Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [80]
Given that development, Eilat burst like a racehorse from the starting gate. Its lifeline, the highway to Beersheba, was opened in 1958. As the artery of the Negev’s future, the road has made possible the expansion of the desert and Dead Sea chemical industries whose products, borne on diesel-powered fifty-ton trucks with eight pairs of wheels, now rumble into the docks of the new port. The port can accommodate four ships at the pier and three tankers at the oil jetty. Plans have been drawn up to double present capacity. Goods leave Eilat bound for Abyssinia, Iran, Burma, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, and Australia. Rubber imported from Singapore is manufactured into tires at Petah Tikvah in the north, to be re-exported from Eilat to Iran as finished product. The manager of the port is a young man of twenty-four who came to Eilat three years ago after his army service. To improve his command of English for dealing with shipmasters, he was going to England for two and a half months. Accustomed to government grants and the largesse of foundations, I asked who was sending him. “I send myself,” he replied haughtily.
In addition to being a port, Eilat is booming as a tourist resort for sun-seekers and skin divers. It has twelve hotels of varying size and luxury, a tour by glass-bottomed boat to view the exotic fishes of the Red Sea, three museums, including a “musée de l’art moderne,” a library, an aquarium, a zoo, a park, a shopping plaza, a municipal hall of immodest proportions obviously designed for a town three times the present size, a 120-bed hospital under construction, two movie houses and a third under construction, a Philip Murray Community Center jointly established by the CIO and Histadrut, Israel’s labor federation, two local airlines serving Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba, a bus line, three banks, three filling stations, two synagogues, two bars, and one mayor of dynamic capacity.
He is Joseph Levy, aged forty-three, a native of Egypt who in 1948 was arrested in Cairo as a Zionist youth leader and sent to a prison camp in the Sinai peninsula. Held there for a year, he planned an escape to the nearest point in Palestine, which happened to be Eilat, but was released before he could make the attempt. Reaching Israel, as it had now become, by way of Marseilles, he made for Eilat, having on the way talked himself into a job as manager of an airline branch office about to be opened there. He arrived in 1949, one of Eilat’s Mayflower generation, and ten years later was mayor.
A dark-haired, dark-skinned, quiet-mannered man, he wore when I saw him recently an air of enforced calm, as if he felt that were he to let himself go in reaction to all the demands, pressures, and harassments of his job, he might fly apart in a thousand pieces. He was entirely self-possessed, with the self-assurance that comes from having tackled and, if not solved, at least come through a chronic multiplicity of problems, and from acquiring the knowledge en route that no one of them need be fatal. Besides Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke English, French, and Italian, all of which he had been taught as a boy at the Jewish school in Cairo because, as the headmaster had explained to protesting parents, “Who knows today what may happen in the world? I must do what I can to prepare these children for anything.”
Mayor Levy knew all about Mayor Lindsay of New York, kept similar hours, and left us after dinner to attend a meeting at ten-thirty. He had just been re-elected for a second term by an increased majority and was supported by what he called a “wall-to-wall coalition” in the municipal council—that is, without other-party opposition on the council, a condition virtually unique in Israel. He ascribed it to the pioneers’ sense of solidarity in Eilat. Out on the perimeter, too distant from the rest of the country to draw either water from the national carrier