Jerusalem is one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It is small, set high in the Judean hills and built from a pale honey-coloured stone that, at certain times of day, glows gold. The desert air is clean. Standing on the Mount of Olives, looking across at Jerusalem’s walls and domes, one can pick out the churches that celebrate the life of Jesus, and his last hours—the place of the Last Supper is on a hill to the left, and the Garden of Gethsemane, its foliage surprisingly dark green and luxuriant, is just below, to the right. The sky above Jerusalem as seen from this hilltop has an unusually brilliant, pure light. It is, people say, the outermost garment of the Lord.
Hawke first saw the city in 1971. He came upon it suddenly, rounding a bend in the mountain road. He recalled,
The physical impact of Jerusalem on me was almost, in the literal sense of the word, indescribable. It conjured up so much from my background, my knowledge of the Bible . . . I don’t know how often I’ve been there since, but every time I’ve felt a thrill as the car rounds a brow of the hill, and there it is!
Jerusalem: City of David; execution place of Christ; the town from which Mohammed’s soul, resting a moment upon a rock, soared upwards into Heaven. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, Jews in the Diaspora prayed for almost 2000 years and, if they were Orthodox, left a part of their houses unbuilt, to signify temporary residence outside the Holy City of the Holy Land.
The city has changed owners often, for it has the sacred sites of three great reformist religions. When Hawke first went there Israelis were still exulting that they had recaptured east Jerusalem and the Wall, all that is left of the Second Temple, from Jordan. The Wall looks like any old wall except that at the height of a man’s head and hands, on the left side, and slightly lower—the height of a woman’s—on the right, its stones are darkened and have a buttery glaze from the pressing of millions of humans against them. And between all the stones within human reach there are strips of paper, hundreds of thousands of them, each one a prayer. Hawke was taken to the Wall and inserted his own prayer: May Labor win the 1972 election. A few years later at least one Israeli inserted a prayer: May Bob Hawke become Prime Minister of Australia.
Hawke is loved in Israel. Initially, Israelis were sceptical of him.
He went there when he did, and in circumstances that obliged him to take a more than usually active interest in the country, almost by accident. In 1969 the ALP Senator Sam Cohen died during the election campaign. His widow, Judith (later Justice Cohen), and friends wanted to celebrate Cohen’s memory and achievements. At the urging of Clyde Holding (leader of the Opposition in the Victorian Parliament, later Labor MHR), a Gentile with the status of ‘a Jew among Jews’ in Australia, it was decided to reject a plan that would have made Cohen’s memorial some gift to Israel—a building at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem was favoured—and instead to send a trade unionist or a member of the Left-wing of the ALP to visit the country. On return, the visitor would be required to give a Sam Cohen Memorial Lecture about Israel to an invited audience. Holding was of the generation, as was Hawke, that in youth had been stunned by news of the Holocaust and then exhilarated by the founding of the state of Israel, in which H. V. Evatt, as Australia’s Minister for External Affairs and Chairman of the General Assembly of the UN, had played a leading role.
Holding showed an uncanny foresight about a change in ALP attitudes to Israel in the 1970s and the need to encourage prominent Labor people to speak out in Israel’s defence. He remarked later,
With the decline of that whole heady, awful business, the Vietnam War, a lot of the younger radicals were a bit lost for a cause. They were on the lookout for the next wretched depressed victims of American capitalism—and there were those benighted Palestinians.
The choice of Hawke as the first Sam Cohen Memorial Lecturer seems, in retrospect, uncanny also. It is impossible to think of another gentile Australian in public life whose upbringing had made him so open to the appeal and difficulties of the state of Israel and who, at the same time, would be so ready to shout about it from the rooftops—and be heard. Hawke’s whole career has been shaped by a sense of indignation. All his successes as a trade union advocate, a strike negotiator and a political campaigner have occurred when he has been able to heat others with his own belly fire—that old Methodist anger he had got from Ellie and from Will Lee before her, and which, as a small, sickly boy intimidated by bigger children, had become concrete and personal in his own life. The institutions and problems of the state of Israel were to seize upon the core of Hawke’s being: his admiration for achievement, his capacity for anger, his identification with the ‘little man’, his instinct to rescue. Israel was—still is—the very image of David defying Goliath.
Israel had not been an issue in Australian politics before the escalation, in 1964, of the Vietnam War. In that year the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was founded with the major aim of its charter the total destruction of Israel. This aim was inspired by rankling over injustice: the United Nations decision of 1947 to divide British Mandated Palestine, a colony of the Empire, into two countries, allotting one to Palestinians and the other to Jews as a national home, was, from the Arab point of view, both a colonial act of theft and an insult to the whole Arab world. The Arabs had never accepted the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that such a Jewish national home should be created in Palestine; they discounted the fact that already, before World War II, Jews who had been returning to live in Palestine since the 1880s had bought a great deal of land there from Arab and absentee Turkish landowners. That by 1947 European Jews were desperate for somewhere to live was of little concern to the Arabs for it was not they who had set up the gas chambers and slave camps. They saw the partition of Palestine as a European attempt to assuage European guilt. The Arab policy was to reject half a country and gamble upon winning by force of arms a whole country—or to lose the half they already had. But despite four major wars, 87 000 killed in action, hundreds of thousands wounded, billions of dollars spent on armaments that could have been spent on improving the lives of people, orgies of propaganda to encourage hatred, there is no Palestinian state and Israel has increased its territory.
On the day in 1948 when Israel was declared an independent state the Arabs launched a war and as a result lost territory to Israel. They continued to harass until 1956 when Israel launched a war and won more territory. The Arabs continued to harass, and after 1964 became better organised in their campaign for the total destruction of Israel, which in 1967 made a pre-emptive strike. In six days Israel won a victory that astonished the world. The Arab nations reacted to defeat by increasing the price of oil to what was at the time a staggering $US5 a barrel, more than double the old price. Israel, by now, had the image of permanent military invincibility, and slowly its status as underdog began to change. In the years after 1967 the Arab nations, with a population of 120 million, were able to cast themselves as the plaintiffs against Israel, with a population of three million, as defendants. The Palestinians, refusing to acknowledge the legality or the reality of the state of Israel, lived in refugee camps. In the early 1980s, children in the Palestinian camps born there and born of parents who were born there would reply to the question ‘Where do you come from?’ with the name of a village, now part of Israel, that their grandparents had once lived in and that they had never seen.1
The primary attitude of the Left everywhere is an amalgam of fellow feeling (for the weak) and hostility (for the strong). The Palestinian cause was tailored, after 1967, to Left emotions, especially since by then Israel was firmly in the American camp and, partly because of the Vietnam War, America represented All Evil. However, within the ALP the moral stature of Sam Cohen, which was towering, and the activities of other Jews who were active in the ALP Left, had managed to prevent an outbreak of anti-Israel feeling. With Cohen’s death and the passing of the heyday of the Vietnam moratorium marches, in which Jews played a leading role, there was a gap. Holding had foreseen that the party was likely to become increasingly anti-Israel—at least, among those Left-wing, and younger, members who could not remember newspaper pictures of the Holocaust and the joyful relief that had greeted the founding of the state.
For anyone in the trade unions or the ALP, Israel in 1971 was a fascinating country. It had had Labour governments since its founding in 1948 and it had an egalitarian atmosphere that was an unachieved ideal in Australia. Its trade union council, Histadrut, controlled 25 per cent of Israel’s GDP; it was one of the country’s largest employers; it had 70 per cent of the population as members; Histadrut had the largest health fund; the second largest bank; the biggest construction company; holiday villas; a shipping line . . . There are no demarcation disputes in Israel because workers—including doctors, diplomats and the president of the country—join Histadrut direct and are then allotted to unions. While other countries have a trade union council, Histadrut got itself a country. It had existed almost thirty years longer than the state of Israel, having begun as a workers’ co-operative in British Mandated Palestine, and had provided the first framework of government in the new state. Everybody who was anybody in Israeli politics, aside from the religious, was a member of Histadrut. The Israeli Establishment was, in the broad, Labour.
