by an unaccented syllable, seemed distressingly reminiscent of prewar German rhetoric, and alienated white sympathies—which the movement will need as long as the need for a movement exists—still further. (What black extremists in the Northern ghettos heard remains to be seen.) “Black Power!” turned out to be, at best, an expression of political naïveté; at worst, it could be misconstrued as a call to violence, which would bring on retaliatory violence to oppress the blacks more heavily than ever, and cause the country to cheat itself once again of the equal participation of its black minority.

  Another irony, which almost obscured the purpose of the march, was that violence should appear to be a major issue in the movement. The only marcher who seriously advocated “violent revolution” was a white college graduate, unemployed, wearing a baseball cap and a few days’ growth of beard. He became known to reporters as the House Marxist, and he provoked from black marchers such comments as “I don’t know what to say to you,” “The first thing you whites want to do when you come to the movement is make policy,” “Everyone has a right to his opinion until he hurts someone else,” and “We gonna have a non-violent march no matter who here.” The House Marxist joined the march at Batesville and left it at Grenada—muttering that the march itself was “only a tool of the power structure in Washington.”

  It is true that the marchers were often kept awake for much of the night by discussions of the black’s right to bear arms in his own defense. But the issue was always just that—self-defense—and discussions of it were largely academic. Even SCLC workers have tacitly acknowledged that the strategy of non-violence, so effective in integrating lunch counters, is simply pointless when it comes to facing armed night riders on a Southern highway. Black communities have for years afforded their civil-rights workers what protection they could, and not even the Mississippi government has made an issue of it. The march’s ideologues—mostly Northern pacifists and hipsters, who kept insisting that the argument lay “between a Selma and a Watts”—brought the question unnecessarily into the open and managed to produce what eventually became a split in the movement. (The mere fact that Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, among so many, are dead while Byron de La Beckwith, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, among so many others, are still alive should be testimony enough to the movement’s commitment to non-violence. There have been no white-supremacist martyrs yet.) Marchers who, giving way under the strain, exchanged threats and insults with bystanders were quickly surrounded by other marchers and roundly scolded; but when a memorial service in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was engulfed by a white mob armed with hoes and axe handles, the marchers fought back with their fists, and no one—not even the vocal pacifists—protested.

  Perhaps the reason for the disproportionate emphasis on divisive issues during the march was that civil-rights news—like news of any unified, protracted struggle against injustice—becomes boring. One march, except to the marchers, is very like another. Tents, hot days, worried nights, songs, rallies, heroes, villains, even tear gas and clubbings—the props are becoming stereotyped. Radicals and moderate observers alike long for a breakthrough into something fresh. The institution of the civil-rights march, however, is likely to occupy a long moment in American history, and the country might as well become familiar with the cast.

  THE DRONES: In every march, there seem to be a number of white participants from out of the state who come with only the fuzziest comprehension of the issues but with a strong conviction that civil rights is a good thing to walk for. The last to be informed of events and decisions—after the police, the pres
s, the nation as a whole—the drones trudge wearily along. They become objects of hostility when black marchers—forgetting that the only whites within scorning distance are likely to be friendly whites—mistake who their enemies are. In the March Against Fear, the drones turned out to be the only continuous marchers. Leaders dropped out repeatedly—Martin Luther King to attend to affairs in Chicago, Floyd McKissick for a speaking engagement in New York, Stokely Carmichael for a television appearance in Washington—and most of the local blacks could march only part of the way. But the drones stuck it out. Some were thrust into action, and reacted in various ways to dangers of which they had not been fully aware. A mustachioed anthropologist from a Northern university, for example, volunteered for a voter-registration task force in Charleston, Mississippi. When the white population proved hostile, he simply drove back to the march, leaving the rest of the task force to fend for itself. After two more incidents of this kind, he was punched in the jaw by another marcher, and wisely went home. Two drones from the North arrived in a station wagon, bringing their three-year-old son with them. The child, whom they left alone for naps in their car by the side of the road, became covered with mosquito bites, and was twice found wandering by himself, screaming in terror at the sight of a large, barking dog. On the night of the tent-pitching in Canton, Mississippi, the child was rendered unconscious by tear gas, but his parents were preoccupied with what they thought was the need to precipitate another episode. “We’ve got to pitch those tents again,” they insisted, on the second night in Canton. “By backing down, we’re only deceiving the local people.” (The drones were the last to learn it was the local blacks who decided that they had proved their point and that another act of civil disobedience would be unnecessarily dangerous.)