Enlightening Disillusionments
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1 ENLIGHTENING DISILLUSIONMENTS Aki ORR 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1. Enlightening disillusionment (stage 1) 4 2. More enlightening disillusionment (stage 2) 17 3. Medals for war resisters 30 4. Peace, peace, yet there is no peace 36 5. A moth in a black Hole 48 6. A nuclear war resister 57 7. The same children 62 8. To forgive - or not ? 66 9. One word against one's conscience 69 10. A difficult choice 80 11. Wonders of the C.I.A. 83 12. A nice hot cup of tea 86 13. Nello is still here 91 14. Beware of "Ultimate Truth" 96 15. Ruler of the flickering shadows 105 16. Can an airplane be a musical instrument? 111 17. The loneliness of Elinor Rigby 117 18. Lord Caradon 121 19. A Brutal Revolution 124 20. Sinai 130 21. Sheikh Ali 135 22. The smallest child 140 23. Hava Nagila or Hava Shatila 141 24. Slovo 144 25. Reply to Ra'anan 150 26. Suicide? 155 3 Author‟s introduction to the English translation (2011) This book was written in Hebrew in 2005 for an Israeli readership. I was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931 to Jewish atheist, humanist parents. They met in Berlin in 1924 but emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1928 and married there. In 1931 they returned briefly to Berlin to settle inheritance matters. I was born there and their stay was prolonged. In 1933 the Nazis won power in Germany. That summer, when I was two years old, my mother strolled in a Berlin park with me in the pram when a uniformed Nazi SS officer came towards her and greeted her with the stretched arm “Heil Hitler” salute. As my mother's hands were pushing the pram she wondered whom was he saluting. She looked around but saw no other people. Then she looked at me in the pram. I sat there with my arm raised. She realized the SS Officer thought I was saluting him and returned the salute. When she came home she told my father: “We must leave this country. Our son imitates Nazi gestures and will grow up to be a Nazi”. My father nodded in agreement but did nothing. Eventually the Nazis passed a law that children of Jewish parents must sit in classrooms on a special “Jews‟ Bench”. That motivated my father to emigrate. My parents had all the necessary documents to emigrate to the USA but my mother had a brother who had emigrated to Palestine in 1924 so she decided to visit him before leaving for the USA. They arrived in Jaffa in 1934. My mother fell in love with the magnificent Tel-Aviv beach, its snow-white sands (in 1934) and emerald clear sea (nowadays polluted) so she prolonged her visit. They were still in Palestine in 1939 when WW2 broke out. So they had to stay. When Israel fought its war of independence in 1948 my father said to me: “In 1934 I knew nothing about the Palestinians. I didn‟t know they had lived here in many towns and villages for over a thousand years. Had I known it I would have left. There will be a century of nationalistic conflict here. It will suck up, like a whirlpool, all the thinking, creativity, - and lives, of people. It will be a waste of one‟s life. I am not a nationalist, I made a mistake in staying here but at my age it is too late for me to start life from scratch elsewhere". I was 17 and did not understand him. I went to school in Tel-Aviv and was fed all the standard nationalistic Zionist propaganda. Like all kids I imbibed it without questioning. As the years passed I gradually became disillusioned with many ideas I had absorbed at school. This book describes some - but not all - of my disillusionments. Many Israelis of my generation share these disillusionments. Weaning from an illusion is often as traumatic as weaning from a physical addiction. However, if one overcomes the post-weaning depression, the final outcome in both cases is always beneficial. Aki Orr, Tel-Aviv, 2011 Thanks are due to Mark Marshall of Toronto for this excellent English translation. Ziona ORR reminded me to add "Suicide?" which I forgot in the Hebrew edition. 