7 October 2024
“Eh, Yohnnie, you know the British Embassy in Tel Aviv has advised you must to leave,” said Tamir, down at the fish farm. I’d been working there since January 1981. ‘Ha staphon,’ (the north) he said nodding towards Lebanon. We were tugging at a fish net so huge it might once have seen service on a tennis court. Columns of tanks droned passed heading north. Lebanon-panic had seized the country’s diplomatic corps. Overnight several foreign volunteers on the kibbutz had departed. Embarrassed, I shrugged. ‘There’s the Mishloah to think about,’ I said. This was the harvesting and sending of fresh carp to market, conducted every couple of months.
Back then in 1981 opinion was that Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, was about to invade Lebanon. The aim was to stop the PLO lobbing shells into the north of the country. A secondary aim was to liberate the Christian enclaves routinely terrorised by Yasser Arafat and his thugs. In fact the invasion came the following year. However, in what many of us later thought was a dress rehearsal, thousands of young Israelis, melted away. Tamir and the three guys who ran the fish farm were all senior reservists with well defined roles in the IDF. That left one very old man, an Austrian, and myself. Herr S. had dug out the lakes in the 1930s. A Parkinson’s sufferer, S. shivered and shook and spoke no English. We conversed well enough, he in a quaint Austrian German and me in a rough dialect I’d picked up working on a building site in Stuttgart the year before. S. told me how much feed to give each lake and how the water levels should be raised and lowered to oxygenate the water. Two school kids turned up to help when they could.
The invasion of Lebanon, when it came, was traumatic for Israel. Intellectuals ranted at Begin, a conservative, despite the fact he had concluded a peace deal with Egypt three years before. Israel, they said, had never before invaded a country. In fact pre-emptive strikes were nothing new. As any professional soldier will tell you, attack is often the only way to sure defence.
‘Are you sure?’ Tamir asked. ‘Are you Jewish?’ ‘No I’m not but I can’t go.’
With Tamir and the lads gone we worked long hours in the fish farm. Pulling in nets of threshing fish at dawn, waist deep in a lake the size of a rugby pitch, I understood I was standing in a scene little changed from the time of the apostles. It was all too easy to imagine them doing the same just up the road in Galilee.
The Holy Father recently asked us to pray for peace in the Middle East, to recite the holy rosary and to fast. I’m happy to do this. However as I entreat Our Lady’s prayers, I pray for victory. Victory for Israel, the vanquishing of Hamas and Hezbollah and the overthrow of all the powers of this current darkness.
As I recite the rosary, my mind wanders along the lanes that bordered the fish lakes I tended. Hung with willows and eucalyptus trees it was the finest job I ever had. As I say the ‘Glory Be’ I think back to the old one storey bar where we’d dance and sip our Nesher beers. I cross myself and say the ‘Shema Yisrael’. This is the first prayer of religious jews everywhere, every day. I’ve come to believe it should be the first prayer of all people who believe in the ultimate victory of good over evil.
When Tamir and the others returned, they made a bit of a fuss and bought me beers. ‘Thank you so much,’ they said. I waved their thanks aside. ‘You don’t understand,’ I said, ‘I’m stuck here at the moment. I can’t afford the airport tax – it’s nearly $20 now. So, you know, I had no alternative…’
Tamir grinned more broadly than ever. Looking up at him I knew he didn’t believe me.