Thieves in the Night (30 page)

“Then why do they sell their land to the Jews whenever they get a chance?”

“My dear sir—individual greed and patriotic feeling are antagonists as old as the world. The desire to eat one's cake and have it is a general human characteristic.”

“And so you are going to make it your business to check this greed and foster patriotic feelings by prohibiting the sale of land to the Jews….

“We may indeed have to enforce legislation to that effect,” the A.Ch.C. said casually, while wondering where this confounded American intruder got his inside information from.

“You realise, Mr. Chief Commissioner, that such a law, prohibiting the free sale of property to Jews, would be unique in the world—except for National Socialist Germany?”

“I know that if we bring in an Ordinance to that effect-though I wish to point out that nothing has been officially decided yet—the Zionists will raise their usual hue and cry, using precisely your arguments, Mr. Matthews. But the analogy in fact is purely extraneous. Germany has an old-established Jewish population, whereas here such a law would merely aim at protecting the native population against the foreign influx.”

“I thought your Government was pledged to establish a National Home by means of a ‘close settlement of the Jews on the Land'? But I guess I have come to the wrong country.”

The A.Ch.C. looked at his watch. It was the first sign of annoyance he had permitted himself, and he at once effaced this self-indulgence with a charming smile.

“Well—we won't start a legalistic argument, Mr. Matthews. The simple truth of the matter is that we have to balance the conflicting interests of the two communities. We are extremely sorry for the Jews, and it may not be irrelevant to point out that in aiding Jewish refugees Great Britain has played a larger part than any other country in Europe—or outside Europe, if it comes to that. There is, for instance, good reason to believe that a considerable proportion of the Jewish children in Germany whose transfer to this country proved not feasible, will shortly be admitted to the United Kingdom itself. However, we cannot afford to antagonise the Arab world for the sake of the Jews, just as we could not afford to start a world war for the sake of the Czechs. You may say that we have sacrificed the Czechs, and I shall answer you that in order to avoid a world-conflagration this small sacrifice was justified. We have quietly faced the wrath of well-meaning but somewhat hot-blooded young men like yourself, and we were called names and had a very bad Press—but that was a small price to pay for ensuring Europe's peace for our lifetime. You may say and write, Mr. Matthews, that we have no ‘guts'— personally I rather dislike the term—but you will have to admit that we never lacked the courage to incur momentary unpopularity in the interest of lasting good. Our task in this country may be ungrateful, but be assured that we shall carry it through. We have come to terms with Egypt and Iraq, and we have to come to terms with the Arab population in this country, on the basis of a reasonable compromise which will fully safeguard the rights of the Jewish minority. That is the whole issue in a nutshell—and everything else is propaganda and rhetorics….”

There was a short pause; then Matthews heaved himself into an erect position.

“Thank you, Mr. Chief Commissioner,” he said. “That's all I wanted to know. Now we are fixed. I've listened to your reasonable reasoning which will bring the world greater disaster than the ravings of lunatics. So long.”

He lumbered towards the door. The A.Ch.C. affably accompanied him. Then he went back to his armchair. He thought it would perhaps be better if he himself wrote to the organisers of the tournament to cancel Jimmy's entry.

—Well, old man, he thought, to have one leg cut off defending Jewish settlements doesn't seem to satisfy Mr. Matthews. What about the second one? Otherwise he will keep on saying that you have lost your guts.

Answering Colonel Wedgwood's question, the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, said that
1220
illegat immigrants have been prevented from landing in Palestine between February
15
and April
15, 1939.

On March
21, 269
Jews from the steamer
Assandu
had been ordered to return on March
25
to Constanza, their port of departure
. 710
Jews, of whom
698
were from Germany, were prevented from landing from s.s
. Astir
on April
2,
and ordered to return
. 250
Jews were prevented from landing from the ship
Assimi
on April
11,
and the vessel was detained with its passengers at Haifa port and ordered to return
.

The Colonial Secretary was then asked by Mr. Noel-Baker whether, since the Jewish refugees had suffered appallingly, they had been returned when refused permission to land
.

Mr. MacDonald said that they had been returned to their ports of embarkation
.

Mr. Noel-Baker: “Does that mean to concentration camps?
”

Mr. MacDonald: “The responsibility rests on those responsible for organising illegal immigration
.”