In 1971 Hawke had, he said, ‘a general knowledge about Israel, but no particular interest’. His eldest child, Susan, had recently read the best-selling novel Exodus, and was intrigued by Israel. When he accepted the invitation to be the first Sam Cohen Memorial Lecturer he asked if Susan could accompany him, explaining to the sponsors, with an incuriosity about the thinking of others that, by now, was habitual, ‘I don’t know why, but she’d like to come’. Arrangements were hastily made for Susan to stay on a kibbutz for six weeks. Hawke was to be in the country only a fortnight, before continuing on to Geneva for an ILO conference. He would collect Susan on the way home.
Dramatic complications to this bland scenario quickly arose. There was the bomb scare on their flight from Perth because of Hawke’s role in the Springbok campaign, but this, as things turned out, was a mere gentle prelude. Hawke’s love of Israel and his willingness to fight for it were to cause problems that veered close to wrecking his life and career. Havoc was created in the lives of his children, who became hostages to his public activities. Created, too, were the circumstances for an awful courage.
Hawke recalled his first impressions of the landscape of Israel as if it were reaching out from the books of childhood to embrace him: ‘It was as I’d imagined, dusty roads and olive trees’. From the moment of arrival Hawke and Israel were en rapport.
Histadrut, which has a large international department that, among other things, looks after foreign guests, had provided an officer, Michael Siew, and a Tel Aviv taxi driver, Ari Tel-Shahar, to escort him. Relationships, emotional bonds, are everything to Hawke, the rest—including people’s names (he could never remember Ari’s surname although he loves him)—is detail. The three men formed an immediate bond. Tel-Shahar, who is sandy-haired, as wide as he is high and, in Hawke’s words, ‘one of the great rogues of all time—would take anyone down’, said, ‘When the three of us met, it was like a match to petrol’. He and Siew were astonished by Hawke’s drinking and his ability to keep going for days with virtually no sleep. ‘We learned’, Tel-Shahar said later, ‘when Bob comes, forget sleep’. Siew, who used to be a BBC journalist and, like Tel-Shahar, was in a tank unit, recalled Hawke at first meeting:
Initially I was impressed by his Mephistophelian eyebrows which he would twitch at me. Then, the fellow was asking too many questions—and very pointed ones, at that. And his arrogance! He actually hinted he was more intelligent than I. And then, his frankness—he told me that while in Oxford he realised one day that he had a prejudice against Jews. Then there was his sardonic impatience with some of our high-sounding, stuffy diplomats, who tried to impress our uncouth guest with Shakespeare. And there was his enthusiasm upon seeing and analysing some of our achievements in social experimentation. And he was a real humanitarian: he was disgusted at the suggestion that El Al should fly to Australia via South Africa. There was his sense of humour. His great taste in sheilas. And there was his all-consuming love for Australia, and his grief about the gap between what is and what could be . . . After fourteen harrowing days and nights with him I was so exhausted I could hardly remember the brand of my favourite beer. I volunteered to take him to the airport to make sure he would leave, and en route he had the nerve to assure me he thought I had done my homework on Israel . . . When he left I was besieged by my curious colleagues. They were sceptical about him. After all—shame!—he wasn’t Jewish. There must be, they said, some ulterior motive to account for his friendliness—the man has yet to be tested. I told them, ‘You can’t even tell a friend when you see one’. Until this day people ask me about his blood. I tell them, it’s hot, but he’s not Robert James Lee Rosenblum. He is Israel’s friend.
Hawke said,
I’m sure I would have developed a love and affection for Israel and its people, but the relationship that was so quickly forged between me, Michael and Ari and has remained ever since, created a beautiful initial environment. The first impression is one that has remained: here was this fantastic blend of informality—in dress [Israel lives in blue jeans], in arranging things; an irreverence, a cocking a snook at authority—combined with a very profound awareness of the ever-present threat. It seemed to me that in many people the threat would have produced paranoia, craziness—but here were these people delightfully relaxed in so many ways, and yet sharply attuned. You felt it was like a relaxed spring, that could coil into action very quickly.
The correspondences with his own style were striking.
He had arrived in Israel at a period when the country was exuberantly self-confident: Israelis had the Arabs licked. Or so it was thought. Hawke was taken on a tour of territory captured in three wars: to Sharm-el-Sheik, where Egyptian cannon had once blocked Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran; to Syrian bunkers on the Golan Heights from which machine-gunners had hosed the Israeli villagers below with bullets. Standing in the bunkers and looking through a slit in the side of the hill one can see, with a pair of binoculars, the faces of Israelis in their houses below and the shelters in which they had slept every night to avoid bullets and mortars. As Hawke’s guides told him, ‘We fought like Russians, just throwing away lives, to capture these positions’. Lists of the names of Israelis who died to capture a particular bunker are engraved on stones at their entrances. The bunkers themselves, a network of tunnels through the hillsides, are meticulously maintained; around them, above ground, there are heaped in nests old Syrian tank obstacles—great black iron thorns that look like the spiked eggs of some monstrous reptile. All Israeli war memorials have the same plain, brutal design of rock and jagged metal. They are horrifying to those with an eye for symbolism, for they all tell one story: this celebrates nothing; there has been no catharsis; this stands not for national glory but as a reminder that the war continues. Hawke quickly realised that the Israelis were deadly serious about the security of their borders.
He was impressed, too, by the achievements of Histadrut, and the argumentativeness and humour of the people he met. For the first time he was encountering a whole nation of individualists—tradition has it that every Jew is ‘son of a king’—who had more jokes and as many opinions as he. There is a saying: when three Israelis meet they form eleven political parties; and another: the only reason I don’t make love in Dizengoff Square (the most fashionable area of Tel Aviv) is because every passer-by would give me advice. Hawke said, ‘It’s the only country I’ve been to where every citizen reckons that he or she could be prime minister and would do a better job’. Hawke’s love of all-night arguments had found a permanent home. But, more compelling than these attractions, there was a spot in his consciousness that Israel burnt into, ineradicably.
When he was taken to Jerusalem to visit the holy places he was taken to see Yad Vashem. This is a museum built to the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. It is on a hilltop, with a short avenue of trees leading up to a couple of squat buildings and a bronze mural depicting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Each tree in the avenue has a name beside it and has been planted for a Gentile who, during the Holocaust, defied authority and saved the lives of Jews. Such people are known in Israel and throughout the Diaspora communities as The Righteous. Inside the buildings there is a collection of photographs and objects of surreal horror. They are displayed simply, with low-key, informative captions. Some people walk through the museum, read the captions, look at the display and after half an hour continue on the next part of their tour. Others are struck dumb with an inner howl of rage and shame. Hawke was among the latter. Tel-Shahar, who had been waiting in the car outside, said, ‘Bob’s face was very grave. He sat in the back of the taxi and lent his head against it and couldn’t speak. I could see there were tears running out of the sides of his eyes.’ Some time later Hawke said, ‘The whole of Christendom bears the guilt for that’. He will talk for days about Israel without ever referring to Yad Vashem. For him, finding it always difficult to mention the horrible, the Holocaust is almost taboo in speech, if not in thought. One day in 1981 when the subject arose he said suddenly, ‘I can’t understand anybody who doesn’t weep when they see that. Whenever I think of Israel that’s what I have in my mind.’
A few days after Hawke’s visit to Jerusalem he, Siew and Tel-Shahar were in Beer-Sheba holding one of their all-night drinking and talking fests, when the question of Israeli–Soviet relations arose. Hawke said,
The yarning led to my first visit to Moscow on Israel’s behalf. I argued to the others that the Israelis hadn’t properly explained to the world, but most particularly to the Soviet Union, their position. And the parallel immediately struck me: Israel and the USSR were both creations of the twentieth century. Their viability had been put at issue immediately—there had been an attempt to destroy them at birth, and subsequent attempts. And that the whole concept of the need for security, for recognised boundaries, was something that was uniquely relevant to both countries. As a passing observation I said, ‘You know, I really would love to make those arguments to the Russians’.
