THE EXODUS SAILS AGAIN

       Israel has a number of shlichim, emissaries, stationed in various parts of the world whose job ostensibly is to strengthen ties between Israel and local Jewish communities, but whose real job is to persuade people, especially young people, to make Aliyah, emigrate to Israel. All the emissaries are volunteers employed by the Jewish Agency. In addition to doing something useful for their country it gives them the opportunity to work abroad for two or three years and experience life elsewhere.

      In 1986 the emissary in Glasgow was Uzi Shilon, a Tel Aviv lawyer. One day he came to me and said he had an idea to commemorate Yom Ha'atzmaut, the anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. As honorary Public Relations Officer of the Jewish Representative Council I was often called upon by a variety of Jewish organisations and groups to do some publicity work for them. I didn't mind because most of the publicity jobs were interesting and enabled me, too, to do something useful for my co-religionists.

      Shilon had the idea of hiring the Clyde pleasure steamer Waverly and re-enacting the voyage of the Exodus, whose exploits in 1947 made headlines throughout the world. We were sitting in his office discussing how we could make the re-enactment really newsworthy when he mentioned casually that he knew the whereabouts of  Ike Aranne, the man who captained Exodus 39 years earlier.  Now 62 he was living in Tel Aviv and understandably was in the shipping business.

      "Get him on the phone, " I said. "Tell him what we are doing and ask him to come and join us." Aranne wasn't all that enthusiastic about the idea but Uzi was very persuasive and he finally agreed.  The next obvious step was to get another man who played a major role in the 1947 adventure, Captain Tony Bailey, who commanded HMS Childers, one of the six British destroyers which prevented the Exodus from entering Haifa with its human cargo of 4554 refugees from all over Europe. .

      Bailey, now 70,  had long retired from the Navy and was living in Bridgewater, Somerset. He, too, agreed to come to Glasgow and join the 600 Scottish Jews who took part in the re-enactment, which was reported throughout Britain and in Israel..

      The 1986 "emigrants" aboard the Waverley, renamed Exodus for the day, sailed from Anderston Quay on their three-hour voyage on a chilly May morning. They were more fortunate than their predecessors four decades earlier who spent two months at sea in conditions which shocked the world.   

      The modern-day voyagers reported to an 'emigration' registration desk on the quayside although there was no time for such formalities in 1947. Five areas of the ship were named after Israeli cities, Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon and Eilat.

      Various activities were organised for each area, some relating to the massive outpouring of Jews from Europe and some more appropriate to a summer's evening sail on the Clyde. Among the activities was a showing of the film Exodus with Paul Newman.

      As we sailed down the quiet river Captain Bailey told me,  There is no bitterness between Ike Aranne and me. We are good friends. This is not our first meeting since 1947. We had a very enjoyable dinner with our wives in Jaffa one night in 1980.  As a naval officer in 1947 I considered it my duty to obey my orders to prevent the Jews from landing in Palestine. If we had failed there would have been another Arab rebellion causing chaos in the Middle East and perhaps even preventing the establishment of a state of Israel at all. We had a lot of sympathy for the immigrants, herded as they were like cattle in over-crowded, insanitary and often unseaworthy craft. It was the most distasteful as well as the most difficult assignment ever given to the Royal Navy, certainly in peacetime.     

      Ike Aranne said, All of us at that time of turmoil were reluctant players in a macabre drama. British politicians of the period had a lot to answer for but the servicemen were generally not unkind in an impossible situation."

      The  original Exodus, real name the President Warfield, was a former pleasure steamer which had been used for sailing in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, when she was bought by the Jewish Agency from an American scrap dealer and taken to France to be fitted out as a refugee ship. It had also been a British training ship during the war.

      The President Warfield had been christened by the owner's niece Wallis Warfield, later to become Duchess of  Windsor. Despite strict orders from the French government, in response to British representations prohibiting the ship's departure, Captain Aranne, a 23-year-old former war-time seaman in Britain's merchant navy, quietly sailed the President Warfield out of  the tiny port of Sete at 0600 hours on July 12, 1947 carrying 1600 men, 1282 women, 1017 teenagers, and 655 children on a ship that was built to hold 600.

      Once in the open Mediterranean on route to Haifa a hugh banner bearing the words HAGANAH SHIP EXODUS 1947 was unfolded. The Haganah was the Jewish defence force which in 1945 began organising the emigration of displaced European Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British blockade.

      Twenty miles from Haifa the 1800-ton Exodus was buffeted by the destroyers Childers, Ajax, Cheviot, Chequers, Chieftain and Charity and  boarded.. Among the weapons used by the boarders were Chinese crackers to create noise and confusion. The refugees fought back with cans of food, iron bars, steam and oil jets, metal buckets and bottles. Three of  the refugees were killed and more than 200 injured in the battle.

      The battered Exodus was towed into Haifa on July 18 and the embittered passengers transferred to three caged transport ships Runnymede Park, Ocean Vigour and Empire Rival whch sailed back to Port-de-Bouc, near Marseilles.  The French government, however, would not allow the refugees to be forcibly landed in France and they were taken to Hamburg, back to the country in which they had for many years suffered unspeakable horrors.

      Most of the Exodus refugees later sailed in other illegal immigrant ships to Cyprus and then to Israel when the new state was born on May 14, 1948.  The Exodus was the largest of the 34-strong armada of illegal ships. One of them, the Struma, sank in the Black Sea after being refused entry to Palestine. Not one of the 769 people aboard survived.

      Every move of the Exodus and the plight of its passangers was reported world-wide to the embarassment of  the British and French governments. The episode and the relentless Arab hostility towards the Jews finally led Britain to relinquish its rule over Palestine, which had begun in December 1917 when British troops marched into Jerusalem to wrest the country from Turkish control.

      The last British commander in Palestine was General Sir Gordon MacMillan of MacMillan under whom I served in the 1940s and again decades later in a very different capacity when he became chairman of Erskine Hospital for disabled ex-servicemen and women at Bishopton, near Glasgow.

      General MacMillan's contacts with the Jewish Agency during his command in Palestine were through a young liaison officer named Chaim Herzog who later became President of Israel.

      The historian Netaniel Lorch wrote of General MacMillan, Although he was often at loggerheads with the Haganah he did his best to carry out his responsibilities as an officer and a gentleman. He personally intervened on occasion to safeguard the lives of the Jewish population under his charge.