We met Isaac because the woman carrying his coffee thought I was his son.
She was carrying his coffee because Isaac is old and walks with a cane. He’s missing his right middle index finger from mid-knuckle down and when I shook his hand, I could feel the nub of knuckle pressing firmly into my palm.
Isaac laughed at the woman’s mistake.
I laughed too and offered for him to just sit with us.
“No, no, I don’t want to interrupt you,” he said. He had picked up his coffee by the saucer beneath the cup. It was quaking in his hands as he barely grasped it with the nub of index finger.
“Really, it’s not a problem,” I said.
He sat.
Isaac was visiting from Florida. He was a Jew and had lived in Jerusalem all his life prior to retiring to Florida. He had served in the Israeli army during the War of Independence in 1948. Before that, he lived under British occupation.
“Now, you see the King David over there?” he asked, pointing over to the King David Hotel across the street from where we sat.
We did.
“Now, that was the central hub of the British administration,” he said. “Listen, before Israel became a state there were underground organizations that were working to uproot and oust the occupying British. One of the tactics used was…” He paused for a second. “Well, it was terrorism against the British occupiers,” he continued. “There’s no other way to describe it.”
“Now,” he said. “They knew that the hub of the British administration was right there in the King David Hotel, so they picked that as a target. They cased the joint and noticed that milk was delivered everyday at 6:00 a.m. A truck would arrive carrying large metal containers of milk and those containers would be unloaded into the kitchen. So the Ergon—that was the name of one of the resistance groups—made a plan to get bombs into the building by faking the milk delivery. One morning, about 20 minutes before the regular delivery, some Ergon members in Arab dress, arrived at the King David with a truck-load of explosives hidden inside milk containers. The containers were unloaded into the kitchen and they drove away. Now, they wanted to limit the number of casualties, so they telephoned the British high commander whose office was located in the the King David and told him that there were explosives in the administrative wing of the hotel and that they had 20 minutes to evacuate. Now, instead of notifying everyone, the commander went to the opposite end of the hotel. When the regular milk truck arrived at 6 a.m., the guys in the kitchen knew that something strange was going on. But it was too late. The explosives hidden inside the milk containers went off. Ninety-six people perished.”
We told Isaac about our project and that we were having problems finding Israeli Jews to interview. He gave us the names of some places he thought we would find people to interview.
We asked if we could interview him.
He smiled and laughed.
“No, I’m just a boring old man who will only talk about the past,” he said.
“The past is very important,” I told him, thinking of the story he had just told us about the King David Hotel.
But he declined to be interviewed and his opinions and stories would go unrecorded.
