Kerry Greenwood - Tamam Shud

My mother wept as she watched that film and later I saw it and wept as well. What possible recompense could be offered for such cruelty and deprivation? And where could Jews ever feel safe in the world again? One reason why Hitler was so successful was that many German Jews like the man who told Dennis Pryor about his ‘ Deusche Hertz ’, his German heart, had thought of themselves as Germans first and then Jews, just as I would feel myself to be Australian and then Anglican. On the extensive list of betrayals in world history, Hitler almost makes it into Stalin’s league where massacring his own people is concerned.

After the genocide of the camps, no one could think of themselves as any nationality first. The survivors had to think of themselves as Jews. A Jewish homeland became the only way the world could possibly try to make sure that this atrocity never happened again. But as soon as the Jews got there, it seemed that they were about to be ‘swept into the sea in forty-eight hours’, as the demagogues boasted.

Let us examine the timeline of the War of Independence. It was not exactly a declared war. It just happened because armies invaded. If you look out of your door and find the street full of soldiers who mean to kill you, you can reasonably assume that you are at war. In this case, the war could be said to have started in March 1948 with the siege of Jerusalem and it lasted for almost a year, with intermittent truces brokered by Britain or America. The first Czech arms arrived in April and the war continued until the first truce, 11 June to 9 July, then blew up again until 17 September. That truce did not last long either and the next ceasefire did not come about until 7 January 1949. Armistice agreements followed – on 24 February with Egypt, on 23 March with Lebanon, 3 April with Jordan and 20 July with Syria.

In other words, on the relevant date for the death of Somerton Man, 30 November 1948, there was a war in the Middle East for which Israel still desperately needed arms. Thus many non-Jewish people felt it was not only righteous, but potentially exciting to help Israel. At the beginning of the war Israel had no air force and no navy and it was buying a lot of ordnance from anyone who was willing to risk British disapproval, then employing the captain of any ship willing to run the blockade.

Nineteen forty-eight was the time of Operation Balak, an arms smuggling operation, named after a biblical king of the Moabites whose name means, roughly, Destroyer. The Zionist military organisation Haganah recruited pilots and sailors in Europe for Operation Balak, including an English pilot, Gordon Levett, who flew Avia S-199 fighters, supplied by Czechoslovakia, from that country to Rehovot airfield in Israel. Repeatedly. He flew many missions, bringing in new planes, people, arms and ammunition. This admirable man was not a Jew and he was certainly not in it for the money. He was in it for the thrill, and because he had a strong sense of justice and felt for the underdog Israel. He said, ‘I shall leave the world a better place than when I entered it because I helped to found the state of Israel’.

Czechoslovakia supplied a lot of arms to Israel and Australia sold them at least four planes. Australia had voted ‘yes’ to the establishment of the nation, so someone selling arms to Israel from Australia was breaking no laws. A lot of people might easily have done so. Amongst my father’s friends, there were a reasonable number of smugglers, although smuggling in the innocent old days just meant evading the government duty on clothes, silk, perfume, tobacco, alcohol and jewellery, especially watches. I never met drug smugglers until I started my career in the Magistrates’ Court – and they were a different kettle of fish altogether.

Large amounts of ‘uncustomed goods’ used to come through Melbourne Port in the days before containerisation. (And now too, of course, but it isn’t anything as interesting.) Some of the old smuggling methods were very ingenious. There is a space between the inner and outer hull of a ship and Portland Bill (that couldn’t have been his real name) tied his watches onto a long thin line, slipped the necklace of watches down into the hollow between the two hulls and secured the end to a porthole window sill, which he had holed and then patched. No one ever found them.

I thought the old-style smugglers were very exotic. Some of them had rings in both ears and they all had that sparkle in their eyes that identifies the risk taker, the downhill skier, the parachute jumper. You can see it in athletes and in con men. It’s very attractive and totally unreliable but, as Phryne would say, inadvisable has never meant undesirable. Like my clients in the Magistrates’ Court, the smugglers put the sort of effort and brains into evading the law, which would have made them a good career if they had been obeying the law. But that always misses the point. They liked the danger, they loved the risk, they were adrenaline junkies. They told me three separate ways to slip into Melbourne Port without attracting notice from the authorities, all of them dangerous. A man called Rene, pronounced Reen, told my father how he had run the Rip at its height in a small boat. My dad asked, ‘Why run it? Why didn’t you wait until the tide turned?’ and I remember the flash of white teeth as Rene grinned and replied ‘Oh, but that wouldn’t be any fun!’

Australian sympathy has always been with the underdog and Australia, the Jewish Encyclopedia informs me, has never had a pogrom – one of the very few countries to be so distinguished. Australian soldiers in Palestine during General Allenby’s 1917 campaign made friends with the kibbutzim. They didn’t see the Israelis as major threats to world peace but as people who offered them tea and allowed them to join in the kibbutz feasts. One returned soldier I knew was very proud of his ability to dance the hora . The Jewish authorities in Jerusalem furthered the general good will by warning shopkeepers not to overcharge Australian soldiers for their souvenirs. By 1948 there were plenty of disaffected and bored unemployed Aussie soldiers, airmen and sailors who might not have minded stepping a little way over the line for a good cause.

I do not mean to say that Australian politics were clearly pro-Zionist or anything as simple as that. Chanan Reich’s instructive and thorough book Australia and Israel: An Ambiguous Relationship details the endless bickering which went on in the United Nations, as well as domestically. Some of the denunciations of Israel by the Catholic church are disquieting to read, since this is soon after Hitler and they knew what the end product of such demagoguery could be. But basically, as a country, we came down in favour of the establishment of a Jewish state. Meanwhile, no one in Israel thought that the ‘sea of enemies’ was going to ebb any time soon, so there was a market, and where there is a market, there is a seller.

For a price. And for the delicious danger.

If I had been around at the time, for instance, I might have bought a biggish tramp steamer, say 900 tons – that’s a reasonable burden. For the purposes of this narrative I will call her Deborah, the name of a very strong-minded biblical general. I would take my SS Deborah up to New Guinea, where a word in the right ear might get me a lot of abandoned American army hardware for a song or two, which I would stow in the hold in crates marked ‘scrap iron’. (As a wartime souvenir, a friend of my dad’s brought back a complete Bren gun, broken down into components and shipped as ‘bicycle parts’. He said that he had captured it and therefore it was his.)

My SS Deborah would sail through most inspections because if Customs opened the top crates, all they would find would be oily bits of unidentifiable iron. Besides, Customs wouldn’t bother searching a tramp too thoroughly, because there were so many of them. Until recently, tramp steamers were the mail boats, carriers of small luxuries and cargo runners to many islands. When I got a job on one in the seventies, we carried mail and also videotapes, books, cosmetics, whisky, pharmaceuticals (like aspirin, insect repellant, disinfectants, not prescription or illegal drugs) and lots of not strictly necessary things, such as oil paints, pencils, ribbons, embroidery thread, dyes, pins and needles. Tramp steamers were like the pack peddlers of old, making life easier for the inhabitants of islands too small to merit visits from official ships. Now I believe that those islanders are supplied from planes but tramps were a fact of the sea for a long time and not, perhaps, excessively scrupulous about what they were carrying, or for whom.