After the Tall Timber Page 9

  All this, of course, has been altered by the outcome of the Eventuality of Everybody. The speed and thoroughness with which this outcome was achieved make it seem in retrospect like a foregone conclusion. It was not. Even the fact that war should come, with anyone, in any form at all, at least so soon, did not seem, in the days preceding June 5th, anything like a certainty.

  Thursday, June 1st: An American Jew of German descent who now makes his home in New York arrived at Lod Airport, in Tel Aviv, and got into a battered old taxi, which was already carrying a few passengers, for the ride to Jerusalem. His daughter was spending her junior year abroad at the Hebrew University, and he was going to try to persuade her to come home. He thought he recognized a pattern to events, and he was afraid. He had been merely depressed by previous violations of international guarantees to Israel—free passage through the Suez Canal, for example, or free access to the Old City of Jerusalem—but the blockade of the Strait of Tiran had made it impossible for him to sleep. While the great powers temporized and rationalized, he felt that a little country’s territory and morale were being worn away. It reminded him exactly, he said, of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Foreseeing, as he thought, its inevitable consequences, he wanted his daughter home. The taxi picked up several passengers along the road (which was nearly deserted but still lined with the carapaces of armored cars destroyed in 1948), and on the outskirts of Jerusalem the worried gentleman got out.

  The city itself resembled, on that Thursday before the war, a sunny sparsely populated colony for the infirm. Even the taxi driver wore a leather glove concealing an artificial hand, and most of the pedestrians (there were few cars) were either old or lame or very young and scruffy and truant-looking. The King David Hotel was nearly empty, except for some journalists and a few indomitable tourists. Zvi Avrame, the large, middle-aged manager of the King David, engaged his guests in merry conversation, and new arrivals at the reception desk were offered rooms overlooking the Old City (“There you have the view”) or overlooking the YMCA on the Israeli side (“There it is more safe.”). The entrance to the YMCA—the scene of bitter fighting in 1948—was concealed by sandbags, but aside from these, and from the strange emptiness of the streets, Jerusalem had made no obvious preparations for a state of war. From some windows, the sound of radios tuned to Kol Yisroel, the Voice of Israel, drifted over the city. Since the early stages of mobilization, Kol Yisroel had been broadcasting only Israeli songs, Hebrew news, and (recognizing that few Israelis over twenty-five speak the national language perfectly) two news programs each day in French, Rumanian, Yiddish, English, Hungarian, Russian, and Ladino. On Thursday, June 1st, Kol Yisroel announced in eight languages that the Mapai Party of Premier Levi Eshkol had at last formed an emergency Cabinet with the Gahal Party and with Ben Gurion’s Rafi Party (although BiGi himself, as the Israelis call him, had remained aloof), and that the Rafi Party’s General Moshe Dayan had been appointed Minister of Defense.

  Friday, June 2nd, in Tel Aviv was listless and stiflingly dull. The city was uncrowded, but it seemed as though everyone might merely be taking a siesta. In fact, quite a number of people were off at the beaches and swimming pools. Several international journalists, having exhausted their color stories about a proud, encircled people unafraid in the face of overwhelming odds, or the economic impossibility of maintaining a civilian army on perpetual alert, were preparing to go home. It began to seem that even the appointment of Dayan had been only a bit of stage business in the little off-Hot Line theatrical productions to which the small nations seemed now to be reduced. It appeared that Nasser’s production had all the angels, and that even lack of initiative had passed out of the hands of Israel to London, Paris, and Washington. The oppressive sense that nothing at all was going to happen created the feeling that access to the world’s attention was being closed along with passage through the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel seemed about to drop out of the news.