Hawke had already met the president-to-be of Histadrut, Yerucham Meshel, a man old enough to be his father, who said of Hawke:
It was love from first looking at each other, from the first sentences. I realised that this man was very open to the tragedy of the Jewish people and the Jewish nation. I realised that he’s a dreamer, emotional, spiritual, that he loves people. That he was dedicated to the Labor movement, and the trade union movement, not because he was a real trade union man, but because he wants to improve the standard of living of people in general . . . With all that intellect he has, Bob is also naive. Absolutely naive.
Hawke’s desire to ‘put those arguments to the Russians’ revealed, perhaps more than anything else, the strength of his idealism. It was a combination of naivety—in the sense of his faith in goodness and logic—and his dreaming to improve the human condition, the quality that Bob Rogers had noticed when Hawke returned from India.
The USSR had supported the creation of the state of Israel but this had little to do with goodwill towards Jews. It was stimulated by Soviet desire to hasten the decline of Britain’s power in the Middle East, to the advantage of the Soviet Union. Russia’s initial expressions of warm feelings for Israel quickly cooled, then chilled and in 1967 became frigid. Soviet disinformation had triggered the Six Day War and the Russians, in high dudgeon of embarrassment, broke diplomatic relations with Israel. Tens of millions of dollars worth of Soviet armaments, sold to Egypt and Syria, had been destroyed by Israel in the war. By 1971 the USSR was massively rearming Egypt and Syria and had that year signed a Treaty of Friendship with Egypt, which was still formally committed to the total destruction of Israel.
Hawke’s initial thinking about the arguments he might put to Moscow had sprung from his deep-seated belief in the Brotherhood of Man and his instinct to find common cause and mediate conflicting positions. On further reflection he realised a more sophisticated debate would be necessary; he proposed to make one of his complicated carrot-and-stick arguments to the Russians, a combination of morality and threats to self-interest: that the USSR, having worked for the creation of Israel, would lose credibility if Russian weaponry caused its destruction; that if Israel were destroyed the Arabs, who hated the Russians on political and religious grounds, would turn away from the Soviet Union, therefore it was in Russian interest that Israel continue to exist so that Arabs would continue to look to the USSR for support. He did not intend to state the too obvious: that if Russian weapons employed by Arabs destroyed Israel, the Jewish lobby in the USA would put an American president under immense pressure to intervene, either against the Arab destroyers or against the USSR.
By 1971 détente was under way and the Soviet Union was concerned about international public opinion, so there was some reason for Hawke to be optimistic that the Russians would heed his argument about morality and consistency. But given the freezing relations between Israel and the Soviet Union, it was a long shot. However, Hawke could aim at the bull’s eye: he was already friendly with Alexander Shelepin, head of the Soviet trade union movement and a man who was among the top officials in the Soviet hierarchy, spoken of in the Western press as a potential successor to Brezhnev. Before becoming leader of Soviet workers, Shelepin had been head of the KGB.
Siew passed on the word that Hawke was interested in presenting a case for Israel in Moscow. Events started to move quickly. As yet Hawke had not realised what a godsend he was to the Israelis. One country wishing to communicate with another with which it is not on speaking terms must use clandestine methods or envoys from a third nation, usually ambassadors or heads of state who, as a matter of course, extract some payment for their own nation in recompense for the favour they are doing. Hawke had access to one of the highest in the land in the USSR, and his services to Israel cost only the price of his airfares.
He said,
I was taken to meet Golda Meir, in her prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv. On the personal side a fascinating dichotomy in her character came out. Susan was with me and had been given the inevitable drink of orangeade. Golda was sitting behind her desk, chain-smoking, and she and I were seriously talking about Israel. Suddenly, Susan knocked over her drink and the glass smashed on the floor. There was an immediate transformation in Golda from a stern stateswoman into a grandmother. She jumped up and came from behind her desk to put her arm around Susan and tell her that it didn’t matter about the glass. That spontaneous and unaffected warmth of the human being, the woman, immediately coming out, had a big effect on me.
Hawke’s friends said later, ‘Bob had the greatest platonic love affair of his life with Golda’. One day, years later, when Hawke was talking to Kate Baillieu about the tribulations Mrs Meir had suffered in childhood, ‘he began to weep—he was not drunk’. On their first meeting, scheduled for fifteen minutes, the conversation ran on for more than an hour, and touched on Moscow. Later, Hawke met the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban.
A delicate process of testing Hawke for soundness was in train. A Histadrut official said, ‘We couldn’t quite believe him—a man with such an intellect, such a forceful personality, a politician . . .’ At length, the Israelis were convinced that they had met a rare character: a Righteous Gentile. Whatever the Israeli leaders thought of Hawke’s proposed arguments and their chances of success, they had a different submission for him to make in Moscow: they wanted Hawke to argue for the release of Soviet Jews. But for him to do this on Israel’s behalf it would be necessary to make him privy to confidential matters of state.
The position of the Soviet Jews, who number 3 million, is one of the most emotional and diplomatically sensitive issues for Israel and world Jewry. Soviet Jews are known as ‘The Silent Jews’, ‘The Prisoners of Zion’ and ‘The Beautiful People’, and have the status of living martyrs among their co-religionists outside the USSR. Little was heard of them during the 1950s and 1960s in the councils of world Jewry. But following the Six Day War many asked permission to emigrate from the USSR. Anti-Semitism is rife in the Soviet Union. It was pogroms in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had forced some Russian Jews to flee to Palestine and dream of establishing a Jewish homeland there. When exit visas were requested more frequently after 1967 some were granted, some were not; some Jews were sacked for asking, some were not; some Jews were harassed by the KGB, some were not. No explanations were given. Two hundred were allowed to emigrate in 1968, 3000 in 1969, but in 1970 only 1000. Then on Christmas Eve 1970 a group of three Jews and two Gentiles, who had been refused exit visas and had talked about hijacking an aircraft, were sentenced to terms ranging from fifteen years imprisonment to death. There was an international outcry. The Queen publicly implored clemency. The hijack plan was so widely known that Israeli officials were aware of it before its proposed date and in these circumstances it was doomed in advance, for the KGB must have known of it also. However, just as PLO hijacks were raising the national consciousness and indignation of Arabs, the Russian group’s very plan and their draconian sentences had a great impact upon the consciousness of Soviet Jewry. Throughout 1971 the demand for visas increased dramatically although, as an Israeli remarked, ‘It was like playing Russian roulette’. The Israelis were fearful that a false move would mean a loaded chamber for their kin in the USSR.
Hawke said,
At some point as the trip went on the Israelis put it to me that they would like me to do a job of representation—in terms that I had proposed to them, to discuss with the Russians the attitude of the Soviet Union towards Israel, and also on the question of the Soviet attitude towards the release of Soviet Jewry.
Hawke flew to Rome and telephoned Alexander Shelepin. A year earlier Hawke had gone on from an ILO Conference to Moscow on a fraternal visit, as Shelepin’s guest. They had taken a liking to each other: Hawke said,
While I detested all that he stood for, the fantasy about a free trade union movement, and particularly his background in the KGB, I found him a fascinating and likeable bloke. He had an acute intelligence and was extraordinarily well informed. On my 1970 visit he had brushed aside his aides to ask all his own questions about Australia, revealing an unusual depth of knowledge and understanding. Physically, Shelepin could have been the twin of [Sir Henry] Harry Bland [former head of the Australian Department of Labour]—short, dark, sharp. We had a strange liking for each other. I had no doubt that in an ultimate sense he was totally ruthless.
One of the pranks Shelepin had played on Hawke in 1970 was to try to trick him into vodka-drinking contests. Hawke said,
There would be toasts for everything, and suddenly the cry, ‘Bottoms up!’ I noticed that I seemed always to have the biggest glass of vodka, and while the two comrades standing closest to me would do a ‘bottoms up’ and would look at me as a challenge to do the same, the real heavies weren’t bottoms-upping at all.’
After a number of international telephone calls it was established that Shelepin, who was on holiday at the Baltic Sea, would be delighted to receive Hawke there. Hawke went on to the European conference, returned to Israel to collect Susan and have further briefings, then flew to Moscow. He arrived there on the evening of 21 July and was met by Boris Averianov, head of the international department of the USSR trade union movement, and others. Next morning they flew to Palanga, on the Baltic, where Shelepin was waiting in welcome. They had to communicate through translators.
