Leon Uris (95 page)

It was choppy and the plane bounced badly as he tried to get height. He “turned the corner” at the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and beelined up the center of the Red Sea with Saudi Arabia on one side and Egypt on the other.

Hanna came in and she, too, was green. “Can’t you make this plane stop bouncing?” she said. “They’re all throwing up in there.”

Foster shut off the heat in the main cabin. “Get in there and open the air vents. I’ll try to get a little higher. The cold air will straighten them out.”

His head throbbed from the hangover. Why did he ever let Stretch Thompson talk him into this?

In another half hour, Hanna returned. “They’re all complaining that they are freezing ... so am I.”

“You got your choice—if I turn on the heat they’ll start vomiting again.”

“Let them freeze,” Hanna mumbled, and returned to her passengers.

In a few moments she ran into the cabin shrieking and screaming in Hebrew.

“Speak English!”

Hanna pointed to the main cabin. “Fire ... they’ve started a fire to keep warm.”

The plane was on automatic pilot and Foster tore out, throwing bodies to right and left. A small fire was going in the middle of the floor. He stamped it out in a rage and went to Hanna, who sagged limply by the compartment door.

“Do you know how to talk to these people?”

“Yes ... Hebrew ...”

Foster shoved the intercom microphone into her hands. “Now you tell them the next one who moves out of his place is going for a swim in the Red Sea!”

The Yemenites had never heard a loud-speaker before. When they heard Hanna’s voice they all began pointing to the ceiling and, terrified, they cried and cringed.

“What the hell’s the matter with them? What did you tell them?”

“They’ve never heard it before. They think it’s God commanding them.”

“Good. Don’t tell them no different.”

Things went fairly well for the next few hours. There were a few minor incidents, nothing bad enough to endanger the plane. Foster had just begun to relax when he heard another loud commotion from the main cabin. He closed his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he sighed, “I’ll be a good Christian from now on. Just let this day end.”

Hanna returned.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Foster mumbled.

“Tex,” she said, “you are the godfather of a baby boy.”

“What!”

“We’ve just had a birth.”

“No ... no ...
no!
”

“It’s all right,” Hanna said. “Giving birth is a very routine matter with them. Mother and son are resting well.”

He closed his eyes and gulped. Nothing more happened for an hour—suspiciously, Foster thought. The little people got used to the sound of the engines of the “eagle” and began to doze off one by one, tired from their ordeal. Hanna brought a bowl of hot broth to Foster and they began to laugh over the events of the day ... Foster asked Hanna a lot of questions about the Yemenites and the war.

“Where are we now?”

Foster, pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and radio operator, looked up at the map. “We’ll be turning the corner pretty soon and go up the Gulf of Akaba. On the way down I was able to see the battle lines in the desert.”

“I hope the war will be over soon.”

“Yeah, war’s rough. Say, how in hell did you ever get roped into a job like this? Whatever they pay you, it’s worth double.”

Hanna smiled. “I don’t get paid for this.”

“Don’t get paid?”

“No. I was sent here. I may go out with these people to build a settlement or I may continue this run.”

“I don’t dig you at all.”

“It is rather hard to explain. Sometimes outside people don’t understand how we feel. Money means nothing to us. Getting these people into Israel means everything. Sometime I’ll explain it better.”

Foster shrugged. A lot of strange things were happening. Well, it didn’t matter, he thought. It was worth the ride, but once on a run like this was enough.

After a while he pointed ahead. “That’s Israel,” he said.

Hanna ran to the microphone.

“What the hell you doing!”

“Please let me tell them, Tex. They’ve been waiting for this moment for ... thousands of years.”

“They’re liable to tear the plane apart!”

“I promise ... I’ll make them stay calm.”

“Well ... go on.” He set the automatic pilot again and went back to make sure they didn’t blow the plane up. Hanna made the announcement.

A fantastic scene of jubilation broke out. Crying, singing, laughing, praying. Whoops of joy—dancing—hugging.

“My God,” Foster marveled, “they didn’t make this much fuss when we beat Georgia Tech in the Cotton Bowl.”