The Minister added that the Government had the fullest sympathy with Jewish refugees, but if they allowed one shipload more would follow
.

(From the debate in the House of Commons, April 26 and 27, 1939)

Any commanding officer whose ship or boat has hoisted and is carrying the proper ensign or appropriate flag may pursue any vessel within the territorial waters of Palestine which he believes to be carrying intending immigrants and which does not bring-to when signalled or required to do so. He may also, after having fired a gun as a signal, fire at or into such vessel to compel her to bring-to
.

(Amendment to the Immigration Ordinance,
Gazette Extraordinary
, Jerusalem, April 27, 1939)

According to his new routine of life, Joseph had spent the week-end—that is, Friday afternoon and the Shabbath—at home in Ezra's Tower, and had set out on Sunday morning to his customary round of duties.

He got up at half-past three, jumped noiselessly over Ellen's sleeping body with his child inside it, ran the hundred yards past tower, dining-hut and children's house to the shower-bath, ran back, got dressed, took the imposing dispatch-case which went with his office (it had once belonged to the Dr. Phil.), and was just in time to catch the milk-truck to Haifa. David the driver was surly and unshaven as usual—he suffered from the national disease, duodenal ulcers—so Joseph settled down to sleep in the seat next to him and only woke from time to time when a jolt sent his head bumping against the side frame of the driver's cabin. But the jolts ceased as they reached the metal road, and for a couple of hours there was nothing to disturb his sleep.

He woke, however, as he had intended to, at a particular curve a few minutes past Nazareth, where the road emerging from the lower Galilean hills opened on a sudden, breath-takingly lovely view over the Valley of Jezreel. To the south the valley broadened into a plain about twelve miles wide and flat,
glistening in the new-born sun—a brilliant chess-board with squares of cultivation in dark and lighter green, lemon yellow and sienna. The main Afuleh-Jerusalem road cut sharp and straight across the plain, a white arrow in flight, pointing at the silvery chalk hills of Samaria which embraced the valley in a sweeping semicircle like the walls of an amphitheatre. To the west, this distant and hazy wall ended in the darker pine slopes of Carmel, falling into the pallid sea; to the east, in the aggressive bulk of Mount Gilboa.

But the distant hills were merely the frame of the picture; the feast for Joseph's eyes was the green Valley of Jezreel itself, the cradle of the Communes. Twenty years ago a desolate marsh cursed with all the Egyptian plagues, it had now become a continuous chain of settlements which stretched like a string of green pearls across the country's neck from Haifa to the Jordan. It was the proudest achievement of the Return, the nucleus of the Hebrew State, the valley of valleys. A battlefield throughout the ages, it was grandiose even in its geological features, for its eastern part sloped down into the deepest inland depression of the earth, four hundred feet under sea level. This eastern part was a broiling tropical underworld with temperatures surpassing a hundred degrees in the shade, and it seemed perverse that the oldest of the large Communes—Herod's Well, House Alpha and Josef's Hill—had been set up just in this infernal, swampy, disease-ridden and robber-haunted spot. But twenty years ago land in those savage marshes had been cheap and each square yard of the country had to be bought for hard cash; and the National Fund's only sources of income were charitable donations and the blue collecting-boxes which the jet-eyed, curly-haired children of the race jingled in the East-Ends from Warsaw to New York;—begging-bowls for the purchase of a kingdom. The race proverbial for its financial genius had to buy its national home by acres on the instalment plan, and native speculation soon drove the price of an acre of desert marsh up to the level of a building plot in an industrial town. If this was Jehovah's punishment of the money-changers,
the old desert god had once more proved his vindictive ingenuity. But this time the Colonial Office had outwitted even old Jehovah. No more waste land was to be sold to the homeless. The wooden plough had to be protected against the noisy tractor, the thirsty earth against the artifice of irrigation, the stones on the fields against impious removal and the helpless mosquitoes against the cruel draining of their breeding marshes. For behold, there was still justice in the world which looked after the feeble.

