AMOS ELON

The Israelis: Founders and Sons

1971

FOR MOST OF 1962 I was living in Haifa or Tel Aviv gathering impressions for Next Generation: Travels in Israel, which was published a couple of years later. Some of those I met and even wrote about became lifelong friends and one of them was Amos Elon, whose reporting for Haaretz, the daily newspaper of record, had already made him an internationally known journalist. Born in Vienna in 1926, he was seven when his parents brought him and his sister to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His Hebrew, German and English were fluent. Immensely well read, he had a sardonic sense of humor and excelled in pointing out ignorance, inconsistency and stupidity. Once upon a time, a great many Jewish intellectuals wrote and talked their way to fame in the cafés of Vienna, and that was the course Amos’s life would naturally have taken. It is hardly an exaggeration to think of him in the same frame as Joseph Roth or Stefan Zweig.

On behalf of Haaretz Amos was in Hungary at the time of the anti-Communist revolution of 1956, then their correspondent in Washington, finally travelling extensively in order to write his first book, a suitably ambiguous portrait of post-Hitler Germany with the title Journey Through a Haunted Land. Establishing himself, he married Beth, an open-minded American prepared to make her life in Israel. Tel Aviv was then a city whose inhabitants rose early in the morning and went to bed early in the evening. The Elons were different. Their house was a sort of unofficial media center for anyone on some reporting assignment. Karl Meyer of the New York Times, the Magnum photographer Erich Lessing, Herbert Pundik editor of the Danish paper Politiken, were among those who liked to think there was a secret self-selected network known as the Friends of Amos Elon. When Amos pushed his spectacles high on the bridge of his nose or took them off altogether and started describing reality in the Middle East, it was time to listen. He had an undoubted streak of melancholy, which at first I thought was an individual trait, until I realized that everyone in the country had the same deep-down but unspoken regret that they could no longer live wherever they had once lived.

What now looks like Israel’s Golden Age of enforced isolation came to an abrupt end in May 1967 when Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered Egyptian units to take up positions in the Sinai Desert. The watching world wondered whether Nasser might make good his threat to eliminate Israel. John Anstey, editor of the Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine, sent me to cover what became known as the Six Day War. On the day when I caught up with Amos, he was back home in his house on Hazayit Street in Tel Aviv, too exhausted to talk except to say that he had been at the front somewhere in Sinai in a jeep with General Avraham Yoffe, a man larger than life in more ways than one. The General was standing up and surveying the battle through field glasses when Amos heard him groan, “My God, war is boring!” (At that time, the novelist Mordecai Richler remarked just as memorably that if planes were overhead he’d rather they were ours.)

Nobody that I know of had anticipated that the Palestinians on the West Bank of Jordan and in Gaza would ever come under Israeli rule. Writing in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, Amos was among the very first to propose unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all Palestinian territory, in effect arguing that victory in the Six Day War had given Israel unwanted responsibility for other people and that was no victory at all. Put another way, the Arabs were to pay no price either for going to war or for losing it. No Israeli had previously written a book like Amos’s Flight Into Egypt, published in 1980. An official guest in the country, he met and admired the then President Anwar Sadat, Mrs. Jihan Sadat and other Egyptians whom he took to be genuine peacemakers. The repeated attempts to restart a peace process seemed to me fanciful; I tend to believe that on the evidence available a Palestinian state is bound to be an Arab tyranny like all the others, and not worth having. Those in the know often expected Amos to reject my opinions lock, stock and barrel, but he never did. In spite of our differences, he even gladly endorsed my book The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.

Touring in Tuscany, Beth had visited Buggiano, a small but beautiful town on top of a steep hill about an hour from Florence. On impulse, Amos and Beth bought a house in a secluded spot at the end of a lane. The more time they spent there, the more their critics accused them of turning their backs on Israel and nationalism, so making a bad situation worse. We saw the Elons so regularly that I am pretty sure their retreat to Buggiano was motivated as much by aesthetics as by politics. Here was an ideal setting for reading and writing, for growing fruit and making wine.

We had inherited a family house high up at Arcetri on the southern side of Florence, and together with Beth we prepared a surprise fiesta in the courtyard to celebrate Amos’s sixtieth birthday. Guests were to come from six countries. Karl Meyer edited a Festschrift of some twenty contributors whose columns made and unmade reputations, while he himself observed that what distinguishes Amos’s writing “is its passionate and humanizing sense of fairness; he deals justly with friend and adversary, despising the wretched little orthodoxies that unworthily divide them.” I still see the look on Amos’s face as he entered the courtyard and the assembled guests sang for him.

I hear Amos telling stories, for instance how President Johnson had summoned Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, to Washington and opened conversation by saying, “I was a-sitting here scratching my ass and thinking about Is-ra-el.” In one session at a conference, the egregious South African novelist Nadine Gordimer said that if Amos was sincere about the Palestinians he would go to a barricade and get himself shot dead on their behalf, and I hear him reply, “Did you get yourself shot on behalf of Mandela?” A woman by the name of Dina Vierney sued me for describing her as the teenage model and mistress of the sculptor Maillol. I hear Amos immediately quoting from memory a passage from the diaries of Count Keyserling, social busybody par excellence, recording that Vierney had indeed been the mistress of Maillol. I hear him describing how he had come to Vienna to be interviewed on television in the aftermath of the first invasion of Iraq, when an old man in front of a shop displaying books about the Middle East turned to him and said that he hoped Saddam Hussein would throw the Jews into the sea. Why is that? Amos asked. Because some of them might come here, was the unexpected answer, and life would then become bearable again. Beth wrote comprehensive books about Italian cuisine, practicing it herself at the highest level, and one day just before lunch I hear Amos warding off his diet by saying to her, “I don’t want any of your Third World food.”

The Pity of It All (2002), his last and most powerful book, is the master-work of a lifetime, a heart-felt and fully researched account of the Jewish experience in Germany from nineteenth-century emancipation to the Third Reich. As Amos had found for himself, it is wishful to believe in happy endings, and Jews should always have in mind where else they can live. On a visit to Buggiano I saw him one last time rising up the stone stairs of his house on the chair lift chanting some dog-Latin and giving a very good imitation of a papal blessing.