The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (5 page)

Charlton:
I’m expecting Mr. Clow [superintendent of the Nablus jail] at five o’clock, and I’ll ask him if he will carry out the executions. I cannot guarantee that he will.

Thorne:
Under the circumstances, and in view of the fact that Clow may not get here in time, and given the importance of the time factor, I’m going to Haifa immediately and inform Government of the situation. [Haifa was the nearest place with a secure telephone line.]

Later, Thorne phoned Hackett from Haifa:

Thorne:
Government confirms the executions must go forward as arranged. If Charlton still refuses to carry them out, either you or Clow must do so under all circumstances. Even if Charlton has a change of heart he has become so excited he won’t be in a fit state to carry them out, so there is no use in pressing the matter further.

At 5.30
p.m.
Clow, the superintendent of the Nablus prison, arrived at Acre.

Hackett by phone to Thorne:
Clow is here. He will carry out the executions if that is Government’s final instruction. He is pressing for a postponement though.

Thorne:
A postponement is out of the question. The executions must be carried out as ordered. You have confirmed that the warrant is made out to “the superintendent of Acre prison” [and not to Charlton by name]. So I have relieved Mr. Charlton of that post and have appointed Mr. Clow as superintendent in his stead.

Hackett to Thorne
[at midnight]: The tensions have relaxed. There will be no hitch in the executions.

And, indeed, there was none: Avshalom Haviv was hanged at four in the morning, Meir Nakar at 4:25, and Yaakov Weiss at 5:00.

No one in the Acre jail slept that night. One prisoner, whose Irgun name was Natan but whose real name was Chaim Wasserman, was in a nearby cell, and he smuggled out a letter to Menachem Begin describing what he saw and heard. He wrote:

Early this morning our three comrades went heroically to the gallows. We were already aware what was going to happen between four and five in the morning, and pressed against the bars with bated breath watching haplessly what was going on around the cell. The prison superintendent, Major Charlton, had left the place yesterday afternoon and was not seen again. Toward evening a party of hangmen arrived.

The officers went in and informed the condemned men they were to be executed between four and five in the morning. Their reply was to sing Hatikva and other songs in powerful voices. They then shouted to us that the hangings would begin at four o’clock, in this order: Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, Yaakov Weiss. They added: “Avenge our blood! Avenge our blood!”

We shouted back, “Be strong! We are with you, and thousands of Jewish youth are with you in spirit.” They replied, “Thanks,” and went on singing.

At two a Sephardic rabbi whom we could not recognize from afar [Rabbi Nissim Ohana] was brought and stayed in the cell fifteen minutes.

At four in the morning Avshalom began singing Hatikva, and we joined in loudly, pressing against the bars. At once armed police came up to the visitors’ fence near our cell. At 4.03 Avshalom was hanged. At 4.25 we were shaken by the powerful singing of Meir. Hardly able to breathe we nevertheless joined in. He was hanged at 4.28. At five o’clock the voice of Yaakov, this time alone, penetrated our cell, singing Hatikva. Again we joined in. Two minutes later he was hanged. Each of the bodies was left hanging twenty minutes before being carried off, one by one.

The chief hangmen were Hackett, Inspector of Prisons, and Clow, superintendent of the Nablus jail.

At dawn we informed the prison officers through an Arab warder that we would not be responsible for the life of any Englishman who dared enter the jail yard. We declared a fast and prayed. Later in the morning we found the following inscription on the wall of the cell of the condemned: “They will not frighten the Hebrew youth in the Homeland with their hangings. Thousands will follow in our footsteps.” Next to it was the Irgun insignia and their three names in the order they were executed.

News of the execution quickly seeped out, the whole country was put under curfew, and Menachem Begin made good on his threat
–
gallows for gallows. Sergeants Martin and Paice were summarily tried and duly hung, and it was the following day, that I, a Manchester school lad, had shivered at the sight of the blood-red graffiti on the synagogue wall, “HANG THE JEW TERRORIST BEGIN.”