—A jerk of the lorry woke Joseph from his brooding and sent his head straight against the roof of the driver's cabin. He was grateful for the pain which cut the bitter stream of his thoughts and his cramp of impotent hatred. During the last few days it had become almost an obsession. At night, when he tried to settle down to sleep, the stream began its turgid flow. At first it was only a trickle of phrases, of arguments to convince an invisible, impersonal, dumb and almighty opponent. Sometimes this opponent appeared as the copper-faced Police Major who had visited them on the first day; sometimes it was the whole House of Commons whose stilted antics had once enchanted him from the Visitors' Gallery; sometimes the bear-skinned automaton banging his stiff legs down on the gravel in front of Buckingham Palace. But he could never catch the Speaker's eye nor stop the leg-throwing six-footer marching past; and as his plea remained choked in his throat, its pressure increased and the trickle swelled to a torrent, which expanded through his whole body until his stomach contracted in a spasm and he spat green bile into his handkerchief. I shall either get a stomach ulcer, he thought, or join Bauman's terror gang. This is the real alternative. One can reach a point of humiliation where violence is the only outlet. If I can't bite, my wrath will bite into my own bowels. That's why our whole race is ulcerated in the bloodiest literal sense. Fifteen hundred years of impotent anger has gnawed our intestines, sharpened our features and twisted down the corners of our lips.

When at last he fell asleep he had no real dreams, only half-conscious images of torment. He was sitting in the Visitors' Gallery and shouting down to the Speaker with his white wig, but nobody heard his voice and he could never catch that beautiful and dignified figure's eye. He tried to bar the bear-skinned Guard's way, but the six-footer marched through him with his banging legs as if Joseph were transparent air. And once he seemed to hear a suave, cultured voice with the accents of his own University: “In the interest of peace and order, the honourable Members are invited to sit on the drowning men's heads.”

—The nights were bad. But in the morning, instead of trying to get in touch with Bauman or Simeon, he would get on with his complicated duties as a roving Treasurer of the Commune of Ezra's Tower. The Commune was growing rapidly; a third graft had arrived and Joseph knew that for the time being he was indispensable. He longed to have a talk with Simeon but both he and Bauman had gone underground, and though Joseph knew one end of the chain through which he could get in touch with them, he was instructed only to do it in case of urgency. He envied them for having burnt their bridges, and admired them as a little clerk admires the gambler who plays for all or nothing. Oh, for the supreme gift of irresponsibility, the gift to translate feeling into direct action! Oh, for the relief of having one's wrath exploded with a good, home-made bomb! The act of killing already appeared to him divested of its flesh-tearing, physical aspect, free from the angle of death and pain, as an almost platonic act. It was no longer the tactile sensation of the mush which had replaced Naphtali's eye, but the clean, impersonal act of aiming at a spark in the night. What a luxury to press one's finger on a hard metal trigger and get hanged singing the anthem and have done with it—done with the Things to Forget which refused to be forgotten and were being repeated on an ever-increasing scale with ever more lurid details; growing on one, growing into one, clawing at one's brain and bowels, while the waving hands
of the drowned failed to catch the Speaker's eye. There was only one hope of arousing his attention: by the report of the bombs which Bauman's people threw. But that was not his, Joseph's, job. He had to wangle a loan from the Settlement Department for a pump to irrigate two hundred more dunums; and two hundred more irrigated dunums meant a haven for fifty more families.

There was only one relief: his week-ends at home. In the shadow of Ezra's Tower the tragedy became almost unreal and the only problem was whether the new chicken-house should be built first, or the new shower-bath. And there was Ellen, a mainstay of the vegetable garden and mother of his future child; and there was Dina.

The lorry slowly descended among the foothills of Zebulun into the valley. To their left stood the young Balfour Forest with rows of silvery Aleppo pines. They too had been planted by the National Fund and were thus intruder trees, Jewish trees, each slender stem a thorn in the native patriots' eyes who organised raiding parties at night to cut the young trees down and dig the saplings out of the earth; so that during the riots bloody battles were fought between the Hebrew forest-watchers and the killers of trees. What a country, Joseph thought, what a country where each stone and tree is bristling with a high-tension charge and cursed with archaic memories. Your eye rests on a peaceful Arab stone house, but suddenly your brain draws a spark; for lo, you have noticed that one of the stones is part of a Roman column broken by the rebel Maccabeans, or the lintel of a Byzantine synagogue from Bar Giora's days.