I made plain I would not report what his own propaganda bureau wanted, but only what I saw with my own eyes or learned from reliable sources. But what I wrote would be fair.
“That’s all I want,” he said. “Fair. After that the story will tell itself.”
So our deal was struck. I was a freelance with no clients. All I had was a story that deserved to be told and the opposition of a British establishment that seemed determined no one should hear about it.
And somewhere, deep in the bush, the children began to wither and die, but no one knew.
Biafra had been in lockdown since the start of the secession ten months earlier. That meant all borders were closed and the blockade included food. The native Ibos grew their own cassava and yams in ample quantities. Pounded cassava root and pounded yams made the staple diet and never ran out. But both are totally carbohydrate.
It is a fact that an adult needs one gram of pure protein per day to stay healthy. A growing child needs five.
The native population had always raised a few chickens and some small pigs for their eggs and meat. Other than these, there was no protein source and, unperceived, the hens and pigs had been consumed.
The traditional protein supplement had always been fish; not river-caught fish but enormous quantities of Norwegian-imported dried cod called stockfish. These rock-hard sticks of cod went
into the family stew pot, became rehydrated, and served as the family protein ration. For nine months, no stockfish had entered the surrounded and blockaded enclave. The meat/milk sources were gone. The national diet was now almost 100 percent starch.
In the deep bush, mothers noticed their babies’ limbs were withering to sticks. Heads with glazed eyes lolled on weakened neck muscles. Bellies swelled to great drums but full only of air. Thinking their children were hungry, the mothers of the bush fed their offspring more carbohydrates. It would not be until May that they would come out to show their babies to the missionaries, who would know what they were looking at.
My first two months were almost idle. There was little movement on any of the fronts. I had some savings left and decided to take up a long-standing offer from a friend to be his guest on a visit to Israel. So I did.
LIVING HISTORY
Israel in the spring of 1968 was still infused with a spirit of bemused euphoria deriving from its smashing victory of the Six-Day War.
The size of its territory had virtually doubled, more so if one includes the barren wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, long since conceded back to Egypt. The old, confused borders left over from the 1948 war had been swept away. The Nablus Salient was gone. The city of Jerusalem had been conquered, and the holy places, forbidden to Jews by the Mandelbaum Gate, were open for worship.
Diggers were still revealing foot after foot of the long-buried Wailing Wall, the last remaining section of the old Temple of Solomon. There was a countrywide mood of slightly intoxicated optimism.
But the country that had always contained some Palestinian Arabs had now absorbed half a million more, and the problems of the future were still too far ahead to contemplate, had anyone wished, which they did not.
While some have deemed this mood to be conqueror’s arrogance, I choose to accept it as the euphoria of a Dr. Pangloss and his belief that “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” There seemed no problem, including that of a negotiated and lasting peace, that could not be surmounted. Seen from forty-five years later, it was the product not of gloating but of a slightly touching naïveté.
During my stay I determined to see as much as possible of the land, and with the help of my London-based friend, had set up a few points of contact. Starting at the Dan Hotel, Tel Aviv, I headed south out of town for Beersheva and the Negev Desert. There was a man living in almost complete isolation in the Negev writing his memoirs who had agreed to give me a few moments of his valuable time.
There is only one way to see the real Israel, and that is to travel everywhere by the Egged buses, so I took one from the Tel Aviv terminal to Beersheva and changed for the connection to Eilat. They may not be fast and they stop everywhere, but they are cheap and my funds were meager.
Out of Beersheva, we passed the nuclear research facility at Dimona, birthplace of Israel’s nuclear weapons array and mockingly referred to as a “jeans factory.” Then it was the desert.
During National Service, the Hastings in which I had hitched a lift from Lyneham to Malta had refueled at the RAF air base of El Adem in Libya. Otherwise, I had never seen a real desert, let alone motored through one. Later I would see many more, but they are all the same. They just seem to go on and on, a wasteland of dun brown sand and gravel. Only the Bedouin choose to live in them.
After hours of bumping along, we came around the curve of a hill, and far ahead and below was a brilliant patch of green, like a pool table dumped in the middle of nowhere. The green was the irrigated crops of the moshav, or collection of smallholdings, I had come to visit. The bus stopped at the gate, I descended, it broke wind noisily, and headed on to Eilat.
Inside the compound, I was pointed toward a residence that was little more than a Quonset hut standing alone. Outside was a single giant Israeli paratrooper, apparently the only security. He examined my passport, turned, and knocked. A middle-aged housekeeper answered, also looked at the passport, and beckoned me in. “Twenty minutes,” she snapped in English, evidently housekeeper and dragon-guardian. She knocked on a study door and showed me in. Behind a desk cluttered with papers, a tiny man beneath a snow-white candyfloss cloud of hair rose and smiled. I was meeting David Ben-Gurion, once one of many, but now regarded by many as the founding father of Israel.
He explained in perfect English that I created a perfect excuse to break from his labors at his memoirs. We sat in opposing chairs and he looked expectant. I wondered how many interviews to journalists he had given; thousands, probably, many famous, and now to a complete unknown.
I calculated that old men can often recall with total clarity what they did in their youth, while having completely forgotten whom they had dinner with last week. I know the feeling too well. It seemed to me he must have been badgered many times for details of the Six-Day War, even though it was Levi Eshkol who was premier at the time.
“When you landed on the shore of Israel for the first time in 1906, sir, what was it like back then?”
He stared for several seconds, then came alive, as if jolted by an electric charge. Then he started to talk, eyes closed, recalling those very first early days. He was not a statesman back then, he was a penniless immigrant from a poor Jewish shtetl in Russian Poland.
He and his companions had berthed at the Arab port of Jaffa, but they were not welcome and could get no lodgings, so they trekked north and camped among the sand dunes. They spoke Russian and Yiddish, not modern Hebrew, which had not yet been standardized.
They were camped in a range of low sandhills and it was spring. The Hebrew word for “hill” is tel, and for “spring” aviv.
It took six days on a donkey to travel from the coast of this Turkish province to Jerusalem, a journey he made with a petition to the Ottoman governor for land. He was there ten years later, when the Ottoman Empire fell. He saw General Allenby of the conquering British Army enter Jerusalem.