"Idiot, Idiot!"
Those were the first words spoken to me when I arrived with Betty, my bride of six weeks, in Jerusalem in September, 1947. The epithets came from the mouth of a boy standing outside the bus that had brought us from Haifa Port. How could he have known that I had just arrived from the USA The parting words of our friends and family in New York were not dissimilar "Are you crazy! Going to Palestine at a time like this? You must be mad. Wait until the situation settles down."
Well, it never did settle down and had we listened we never would have gone to Israel where we have spent most of our lives without so much as a boring day.
But back to the boy outside the bus. It was only later that I realized he was not really screaming "Idiot!", but waving a paper in my face yelling, "Yediot," the name of the newspaper he was trying to sell me.
Few Americans went to Palestine in those days. We were idealists, not lunatics. We had come to help create a Jewish state. On arrival, we found a nasty, three-way conflict in progress. Arab was fighting Jew, Jew was fighting Arab and both were fighting the British. The British were following a policy of divide and rule, but by mid-1947, were losing the battle and would soon retreat.
Extremists on all sides seemed to dictate our lives. Arabs would shoot up Israeli buses and bomb Jewish centres, strew nails on roads over which British diplomats travelled. Israelis would throw grenades into cafés frequented by British soldiers, spray Arab villages with gunfire, and blow up bridges used by the British army. There were British who would supply Jews with weapons. A crazy-quilt life of gunfire, arson, assassinations that went on 24 hours a day.
In preparation for our trip, we thought we had prepared for every eventuality: mosquito netting, a two-way radio, books, kitchenware, and a good supply of Kodachrome colour film, relatively new on the market, for my 35mm camera.
I took my first pictures with a box camera at the age of eight and became serious about photography while serving with the US forces in Europe during World War II. As a professional journalist, I never went anywhere after that without my portable typewriter and my camera.
What attracted my camera lens in those chaotic days in Palestine was not so much the blood and thunder of the tripartite war, but the ordinary people who suffered through it without a whimper. I never quite understood how they, or rather we, could live the lives we did. Constant curfews, searches, zoned-off areas, outbursts of terrorism approaching all with such aplomb, even nonchalance. Nothing seemed to faze us. We would walk smilingly through the streets of Jerusalem accepting the situation as it was, going about our daily affairs with a supreme air of confidence (even when hand-to-hand fighting was only blocks away) and greeting each other with one standard phrase: "Yeheye tov! It will be OK." In effect we were saying, "Dont worry, better days are ahead."
Shortly after arriving in Palestine, Betty and I went on a tour of the country, travelling by rickety bus, donkey cart, treading over bad roads, and sleeping in tents in kibbutzim. Everywhere we lugged our knapsacks, typewriter and camera.
Back in Jerusalem, I went to work for The Palestine Post and United Press. I shall never forget my indefatigable editor, Gershon Agron, later to become mayor of Jerusalem, with whom I daily walked to work during the siege. One day, as we neared Zion Square, not far from the editorial offices, shells began to explode around us. I shouted to him to get to the nearest shelter. He refused and instead went to have his shoes polished by an elderly man sitting exposed under a cinema marquee. Later, I asked Agron why he did such a foolish thing. He replied, "If that old man was brave enough to sit out there while shells fell, then I could do nothing less."
One day at the end of November, while Betty and I were visiting a childrens village up north, we heard that the United Nations, had decided to partition Palestine. That meant the creation of a Jewish state! In one stroke the international community had reversed nearly 2,000 years of history.
We returned to Jerusalem to see the entire city in a glorious mood. Spontaneous processions filled the streets. It was almost dark, but I lifted my camera and through the view-finder saw a truck filled with jubilant youth, one of them waving a blue and white flag. It was a scene out of Les Misérables. I clicked away.
Even during the height of the Arab siege of the city when we were without water, electricity, fuel and food, the average Jerusalemite, weary and hungry, displayed good humour even when they went for their meagre rations or traded a bit of bread for an extra pail of water.
In the editorial room of The Palestine Post, we would spend nights producing the paper under difficult conditions. When the British shelled our building with 25-pounders, we would take our typewriters and crawl under tables to edit copy. We went to work each day famished.
Then the day in 1949 arrived when the fighting stopped, although in Jerusalem it continued even after the armistice agreements were signed. For years, Jordanians guarding the wall of the Old City would periodically subject us to sniper fire, and because of that, Jerusalemites walked down main streets behind hastily constructed fire walls.
In May, 1949, the entire city turned out to see its military forces on parade for the first time. These were the men, women and even animals, who had won the war a citizens army in the truest sense. No one stayed home. Proud people filled every available spot in the streets and on buildings.
I aimed my camera at the crowd, at the faces of the men and women marching, at the boys and girls on a truck waving a Zionist banner. It was a day that made Israelis feel they were invulnerable, for if they could conquer the armies of six nations, they could do anything! And, historically speaking, they did.
The photographs on the following pages - among the first color photos in Israel - were taken by the reporter Marlin Levin during and after the War of Independence (May 1948).