Chapter 11: African and other friendships
Aiding Africa
"Still, the world was not made up exclusively of Europeans and Asians. There were also the emerging nations of Africa, then on the verge of achieving independence, and to the black states-ui-the-making there was a great deal that Israel could and wanted to give. Like them, we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together and how to defend ourselves. Independence had come to us, as it was coming to Africa, not served up on a silver platter but after years of struggle, arid we had had to learn —partly through our own mistakes —the high cost of self-determination. In a world neatly divided between the ‘haves’and the ‘have-nots’,Israel’s experience was beginning to look unique because we had been forced to find solutions to the kinds of problems that laige, wealthy, powerful states had never encountered. We couldn’t offer Africa money or arms but, on the other hand, we were free of the taint of the colonial exploiters because all that we wanted from Africa was friendship. Let me at once anticipate the cynics. Did we go into Africa because we wanted votes at the United Nations? Yes, of course that was one of our motives —and a perfectly honourable one —which I never, at any time, concealed either from myself or from the Africans. But it was far from being the most important motive, though it certainly wasn’t trivial. The main reason for our African ‘adventure’ was that we had something we wanted to pass on to nations that were even younger and less experienced than ourselves.
Today, in the wake of the post-Yom Kippur War rupture of diplomatic relations between most of the African states and Israel, the chorus of cynics also includes disillusioned Israelis. ‘It was all a waste of money, time and effort,’ they say, ‘a misplaced, pointless, messianic movement that was taken far too seriously in Israel and that was bound to fall apart the moment that the Arabs put any real pressure on the Africans.’ But, of course, nothing is cheaper, easier or more destructive than that sort of after-the-fact criticism, and I must say that in this context I don’t think it has the slightest validity. Things happen to countries as they do to people. No one is perfect and there arc setbacks, some more damaging and painful than others, but not every project can be expected to succeed fully or quickly. Moreover disappointments are not failures, and I have very little sympathy indeed for that brand of political expediency that demands immediate returns. The truth is that we did what we did in Africa not because it was just a policy of enlightened self-interest —a matter of quid pro quo —but because it was a continuation of our own most valued traditions and an expression of our own deepest historic instincts.
We went into Africa to teach, and what we taught was learned. No one regrets more bitterly than I that, for the time being, the African nations —or many of them —have chosen to turn their backs on us. But what really matters is what we —and they —accomplished together; what the thousands of Israeli experts in agriculture, hydrology, regional planning, public health, engineering, community services, medicine and scores of other fields actually did throughout Africa between 1958 and 5973, and what the thousands of Africans who trained in Israel during those years took home with them. Those benefits can never be lost, and those achievements should never be minimized. They are of enduring worth, and nothing can erase them, not even the current loss to Israel of whatever political or other benefits we derived from our ties with the governments of the African states. Ungrateful those governments most certainly have been, and it will take a great deal of effort on their part to remove the bad taste left by their desertion of us in a time of crisis. But that is no excuse for disowning, or belittling, what I honestly believe to have been a profoundly significant, not to say unprecedented, attempt on the part of one country to better human life in other countries, and I am prouder of Israel’s International Cooperation Programme and of the technical aid we gave to the people of Africa than I am of any other single project we have ever undertaken.
For me, more than anything else, that programme typifies the drive towards social justice, reconstruction and rehabilitation that is at the very heart of Labour-Zionism —and Judaism. The philosophy of life that impelled the men and women of Merhavia in the 1920s to dedicate themselves to pioneering within a cooperative framework, that led my daughter and her comrades to continue in that same demanding pattern in the Revivim of the 1940s and that is responsible today for each new kibbutz established in Israel is identical, I believe, with the vision that took Israelis into African countries for years to share with the Africans the practical and theoretical knowledge that alone could answer Africa’s needs in a changing world in which it was, at last, responsible for its own destiny. Not that all those who took part in the sharing of our national experience with the Africans were socialists. Far from it. But for me, at least, the programme was a logical extension of principles in which I had always believed, the principles, in fact, which gave a real purpose to my life. So, of course, I can never regard any facet of that programme as having been ‘in vain’, and equally I cannot believe that any of the Africans who were involved in it, or reaped its fruits, will ever regard it in that light either.