  At the Chaim Weizmann Institute, in Rehovoth, on Friday night, however, people seemed both more active and less sanguine than in Tel Aviv. The Orthodox rabbis in Jerusalem had announced that for the Army the obligations of the Sabbath were temporarily suspended, and some of the inhabitants of Rehovoth felt that war might begin the following morning. (The rabbis had earlier suspended their campaign against autopsies, and this sort of concession had led some people to expect war on every Sabbath since the beginning of the crisis.) The Weizmann Institute—whose cornerstone was laid to the sound of distant gunfire in 1946—has become over the years a kind of dream haven for pure science, an intellectual aerie amid green lawns, orange groves, and bougainvillea between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Agricultural research at the Institute had contributed vitally to Israel’s unprecedented programs for reclamation of the soil. Theoretical research in nuclear physics and chemistry had succeeded so well that scientists were turning their attention to newer fields, like high-energy physics and research with RNA. One of the country’s crowning and yet most characteristic achievements, the Institute had for weeks been on an emergency footing. (For one thing, a prevailing myth among the Arab nations that an atomic bomb was housed there made it a prime target for enemy bombing.) Of forty-three men at work on constructing a new building for the Institute, forty had been called up into the Army. Those members of the scientific staff who had not been called up as soldiers or military advisers, or put to work on special scientific projects related to mobilization, were busy taping windows or wrapping up sensitive or explosive instruments against the threat of attack. The children of the community were taking first-aid courses. Research biologists who had taken medical degrees but never actually treated patients were setting up emergency clinics. Sandbags and supports for basement ceilings were being put up in all the buildings of the Institute. In addition to their other work, scientists with walkie-talkies strapped to their waists took part in patrolling the Institute’s grounds at night.

  War, of course, did not break out on Saturday morning. Instead, wives and children took advantage of the Sabbath to join their men for picnics at the front. In effect, the front in a country of Israel’s size was everywhere. But border kibbutzim like Nir Yitzhak and Shalom Karem, at the edge of the Negev and the Gaza Strip, were particularly full of families reclining with picnic baskets under the trees near the webby, shapeless tents in which the soldiers had been living for two weeks. The station wagons parked by the side of the road, and the tanned, rangy aspect of the men, made it look as though there had been an unlikely suburban commute from Scarsdale to the land of Owen Wister. The men—masons from Beersheba, bank tellers from Haifa, curtain manufacturers from Tel Aviv—were all dressed in highly personal variations on the Army uniform. In an army where no officer may order his men to charge, but only to follow him, there is a great deal of informality. “Tell my mother I am beautiful in my uniform,” a soldier helping the civilians of Nir Yitzhak to harvest peaches said to a visitor from home. But, without any actual battle eagerness, the general attitude seemed to be “What are they waiting for?” and “Let’s get it over with.”

  On Saturday afternoon, in Tel Aviv, Moshe Dayan held a press conference in which he apologized for having nothing to announce. He answered every question urbanely, with a crooked smile, looking confident and slightly sinister. He remarked that he would be “glad and surprised” if a diplomatic solution to the blockade could be found, and, in answer to a question about disposing of Egypt once and for all, he said, “I don’t think in war there is any such thing as ‘once and for all.’ I don’t think ‘once and for all’ can be applied to war.” Although Dayan had been able to infuse with all the drama of his person an interview that contained no news at all, the fact remained that there was no news and no clear way out, and that patience was wearing thin.

  That evening at Rehovoth, some friends gathered for coffee in the living room of David Samuel, grandson of the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, and himself a professor of nuclear chemistry at the Institute. Three friends—Amos de Shalit, Michael
Feldman, and Gideon Yekutieli—were professors there as well. One, Peter Hansen, was a young English research chemist, doing post-doctoral work at the Institute, who had chosen, for the duration of the crisis, against his embassy’s advice, to stay. Hansen said he had read in a column by an English correspondent that if Dayan had not been appointed he would have been brought to power by a military coup. Everyone laughed. “How can they say a military coup?” said Mrs. Yekutieli. “When an entire country has been called into the Army, a military coup would be an election.” There was a discussion of the restlessness of several men who had not been called up: a frogman, a paratrooper, and a middle-aged pilot. (The pilot subsequently offered his services as a crop duster.) Mrs. Samuel said that she thought an insufficiently hearty welcome was being accorded the volunteers who were coming into Israel from other countries to fight, to give blood, or to work. She felt there should at least be a poster to greet them at the airport. “It could be a tourist poster also,” someone suggested. “ ‘See Israel While It Still Exists.”’