Hawke was extremely cautious, as revealed by the report he dictated as soon as he left the USSR. He spent four hours on a tour d’horizon of international events with Shelepin, who opened talks with an exposition about recent USSR–USA discussions in Helsinki; the end of the Cold War; the obstacle of East Germany; the role of Norway, and so on, and set forth an overall view of international relations that was optimistic, in Soviet terms. They had lunch. Hawke then said he wished Shelepin to be under no misapprehension: he wanted to discuss specific issues ‘which even by Right-wing standards transcend politics’. Hawke had reduced his arguments to note-form and kept his notes ‘on my person for the whole period before and after this’. He made a general introduction, then ‘submissions’—first on the Arab–Israeli question. His report says, ‘While I put these Shelepin listened with absolute intensity and made copious notes. I proceeded to conclusion without interruption.’ He said later,
Often when you’re talking to important people from other countries you know it’s only a game you’re going through, that the exchange of views is a charade of listening. There was no question that Shelepin was just being polite; his attention and seriousness were for real . . . I put the altruistic argument about Soviet consistency, then I tried to impress upon him that the Israelis were just as serious about the security of their borders as the Soviet Union was, and, Christ Almighty, look at what the USSR had done in the cause of its security. It had enslaved the peoples of Eastern Europe, kept its own living standards appallingly low to spend billions upon armaments—naturally, I did not advert to specifics . . . Then I moved on to Soviet self-interest in the Middle East—their capacity to bargain with and keep the Arab states dependent upon Russia for this very fact: that Israel existed.
Shelepin heard him out and began his reply with an insistence that everything he said must remain confidential.
In broad terms he tried to justify Soviet sympathy for the Arab cause and warned Hawke that he and the Israelis ought not to be deceived, that since their dreadful defeat in 1967, ‘the Arab armies have been transformed’. He assured Hawke that the Soviet Union did not want another war in the Middle East and had ‘expended kilos of salt’ in attempting to convince the Arab states that they must abandon their plans for ‘liquidation’ of Israel. Hawke argued to him, ‘You are backing the wrong horse’, and a year later his remark was justified, when President Sadat expelled all the USSR advisers from Egypt. (Five years later Sadat unilaterally broke the Treaty of Friendship and severed diplomatic relations with the USSR.)
Hawke said in his report,
What Shelepin really seemed to grasp was my repeated pushing of the analogy between the Israeli determination about the security of its borders, and the same Russian determination. He emphasised the need for time. That he would need time to talk to his peers about this; then, if they accepted the point, time for the Russians to talk to the Arabs. I believe it is crucial to develop a diplomatic crescendo about the security complex—use the German analogy, albeit in muted terms, and create the equation: What is the difference between the Soviet desire for territorial integrity and the steps it has been prepared to take, and the position of Israel?
They then moved on to the topic of Soviet Jews. Hawke’s report said,
I put the argument, then Shelepin produced some strained statistics and when I pointed out that they were strained, he reacted. He said the exact statistics could be provided for me. Then he said, ‘The Jews are less than 2 per cent of our population, but they constitute at least 15 per cent of our scientific people and those with access to state secrets essential to our security’. He looked at me across the table and said with his hand raised almost plaintively, ‘What do we do? You tell me what we do.’ My first rejoinder was, ‘Do these people want to leave?’ To which he replied, ‘Yes!’ My answer was, I suppose, inadequate. I certainly gained the impression that it was for him. I said, ‘These people are merely identifying with a wider cause. If you are humane to the less important Jews and allow them to leave, then the ones you are really concerned about, those with access to state secrets, will not feel the pressure so much and will not want to leave.’ Perhaps you [Jews] pay too high a price for your ability.2
In 1971 the USSR allowed 13 000 Jews to emigrate. In 1972, 32 000; in 1973, 35 000. It is widely accepted by Israeli officials that Hawke’s ‘submissions’ to Shelepin had helped to achieve this result. The reason may not be as straightforward as it appears—a matter of Hawke, as advocate, convincing Shelepin, as judge. A senior Australian diplomat who claims expertise on Soviet affairs made the point that because anti-Semitism is so great in the USSR, Soviet officials tend to have paranoid fears about Jews, which include an overestimation of the power of world Jewry. Further, that the KGB (Shelepin’s former field) is especially prone to such attitudes. This certainly would explain the extreme seriousness of Shelepin’s behaviour towards Hawke in 1971, for it suggests he would have seen Hawke as the emissary of a mighty and devious foe.
There was immense gratitude to Hawke in Israel. On every trip abroad he began to call in there. A Histadrut official said, ‘In Israel, people really cared for Bob. We cared about his drinking problem and his family and his political problems, and he knew it. Here, everyone was his friend.’
But meanwhile, in Australia, relations with Israel were beginning to sour. The Australian Jewish community had donated lavishly to the Whitlam government’s 1972 campaign, much of the money being channelled through Hawke, who, on returning from Israel in 1971, had become a favourite Gentile. Hawke had not told people about his trip to Moscow on Israel’s behalf, but news had seeped back from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that the government of Israel looked with particular fondness upon Hawke. Australian Jews inclined towards Labor, for it was the Chifley government that had offered them asylum and Evatt who had helped to establish Israel. They expected great things from the Whitlam government. During the election campaign Whitlam had promised that Qantas would fly to Tel Aviv. This was especially important for Israelis and their relations abroad because there are many airlines that will not fly to Israel and many countries in which Israelis dare not have stop-overs, so that travelling in and out of the country is a complicated process of picking out routes and airlines that only stop in neutral or friendly nations. Whitlam did not keep his promise about Qantas and the Israeli government was becoming testy, the Australian Jewish community uneasy.
Given the government’s desire to play an active role in international affairs and to assume leadership of Third World and radical causes, disillusion was inevitable. Power was flowing towards radical Arab nations. There were various reasons: a renaissance of Islam had been under way since the 1920s, worldwide. It had swept through Africa and into the black population of America. The decay of the Christian colonial empires had given it room, and encouragement. Since the end of World War II the world production (and consumption) of oil had expanded from 5 million barrels a day, in 1945, to about 60 million in the early 1970s and the Arab oil-producers were black with black gold. Their societies were suffering psychic shock from the challenge to traditions that sudden wealth imposed, and were febrile. Importantly, the Palestinians and others were beginning to win the propaganda war against Israel. The world community would not tolerate their assertion that Israel must be obliterated, but to the less dramatic claim, that a great injustice had been done to the people of Palestine, there was growing attention.
Communists of all persuasions were hostile to Israel and in the Left of the ALP hostility was increasing. Hawke widely advertised his plans for Histadrut–ACTU joint ventures; he was invited to speak at what a leader of Australian Jewry called, ‘every Jewish mothers’ club in the country’; he was, inevitably, seen as an enemy of the Palestinian cause. His position on Palestine was straightforward: that a Palestinian state should be created; that Israel and its neighbours should recognise Resolution 2423 of the United Nations. He complained later, ‘I have made my position clear many times and I don’t think I have ever been given any credit for it by the supporters of Palestine. They have simply refused to listen to what I have said.’
The problem is that in his speeches on the Middle East, Hawke has devoted only a small percentage, if any, of each one to the plight of the Palestinians, while highlighting the violent physical and verbal assaults upon Israel by its neighbours. He thus projected the impression that, for him, the Palestinians were irrelevant.
By 1973 tension was steadily building in the Middle East. Hawke went to Israel in the first half of the year and by mid-year was convinced that a crisis was looming:
I felt very tense about it all. Then on the eve of the ACTU Congress there was a death threat, purporting to come from the Black September Movement. I think I was so nervous at the Congress because I had a sense that something was going to break.
By late 1973 the pace of Hawke’s life had turned his life into the panting of a revolving door.
Then on 6 October, the Day of Atonement in Israel, the most holy day of the year, Egyptian forces surged across the Suez Canal and captured the Bar Lev defence line while, simultaneously, Syrian tanks pushed deep into Israeli-held territory north-east of the Golan Heights. It was a massive assault. At first it seemed that Israel had been swept into the sea, but by 12 October it had recaptured territory taken by the advancing Syrians and three days later had thrust between the Egyptian armies on the eastern bank of the canal, crossed the canal and established a bridgehead into Africa. On 17 October the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced it would reduce oil production by 5 per cent a month until Israel withdrew from all occupied Arab territories. Saudi Arabia put a total embargo on oil sales to the United States. The war continued. The USA and USSR worked out a ceasefire resolution that was passed by the Security Council of the UN. This broke down immediately, and on 25 October the Israeli forces on the west bank of the canal surrounded the Egyptian Third Army. Israel now had the Egyptians in checkmate on one front and, on the other, was in a position to destroy Damascus. The USA went on worldwide strategic forces alert, warning both the Israelis against further advances and the Soviet Union against intervention. There was a ceasefire. OAPEC announced further cuts in production of oil. On 6 November the nine members of the European Economic Community endorsed a statement that called for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967. The long campaign of forcing Israel down to the status of an international pariah had begun.
Hawke had been in Geneva at an ILO Governing Body meeting. He flew to Tel Aviv on 18 November and was met by Tel-Shahar, who was summoned from military duty to escort him. Michael Siew had disappeared, fighting in the Golan Heights. With an army spokesman, a journalist, and Siew’s father, they set out for the north, Hawke determined to find Siew. The Golan Heights were ‘a cemetery of tanks’—hundreds upon hundreds of them. Bodies had been removed and the barren mountains were eerily quiet, littered with wreckage. Hawke said, ‘The tanks were brand new and had Russian writing on them—inside some of the ones I looked in there were bits and pieces of what had been men’. They drove all day, kilometres into Syria, stopping at Israeli army camps to ask news of Siew. It was bitterly cold and Hawke sat hunched up and swearing, increasingly distressed as they failed to find his friend. (Siew was alive; he turned up a few days after Hawke left Israel.)
Hawke recalled,
After hours of wandering through this evidence of carnage we drove down to Jerusalem, arrived there late in the afternoon, and I immediately met Golda, in her office. I think that was the most emotional meeting I’ve ever had in my life with anyone. There was an old woman who had just been through the most unbelievably traumatic experience of having the survival of her country in question—if the Egyptian and Syrian advance had lasted another twenty-four hours Israel would have been finished—and she was tormenting herself. Because, as she said, all the intelligence reports for days before Yom Kippur had indicated a massive build-up of Arab forces. So the pressure was on to do what they’d done in 1967 and make a pre-emptive strike. But, as she said, the overwhelming factor was that the Americans had warned they would not tolerate another first strike attack by Israel, and there had been a great fear that if they did attack first they would be left without the sustaining flow of ammunition and replacement weaponry. And she was just emotionally and spiritually shattered, because ultimately she had to make the decision, and she’d lost the lives of 2500 men. She was blaming herself. There was this great human being, in tears. She hadn’t lost control of herself—in fact, the opposite, there was still a great strength in her—but tears were running down her face. It was in that circumstance that she showed me photographs of young Israelis who’d been captured in the Golan Heights by the Syrians, had their hands tied behind their backs and had their heads shot apart. And she was weeping and saying she couldn’t understand how people could behave like that. I asked her if I could have copies of the pictures. I made up my mind that I’d do what I could for Israel.
When Hawke emerged from the Prime Minister’s office Tel-Shahar said, ‘I did not recognise him. He was trembling. Pale.’
Hawke’s sense of duty had been stimulated as never before. And probably, too, his belief in his destiny—that he was an instrument that must be used for the good of humankind. He recalled later,
I had been uniquely privileged to have seen what I had—I was the first non-Israeli to have been taken so far into the war-zone to witness what had happened and what could have happened. The Israelis were shaken beyond belief by the war, not just emotionally but in the confidence they’d had in their strategic strength. That confidence was gone. But it had been replaced with a determination, which I cannot overemphasise, that, ‘This will never happen again’. I must make this point: I have never been told by Israelis either in confidence or out of confidence that they have nuclear weapons, but it was not unreasonable to think in 1973 that they might have them, or might acquire them. In my conversations with people outside the leadership I made the suggestion, based on my observation of their utter determination, ‘If Israel had tactical nuclear weapons and was again faced with obliteration, she would use them’. And there was no dissent from this view. So what we were looking at, if there were another round, was the possibility of nuclear war. I had already decided to return to Moscow to talk to Shelepin if the Israelis wanted me to. They did, and had already made arrangements before I talked to Golda. There was no question of the Israelis wanting me to convey the message to Moscow, ‘Next time it’s nukes’. But by then we knew each other very well—I had a relationship with people there in which the nuances and the unspoken were as significant as the direct and the spoken. I think they knew I would be talking about nuclear war to Shelepin. Certainly, they wanted me to tell him just how much determination there was in Israel, the same message as before, but now even louder. And, of course, they wanted me again to put pressure on him for the release of Soviet Jews.
On 22 November he flew to Moscow and was met at the airport by Shelepin. They talked during the late afternoon and into the night. Hawke recalled,
I had the sense that this was one of the biggest moments in my life, that I was uniquely placed in terms of knowledge and understanding of Israel to try to get this very powerful man, whose country’s equipment I had seen smashed to pieces, to understand the enormity of the situation that had loomed and could return. And to try to make him realise that Soviet policy, resulting in the destruction of millions of dollars’ worth of its most modern technology, was just insanity! The Arab armies had not been transformed by the USSR. The Israelis had surrounded the Egyptian army, and the bloody Syrians could have lost Damascus. And if it had gone the other way, against Israel, what did he think the USSR would gain? War with America, maybe?
Hawke quickly told Shelepin of his worst fears, the possibility of a nuclear war. Shelepin replied, one can only hope untruthfully, that Egypt had a nuclear device already installed and this could be activated in twenty-four hours. He maintained that the USSR was determined Israel would not be flung into the Mediterranean and that, if this had seemed likely, Moscow would have ordered the Egyptian and Syrian armies to halt their advance. Hawke replied ‘rather strongly’—which means, he shouted—that such an assertion was idiotic, that the Arab armies could not have been halted by a command from Moscow and that Shelepin was insulting his intelligence with this assertion.
Hawke recalled,
There was a big difference in Shelepin since 1971. By late 1973 he was totally absorbed, fascinated and worried by China. Australia had a unique position because of Gough’s opening of diplomatic relations with China and Shelepin seemed to think that we therefore were able to speak with particular authority. He talked to me as he would talk to very few people. He was paranoid about China. Full of fear and contempt. He said they were rubbish, nothings, but at the same time he manifested an enormous apprehension. He was terrifically concerned by the rapprochement between the USA and China and in this context, talking about Nixon, something weird happened. I’d said to him, ‘You can stop thinking about Nixon—he’s finished’. One did not need to be brilliant to know that by late 1973 Watergate had destroyed Nixon. But Shelepin became vehement that Nixon was safe. He said that the whole Watergate episode was a concoction by ‘reactionary capitalist forces who are angry with Nixon because he initiated détente with the USSR’. He was totally insistent that Watergate would soon be revealed as a capitalist plot. It shows the strange relationship we had: I said to him, ‘Would you care to put your money where your mouth is?’ He was puzzled by the translation for a moment, then he realised what I was saying and grinned. We bet two dozen bottles of best vodka.
By the time Hawke had won the bet Shelepin was on the verge of disgrace, so Hawke did not collect his prize. For reasons unknown, Shelepin was removed from the Soviet hierarchy in 1975; there has been speculation since that his fall may have been due, in part, to his meetings with Hawke.
While Hawke was abroad, Whitlam had announced that the Australian government had an ‘even-handed policy in the Middle East’. The party’s policy, based on Resolution 242 of the United Nations, and adopted in July 1973 at the Surfers Paradise conference, stated:
The situation in the Middle East remains the greatest threat to the peace of the world. There can be no peace until the Arab States respect and recognise Israel’s sovereignty and right to exist. Equally, there can be no peace until Israeli forces have withdrawn from occupied territories to secure and recognised boundaries and a just settlement of the refugee problem is achieved.
Hawke returned to Australia on 24 November 1973 and in a Perth news conference made an impassioned plea for Israel. Clem, for the first time in twenty years, was alarmed by the vehemence of his son’s manner. Hawke showed to the news media the photographs Golda Meir had given him of murdered prisoners of war. They were screened on nationwide television. On his part it was an act of questionable wisdom: there is no such thing as a war in which troops maintain military discipline at all times. Hawke’s implication that the enemies of Israel had a monopoly upon barbarity was both unjustified—one must recall the activities, just for example, of the Irgun—and reckless, for atrocity feeds upon atrocity.
He said, ‘Showing the photographs was, I think, the start of the real hate campaign against me’.
Hawke had said in his news conference: ‘For the Australian government to say our position on the Middle East is one of even-handedness is not an intelligent approach to the situation’. He also made reference to an assumption that the Whitlam government’s attitude was based on fear of loss of oil supplies. He said, ‘That’s all right for the politicians, but I understand what truth and democracy are all about and I don’t put my knees on the same altar as the politicians’. As a result, there were questions in parliament for Whitlam, and more questions at his weekly press conference. The Prime Minister said, ‘Australia has a bipartisan policy, a policy of neutrality in the Middle East. The ALP policy is substantially the policy which governments have pursued for the last quarter of a century in Australia’, and that Hawke was speaking as ‘a private citizen’, not as president of the party. The following day the Sydney Morning Herald in its editorial wondered, ‘How long Mr Hawke, holding the views he does, can sustain his current balancing feat as ALP and ACTU President’. That question was to be tested at the next meeting of the ALP federal executive, due in February 1974.
On 28 November 1973 a senior journalist, Adrian Deamer, delivering the national broadcast, Notes on the News, said:
This is another vicious attack on the Prime Minister and on the politicians of the Labor Party [by Hawke]. It maintains his early form when he criticised the Government’s announcement during the Parramatta by-election that Sydney’s airport was to be sited at Galston as ‘political imbecility’. He followed this up with his public statement that the trade union movement would not support the Government at the December 8 referendum on prices and incomes, and just before he left for Israel he said that the Government should have increased income tax . . . He has emphasised that on this occasion he is speaking as a private citizen, and this explanation was accepted by Mr Whitlam . . .
The real issue that emerges from this controversy goes far beyond whether Mr Hawke should or should not criticise his party and Mr Whitlam . . . What we need in this country is more information on which we can act, and greater diversity of views, not less. We need to encourage people like Mr Hawke to speak out and to tell us what they know and think, not condemn them for going against the official line … Like him or not, Mr Hawke breaks through this apathy and dispels the dullness [of Australian politics], forcing a lot of people to rethink the issues they have taken for granted.4
That night Hawke went to see Abeles, who happened to be in Melbourne. Abeles recalled, ‘Bob was tremendously upset. He needed to let off steam and talk and talk. He was in an agony. He talked the whole night, until dawn, crying sometimes, and shouting. I was terribly worried. I thought he was at a breaking point.’
Next day in the ACTU office Hawke answered the telephone. A man with a foreign accent said, ‘I am from Black September. We are going to kill your children’, and hung up. Hawke went into the boardroom to open an executive meeting. His old friends knew from his appearance that something was wrong. After a few minutes Hawke blurted out what had happened and began to weep, saying, ‘Must I give up my beliefs to save my children?’ The crisis that had been developing all year had been triggered.
A doctor was called. He gave Hawke a sedative injection. Hawke was driven home and put to bed. Police collected the children from school. Police guards were stationed at the house. Policemen accompanied the children to and from school and stood guard in their playgrounds. They opened letters that came to the house.
On 5 December the Friends of Palestine published a full-page advertisement in the Australian headed, An Open Letter to Bob Hawke. It refuted that the death threat had come from the Black September movement and went on to say:
We suggest that Mr Hawke is appallingly ignorant of the real issues in the Middle East dispute. If he can support Israel on morality grounds, then the traditional meaning of the word ‘morality’ has ceased. Mr Hawke is prostituting morality in the services of a fascist regime, sacrificing the noble ideals of the Labor Movement and slaying the Australian ‘fair go’ principle on the altar of a racist government which imports Jewish citizens from Russia and elsewhere, but consistently denies the indigenous Palestinian Arabs the fundamental right of citizenship in their country of birth.
As soon as Hawke was on his feet again he bought a rifle and would check that all the house windows and doors were locked before going to bed. In the office, ‘he looked like death warmed up—he was pretty much a wreck for four months’, Cliff Dolan said.
Meanwhile, letters and telegrams had flooded the ACTU. There were hundreds from churchgoers, from ‘Liberal voters’ and, of course, from Jews. Some said:
God bless you in your work, and as you take this stand I and my church are remembering you in prayer.
Neither my wife nor I are ALP supporters but we both support your views on Israel . . . delighted that at last a public figure has the courage to state what is morally right even if unpopular.
In our church service this morning our pastor led us in prayer for you, your wife and family and for the people of Israel . . .
Australia needs men like you who will stand firm for what they believe to be right . . .
In your role as Trade Union leader, I have never felt there would be anything in which I could support you, but your public stand on this matter has changed my views.
I am not on your side politically but loyalty to principles transcends political differences.
For the first time I find myself in agreement with you.
I beg you to use your position and your voice to pressure the Government into reversing the policy of neutrality . . . I am ashamed to live in a country which will even consider putting economic security before the right of a brave little country to exist, let alone live in peace . . . I have no voice. Tell of my anger, I beg you.
I am not normally an ardent supporter of ‘Bob Hawke’ but . . . after tonight I think I will be . . . You will have I am sure a multitude of Australians behind you if they have the opportunity to make their voices heard.5
Many of the letters were from businessmen and academics; some drew attention to the fact that the writers were not Jewish. The response from the Jewish community was passionate. The Yom Kippur War had terrified world Jewry. Jews who had little interest in Israel were suddenly suffocated by the fear that genocide could recur, and without Israel there would be nowhere to flee. Saul Same, an ALP member, chairman of directors of Glo-Weave and chairman of the United Israel Appeal, was one of those in charge of fund-raising in Australia to help Israel during and after the war. He said,
People who had never given a penny in their lives to Israel came to us. Money poured in to the United Israel Appeal. There are plenty of poor Jews in Australia. They sold things to give us money. People mortgaged their houses, and came to us with their jewellery, even their wedding rings . . . I can tell you that there were those among us who would give their lives for Bob Hawke. If anybody had harmed a hair of his head, that person would have been killed.
Among the letters and telegrams from Jews there were many offering Hawke their houses and cars as refuges for his family. Non-Jews made similar offers—a Western Australian businessman telephoned to offer his private aeroplane to fly the family to safety in the west. A Supreme Court judge wrote, ‘. . . you have had the moral courage . . . while others in high places, known for their articulate professions of the Brotherhood of Man, have remained silent’. Another senior lawyer and an ALP member wrote,
Gough will never know what chills he sent down our spines . . . with that ‘even-handed neutrality’ statement of his. It was so cold and so lacking in insight . . . I suddenly felt insecure here, for the first time in my life.
There were very few unfavourable letters. Some began, ‘Mr Jew Hawke’. A regular critic, who signed himself ‘Joe the Worker’, wrote on this occasion: ‘Your invitation to Zionists to take over your well-planned homes and holidays for the Australian worker is a clear indication that you also support the multi-national corporations and enterprises who [sic] dominate our finances.’ Meanwhile, in the trade union movement and in the ALP there was anger: ‘You have no right to pursue your personal views about Israel when Australian workers finance your trips overseas.’ ‘You [and Whitlam] have a duty to the people of Australia to control yourselves. Otherwise you will be guilty of sabotaging the Labor Party and the people, as did Billy Hughes and Lyons years ago.’6
When Hawke returned to work in January 1974 it was to plunge straight in to the predicament within the upper echelons of the ALP that his outspokenness as president of the party had caused. He was told that the Prime Minister and other members of the federal executive had exhausted their patience with him, and he would be sacked. ‘The phones were running hot, all through January’, a senior ALP man remarked. In mid-January Hawke gave a television interview to Mike Schildberger in the office of Eddie Kornhauser, at the time a Melbourne hotel owner. Kornhauser was a shrewd businessman and one of Hawke’s close friends. When the interview was over Hawke had a violent argument with Schildberger, a non-Zionist Jew, over Israel. Kornhauser, a strong Zionist, was so astonished by the passion of Hawke’s commitment to Israel that, he said, ‘For the first time I realised, “This man is real”. And that night I determined to try to do something for him.’ Hawke had told Kornhauser that he was going to be removed from the presidency of the ALP. Kornhauser had a number of IOUs out in the party, which he had supported handsomely over the years. He decided he would call them in.