One other thing: we shared with the Africans not only the challenges posed by the need for rapid development but also the memory of centuries of suffering. Oppression, discrimination, slavery —these are not just catchwords for Jews or for Africans. They refer not to experiences undergone hundreds of years ago by half-forgotten ancestors but to torment and degradation experienced only yesterday. In 1902 Theodor Herzl wrote a novel in which lie described the Jewish state of the future as he imagined it might be. The novel was called Aitneuland (‘Old-New Land’), and on its title page were written the words: ‘If you will it, it is no dream’ —words that became the motto and inspiration of the Zionist movement. In Aitneuland there is a passage about Africa which I used to quote sometimes to African friends and which I should like to quote now:
‘There is still one other question arising out of the disaster of the nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold. Their children grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say, though I may expose myself to ridicule in saying so, that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans."
Conference on cooperation
"It was a curious and dramatic confrontation. Here we were, in the first African country to achieve independence (excluding, of course, Liberia and Ethiopia). I, the foreign minister of a Jewish state that was all often years old, and sixty men whose countries would achieve their freedom within only two or three years. We had all lived through so much, all struggled so hard for our liberty —they, representing still uncounted millions upon millions of people spread over the vastness of Africa, and we, in our one tiny country that had been battered and besieged for so long. It seemed to me that afternoon that this was a truly historic meeting of the kind that perhaps Herzl himself had envisaged. I couldn’t identify most of the Africans by name, but Padmore told me who they were: the leaders of fighting Algeria, of all the other French colonies, of Tanganyika, of Northern and Southern Rhodesia. The atmosphere in the room was very charged. I could feel the tension and the suspicion, neither of which were much allayed by Padmore’s opening words. ‘I have called this meeting,’ he said, ‘so that you can meet the foreign minister of a young country that has just achieved its independence and that has taken remarkable strides forward in every field of human endeavour.’
For a few seconds, there was an uncomfortable silence, then the representative of Algeria rose. In an ice-cold voice, he asked the most provocative —and relevant —of all possible questions. ‘Mrs Meir,’ he said, ‘your country is being armed by France, the arch-enemy of all those who sit around this table, a government that is fighting a ruthless and brutal war against my people and that uses terror against my black brethren. How do you justify your intimacy with a power that is the primary foe of the self-determination of the African people?’ And he sat down. I was not at all surprised by the question, only by the fact that it opened the meeting. Somehow I had expected more phraseology and more time. But I was glad that we were not going to indulge in any amenities or shadow boxing, and I didn’t need time for preparation.
I lit a cigarette and looked around the table again. Then I answered the question. ‘Our neighbours,’ I said to the sixty African leaders staring at me with such coldness and hostility, ‘are out to destroy us with arms that they receive free of charge from the Soviet Union and for very little money from other sources. The one and only country in the world that is ready —for hard currency, and a lot of it —to sell us some of the arms we need in order to protect ourselves is France. I do not share your hatred for de Gaulle, but let me tell you the truth —whether or not you like it. If de Gaulle were the devil himself I would regard it as the duty of my government to buy arms from the only source available to us. And now let me ask you a question. If you were in that position, what would you do?’
I could almost hear the sigh of relief that swept the room. The tension was over. The Africans knew that 1 had told them the truth and that I was not trying to put anything over on them, and they relaxed at once. Now there was no stopping the barrage of their questions about. They were hungry for information —about the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, the army - and they bombarded me with queries. They were also quite frank in return. One young man from Northern Nigeria (which is almost entirely Moslem) even stood up and said: ‘We have no Jews in Northern Nigeria, but we know that we are supposed to hate them!’
That dialogue with the African revolutionaries went on for the duration of my stay in Ghana, and it laid the foundation for our International Cooperation Programme. I won the respect and the friendship of the African leaders, and they were anxious to meet and work with other Israelis. They were not used to white men who laboured with their own hands or to foreign experts who were willing to leave their offices and work at the site of a project, and the fact that we were what they termed ‘colourblind’ was tremendously important...