  On Sunday, June 4th, a number of soldiers—a tenth of the Army, according to some estimates—were given a day’s leave, and several of the North African soldiers (sometimes referred to euphemistically as the Southern French) took advantage of their leave to return for a day to their families in the port of Elath. Elath seemed confident that war would not break out there. In the first place, people said, the port was now too strongly fortified, and, in the second, at the first sign of trouble the soldiers would blow up the neighboring port of Aqaba, Jordan’s only outlet to the sea. In tents all along the beach, near the empty resort hotels, was the remnant of an international collection of waifs and strays with long hair and guitars whom one now finds in so many unlikely places, and who had long been making Elath a beatnik nomad’s rendezvous. When they needed money, they presented themselves in the morning at a café called Leon’s, where they were recruited to dig trenches or to work for a day in King Solomon’s Mines. At night, they gathered in a discothèque called the Half Past Midnight (where there were also several African students who had been stranded in Elath when their passage home through the Gulf had been postponed by the blockade). Asked why the nomads had not taken the advice of their various embassies and left the port, a long-haired guitar player from Stuttgart looked up cheerfully and said, “Was? Wenn es grad lustig wird?” (Soldiers emplaning on a civilian flight from Elath to Tel Aviv were asked to check their guns in the cargo section.)

  On Sunday night, at Rehovoth, the professors’ wives were just completing their course in how to render assistance at the Kaplan Hospital if war should break out. The cement walls of the still uncompleted building in which they met were lined with stretchers and sawhorses to put the stretchers on. The women were issued forms, in duplicate, on which they could check off a doctor’s diagnosis, and thereby save him the time of writing things down himself. The lecturer, normally a gynecologist, warned the women that even to a seasoned medical man a casualty of war looks different from any other sort of patient. After the first four hours, he assured them, they would get used to it. He reviewed the forms with them, the ways of ascertaining the wounded man’s identity (the pockets of civilian casualties, who did not, of course, have dog tags, would have to be searched), and he went down the checklist for gravity of wounds—mild, medium, serious, mortal. There were several questions about the word “mortal.” The doctor had used the wrong word in Hebrew—one meaning “mortal” in the sense of “human being.” The matter was soon cleared up. One of the women crouched on the floor with her hands locked behind her head to show the position her daughter in kindergarten had been taught to adopt in case of bombing. “ ‘This is how the bunny sits,’ she told me,” the woman said. “ ‘See the bunny ears?’ ”

  Late Sunday night, the Army informed the civilian guard at Rehovoth that they might let up on the security watch.

  On Monday, June 5th: at 8 A.M. the air-raid sirens went off all over Israel, and everyone knew that the country was at war. In one of the bomb shelters at the Institute, five languages were being spoken, with absolute calm, by scientists, children, visitors, and maids. A few minutes later, the all clear sounded, and everyone went to work, as though it were an ordinary day. General Dayan’s voice came over the radio, speaking to the troops and announcing that tank battles were taking place at that moment in the Negev. “Attaque à l’aube,” one of the scientists said as he walked to his laboratory. “That’s good for us. It means that we’ve got the rising sun in the east behind us. In the Negev, the sun is pretty blinding.”

  At 10 A.M. Monday, in his office, Meyer Weisgal, the president of the Weizmann Institute, an important Zionist, a good friend of the late Chaim Weizmann, and one of the greatest fund-raisers of all time, was dictating—to his wife, Shirley—some telegrams to Americans, appealing for funds for war relief. Guns could be heard in the distance, planes were screaming overhead, and sirens, which the Weisgals ignored, went off from time to time. “Send them full-rate, Mrs. Weisgal,” said Yaki, their chauffeur and handyman. “We’re going to win this war.” When Mr. Weisgal had finished dictating, the telegrams were taken into the next room for his secretary to type. As guns, planes, and sirens continued to sound (by this time, it was becoming nearly impossible to distinguish the alert from the all clear, so that half of Israel was undoubtedly going down into the shelters while the other half was coming out of them), Mr. Weisgal told a joke. A Jew, he said was walking down the street, crying bitterly. A friend approached and asked him what was the matter.