A Yemenite woman took his hand and kissed it. He pulled away and returned to the controls. They continued cheering and singing all the way to Lydda. As the plane touched the end of the runway the din rose above the sound of the engines.

Foster watched them pour out of the plane, fall on their knees, and kiss the ground of Israel, weeping.

“Good-by, Tex,” Hanna said. “I am sorry you are leaving, but have a good time in Paris.”

Foster J. MacWilliams came slowly down from the plane. He looked at the scene of bustle. Ambulances and buses stood by. There were dozens of girls like Hanna mingling among the little Yemenites, calming them and joining in their joy. Foster froze at the bottom of the steps and a strange new feeling churned inside him.

He did not even see Stretch Thompson rush out for him.

“Good go, Foster baby! How’d the crate hold up?”

“Huh?”

“I said, how’d she fly?”

“Like an eagle.”

A half dozen officials from immigration pumped Foster’s hand and pounded his back.

“How’d they behave?”

“Was it a routine flight?”

Foster shrugged. “Routine,” he said, “just routine.”

Stretch led Foster away from the scene of jubilation. Foster stopped and looked back for a second and Hanna waved to him and he waved back.

“Well, Foster, you can go to Paris now. I’ve got my crews in and we dug up another plane.”

“If you’re in a jam, Stretch, I
could
take one more run. But it would be my last.”

Stretch scratched his head. “I don’t know ... Well, maybe I can sign you on for one run—to try out the new ship.” Hooked! Stretch said in glee to himself. I got the bastard hooked!

It was the beginning to Operation Magic Carpet.

Stretch Thompson, the erstwhile King Crab King, brought in rough-and-ready American flyers who had flown the Berlin airlift. Each new pilot and crew in turn became obsessed with the mission of bringing the Yemenites to their Promised Land.

Many times the planes were almost ready to come apart. Yet, no craft was ever lost, despite being overworked and underserviced. The pilots on Magic Carpet began to believe that the planes were being divinely sustained so long as they carried Yemenites.

Foster J. MacWilliams never did get to Paris. He flew the Aden run until all the Yemenites were evacuated and then he went on to Operation Ali Baba, the airlift of the Iraqi Jews from Bagdad. Foster worked longer and harder hours than any pilot in the history of aviation. As soon as his ship would land at Lydda with a load of immigrants, he would grab a few hours sleep right at the airport while his plane was being serviced. As soon as the plane was ready, he flew out again. In the next few years Foster flew four hundred missions covering millions of miles and bringing in nearly fifty thousand Jews to Israel.

He kept swearing that each trip was his last, right up to the time he married Hanna and took an apartment in Tel Aviv.

Magic Carpet was the beginning. They came from the hinterlands of Kurdistan and Iraq and Turkey.

A warlike lost tribe of Jews in Hadhramaut in the Eastern Protectorate fought their way to Aden.

They poured out of the displaced persons camps in Europe.

Jews came to Israel from France and Italy and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and Rumania and Bulgaria and Greece and Scandinavia.

Across the breadth of northern Africa they arose from the
mellahs
of Algeria and Morocco and Egypt and Tunisia.

In South Africa, the wealthy Jewish community and the most ardent Zionists in the world went to Israel.

They came from China and India where they had settled three thousand years before.

They came from Australia and Canada and England.

They came from the Argentine.

Some walked through burning deserts.

Some flew on the rickety craft of the airlift.

Some came in jam-packed holds of cattle freighters.

Some came in deluxe liners.

They came from seventy-four nations.

The dispersed, the exiles, the unwanted came to that one little corner of the earth where the word Jew was not a slander.

T
HE TRICKLE BECAME A STREAM
and then a deluge of humanity.

The exodus soon doubled, then began to triple, the population of Israel. The economy, ruptured by war, buckled under the flood of immigrants. Many came with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Many were old and many were ill and many were illiterate, but no matter what the condition, no matter what the added burden, no Jew was turned away from the doors of Israel.

It was not a melting pot, it was a pressure cooker, for they came from every corner of the earth and had lived under every variety of circumstance.

