A Life in Questions. Jeremy Paxman
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names.’
‘Very well, then,’ said the teacher, ‘we will call you Yeremeyahoo.’
And so I remained for the rest of my education in Hebrew, although the only words of the language I can now recall are those for ‘cucumber’, ‘bus station’ and ‘Where is the lavatory?’ Israeli Ambassadors who later came into the Newsnight studio to be cross-examined on their government’s foreign policy tended to be slightly nonplussed by my greeting.
Sitting in a classroom was certainly more congenial than sweating in the fields, but it soon began to trouble me. It was not that I was anti-Israel – at school I had been horrified by accounts of Nazi atrocities in Lord Russell’s The Scourge of the Swastika, and the fact that the country was surrounded by enemy states, its own forces massively outnumbered by their armies, gave it (at the time) the image of the plucky underdog. Most of the British newspaper coverage of the country’s remarkable victory in the Six Day War two years earlier had been pretty fiercely pro-Israel. But kibbutz Hebrew classes were clearly intended for new immigrants to the country, of which I was not, and never could be, one. The fact that our teacher had a number tattooed on her wrist, signifying that she had survived a Nazi concentration camp, made me especially uncomfortable with my dishonesty.
I was, in any case, becoming increasingly disillusioned with the kibbutz. The movement as a whole had made a remarkable contribution to the development of Israel, producing, for example, a disproportionately large number of army officers. But it seemed to me not altogether in the spirit of the movement that local Arabs were employed by the kibbutz to do some of the most menial jobs, which residents felt were beneath them. I really did not like the way they talked about Palestinians, and the nuclear option in any conversation about politics was to be told, ‘Well, you’re not Jewish, you wouldn’t understand.’* There came the inevitable moment in the communal showers when one particularly vehement Zionist with whom I had been laying irrigation pipes looked through the stream of water, eyed up my genitals and walked out. I left a couple of days later.
You rarely hear people in Britain acknowledge that a good share of the blame for the miserable mess in the Middle East belongs with their country, but it is true. The plain fact is that during the First World War, the British – then the greatest imperial power on earth – made contradictory promises to Arabs and Zionists; to say nothing of side deals they did with the French, the other colonial power in the region, to carve up the Middle East between the two states once the war was over. The Declaration of November 1917 by Arthur ‘Pretty Fanny’ Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, of the British government’s enthusiasm for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine is still cited as the source of the war raging there a century later.
On subsequent visits over the past forty years I have shuddered more than once at pathetic scraps of paper from the period of the British Mandate which Palestinians produced from old wooden family chests and said were title deeds to land now built over by Israeli settlements. The plain fact is that, with lavish American aid, Israel has turned itself into the superpower of the region. No one seems to care very much about Palestine, including many of the smug regimes in the region which profess concern. Of course, on many occasions Palestinians have been their own worst enemy: desperation makes for bad judgement.
It is grotesque that refugee camps established in 1948 still exist, yet when I asked a clever young Palestinian why he didn’t leave the camp he was living in and get the job elsewhere to which his medical training would surely qualify him, he replied that ‘Without the camps we have no cause.’ You can see his point, but it is quite something to condemn your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and unborn generations to a life of squalor. One US administration after another has made grand promises about trying to secure a just and lasting peace, but they ring pretty hollow to Palestinians stopped every day on their way to work by soldiers clothed and armed by the United States. Cowering in a Palestinian refugee camp years later, as American-made Israeli warplanes came in on bombing raids, I found it hard to think of Israel as the underdog of my kibbutz days.
I spent the next few weeks living in Jerusalem, which seemed the most magical city on earth, and then caught a boat from Haifa to Turkey. It was a leisurely journey home – too leisurely, as it turned out, because Harold Wilson’s economic miracle had restricted anyone going abroad to £50-worth of foreign currency or travellers’ cheques, plus £15 in sterling. I augmented my budget by sleeping rough, selling my blood a couple of times, and getting occasional odd jobs. I was sleeping on a beach in Crete when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon: someone else spending the night there had a transistor which picked up the American Forces radio service. There was something astonishing about gazing up at the moon from inside a sleeping bag and knowing there were fellow humans walking about on its surface.
By the time I had hitch-hiked up through Yugoslavia and arrived in Trieste, the money had finally run out. When I couldn’t find even a job washing up in a restaurant I hitch-hiked on to Milan and threw myself on the mercy of the British Consul there, who bought me a train ticket home out of his own pocket.
Back in England, the last few weeks of pre-university life passed by in their undramatic rural way. I dated a girl who lived in the village mill house, and drank good warm beer in the Crown with a farmer who boasted that he still castrated his unwanted male lambs with his teeth. I was as eager to get on with life as any other nineteen-year-old waiting to go to university, though clearly at times I must have seemed an insufferable prig. Why didn’t the local newsagent stock the New Statesman, New Society or the Spectator, I moaned. ‘I don’t suppose many people want to buy them,’ was my father’s sensible response. ‘But they sell lots of copies of Farmer’s Weekly.’ On Sundays Mum still dragged us off to hear the vicar, a bony jeweller who had had a late vocation, preaching on thoughtless texts. ‘How odd of God/To choose the Jews,’ he began one Sunday. As anti-Semitic doggerel goes I suppose it’s mild, but just back from Israel as I was, it seemed especially offensive looking up from the pews to see the vicar’s enormous Adam’s apple quivering above his dog-collar in the pulpit. I mentioned it at supper, and Dad just said, ‘That old nonsense. Why didn’t you get up and say, “Not half as odd as those who choose/A Jewish god, yet spurn the Jews”?’ I hadn’t wanted to make a fuss, I suppose. Plus the fact that it had never occurred to me.
By this time, Dad’s business career had taken a decided turn for the worse. As part of its commitment to ensure what Clause Four of the party’s constitution called ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’, the Labour government had nationalised the steel industry. Father’s employers, the pipe company Stewarts & Lloyds, disappeared into an enormous, hugely inefficient corporation owned by the state and chaired by a businessman appointed by Wilson. When, years later, the whole project turned out to be a misconceived shambles, the chairman, Lord Melchett, let it be known that he had harboured serious private reservations all along about whether the state was any good as an employer. Pity he didn’t act upon them. But they were anyway not as great as Dad’s. He stuck it out for a couple of years, and then decided he’d had enough.
Unfortunately, he quit without really having any idea what he was going to do with his life. The Steel Corporation let him buy what had been his company car from them, but by the time I set off for Cambridge he was unemployed. A farmer neighbour gave him work for a while, driving a tractor, but then he fell victim to a scam – for an apparently sensible businessman, he could be astonishingly naïve. He decided to invest almost everything he had in a company cooked up by a Californian shyster named William Penn Patrick. In theory, ‘Holiday Magic’ sold cosmetics to customers in their own homes. In fact it was a pyramid scheme in which the only way to recoup your outlay was to recruit other suckers to buy a franchise; they in turn would only see any money by finding more victims. The thing was wrapped up in much mental mumbo-jumbo and some sinister-sounding ‘Leadership Dynamics’. Dad bought a mountain of overpriced cosmetic products which he stored under the stairs, and which clearly made Mother feel very uncomfortable – she must have had a sixth sense about the scheme. The mountain never seemed to get much smaller, and the levels of stress in the household became almost tangible. Somehow Dad managed to get out of Holiday