The grisly images of their bodies swinging from eucalyptus trees in a Netanya grove filled the front pages of British newspapers, and the public outcry was huge. But Begin remained undaunted. “Flogging for flogging, hanging for hanging, until all capital punishment ceases,” he raged on a poster plastered on the walls of every Jewish quarter in Palestine in the dead of night. This measure for measure reprisal ultimately worked. Whitehall, humiliated into submission, quietly ordered a stop to capital punishment, a surrender which only served to deepen the frustration of an already demoralized Britain which, by 1947, was no longer great.

Exhausted and bankrupted by World War
ii
, its influence on world affairs was essentially ended. Unemployment was high, austerity was everywhere, and everything was rationed. Pubs closed early for lack of beer. And on that particular oppressive August day in 1947 after the sergeants had been hung, the pub regulars, with nothing else to do, sat around feeding each other’s rage at the gruesome news. It didn’t take much for someone here and for someone there to spread the thought that it was time to show the Jews what real Englishmen thought of them. By late afternoon a mob had formed up and moved on Cheetham Hill Road, the heart of the Manchester Jewish ghetto.

Yelling “Yids go back to Palestine,” “Beat up the Jews,” “Down with the Sheenies,” “Kick the kikes,” and all sorts of other jingoistic slogans, the rioters flung stones and bricks at Jewish shop windows, homes, synagogues, and social halls. In one, a Jewish wedding was being celebrated, and like the men of Sodom at the door of Lot, the rabble pounded savagely on the hall’s doors, which the terrified celebrants inside were trying to block. Saved in the nick of time by the arrival of the police, the horde was broken up temporarily but quickly regrouped to surround the place, howling and hurling threats and abuse and muck through its open windows.

Later that evening, the mob massed again, but this time they were met by a phalanx of vigilante Jewish ex-servicemen. The police, under orders to act firmly, broke up the scuffles, and by the end of the melee Cheetham Hill Road looked as it had a few years before, when it had borne the blast of German bombs. As far as the eye could see, broken glass littered the sidewalks, and shiftless thugs hung about nursing bruises amid wreckage of their own doing.

The next day, in school, I was accosted in class by a bully of a fellow whose father was serving with the British Police Force in Palestine. He had me pinned to the floor and was about to punch me in the nose when in walked our geography teacher, a fellow called Hogden, who bellowed, “Haffner”
–
that was my original family name
–
“what’s going on?”

Pudgy, with a florid face and side-whiskers, and with a tendency to doze off after setting us an exam, Hogden automatically picked on me not only because I was a Jew but, equally, because I was not of the Church of England. Hogden had an aversion to anybody who was not of the Church of England. To him, there was only one path that led to the Almighty, and he was sure it did not pass through the synagogue or through Rome.

“Nothing, sir,” I stammered, straightening myself up. “Nothing’s going on.”

“Oh yes there is, sir,” blurted the bully. “Haffner’s terrorist boss, Begin, strung up our two sergeants and he’ll be hanging my dad next.”

“Is that so, Haffner?” said Hogden in a voice brimming with scorn. “Would your Mr. Begin do a thing like that?”

“No, sir.”

Hogden carried a long cane which he would frequently use on his wall map to point out the vast extent of the British Empire’s dominions and colonies that stretched over an immense proportion of the globe. He handed me the cane, and smirked: “I want you to show the class on the map exactly where your Mr. Begin is carrying out his atrocities against our lads who are risking their lives to serve our country.” Turning toward the class, he asked, “Who’s risking their lives to serve our country, boys?”

“Our lads, sir,”

“Exactly! So, come on”
–
he had me by the collar and was frog-marching me to the map
–
“show us where your Palestine is.”

Classmates sniggered and made faces.

“Here, sir,” I stuttered, indicating the slender strip of territory on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean Sea.

“Quite right! Are you a Zionist, Haffner? Does Haffner look like a Zionist, boys?”

“Yes sir.”

“What does he look like, boys?

“A Zionist, sir.”