Tent cities and ugly corrugated-tin-shack villages sprang up to blot the landscape from the Galilee to the Negev. Hundreds of thousands of people lived “under canvas,” in makeshift hovels, breaking down the medical, educational, and welfare facilities.

Yet there was an attitude of optimism all over the land. From the moment the downtrodden set foot on the soil of Israel they were granted a human dignity and freedom that most of them had never known, and this equality fired them with a drive and purpose without parallel in man’s history.

Every day new agricultural settlements sprang up. The immigrants went out to attack the wastes and the desert with the same fervor that the early pioneers had shown in rolling back the swamps.

Cities and towns seemed to spring up from the earth.

South Africans and South Americans and Canadians poured money into industry. Factories were built until the manufacturing potential reached one of the highest levels in Africa or Asia. General scientific, medical, and agricultural research reached an advanced stage.

Tel Aviv expanded into a bustling metropolis of a quarter of a million people, and Haifa grew into one of the most important ports on the Mediterranean. In both cities, heavy industry sprang up. New Jerusalem, the capital and educational center of the new nation, expanded into the hills.

Chemicals, drugs, medicines, mining, engineering, shoe and clothing manufacturing—the list grew into thousands of items. Cars were assembled and buses were built. Tires were made and airstrips laid down, and a network of highways spanned the nation.

Housing, housing, housing—people needed homes, and the concrete and steel skylines pushed farther into the suburbs almost by the hour. The sound of the hammer, the music of the drill, the concrete mixer, the welding torch never stopped in Israel!

The arts flourished. Bookstores lined Herzl Street and Allenby Road. In every
kibbutz
and in every home and in every
moshav
shelves were filled with books written in a dozen languages. Musicians, painters, writers put this dynamic new society into words and on canvas and into melody.

From Metulla to Elath, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv there was the electrifying feel and smell of one huge boom town.

Yet life was brutally hard. Israel was a poor and unfertile country and every single advance was made with sweat. Workers labored exhausting hours for little pay. Those out in the settlements fighting the soil toiled under nearly unbearable conditions. All the citizens were taxed to the breaking point to pay for the new immigrants pouring in. Clawing, bleeding, conquering with their bodies and minds, they made the tiny nation live and grow.

A national airline took to the skies.

A merchant marine flying the Star of David began to sail to the corners of the earth.

The people forged ahead with a determination that captured the heart of the civilized world. Young Israel stood out as a lighthouse for all mankind, proving what could be done with will power and love. No one in Israel worked for comfort in his own lifetime: it was all for tomorrow, for the children, for the new immigrants coming in. And in the wake of this drive, the tough young
sabra
generation emerged a generation never to know humiliation for being born a Jew.

Israel became an epic in the history of man.

The Negev Desert composed half the area of Israel. It was for the most part a wilderness, with some areas which resembled the surface of the moon. This was the wilderness of Paran and Zin where Moses wandered in search of the Promised Land. It was a broiling mass of denuded desolation where the heat burned down at a hundred and twenty-five degrees over the endless slate fields and deep gorges and canyons. Mile after mile of the rock plateaus would not give life to so much as a single blade of grass. No living thing, not even a vulture, dared penetrate.

The Negev Desert became Israel’s challenge. The Israelis went down to the desert! They lived in the merciless heat and they built settlements on rock. They did as Moses had done: they brought water from the rocks, and they made life grow.

They searched for minerals. Potash was pulled from the Dead Sea. King Solomon’s copper mines, silent for eternities, were made to smelt the green ore again. Traces of oil were found. A mountain of iron was discovered. The northern entrance to the Negev, Beersheba, became a boom town with a skyline springing up on the desert overnight.

The greatest hope of the Negev was Elath, at the southern tip on the Gulf of Akaba. When Israeli troops arrived at the end of the War of Liberation it consisted of two mud huts. Israel had the dream of making a port here with a direct route to the Orient, someday when the Egyptians lifted the blockade of the Gulf of Akaba. They built in preparation for that day.