Originally posted in the Financial Times
Israelis can be great grumblers, yet the global economic crisis engenders fewer moaners there than elsewhere: "Our banks," said one caustic tycoon, "never liked lending anyway." Expensive clubs and restaurants in Tel Aviv are full, tourism is flourishing; one hears Russian and French spoken almost as frequently as American English in the halls of palatial hotels.
Jerusalem, however, is increasingly austere, ruled by an Orthodox mayor. Young couples prefer to live outside the city and even senior cabinet ministers commute to Tel Aviv and its garden suburbs. Yet it is still a uniquely dignified setting for ceremonious public occasions. I was there to collect a Lifetime Achievement award in the memory of Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jewish Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993 who earned the respect of Arabs as well as Jews and who was hailed as the greatest builder of the city since Kings David and Herod.
I was overawed at the thought that my forerunners were Helmut Kohl, a great ally of Israel, Isaac Stern, the violin virtuoso and founder of an Israeli music centre, and Professor Bernard Lewis, dean of Middle Eastern history experts. I knew Teddy slightly while I WAS still a schoolboy in Vienna when we were both members of the Zionist Youth Movement. Shortly before the war he ran the underground transports of young Jews in central Europe to Palestine. At that stage of the Nazis' anti-Jewish drive emigration was still allowed, even encouraged. Teddy negotiated with Adolf Eichmann at Gestapo HQ for their release.
Blue-eyed and blond, in the middle of the war Teddy was smuggled by Allied Intelligence into Nazi-occupied Europe and made contact with the ghettos in the east. The author Arthur Koestler, an outspoken critic of totalitarian regimes, gave a dinner party for him in London and invited Nye Bevan, his wife Jennie Lee and assorted left-wing intellectuals to hear his first-hand accounts of the earliest stages of the "final solution". The foreign office met the news with grim incredulity; Frank Roberts, a diplomat whom I believe held Neville Chamberlain's fountain pen at the Munich Agreement, dubbed Kollek's tales atrocious propaganda aimed at weakening the British Government's policy of keeping the doors to Palestine barred to Jewish immigrants. There is somewhere a minute in which he expresses his hopes that, after the war, as many Jews as possible would land on the Russian side of the border because the Soviets knew how to deal with Zionists. Koestler, incidentally, had a minor nervous breakdown on hearing Kollek's details and immediately wrote a novel, Arrival & Departure, in which he prophetically described mass killings -- in fact a pale foretaste of the eventual horrific reality.
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Returning from abroad, the atmosphere in Britain strikes one as bitter and confused and at times morose and elegiac. Body blows against cherished institutions such as Parliament and the financial irregularities of its elected representatives are taking their toll on the universally respected British phlegm.
All the more reason to remember with gratitude figures of peerless integrity as well as brilliance. Two events within a week drew attention to the lives of two remarkable establishment figures, Sir Nicholas Henderson and sir Isaiah Berlin. Sir Nicholas Henderson was possibly England's most popular and remarkable postwar diplomat. As a young man he amassed priceless experience as secretary to galleon figures of diplomacy including Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin; later he was ambassador in Warsaw, Bonn, Paris and Washington (twice), a problem solver with an air of effortless mastery of his trade, intellectually alert and socially unrivaled.
His career started inauspiciously, working in the shadow of the atom spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, but ended triumphantly with his Falklands War role as the link with Washington, where he remains a legend to this day. I also boast of a half century friendship and had a guest bedroom in each of his embassies (except Santiago de Chile, his debut post). In the Paris embassy I slept in the bed of the original owner, Pauline Bonaparte, favoured sister of Napoleon.
The memorial was at Sotheby's, where Henderson worked until his death in March. The guest list echoed post-war political history, including Clarissa Avon, niece of Churchill and widow of Anthony Eden, Lord Carrington and the Oxford historian and Lloyd George's granddaughter, Margaret Macmillan, as well as others from the worlds of the London Library and Bloomsbury.
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At Wolfson College what would have been the 100th birthday of its founder, Isaiah Berlin, was impressively commemorated. James Billington, long standing Librarian of Congress in Washington and distinguished Russian scholar, gave the memorial lecture. New volumes were on sale of Isaiah's vast correspondence with the widest circle of acquaintance of any eminent thinker of our time.
An intellectual influence on two generations of Oxford undergraduates, serious scholar and peerless raconteur, he also had a distinctive style of talking and gesticulating -- nervously lifting his shoulders, pursing his lips, clipped, staccato speech and a unique way of chopping the air with one arm while drawing circles in the air with the other.
Before meeting him for the first time, shortly after the war, I attended a rather feudal ball at Oxford. My host, a keen huntsman, wore the red jacket of the Bullingdon Club, yet I found his way of speech and gesticulation strangely un-English. He spoke with uninhibited enthusiasm of his tutor, Isaiah Berlin. When I met the famous sage soon after I realised whence the redcoat's manners stemmed and, having a passion for the study of the genealogy of manners and mannerisms, thought I detected the origin of Isaiah's: the movement with his shoulders, changing inclination of his head stemmed from the fastidious man of letters, Lord David Cecil; the clipped language and pursed lips from Wadham's warden, Maurice Bowra, but the complex perpetual motion of his arms came straight from his distinguished forebear, the great Rabbi of Vilna -- a far cry and yet a shortcut from a wunder-Rabbi to a Master of the foxhunt.