“And your mother’s from Romania, is she not? Her English could do with a bit of a polish, I would think. What could Haffner’s mother’s English do with, boys?”

“A bit of a polish, sir.”

“So, tell us, are there lots of Zionists in Romania
–
terrorists, too, perhaps?”

Like a zoologist bringing a reallive orangutan to his class, Mr. Hogden had me, the son of a native Zionist Romanian, as his exhibit. He knew of my mother’s origins because, to my everlasting mortification, she had once introduced herself to him in her heavily-accented English at a parents’ evening.

“Now show us on the map exactly where your mother comes from,” he sneered.

I had no idea where my mum came from, exactly. I knew about
der heim
–
the old homestead, in a place called Negresht
–
but I didn’t have a clue where Negresht was.

“Stop idling,” snapped Hogden. “You’re keeping the class waiting.” And to drive the point home he swished his cane this way and that over my head.

To this day I cannot fully explain what happened next. All I know is that my humiliation and despair yielded unexpectedly to an irresistible surge of courage.
“
Geh in drerd
, sir,” I blurted out.

“Gay in what?” hissed Hogden.

“
Geh in drerd
, sir,” I repeated intrepidly.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s the name of my mother’s village, sir.”

“Is it? And where exactly is it? Show us on the map.”

“Here, sir,” said I, pointing to the Carpathian Mountains.

He peered over my shoulder: “I can’t see any Gay-in-something.”

“No sir. It’s a small village, too small for this map.”

Hogden gazed intently at the Carpathian Mountains. “What did you say the name was again?”

“
Geh in drerd
, sir.”

The bigot stroked his chin and mused out loud, “Ah yes, of course. The name has a distinctive Latin ring to it, which is most characteristic of the Romanian language whose origins are largely Latin. What are the origins of the Romanian language, boys?”

“Largely Latin, sir.”

At which point the bell rang, causing Hogden to gather up his belongings and make his exit, causing me to feel a huge rush of jubilation. For I had just given this anti-Semite his comeuppance.
“
Geh in drerd
” is Yiddish for “Go to hell,” and as far as I was concerned, I had feathered and tarred him good and proper.

Perhaps it was because I had by this time discovered a religious Zionist youth movement called Bnei Akiva
–
Akiva’s children, named after the ancient scholar-warrior hero of the Jewish war of freedom against the Romans
–
that I dared be so impudent and bold. Today, when every value is contested and contestable, some readers might find it difficult to understand how, after the Holocaust, one such as me could become besotted to the point of almost mystical worship, with the idea that a new sort of religious Jew was called for, a scholar-peasant-fighter dedicated to building Utopia in the Promised Land through the
establishment
of religious kibbutz settlements to redeem the barren wastes and hasten the day of national freedom.

The romance of it so seized my imagination that a week or so later, when I graduated high school, I joined a training farm in the English countryside to ready myself for a life of pioneering and toil on the soil of Eretz Yisrael. And being such an exemplary devotee of this
Bnei Akiva ideal, I was selected to travel to Jerusalem to attend a year-long course for cadres of Zionist activists at The Institute for Overseas Youth Leaders, commonly known as the
Machon
. It was a time when visas to Palestine were so hard to come by that, in obtaining one, I decided in my own mind I would not come back.

Came the day of departure, Monday the third of November, 1947, and I found myself waving farewell to an adoring family while listening to the most beautiful melody a young man heading for adventure can possibly hear: the steamy puff and jerk of the train pulling out of the railway station. I was eighteen, and I was on my way to Marseille to board a ship called the
Aegean Star
bound for Palestine.

As the train gently gathered pace and the waving hands of my brothers and sisters vanished from view, my excitement was suddenly moderated by melancholy
–
a stab of emotion that left me unstrung. It was a strange and nervous unease. I was leaving home, possibly for good. God knows when I would see my family again, not least my mother, who was bedridden with cancer. I opened the notebook which I had bought as a diary, and spontaneously scribbled on its first page: