The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (58 page)

The foreign secretary took off his spectacles, breathed on them, and polished each lens in turn with a handkerchief from the top pocket of his Saville Row suit. He seemed to be about to speak, but hesitated, and then he made up his mind. “Quite right, Prime Minister,” he said apologetically. “Somehow, your little country, Mr. Begin, evokes all sorts of high emotional fevers. Stirs up the blood, so to speak.”

Begin, his composure regained, smiled at him, the smile not reaching his eyes. “The story of our people is very much a tale of having to defend ourselves against bouts of irrationality and hysteria,” he said. “It happens in every generation.”

“Quite, quite,” said Prime Minister Thatcher, seemingly mystified at this reflection. And then, desirous of steering into calmer waters, she said in a conciliatory tone, “Let’s talk about our bilateral trade relations. I believe they are excellent.” And for the next ten minutes all concurred that indeed they were, after which the talk began to peter out, and then it was time to go.
74

This conversation remained etched in my mind when, a few years later, still during the Thatcher years, I served as Israel’s ambassador in London, and often encountered passionate expressions of disapproval of Israel’s policies
–
from journalists mainly
–
couched in a language that seemed to me to be more offensive than necessary. When that happened, Lord Carrington’s words would invariably come to mind: “Somehow, your little country evokes all sorts of high emotional fevers. Stirs up the blood, so to speak.”

Why was this so? I wondered. Where did genuine criticism end and bigotry begin?

It did not take long for me to realize that an anti-Semitic bigotry of sorts still lingered in segments of the British landed class, which constituted the true aristocracy of Britain. I encountered it firsthand more than once, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly, including one memorable incident in 1985, during a banquet celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday, at Hampton Court Palace.

The tabloids were reaping an abundant harvest that year from the goings-on in the royal family, and Henry
VIII
’s Great Hall at the palace, with its sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries and soaring ceiling, was abuzz with salacious gossip about Britain’s future king, Charles Prince of Wales, husband of the widely adored Princess Diana, who, it appeared, had taken for himself a mistress. Her name was Camilla Parker Bowles, and she was a married woman. To my right sat a baroness whose name I do not recall, but whose appearance was unforgettable. She had the face of a haughty Pekingese, a long neck noosed in yards of pearls, a prominent Adam’s apple, and she was dressed in a fussy fire-engine red.

“Charles has taken a feather out of Henry the Eighth’s cap, I wager,” she remarked in a tone ringing with reproach. “Did you know that after Henry married Anne Boleyn in fifteen thirty-three he still played hanky-panky with her sister, Mary
–
and their mother, too, right here in Hampton Court. Did you know that?”

I confessed that I hadn’t.

“And at the very same time, he was also conducting an affair with a wench called Elizabeth Blount, also right here in Hampton Court. Did you know that?”

Again, I admitted that I hadn’t.

“And did you know that not only was she his mistress, she gave birth to his only son?”

Once more, I acknowledged my ignorance.

The woman stared sharply at me through her pince-nez as if to say ‘You are a nincompoop,’ and then cast a jaundiced eye at the white-gloved butler, who was obsequiously placing a gold plate of kosher cuisine before me.

“Where are you from?” she snapped.

“Israel,” I said.

“Oh, there. Bah!” and she tucked into her own dish, brimming with contempt.

Whether this was meant as a slur against my beliefs, a slight at my ignorance, or a sweep at my country I did not have time to fathom, for now the woman on my left
–
a Lady Carpenter, wife of the Dean of Westminster Abbey
–
marked my meal and began pontificating about the virtues of religious traditions. She was a trim, middle-aged dowager of pious appearance
–
no make-up, no jewelry, her silvery hair simply done, her dress unadorned. The fellow next to her, a husky, soldierly type in his early seventies, with an aristocratic nose, glossy bald head, and piercing blue eyes, joined in, declaring jovially, “By sheer chance, I partook of a kosher meal myself in New York last week.”

“How interesting,” gasped Lady Carpenter. She sounded quite spellbound.

“I was out with a Moslem chap, a Pakistani,” he elaborated. “And since we couldn’t find a hallal restaurant we ended up in a kosher one. Good chicken soup, I can tell you. Ha, ha!”

He spoke in a refined accent, and a crimson sash crossed his chest, decorated with royal insignia and military honors. Proffering his hand, he said, “My name is Howard, but people call me Norfolk.”

I blushed at my gaucherie, for I had failed to recognize the Duke of Norfolk, Premier Earl of the English peerage and chief layman of the English Catholic church.