4 1. Enlightening disillusionment (stage 1) In the summer of 1950 I was demobilized from the Israeli Navy and sought work in the Israeli merchant marine. As a cadet in Israel‟s very first Naval Officers‟ course I had worked six months on the A-16 (a former US ice-breaker) and a year on the frigate K-28, so I was not a novice on ships. But the Zim shipping company who hired me to work on their cargo ship ignored that. They insisted that work in the navy was unlike work in the merchant marine and that I must start from the lowest rank. They said I qualified only as a “deck boy” which is the lowest rank for deck-hands. Above it are the ranks of “Ordinary Seaman‟‟(OS1 and OS2), “Able Bodied seaman‟‟(AB), and “Boatswain,” and the officer ranks: “Third Mate” “Second Mate”, “First Mate”, and “Captain”. To rise in rank one must serve the required sea-time in the a lower rank as set out in the Ministry of Transport regulations and then pass special exams set by the Ministry. At 19 I was accepted for work as a "deck boy" on the Zim company cargo ship “Tel Aviv” that sailed on the Israel-United States line. It was a “Liberty‟‟-type cargo steamship with a capacity of ten thousand tons. In WW2 the United States and Canada built these ships for transporting supplies to Europe. German submarines sank many, but at the end of WW2 many remained in surplus. The US government sold them cheaply, and somebody bought four and donated them to the newly-founded State of Israel. They were named “Tel-Aviv,” “Haifa,” „‟Yafo” and “Ako.” and given to the Zim company in Haifa, of which 51% was owned by the Zionist Labour Union (a.k.a Histadrut) and 49% by the Jewish Agency. I began work on the Tel-Aviv in the port of Haifa a week before departure. At that time Israel exported only citrus fruit - in autumn. I began to work in summer when all Israeli ships sailed empty from Haifa. The Tel-Aviv stood empty in Haifa port and its height was like that of a three-storey building. To me she looked huge. Like all ships at that time she had a steam boiler and a steam engine. The steering was hydraulic but operated by a mechanical steering wheel. She did not have radar, and lookout duty was done with regular binoculars. The cargo holds were covered with wooden planks and canvas tarps. She had her own cranes, and could load and unload cargo without the help of port cranes. The crew of every ship consisted of three sectors: deck, engine and catering. The deck crew was responsible for maintenance of the cargo handling gear, the navigation gear, and watch-keeping doing steering and lookout. In port the deck crew worked to remove rust and to paint the ship. At sea, we steered the ship, kept lookout, and prepared the cargo gear for the next port. Officially our working day lasted eight hours (at sea we worked two shifts of four hours separated by rest periods of eight hours) but at sea deck crews were asked to work four hours overtime nearly every day. In port we could refuse to do that, but at sea refusal was considered “mutiny,” and those refusing risked dismissal. Thus for all practical purposes a workday lasted twelve hours. 5 Shipping companies paint the company‟s emblem on both sides of the funnels of their ships. The emblem of Zim was the Zionist flag – two thick blue stripes with seven golden stars between them. The stars represented the seven-hour working day that Theodore Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, had proposed as the working day in the Zionist State. We used to joke that both funnel sides taken together had 14 stars symbolizing Zim‟s 14-hour working day. The passage to the US lasted three weeks - one week to cross the Mediterranean and two weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The return was the same. The ship stayed in every port of call for a week. Loading at six ports lasted about six weeks. Along with the six weeks at sea, the round trip Haifa-US-Haifa lasted some three months. When I returned my friends asked me: “didn‟t you get bored at sea, with nothing around you except the sea and the sky?” I explained that after 12 hours of work I was so tired that I had no time to get bored and the rest of the time I slept. On my first trip I did not even see the captain. Despite that, in those days Israeli seamen loved their work and would not change it for any work on land even for higher pay. The situation of the men with families was different. The prolonged absence from the family was a burden but they too loved the work at sea. There was an atmosphere of professional pride. At that time most Israeli seamen endeavoured to excel in their work not in order to please their employers or to rise in rank but to win the esteem of their shipmates. Esteem was based on professional competence and willingness to help others.