By not behaving as they had learned to expect foreigners to behave, I think we helped to build much more than farms, industrial plants, hotels, police forces or youth centres for so many of the African countries; we helped to build the self-confidence of the Africans. We proved to them, by working with them, that they could become surgeons, pilots, citrus growers, community workers and foresters and that technical ability was not —as they had been made to believe for so many decades —the permanent prerogative of the white race.
Of course, the Arabs did their best, even then, to convince the Africans that we were fundamentally no different from other ‘colonialists’, but the Africans, for the most part, knew better. They knew that when Israeli experts were engaged by Zambia, it didn’t turn Zambian chickens into ‘colonialist’ chickens, and that the fish-processing programme that Israelis developed in Mali didn’t result in ‘imperialist’ fish. They also knew that the hundreds of African trainees who studied agriculture in Israel were not being trained in exploitation. In fact, we set up three basic criteria for our programme, and I think that it is not immodest to claim that even these criteria were a new departure. We asked ourselves, and the Africans, three questions about each proposed project: is it desired, is it really needed, and is Israel in a position to help in this particular sphere? And we only initiated projects when the answer to all three questions was ‘yes’, so the Africans knew that we didn’t regard ourselves as being able, automatically, to solve all their problems."
Getting along with the Africans
"There were quarrels, projects that came unstuck and hurt feelings on both sides. But for the most part, because both the Africans and Israelis so deeply understood the value of what they were trying to do, the cooperation worked. And nothing delighted me more than meeting Africans who had trained in Israel and who showed me around their African clinics, farms or schools, cheerfully explaining everything to me in fluent Hebrew —to say nothing of the African sabras I met everywhere, the black children who had been born in Israel and whose first language had been Hebrew. Those African children —however ‘radicalized’ they may become —will never, I know, think of the friends they made in Beersheba, Haifa or Jerusalem or, for that matter, of me as their ‘enemy’, regardless of what they may say in public."
"One of the reasons, I think, that I got along so well with them —even though we did not always see eye-to- eye on everything —was that I practised what I preached, and they saw me do it. In 1964, for instance, I attended the Independence Day ceremonies of Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) including a visit for all the guest VIPs to the Victoria Falls, which are partly in Zambia and partly on the territory of what was then still called Southern Rhodesia. We were taken to the falls in buses, and when we reached the border between the two countries, the police of Southern Rhodesia had the effrontery to refuse to let the blacks on my bus get out, although they were all African dignitaries and President Kaunda’s personal guests. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard a police officer say, ‘whites only.’ ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to enter Southern Rhodesia either.’ There was great consternation, and the Rhodesians tried very hard to get me to leave the bus, but I wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I have no intention of being separated from my friends,’ I repeated. The whole busload of us then happily travelled back to Lusaka, where Kaunda received me as though I were Joan of Arc rather than just a woman who couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate racial discrimination in any form."
Ashkenazi immigration
"One of the topics of conversation and debate between myself and my colleagues in Mapai in those days was why there was such a relatively small immigration of Jews from the West. ‘They have it too good,’ was one explanation. ‘They will only come to us when they face real anti-Semitism elsewhere.’ But I felt this to be a very unjust oversimplification, and I used to have long arguments with Ben-Gurion about the unimpressive rate of immigration from such countries as the United States, Canada and Britain. ‘They will come, one day, if we are patient,’ I used to tell him. ‘It is not as simple to transplant oneself and one’s family as it used to be. Also people are not as idealistic, as romantic or as dedicated any more. It takes a tremendous amount of determination for a Zionist from Pittsburgh, Toronto, or Leeds to decide one day to settle permanently in Israel. It means much more than merely moving to another country. It involves learning a new language, accepting a different standard and way of life, and getting used to the sort of tensions and insecurities that we take for granted.’ I was no less anxious than Ben-Gurion for Western Jews to join us in their hundreds of thousands, millions even, but I was not as intolerant of their hesitation, and I was certainly not prepared —at this point in Israel’s history —to demand of Jews who supported the State of Israel without actually living there that they should no longer consider themselves Zionists but rather ‘friends of Zion’, a very diluted formula angrily suggested by Ben-Gurion."