possibilities flashed across my mind, not just getting on but staying on. I firmly declined. Ibrahim claimed to be most offended. If Jack Hulbert was good enough for Sir Alec, why not for Mrs Thatcher? I caught a gleam in the driver’s eye and suggested that paying double the fare for
On Friday afternoon I flew to Damascus. President Assad had recently marked the fifth anniversary of the military
Syria was a tightly controlled police state. Romanian-style eavesdropping was clearly the order of the day at the official Guest House in which we stayed. On our arrival, Gordon Reece and I went up to our rooms to wash and change. But Gordon found that he had no towels in the bathroom and so knocked on my door and asked to borrow one. I had barely gone to fetch it when a maid scurried up to hand him his own.
That evening our hosts would have found their guests’ private conversation more interesting. The Syrians had without warning invited me to a secret meeting with the PLO the following day. I was not going to agree to this. I would not meet them formally at all, still less in secret, because the PLO had refused to renounce terrorism. But I agreed, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to pay a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp and it was arranged that I would be taken to one on the outskirts of Damascus.
The following day began with a long, bumpy ride to Qunaitra, the last town on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. It had been demolished by the Israeli army when they withdrew in 1974. They were even alleged to have desecrated graves, and the whole town was now a showcase for the evils of Zionism. I was told that there was only one inhabitant now, an old lady who had refused to leave and had lived through the occupation. Predictably, I bumped into her on my way round.
We stopped at the Palestinian camp on our return journey to Damascus. ‘Camp’ turned out to be something of a misnomer. It was an enormous settlement with roads, tents, social halls, shops, hospitals and schools. I was shown one school, where the children were assembled in a large hall, being addressed by a woman teacher with great earnestness. I imagined that this was some kind of prayer assembly and asked my guide what the woman was saying. The answer came: ‘She is reminding these children that they are privileged to be at this school because at least one of their parents has been killed by a Jew.’ Now I understood why it was named the ‘School of the Martyrs’.
That evening after my return I had dinner with the President at his comfortable but modest house. He was obviously highly intelligent and knew precisely what he wanted. Though I was impressed, there was little meeting of minds. We talked about a draft Security Council Resolution which the Arab countries intended to put forward on the Palestinian question. It seemed to me that there was everything to be said for framing this responsibly so as not to attract the American veto. But of course I could not know quite what the Syrian President’s objectives in this matter really were: given Syria’s general stance of opposition to peace talks with Israel, he might well have been happier to have a strong pro-Palestinian Resolution vetoed than a weaker one passed. In any case, it was plain at that time that the Lebanese civil war was his real preoccupation, as he insisted again and again that Syria would never tolerate the partition of Lebanon. I was not surprised a few months later when Syrian troops intervened there in force. But I felt, oddly enough, that we had struck up some kind of relationship of mutual respect. He walked with me to the garden gate and jokingly asked whether I had been woken up early by the muezzin from the nearby mosque. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am up even before the Mullahs.’
I had sought to be the perfect diplomat in both Egypt and Syria, but questions were put to me at my final press conference in Damascus which I felt required greater directness. Members of the Arab press corps pressed me on Britain’s attitude towards the PLO, demanding to know why we did not recognize it. Fresh from my visit to the camp, I set out the balanced policy described above, but I roundly condemned the PLO for its reliance on terrorism and said that you could not have peace between nations unless on the basis of law rather than violence. Their protestations at this provoked me to remind them that they themselves would not be free to ask questions if they did not benefit from some kind of rule of law. I also said that I disagreed fundamentally with the anti-Zionist Resolution, which described Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, passed by the UN General Assembly. One journalist pointedly reminded me that Jewish groups in Palestine had also committed terrorist acts. I was fully aware of that. Any English person of my age remembers only too well the hanging of two Liverpool sergeants and the booby-trapping of their bodies by Irgun in July 1947. But one act of terrorism does not justify another. Some people at the time thought this plain speaking was something of a diplomatic gaffe. That would not have mattered to me, because I felt strongly about the principle. But in fact it would shortly stand me in good stead.
In March I made my third visit to Israel. One of my early meetings was with the former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, whom I had first met when she was in office. I had developed the greatest respect for her and, perhaps as another woman in politics, I particularly understood that strange blend of hardness and softness which made her alternately motherly and commanding. She was deeply pessimistic about the prospects for peace and was particularly apprehensive about the Syrians. But she warmly congratulated me on what she described as my bravery in criticizing Palestinian terrorism in Damascus. She also strongly approved of my speeches on the Soviet threat, which she flatteringly linked with Solzhenitsyn’s statements. In her view the West was not nearly tough enough.
I found that my remarks about the PLO had made a similar impression on the other Israeli politicians to whom I spoke. Now and on later visits as Prime Minister, the fact that I had not flinched from condemning terrorism and had consistently defended Israel’s right to a secure existence allowed me to speak frankly, but as a friend, to the Israelis. In my discussions with Mrs Meir and later with the Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, the Defence Minister Shimon Peres and the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, I relayed my impressions gained from Egypt and Syria that Arab leaders were now thinking along lines which made a settlement possible. I also sought to persuade my hosts to consider not just Israel’s security — which I fully recognized must be their prime objective — but also the long-term need to reach a settlement with moderate Arab regimes. But the politicians I spoke to were generally pessimistic, particularly Prime Minister Rabin, who seemed at this time to have little understanding of the difficulties Arabs faced in dealing with their people’s desire to see justice for the Palestinians.
As always, however, I found much to admire in Israel — the commitment to democracy in a region where it was otherwise unknown, the sacrifices people were prepared to make for their country and the energies which had put the huge sums received from America and the Jewish diaspora to productive use: they really had made the desert bloom. One institution, however, which never appealed to me was the kibbutz. I visited one for lunch close to the Golan Heights. Living in a kibbutz in such areas was partly a requirement of security, partly a matter of economics. For me, however, it was also a rather unnerving and unnatural collectivist social experiment. I admired people who could choose such a life but would never have wanted to be one of them. Not so my daughter Carol. As a teenager with some left-wing leanings she had told Denis and me that she wanted to spend some time in a kibbutz. We were concerned about this, but we knew of one which seemed suitable and finally agreed. Life there was extremely hard and conditions rudimentary. One of Carol’s tasks was to inoculate young chickens. She would take them from one box, inject them and drop them in another. Unfortunately, every now and then a fighter plane would roar over, the chicks would jump up and get mixed together. Carol returned with an unromantic view of the tasks of the farm labourer. Moreover, as Denis remarked to me later, she may not have been very good at inoculating the chickens, but she was certainly inoculated against socialism.
I was taken up on the Golan Heights by an Israeli general — a professor in civilian life. I was impressed by
