Exodus - Leon Uris [102]
In Rome there were debates.
In New York bookies were laying four to one that the Exodus wouldn’t sail.
At the end of the second week Ari granted Mark permission to board the ship. Mark picked what he believed to be the ripe moment and arranged it by preset signals. Since he was the first outsider to board the Exodus his next three reports were carried by every newspaper on the front page.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH EXODUS SPOKESMAN ARI BEN CANAAN:
KYRENIA, CYPRUS (ANS).
Today I became the first correspondent to interview Ari Ben Canaan, the spokesman for the children on the Exodus. I confronted Ben Canaan with the barrage of British reports maintaining that he was a professional Zionist troublemaker and with other Whitehall accusations. We spoke in the wheelhouse of the boat, the only place aboard not teeming with humanity. Today the children seem still to be in top spirits but are starting to show physical effects of their two-week siege.
Ben Canaan, thirty, and a strapping six-footer with black hair and ice-blue eyes, could be mistaken for a movie leading man. He expressed his gratitude to well-wishers around the world and assured me the children were holding up fine. In reply to my questions he answered, “I don’t care about the personal attacks on me. I wonder if the British added that I was a captain in their army during World War II. I admit I am a Zionist troublemaker and I will continue to be one until they keep their promises about Palestine. Whether my work is legal or not is a matter of opinion.”
I pressed him about the British arguments and the importance of the Exodus. “We Jews are blamed for many things and we are used to it. In anything concerning the Palestine mandate that cannot be explained logically and reasonably they drag out the old excuse that it is some sinister plot of Zionism. I am really amazed that they haven’t blamed the Zionists for the trouble they are having in India. Fortunately for us, Gandhi is not Jewish.
“Whitehall is using that tired whipping boy, the mysterious Zionists, to cover three decades of dirty work, lies to both Jews and Arabs, sellouts, double crosses, and betrayals in the mandate. The first promise they broke was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which promised a Jewish homeland, and they have been breaking promises ever since. The latest double cross has come from the Labour party, which, before the elections, promised to open the doors of Palestine to survivors of Hitler’s regime.
“I am astounded at Whitehall’s crocodile tears over our victimizing of children. Every child on the Exodus is a volunteer. Every child on the Exodus is an orphan because of Hitlerism. Nearly every child has lived in either German or British concentration camps for six years.
“If Whitehall is so concerned about the welfare of these children then I challenge them to throw open the gates of Caraolos to inspection of the newsmen. It is nothing more or less than a concentration camp. People are kept behind barbed wire at machine-gun point with insufficient food, water, and medical care. No charges have been brought against these people. But they are being forcibly detained in Caraolos.
“Whitehall talks of our trying to bully them into an unjust solution of the mandate. There are a quarter of a million Jews in Europe who survived out of six million.
“The British quota of Jews allowed into Palestine is seven hundred a month. Is this their ‘just solution’?
“Finally, I argue the right of the British in Palestine. Have they more right to be there than the survivors of Hitler? Let me read you something.”
With that, Ben Canaan took a Bible from the desk of the wheelhouse, opened it to Ezekiel, and read:
“Thus saith the Lord God; When I shall have gathered the house of Israel from the people among whom they are scattered, and shall be sanctified in them in the sight of the nations, then shall they dwell in their land that I have given to my servant Jacob wherein your fathers abode and they shall abide therein and even they and their children and their children’s children forever.”