“They’re liable to tear the plane apart!”
“I promise … I’ll make them stay calm.”
“Well… go on.”
He set the automatic pilot again and went back to make sure they didn’t blow the plane up. Hanna made the announcement.
A fantastic scene of jubilation broke out. Crying, singing, laughing, praying. Whoops of joy-dancing-hugging.
“My God,” Foster marveled, “they didn’t make this much fuss when we beat Georgia Tech in the Cotton Bowl.”
A Yemenite woman took his hand and kissed it. He pulled away and returned to the controls. They continued cheering and singing all the way to Lydda. As the plane touched the end of the runway the din rose above the sound of the engines.
Foster watched them pour out of the plane, fall on their knees, and kiss the ground of Israel, weeping.
“Good-by, Tex,” Hanna said. “I am sorry you are leaving, but have a good time in Paris.”
Foster J. MacWilliams came slowly down from the plane. He looked at the scene of bustle. Ambulances and buses stood by. There were dozens of girls like Hanna mingling among the little Yemenites, calming them and joining in their joy. Foster froze at the bottom of the steps and a strange new feeling churned inside him. tt
He did not even see Stretch Thompson rush out for him.
“Good go, Foster babyl How’d the crate hold up?”
“Huh?”
“I said, how’d she fly?”
“Like an eagle.”
A half dozen officials from immigration pumped Foster’s hand and pounded his back.
“How’d they behave?”
“Was it a routine flight?”
Foster shrugged. “Routine,” he said, “just routine.”
Stretch led Foster away from the scene of jubilation. Foster
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stopped and looked back for a second and Hanna waved to him and he waved back.
“Well, Foster, you can go to Paris now. I’ve got my crews in and we dug up another plane.”
“If you’re in a jam, Stretch, I could take one more run. But it would be my last.” (
Stretch scratched his head. “I don’t know … Well, maybe I can sign you on for one run-to try out the new ship.” Hooked! Stretch said in glee to himself. I got the bastard hooked!
It was the beginning to Operation Magic Carpet.
Stretch Thompson, the erstwhile King Crab King, brought in rough-and-ready American flyers who had flown the Berlin airlift. Each new pilot and crew in turn became obsessed with the mission of bringing the Yemenites to their Promised Land.
Many times the planes were almost ready to come apart. Yet, no craft was ever lost, despite being overworked and underserviced. The pilots on Magic Carpet began to believe that the planes were being divinely sustained so long as they carried Yemenites.
Foster J. MacWilliams never did get to Paris. He flew the Aden run until all the Yemenites were evacuated and then he went on to Operation Ali Baba, the airlift of the Iraqi Jews from Bagdad. Foster worked longer and harder hours than any pilot in the history of aviation. As soon as his ship would land at Lydda with a load of immigrants, he would grab a few hours sleep right at the airport while his plane was being serviced. As soon as the plane was ready, he flew out again. In the next few years Foster flew four hundred missions covering millions of miles and bringing in nearly fifty thousand Jews to Israel.
He kept swearing that each trip was his last, right up to the time he married Hanna and took an apartment in Tel Aviv.
Magic Carpet was the beginning. They came from the hinterlands of Kurdistan and Iraq and Turkey.
A warlike lost tribe of Jews in Hadhramaut in the Eastern Protectorate fought their way to Aden.
They poured out of the displaced persons camps in Europe.
Jews came to Israel from France and Italy and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and Rumania and Bulgaria and Greece and Scandinavia.
Across the breadth of northern Africa they arose from the mellahs of Algeria and Morocco and Egypt and Tunisia.
In South Africa, the wealthy Jewish community and the most ardent Zionists in the world went to Israel. 570
They came from China and India where they had settled three thousand years before.
They came from Australia and Canada and England.
They came from the Argentine.
Some walked through burning deserts.
Some flew on the rickety craft of the airlift.
Some came in jam-packed holds of cattle freighters.
Some came in deluxe liners.
They came from seventy-four nations.
The dispersed, the exiles, the unwanted came to that one little corner of the earth where the word Jew was not a slander.
CHAPTER TWO: The trickle became a stream and then a deluge of humanity.
The exodus soon doubled, then began to triple, the population of Israel. The economy, raptured by war, buckled under the flood of immigrants. Many came with little more than the clothes they were wearing. Many were old and many were ill and many were illiterate, but no matter what the condition, no matter what the added burden, no Jew was turned away from the doors of Israel.
It was not a melting pot, it was a pressure cooker, for they came from every corner of the earth and had lived under every variety of circumstance.
Tent cities and ugly corrugated-tin-shack villages sprang up to blot the landscape from the Galilee to the Negev. Hundreds of thousands of people lived “under canvas,” in makeshift hovels, breaking down the medical, educational, and welfare facilities.
Yet there was an attitude of optimism all over the land. From the moment the downtrodden set foot on the soil of Israel they were granted a human dignity and freedom that most of them had never known, and this equality fired them with a drive and purpose without parallel in man’s history.
Every day new agricultural settlements sprang up. The immigrants went out to attack the wastes and the desert with the same fervor that the early pioneers had shown in rolling back the swamps.
Cities and towns seemed to spring up from the earth.
South Africans and South Americans and Canadians poured money into industry. Factories were built until the manufacturing potential reached one of the highest levels in Africa or Asia. General scientific, medical, and agricultural research reached an advanced stage.
Tel Aviv expanded into a bustling metropolis of a quarter of a million people, and Haifa grew into one of the most
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important ports on the Mediterranean. In both cities, heavy industry sprang up. New Jerusalem, the capital and educational center of the new nation, expanded into the hills.
Chemicals, drugs, medicines, mining, engineering, shoe and clothing manufacturing-the list grew into thousands of items. Cars were assembled and buses were built. Tires were made and airstrips laid down, and a network of highways spanned the nation.
Housing, housing, housing-people needed homes, and the concrete and steel skylines pushed farther into the suburbs almost by the hour. The sound of the hammer, the music of the drill, the concrete mixer, the welding torch never stopped in Israel!
The arts flourished. Bookstores lined Herzl Street and Allenby Road. In every kibbutz and in every home and in every moshav shelves were filled with books written in a dozen languages. Musicians, painters, writers put this dynamic new society into words and on canvas and into melody.
From Metulla to Elath, from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv there was the electrifying feel and smell of one huge boom town.
Yet life was brutally hard. Israel was a poor and unfertile country and every single advance was made with sweat. Workers labored exhausting hours for little pay. Those out in the settlements fighting the soil toiled under nearly unbearable conditions. All the citizens were taxed to the breaking point to pay for the new immigrants pouring in. Clawing, bleeding, conquering with their bodies and minds, they made the tiny nation live and grow.
A national airline took to the skies.
A merchant marine flying the Star of David began to sail to the corners of the earth.