Tel Aviv, 1953
Amos Alon strolls along the sand in bare feet as he always does at daybreak. It’s the time of day he likes the most, the hour before the city wakes. Tel Aviv is a city of loud sounds and bright colours, and he enjoys this interlude of peace when the sun tints the sky in streaks of peach, rose and apricot, and the streets are still empty and quiet. He walks close to the shore’s edge, breathing in the clean, salty air and listening to the lapping of the waves as his feet sink into the sand, leaving deep imprints that are quickly filled by the inrushing tide. These early walks feed his spirit and refresh his mind, and he often finds that by the time he is ready to lace up his shoes and head back to the office, the stroll has worked its magic and provided the solution to a problem that has been exercising his mind.
On this particular morning, he is thinking about his new client. It’s a strange case, and the more he thinks about it, the stranger it seems. He reflects on his own split-second decision to accept the brief, something none of his colleagues would have done in this situation, but his ability to trust his instincts and make swift decisions was honed during the War of Independence. As he recalls the war, his hand traces the ridge of the deep scar on his cheek, a souvenir of one of the skirmishes he led against the British while their Mandate was still in force.
His thoughts turn to the case he has taken on. If Isaiah Fleischmann has defamed Miklós Nagy, how come it’s the government, and not Nagy himself, that has sued the pamphleteer? And this man Nagy. Amos doesn’t know much about him apart from the article he read recently in Ha’aretz. According to the report, Nagy saved over a thousand Jews in Hungary during the war, and the government is grooming him for a ministry in the next elections.
Now that’s something to conjure with: a government figure who was a wartime hero now being accused of collaborating with the Nazis, the most serious crime in Israel and the only one that incurs the death penalty. It sounds far-fetched, but Amos knows that in life the most unimaginable scenarios often turn out to be true. Besides, he believes he’s a good judge of men. Isaiah might be a pompous crank with a bee in his bonnet, but he strikes him as sincere.
The more he thinks about this case, the more tantalising it becomes. He has a bloodhound’s sense for the hidden secrets that men in power seek to conceal, and he doesn’t trust the men running the country, especially the one with the bushy white hair who leads the government. To say he doesn’t trust Ben-Gurion is an understatement: he loathes him and would do everything in his power to expose his duplicity. And now in this unlikely case, with its even more unlikely defendant, he glimpses a sliver of light shining through the apparently solid wall of government impregnability through which he might finally wreak revenge.
It’s been a long-simmering hatred and, standing on the promenade, looking out to sea with seagulls wheeling and screeching overhead, the waves foaming the shore with lace-like patterns and the taste of the sea in his mouth, it all comes back to him as if it happened yesterday: the betrayal and the crime. And that memory ruins the serenity of his dawn stroll.
His thoughts turn to Eli, and the pain is as sharp and bitter as it was the day it happened, five years and one long lifetime ago. It was Eli who had joined the Irgun first and, as usual, Amos had been quick to follow in his older brother’s footsteps. Eli was a firebrand searching for a cause, and this time the cause was just, and he couldn’t wait to join. They would be part of the underground army, the Irgun, that would drive the British out of Palestine and set up an independent state of Israel.
Like their leader Menachem Begin, they believed that the provisional government had no vision and no courage. As long as those gutless men of the Jewish Agency were in power, they would go on negotiating and kowtowing to the British, and nothing would ever change. Two thousand years was too long to wait for the restoration of your homeland, but their land would never be free because their leaders were too pusillanimous to risk antagonising their British masters.
According to Eli, who knew much more about politics than Amos did, the British White Paper had swindled the Jews out of their homeland. What neither of them could forgive was that the British had made a pact with the Arabs to prevent Jewish survivors from migrating to Palestine, and they turned away ships bringing Jews who had managed to escape Nazi death camps. Prevented from landing, they perished at sea or were slaughtered when they returned to Nazi-occupied countries.
You can’t blame the British, Eli used to say in his cynical way. After all, fifty million Arabs with oil wells were a better deal than a few Jews with nothing to offer but orange groves, patriotism, and an irritating sense of historical entitlement. But, he often added, our provisional government should have done more to expel the British and establish an independent Jewish state, instead of treating us as a Jewish outpost of Westminster.
Although he and Eli didn’t join the Stern Gang, the extreme paramilitary group who sabotaged British military installations and blew up their military depots, they admired their audacious raids which succeeded against all odds. They were outraged that instead of siding with the young Jews fighting for independence and freedom, the provisional government denounced them as terrorists, and, like the loyal lackeys they were, they helped the British to capture, imprison and hang the ringleaders. The way Eli saw it, their leaders were actually collaborating with their oppressors.
When the British finally left Palestine, and the United Nations declared the independent state of Israel, Amos and his brother were overjoyed. They had been part of the group whose daring actions had helped to push the British out and that resulted in their nation’s independence. To add to their triumph, Winston Churchill validated their struggle by acknowledging that it was really thanks to the actions of Irgun that the British were kicked out of Palestine. They had fought and won. After thousands of years, they had brought a Jewish nation into existence once more. They were on the right side of history, allied to the winning cause. No feeling in the world could equal that. He could still hear Eli’s triumphant voice and feel the pressure of his fingers on his shoulder as he said, ‘We did it, little brother!’
His brother’s words still ringing in his ears, Amos gazes at the far horizon. Spotlit in the morning sun, a cargo ship is sailing along the Mediterranean coast towards Jaffa, and for a moment he imagines it’s the vessel he watched that June day in 1948, the one his brother was on, bringing weapons and ammunition from France to help fight the War of Independence after the British left and to relieve the Irgun men in the siege of Jerusalem.
*
The Altalena was carrying around 900 young Jews from Europe, mostly Holocaust survivors, eager to defend the new nation from its neighbours — Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Syria and Egypt — whose armies had attacked it the day after the United Nations voted it into existence. At that point, the fate of Jerusalem hung in the balance, and Irgun had arranged the purchase of the ship and obtained the weapons and ammunition to equip its men, who were facing annihilation.
Before he sailed for Marseille to help load the Altalena, Eli had scoffed at Amos’s praise for the French who had agreed to supply the ship. ‘Don’t imagine for a minute they did it because they love the Jews,’ he said. ‘It’s politics. France is furious that Britain usurped their colonial power in Syria and Lebanon, and sided with the Arabs against them, so they decided to help us as a slap in the face for Britain. See, where there’s power there’s always a hidden motive, something concealed or not revealed, an evasion, prevarication, or a downright lie. And behind everything, you’ll find the ugly face of politics lurking in the shadows.’ And Amos had listened, his eyes wide with admiration. How smart Eli was.
Amos remembers his excitement that hot June night when the Altalena came into view near the Tel Aviv shore. He rushed to the beach in the morning and found an eager crowd already gathered to watch the unloading of the vessel. Eli had told him that Menachem Begin, the head of Irgun, had made an agreement with Ben-Gurion, the head of the new government of Israel, that twenty per cent of the weapons and ammunition were to be allocated to the fighters of Irgun so that Jerusalem could be saved.
As he stood watching the cargo being unloaded, he noticed two corvettes moving towards the Altalena. They stopped a short distance away and he wondered why vessels from the Israeli navy had suddenly appeared on the scene. He supposed they’d come to protect the Altalena. Suddenly he heard a burst of fire. It seemed to come from somewhere on the beach. He turned, trying to figure out where the explosion had come from, then he heard a blast of heavy machine-gun fire. It was unbelievable, but there was no doubting its target: it was aimed at the Altalena.
If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. The gunfire came from the corvettes. There were shouts and screams from the crowd. People turned to each other in confusion at what they had just witnessed, debating what it could possibly mean. What was going on? Who could be responsible for such an outrageous action? Who had made such a shocking mistake? Heads would surely roll. But whose?
Amos stood there, frozen with shock. He watched as the Altalena started sailing towards the shore, but to his horror it was fired on again, and this time it returned fire. Boats crammed with passengers from the vessel were coming ashore, but suddenly gunfire exploded once again, and he heard himself yelling ‘Stop! Can’t you see, boats are coming ashore, the captain is on the bridge waving a white flag!’ Everyone was shouting, cursing, protesting, lightbulbs were exploding as newspaper cameramen took photographs, and a reporter who had appeared on the scene was scribbling notes in shorthand to his right. But the firing from the shore continued. Amos couldn’t swallow. His knuckles were white as he clutched the railing on the shore’s edge. A rumour went around the crowd that it was Palmach, the military wing of the government, that was firing on the Altalena. A fellow standing beside him said he thought the commander was someone called Yitzak Rabin. It was unthinkable, incomprehensible, but it was happening before his eyes. He only had one thought: Eli. He wasn’t on the boats that had landed on the Tel Aviv beach. Was he still on board?
But worse was to come. Smoke rose from the stricken ship, and someone shouted that a direct hit had caused a fire to break out in the cargo hold containing explosives. He could see men jumping off the vessel and starting to swim for the shore, but the firing continued as explosions erupted on board. Knowing Eli as he did, Amos was certain that he’d be one of the last to abandon ship, and he scanned the sea, squinting to catch sight of his brother, his eyes darting from one small figure in the water to another, searching for some familiar feature.
Eli was a good swimmer, he would definitely make it to shore. Any moment now he would emerge from the water. He could imagine how outraged his brother would be at the loss of the cargo that had been purchased at such great cost in the hope of relieving Jerusalem. Now the cargo that would have brought them victory was lost, and the holy city’s fate was sealed.
As he stood there, flames rose from the stricken vessel, and he heard more explosions. There would be no-one left on board now. But where was Eli? Panic-stricken, he ran from one group to another, asking about him. Had he made it to shore further away? Had Amos missed him? He brushed past the reporter who wanted to know who he was looking for. A young woman with springy reddish hair and a white nurse’s apron spattered with blood sat on the sand, her head in her hands, sobbing. ‘The bastards,’ she kept repeating. ‘The bastards. Our own people and they fired on us.’
A cold dread took hold of him. She had come ashore on one of the boats. He had to know. ‘Do you know Eli Alon? Do you know if he came on one of the boats or swam to shore?’
She looked at him as if she didn’t understand what he was saying, and he had to restrain himself from shaking her, to make her understand. ‘Eli,’ he began, ‘Eli Alon,’ but before he could say any more, the look in her eyes silenced him.
She stared at him with tears flowing down her cheeks, and shook her head. He knew then he would never see his brother again.
He also knew that he would never forgive the treachery of those who had fired on the Altalena. Most of all, he would never forgive Ben-Gurion, with his bushy white hair and deceptively avuncular manner, the leader of the newly established Jewish nation, who had made the decision to fire on his fellow Jews. That day on the beach in Tel Aviv, Amos made a promise to his brother that no matter how long it took, one day he would avenge him.
*
The warmth of the risen sun has dissolved the delicate wisps of colour, and the sky is its usual cloudless blue. The blessed silence of dawn is shattered by car horns, shouts and arguments. Somewhere from the direction of Jaffa, a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. It was going to be another hot and noisy day.
Walking back to his office, Amos quickens his pace. He senses that the strange case that has so fortuitously come his way will finally provide him with the opportunity for revenge that he has been waiting for.