“Dr. Inamullah Kahn, that was the Pakistani’s name
–
secretary-
general
of the World Moslem Congress,” he explained. “And we’d just awarded him the Templeton Prize.”

The Templeton Prize is one of the most munificent prizes in the world
–
a tidy $1,500,000
–
and is awarded for innovative contributions to the harmonious coexistence of religion and science. I deduced that the Duke was a member of its panel of judges.

“And do you know,” he piped on, “an influential New York lobby had the effrontery to try and pressure us at the last minute to withdraw the prize.”

“Really, Your Grace?” sighed Lady Carpenter. “How dreadful! But why would they want to do such a thing?” Her voice trailed off into whispery woe.

“Because, Madame,” answered the Duke with alacrity, “Dr.
Inamullah
Kahn is a friend and supporter of Yasser Arafat and his cause, that’s why.”

“And who is this lobby?” I asked, antlers rising.

“Oh, come, come, Ambassador, you know as well as I do who the lobby is.” His expression was prim, his lips a tight smile.

“No. Who?”

“The Jew press of New York, of course.”

“The what?”

“The Jew press of New York,” he gamely repeated.

I could not believe my ears. “You’re an anti-Semite, sir,” I stuttered.

“Am I? It never occurred to me.” He seemed genuinely taken aback.

Apparently alarmed at my breathlessness, Lady Carpenter began rubbing my back, cooing, “Ambassador, please do not let the wounds of two thousand years be reopened. Let me mollify them with the balm of Jerusalem.”

And as she rubbed, the Duke of Norfolk said over and over again, “Nothing personal, old boy
–
nothing personal.”

These theatrics were halted by former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who stepped over and said to me, “What are
you
doing here?”

“I was invited,” I said.

“But didn’t the president ask you to accompany him to Moscow?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh my God, don’t tell me. I’m getting old. I’ve done it again. You’re not Henry Kissinger. You’re the Jordanian ambassador. Forgive me,” and off he strode, genuinely aghast at himself.

Meanwhile, the red-liveried toastmaster began barking for silence, and commanded everybody to rise for the Loyal Toast. Everybody did, and then we all settled down for the speeches.

Orations done, the guests moved into an adjacent grand parlor, where brandy, liqueurs, coffee, and cigars were proffered, and a string quintet was playing Bach. Amid the hubbub I came face to face with the baroness, who was enjoying a tipple. She was standing under a Gainsborough, not far from the secretary of state for Scotland, Malcolm Rifkind, who was engaged in a vehement conversation with the head of the Liberal Party, David Steel. By now a trifle inebriated, the baroness, sneered “Look at them
–
politicians! Talk! Talk! Talk!”

“Scotsmen do seem to have much to talk about,” I bantered, for want of anything better to say.

A derisive expression spread across the baroness’s face, and with a jerk of her chin in Rifkind’s direction, scoffed, “He’s not a Scotsman, he’s one of yours.”

That was enough! Earlier, this insufferable woman had addressed me with a mixture of paternalism and hauteur. Now, it was pure hauteur
–
anti-Semitic hauteur. Irate, I retorted: “How can you say that a man born in Edinburgh, raised in Edinburgh, educated in Edinburgh, represents a constituency in Edinburgh, and is the secretary of state for Scotland, is not a Scotsman?”

The baroness’s lips twisted into a disdainful smile as she pointed in the direction of yet another Jew who was a member of Prime Minister Thatcher’s cabinet
–
the secretary of state for trade and industry, Lord David Young. Scornfully, she hissed, “Young’s an Englishman as much as Rifkind’s a Scotsman.”

Aghast, I began scanning the big room in search of other Jewish members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. “Look,” I said challengingly, “There’s Keith Joseph, secretary of state for education. And over there is Leon Britain, the home secretary. And by the window is Nigel Lawson, the chancellor of the exchequer. And there’s Michael Howard, minister of state for local government
–
in addition to Malcolm Rifkind and David Young. So what do you make of that? How come Mrs. Thatcher has so many Jews in her cabinet?”

Her eyes held a vicious glint, as smoothly, snottily, the baroness answered, “Because Margaret Thatcher is most comfortable among the lower middle class,” and off she went.

