Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [36]
From 8 May to 22 May we were in Israel, coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary celebrations. Neither of us had ever been before. I had missed going with Hugh (a strong supporter of the state) several times, for trivial reasons of illness, children, etc. Harold was also a supporter; I didn’t know why he had never visited it: his parents for example went at least once. I kept an elaborate Diary, typed daily while Harold had his bath, which, reread another thirty years later, gives me a mixture of pleasure and sorrow, even more than most Diary entries.
8–22 May
We are staying at the so-called artists’ colony, Mishkenot Sha’anim. There are many labels in the kitchenette saying ‘Meat’ and ‘Dairy’. I resolve not to let the side down by getting things wrong; Harold quite indifferent to this subject, I noted. Later however his religious past comes to our rescue when we get completely lost trying to return to our pad after dinner and the numbers are in Hebrew. Harold suddenly recalls his Bar Mitzvah lessons (he gave up the practice of religion thereafter) and saves the day by locating our apartment.
There was a magic moment in the early morning when I woke to the sound of Radio 3, and it was Rostropovich playing Bach, the Sarabande in G. To my surprise when I came to, I was in Israel … and the noise coming through the wall was Rostropovich himself practising for his concert in the evening. We later discovered, puzzled by the absence of this item on the programme, that he was practising for his third encore, for which he returned with great reluctance owing to the tumultuous demands of the audience. Quite right too.
Security is intense, beginning at the airport – nothing which we had remotely experienced, but travellers to Israel had been blown up at Orly Airport shortly before we departed. It was summed up by Harold looking up in a crowded shopping street and seeing a soldier with a gun sitting just above us: ‘Looking for a familiar face in the crowd.’ The security provided one amusing moment when the very young female soldier-interrogator asked, looking at our passports: ‘Pinter. Fraser. Why are you here together?’ ‘We are lovers,’ declared Harold, opening his arms wide. This tough heroine looked deeply embarrassed.
We both believed strongly in the right of Israel to exist, a point of view from which Harold never deviated, despite his criticisms, publicly expressed – which he thought to be his duty as a Jew – of the state in later years in its treatment of the Palestinians. I note from my Diary that we never met any Arabs, although we met many ‘liberal’ Israelis, admired Shimon Peres and the Mayor Teddy Kollek. We both read Moshe Dayan’s autobiography while we were there and pondered the problem represented by the dreadful yo-yo of Israel’s existence. Without military strength, it would surely have been extinguished in 1978. Yet Begin (the new PM) seems far from the democratic and secular values on which the state was founded.
A cousin of Harold’s who lives in Israel and was a pioneer says: ‘I’m sorry you come here when we have a Fascist regime.’ He’s rather disagreeable and out to annoy because he clearly resents Harold’s arrival. He is a strong Socialist and explains the Kibbutz principle to us: ‘The man who negotiates a million-dollar deal and the man who picks a tomato are paid the same.’ I see from my Diary that I continue to ponder the question of settlements – Americans and Indians all over again, who is right? Is there any right in history? – without of course reaching any conclusion. All the same … Instead we concentrate on the thirtieth anniversary concert held in the great valley below Mishkenot, in Jerusalem.
Ten thousand people. Real cannons beneath us roar in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 symphony, the only firing, although several people mutter: ‘an opportunity for Arafat’. At the end Harold reveals the real reason he didn’t come before, not covered by the terse reply he generally gives to