Meanwhile, Hawke refused to keep silent on Israel. On 26 January he addressed a conference of the Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand in Sydney. He was still being escorted by bodyguards and the hall where the meeting was held was under heavy police surveillance. Hawke wore the traditional Jewish skullcap as he spoke to a group that was already hyper-charged with emotion. He scorned the even-handed interpretation that Whitlam had given to ALP policy on the Middle East and went on to say,
Oil is a murky substance and it has, I believe, blurred the vision of men of goodwill . . .We cannot be even-handed in judgment between states, any more than between individuals, when one side is bent upon the physical destruction of the other. In the 1930s appeasement under threat and blackmail permitted, among other things, the holocaust in which six million of our fellow human beings, who happened to be Jews, were exterminated. All mankind was diminished by those events. I do not speak here for my party or for the industrial movement which I lead. But as an individual Australian, I know that I am not an island and I know that if we allow the bell to be tolled for Israel it will have tolled for me, for us all.7
There was a standing ovation.
On 14 February the ALP federal executive was to meet. It would be the first meeting to discuss the government’s failure to win Parramatta and to win the referenda. The Hawke camp had decided to bring up the question of the Middle East. The numbers would be close but within the party those who were furious with Hawke for his criticisms of the government and the Prime Minister were confident they could force Hawke to resign. This has been one of the better-kept secrets in the ALP. Even in 1981 executive members were unwilling to talk about it, including Hawke, whose only comment is, ‘I can’t really remember that’. Others too have developed amnesia. However, a letter dated 19 February 19748 to Eddie Kornhauser suggests that the move against Hawke was serious and failed because of the hard lobbying conducted by Hawke’s supporters. It appears that the attitude of Egerton was critical, for if he would not agree to accept the presidency there could be no smooth transition, but a party brawl. As it was Egerton (most unwillingly) recalled, ‘Gough was saying to me, “Mr President, Mr President”. Well . . . I’ve never had any time for Gough. I stuck by my mates.’
The executive minutes reveal little: merely that on a motion, moved by Egerton and seconded by David Combe, to debate the situation in the Middle East, the executive tied 8–8, and it was therefore resolved in the negative.9 The voting line-up seems to show that before the meeting opened, a Left–Right alliance against the Hawke group had come to an agreement with the latter, and that the alliance itself aborted the plan. One person who reluctantly spoke of the affair gave an explanation that has the ring of realpolitik truth:
They tried to take Bob head on and saw it would be very difficult. So they called that off and went underground against him—used the news media, the smear campaign in the party. They’re the sort of people who don’t much like the light of day and prefer to work in the dark.
The speaker made clear that he did not include Whitlam in this group.
Hawke escaped with a reprimand about his outspokenness. But his problems within the party were only just beginning for he had now earned the enmity of many Caucus members and all the Left-wingers.
A prominent Left-wing figure on the federal executive was Bill Hartley, former secretary of the Victorian branch, and as devoted a supporter of the Palestinians as Hawke was of the Israelis. Hartley is a friendly, personable man who, after being a Liberal in his youth, made a change to radical politics. He was active in his opposition to state aid for non-government schools and the Vietnam War and after that turned his attention to the Palestinians. Later he became an employee of the government of Iraq and championed the ‘People’s Revolution’ in Iran. He and Hawke had fallen out in 1970 over federal intervention into the Victorian branch of the ALP but were still on reasonably friendly terms in 1974. Hartley was, and still remains, at the extreme perimeter of the Socialist Left faction of the Victorian ALP and was for many years the faction’s representative on the federal executive, one of the two Victorian delegates to the executive.
Hawke was in such poor shape before the 14 February meeting that Hazel, stalwart as ever, had accompanied him to Canberra. That night Hartley came to their room and he and Hawke had a long, ‘fairly amicable’, Hawke said, argument about the Middle East. It was the last fairly amicable meeting between them. Hawke developed during 1974 a hatred for Hartley because of the latter’s published assertions about Israel, which included comments such as ‘International Zionism collaborated with the Nazis’;10 and ‘Israel is a huge Ghetto founded on a monstrous injustice [to Palestinians, which] should be replaced by a State containing virtues which Israel has never had, and never could have: an open society, equality, political and religious pluralism, freedom, democracy and amity with its neighbours’. Hartley’s notions about the Middle East enjoyed currency in Socialist Left circles, and Hawke’s determination to contest them at every opportunity was to intensify his struggle with the Left. The Yom Kippur War, which marked the beginning of Israel’s conversion by the international community into a pariah state, was also the beginning of Hawke’s pariahdom in the eyes of the Left. By the end of the decade he had, among radicals, the image of a monster: a corrupt and greedy man, a friend to millionaires and a ‘fascist regime’, an enemy of the poor and weak.
That night in the Canberra Rex Hotel Hawke had drinks with party officials and a group of journalists, during which he expressed the views that he had been unable to, earlier that day, in the federal executive. He said,
I had these feelings: an enormous sense of frustration that people thought that the Yom Kippur War was just another war—so what? I was also horrified by the callousness of attitudes: people were almost blaming Israel for having been in a scrap, and, ho-hum, it might happen again. And following from that, I wanted to try to get home the message that if an attempt to obliterate Israel recurred and if Israel had tactical nuclear weapons, they would be used.
It appears that only Hawke’s last point—which he illustrated dramatically by saying that if he were Israel’s prime minister and were faced with the destruction of his country, he would feel bound to employ tactical nuclear arms in self-defence—got through to his audience. His agitate-and-educate conversation with the group was not an interview, and was therefore off the record. But on 16 February Sydney’s Daily Telegraph carried a front-page story headlined, ‘I’D A-BOMB ARABS, SAYS HAWKE’. Three days later the popular television program, A Current Affair, broadcast a jingle to the tune of the Jewish folksong, Hava Nagila, which implied that Hawke was nuclear-bomb happy. He sued on both accounts for libel and won costs against the Telegraph and a settlement from A Current Affair, but the damage to his reputation had been enormous.
Throughout Hawke’s career many of his failures, like this one, have arisen from the same source as his successes: that behind what he says there is an attitude of mind and a system of values that people either grasp spontaneously, or not at all. It is often not the fault of Hawke’s audience that he is misunderstood, for he talks in a sort of shorthand, on the assumption that others share his thinking. In conversation with him it is necessary to fill in or to translate much of what he has left unsaid or has stated in his own brand of laconic communication: a twitch of his mouth, a pause, a shrug, a look of puzzlement in return for puzzlement. One early example of the lacunae in his communications was his attitude towards Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes scholars, which none of his peers understood. A later example came from a very senior public servant who was involved in Hawke’s first strike negotiations: the man recalled being initially confounded by Hawke’s verbal shorthand. He commented, ‘Bob said that “for obvious reasons” such and such could not happen. Those reasons were not at all obvious to me. It was only after lunch that Bob explained. His sincerity, his conviction and his total honesty then came through.’ The public servant, who requested anonymity, is a man of unusually sharp intelligence and subtlety; less gifted people are more likely to be bemused by what Hawke says. Good journalists who attempt to maintain objectivity and therefore deliberately resist falling into rapport with Hawke often achieve this at the expense of understanding him.
A second aspect, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage, is Hawke’s direct expression of anger. Clyde Holding recalled an evening when he and Hawke were arguing about Hugh Gaitskell:
Bob wanted me to agree with him that Gaitskell was a bastard. I wasn’t really interested, but Bob got intense about it. When I wouldn’t agree with him he grabbed me and began shaking me or banging my arm on the table, I can’t remember which, saying, ‘Go on! Say it! Admit Gaitskell’s a bastard!’ People who aren’t used to him, who don’t know that’s just the bloke’s style, get very upset.