Still, while I would come across many a haughty and hidebound aristocrat of the baroness’s breed, there were also numerous high-ranking types who thought Jews admirable and the Jewish State remarkable. I had known one such for years, and had arranged to meet him during my trip to London with Prime Minister Begin shortly after the rather crabby luncheon at 10 Downing Street. The appointment was at yet another refined address, this one at the corner of Pall Mall and Waterloo Place
–
The Athenaeum. The Athenaeum is one of London’s celebrated gentlemen’s clubs, built at a time when Britain ruled the waves and when its masters concentrated their phenomenal power in the drawing rooms of gentlemen’s clubs all along London’s Pall Mall, once the epicenter of the world’s largest empire.

When one enters the Athenaeum, a sign beneath a nude statue catches the eye:
TIES MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES
. A porter in the doorway, with a gaunt face made grand by white muttonchop whiskers, asked me my business. I told him I was looking for Sir Herbert Hardwick.

“Sir Erbert Ardwick is ’ere, upstairs, ’aving a drink,” he advised me.

I found the gentleman at the entrance to an expansive chandeliered parlor. It was a mausoleum of a place, hung with portraits of the Victorian upper crust haughtily gazing upon an array of dozing, reclining and or conversing men: cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, church dignitaries, and other assorted celebrities, all of them over sixty. Sir Herbert had not changed a bit over the years I had known him. He wore a pinstripe suit, held a bowler hat in one hand and a tightly rolled umbrella in the other, and his face was staid and melancholy.

“I’ll just pop these in the cloak room,” he said, indicating his hat and umbrella, and off he strode, with the ramrod posture of a British grenadier.

We had initially met in early 1967, when I was at a gathering in London to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, at which Sir Herbert spoke. It was hosted by a group of parliamentarians
–
friends of Israel
–
in a Westminster reception hall. When the proceedings were done, Sir Herbert asked me if I would care to join him for tea on the parliamentary terrace, and there, munching scones with Devonshire cream, he revealed that his father, whom he referred to as Pater, a former Colonial Office man, had been of the same old Scottish lineage as the famed Lord Arthur James Balfour, and a devout Presbyterian, as was he. It was due to this pedigree that he had been prevailed upon to speak at this annual commemoration of Lord Balfour’s historic 1917 declaration proclaiming in the name of His Majesty’s Government that Britain “views with favor” the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people,” thereby giving the Zionist enterprise its first vote of approval from a significant power. I was to learn, further, that his father had been closely acquainted with Blanche (Baffy) Dugdale, Lord Balfour’s niece, and one of Chaim Weizmann’s closest confidantes.

“Baffy used to conduct a Zionist salon luncheon in the private room of a Soho restaurant, to which my Pater was often bid,” he revealed. “They would dine in the company of such Christian Zionists as Orde Wingate, Wyndham Deeds, and C.P. Scott.” And then, with some fervor, “Indeed, under Pater’s influence, I have been strongly infused in the Hebraism of the Old Testament and the People of the Book. And I can tell you that the Christian religion and civilization owe to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill-repaid. Hence, Israel’s future welfare seems to me of immense moral importance.”

He went on to recount with a self-deprecating chuckle how, back in the 1950s, he had pulled family strings to get himself appointed as a junior diplomat to the British Embassy in Tel Aviv. “But I didn’t last very long,” he said wistfully. “I was so pro-Zionist my ambassador cabled London to say I’d been stricken by what one nowadays calls the Jerusalem syndrome, and was promptly sent packing. All my subsequent postings were to Eastern Europe, where I became something of an expert on the Soviet bloc.”

Upon retirement, given his expertise in Soviet affairs, Sir Herbert became a firm and useful advocate of the “Let My People Go” movement, which lobbied aggressively worldwide for the right of Jews to leave the Soviet Union. This, together with his passion for Israel, brought him periodically to Jerusalem, invariably accompanied by a colleague or two from the Institute of Strategic Affairs, of which he was a senior fellow. It was in the lobby of the King David Hotel that I had next bumped into him, in June 1967, during the excruciatingly tense days leading up to the Six-Day War. Not recognizing one another at first, we both hesitantly searched our memories for the right identification, and his penny dropped first.

“By George,” he warbled, “you’re the chap I had tea with at the Balfour affair a few months ago,” and he pumped my hand, spilling over with goodwill. I responded in kind, and invited him to join the clusters of war correspondents sipping drinks on the hotel’s terrace, in full view of the spectacular Old City walls. Incongruously, Sir Herbert was still wearing his pinstripe suit and bowler hat. His face was more staid and melancholy than ever as he confided the chilling thought that Israel’s days were surely numbered.