  “You see,” said the Jew, “I am an optimist.”

  “An optimist?” said the friend. “Then why are you crying?”

  “So,” said the Jew. “You think in these times it’s so easy to be an optimist?”

  Someone turned on the radio, where the code names of units designated for full mobilization were being read out: Alternating Current, Pleasant Shaving, Peace and Greetings, Electric Broiler, Bitter Rice, Silver Lining, Wedding March, Gates of Salvation. There were twenty-three in all, and buses were lining the main street of Rehovoth to pick up the men called to duty.

  There were more thundering sounds, and Mrs. Weisgal said, “When I think of the casualties. When I think of the mothers.” The siren went off again.

  “Don’t listen,” Mr. Weisgal said, and instructed her to read him a letter that had arrived that morning. The letter, written five days before, was about the situation in Israel. “ ‘ . . . I was afflicted by a sense of absolute despair,”’ Mrs. Weisgal read aloud, “ ‘which has since left me.”’ Everyone laughed.

  Toward eleven o’clock, a man with a helmet, a briefcase, and a civil-defense armband came in. “The news is good,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Weisgal asked.

  “I can’t say,” he said, and left.

  Toward afternoon, the sirens became fewer. In a taxi gathering hitchhikers on the route to Tel Aviv, someone, apparently American, said, “There is always the Sixth Fleet, in case something happens.”

  “My impression is that something has happened,” an Israeli replied mildly.

  A passenger suddenly announced in Yiddish that he had four sons at the front—he was not at liberty to reveal which front—and that since he himself had been a member of the Palmach, the commando unit of the pre-independence Army of Israel, he had written them that he hoped they would not give him cause to be ashamed of them. Three of them had been born after the war of 1948. “Aber zie machen gut,” he said firmly. “Unzere kinder machen gut.”

  Tel Aviv, on the first afternoon of the war, was not much changed, except that all windows had been taped in accordance with instructions delivered over Kol Yisroel. Word had come that several kibbutzim along the Gaza Strip were being shelled, that Ein Gev, near the Syrian frontier, was under fire, that Haifa and Jerusalem were being attacked, and that for some reason the resort of Nethanya and the Arab village of Safad were being bombed. People seemed most worried about the civilian population of Jerusalem.
An English translation of Dayan’s speech to the troops was broadcast, announcing that the Arabs were being supported from Kuwait to Algeria. “I need not tell you,” he added, in brief remarks to the civilian population, “that we are a small people but a courageous one . . .”

  On Tuesday morning at five, in Tel Aviv, there was an air-raid alarm (it turned out to have been a mistake); there had been none during the night. Bus service to Jerusalem was almost normal, except that, on account of Israeli Army emplacements, buses had to make a detour of several kilometers through En Karem. On one bus, Kol Yisroel was audible, and, looking over into Jordan from the highway, one could see smoke rising from a town on Jordan’s wedge into Israel and verify the report that Israeli troops were taking Latrun. Because Jerusalem had been shelled throughout the night (the Egyptian general, who, under the terms of the Hussein-Nasser pact, had been put in charge of Jordan’s Army, had often in the past expressed his belief in the shelling of civilians, since it diverted troops to their defense), and was still being shelled by day, most of the population of the city was in shelters. Israeli troops were attacking gun emplacements in the Old City, taking care to observe the order to preserve the monuments of all faiths, if possible. The King David Hotel had incurred minor damage—a tree down, a few broken windows, some slight injuries to members of the staff, but Zvi Avrame, who had been called up, was now wearing a uniform and seemed enormously gratified.