Many people are half-deafened by Hawke’s intensity and find it difficult to follow what he is saying because their emotional reaction to him has partly shut down their thinking processes and Hawke’s arguments come through to them simplified by the flood of adrenalin he has aroused.
One of those present in the Canberra Rex on the night of 14 February recalled that when Hawke had spoken of nuclear weapons, and had been challenged: ‘You cannot justify the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances’, Hawke had replied,
Why? Because of world morality? Be damned to world morality—the world has stood by for twenty-five years and watched attempts to push Israel into the sea without lifting a finger. If I were the Israeli prime minister I wouldn’t give a damn about world morality—I would use the atomic bomb to protect my own.11
Had Hawke gone through the steps of his argument, beginning at Yad Vashem and leading on to the Israeli war memorials, his audience may have had a better grasp of his ideas. As it was, he simply expected them to know the effect the Holocaust has had upon Israeli attitudes, to know that Israelis have never forgiven and, perhaps, will never forgive the rest of the world because of the Holocaust, and to know that Israelis regard Gentile morality as bankrupt. They grasped, it seems, none of this background but remembered only the vivid foreground of his anger.
The months from the end of November, when the death threat was made, through to April, when Hawke gathered himself together for a federal election campaign, were terrible ones for the whole family. Hawke had been an absentee father for years; suddenly it had come home to him how dear the children were, and for the first time since his early days at the ACTU he decided he must make time for a family life. A doctor who was a long-term friend and who had treated Hawke after he had been on drinking benders owned a farm in Gippsland and had offered it to the Hawkes as a weekend retreat earlier in 1973. A police guard put on duty there in 1974 noted that Hawke was pitifully overwrought.
There were other symptoms: one night in early 1974 Hawke was drinking in the Boulevard Hotel in Sydney with a friend when he suddenly thought that a waiter, walking towards him, intended assault. Hawke threw a punch at the waiter and had to be forced to leave the bar and go to his room. Next day the friend upbraided Hawke for his behaviour:
He looked appalled when I told him all the things he’d done the night before. We were having lunch in a restaurant. He said, ‘Oh, God, why do I do these things?’ and started to cry. But he had the guts to go back to the Boulevard, find the waiter and apologise to him.
The Attorney-General’s department spent months investigating if indeed a terrorist group was operating in Australia and intended to murder the Hawke children. Its officers came to the conclusion that neither Black September guerrillas nor other Arab terrorists had reached Australia, and that the threat was, therefore, probably from a crank—which is not to say that cranks are incapable of murder. Hawke said later with bitter anguish, ‘It worried me that, maybe, the kids had been through all of that for nothing’. When questioned further his demeanour becomes threatening, with a look that says, ‘I refuse to discuss that’.
By April 1974 the worst period was over. Hawke’s recovery was speeded by national political concerns, for the Opposition—emboldened by the government’s failure in Parramatta; with the referenda; and by its mismanagement of an attempt to play political thimble-and-pea (the Gair Affair)—had summoned the nerve to delay Supply in the Senate. Whitlam decided to hold a general election. Hawke’s popularity rating was very high and the party decided to use him to the utmost in the election campaign. He was especially useful because of the disillusion with government in the trade union movement, which was so great that a number of unions had disaffiliated from the ALP. This had depleted the party’s campaign funds. Another of Hawke’s uses was that he was by now an excellent fund-raiser. David Combe said later,
I don’t know how much Bob has raised for the party, but it is certainly hundreds of thousands of dollars. We could be confident that he would pack any hall. And he got a lot of dough from businessman. There was always an irony that the Left would shriek about Hawke’s being friendly with big businessmen but when he got big cheques from them there was no suggestion that the money should be sent back, or that he’d done the wrong thing.
During the campaign Hawke was anxious that Whitlam should win back the hearts of the Jewish community. Kornhauser gave a breakfast in his hotel, the Chevron, at which the Prime Minister was to address Melbourne’s Jews and calm their fears about the government’s joining the rush away from Israel. Unfortunately, the soothing turned into a confrontation, for during the meeting Whitlam demanded, ‘What do you people want?’ Years later Jews were still wrathful that Whitlam had called them ‘you people’. Saul Same said,
Gough lost the Jewish vote when he said those words. But people made a distinction for Bob. If there were a fund-raising function and Bob was speaking everyone wanted to come. I remember organising a dinner and being doubtful about approaching a particular man, one of the most senior industrialists in Melbourne. I rang him and he said, ‘What! For Bob Hawke? I’ll cancel a wedding.’ And he did.
Even Hawke’s enemies acknowledged that his efforts during the 1974 campaign were heroic and that the government’s victory, with five seats in hand, owed as much to him as to Whitlam.
His determination to spend the weekends undisturbed in the country had of course been abandoned during the campaign. When the election was over his weekend peace was never completely restored. By May 1974 it was obvious that the economy was seriously ill; inflation was surging forward, thanks in large part to the sharpest weapon in Middle East politics: the price of oil. There was an epidemic of strikes; wage claims were extraordinary and fed back into the inflationary spiral; the Treasury restrictions on money supply were biting hard on business; and unemployment was increasing. After a while the demands on Hawke were such that a telephone had to be installed at the farm. He was called back to town more and more, and gradually the dream of a ‘normal’ family life drifted away.
Hawke had cancelled two ILO meetings, fearful that if he were in Europe, where Arab terrorists were most active, he could be killed. But in June he decided he must keep an appointment to address a conference in Oxford. Before he left he called on Kornhauser to ask him to look after Hazel and the children for him if he were murdered. Hawke had no idea what his exact financial situation was, except that he was in debt. He did not know if he had any life insurance policies, for Hazel looked after such matters. Kornhauser recalled,
Bob was giving me a heart attack! No money, a wife, three children! What am I going to do? It’s Saturday night and he’s leaving the next morning. We owed him so much . . . I assured Bob that if anything happened to him Hazel and the children would be cared for.
The Israelis also considered it their duty to protect Hawke, and when he arrived there en route for London, a bodyguard was waiting for him. Governments normally provide bodyguards only for ambassadors or heads of state. An Australian diplomat in Israel described the bodyguard as ‘nine feet [2.75 m] tall and nine feet wide, covered in weapons and muttering into a walkie-talkie all the time. It wasn’t very pleasant.’ In England Hawke’s back gave way again after a two-year remission of trouble and he had to board his aircraft home as an invalid in a wheelchair.
By August he was warning that the government would not survive unless it brought down the rate of inflation within a year. Meanwhile, throughout 1974, one after another of Hawke’s ACTU enterprise schemes had been neglected and the enterprise ideas were fading away. There had been an outright rejection from the unions of any joint ventures with Histadrut, because of the odium now attached to Israel. Other schemes had vanished because Hawke had been too ill or too distracted with strike negotiations and other work (he was already a member of the Jackson committee as well as on the Board of the Reserve Bank), to give them time. All round, it had been a miserable twelve months.
Hawke was personally consoled when, in September, he was re-elected unopposed as president of the ALP and the federal executive paid tribute to the efforts he had made to have the government returned to office. Some office. Inflation for the year was 16.3 per cent, strikes had cost 6 292 500 working days lost and more than a quarter of a million were unemployed. Before the Budget was introduced, a month late, Hawke held pre-Budget discussions with the government, arguing for cuts in indirect taxes and the income taxes of the less well paid; a reduction in interest rates; the introduction of quarterly wage adjustments to curb wage claims; and indexation of income tax. At a special conference of ACTU affiliated unions he had managed to wring from delegates a commitment to try to pull together with the government, even to the extent, as the meeting’s resolution stated, of giving ‘sympathetic consideration to supporting attempts by the Government to acquire . . . powers’ to deal with economic problems. This was almost a reversal of the unions’ previous policy on the incomes referendum.
By October he and Whitlam were friends again, lunching together at The Lodge. It was the calm before the next storm.