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 the balance and moderation of his opinions. At one point he told me that where we stood was not Israeli land, but rather held in trust against the day when there was a secure settlement. He was a considerate man, and seeing that I was shivering in the cold wind which swept across the mountains he lent me his flak jacket. I was photographed in this and there followed furious Syrian objections. And so my first major Middle Eastern foray ended amid the endemic misunderstandings of the region.
In retrospect, my visit to the Middle East occurred at an important time of transition between the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1978–79 American-brokered Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. Although the Camp David Agreements ultimately failed to solve the deeper problems, they were a remarkable tribute to the principal participants — Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the time I became Prime Minister they still seemed to form the best basis for progress. In fact, however, the rise of armed, aggressive Islamic fundamentalism, principally financed by and focused on Iran, was to upset all such calculations.
I was one of the last senior Western politicians to visit Iran while the Shah was still in power. The troubles had already begun. There were riots in Tabriz in February 1978 against the Shah’s programme of Westernizing reforms, which the Mullahs described as impious attacks on Islam and which, alas, ordinary people often experienced as the forced disruption of their traditional ways of life. As the disturbances increased, the Carter Administration vacillated in its attitude to the Shah. At times, it would offer him support as a bastion of Western influence in a strategically important part of the world; at others it would denounce his human rights record and demand the introduction of liberal reforms. What this recommendation failed to bear in mind was well summed up by the Shah himself: ‘I will behave like the King of Sweden when my subjects behave like Swedes.’ In any event, the Carter Administration’s blowing hot and cold only served to undermine the Shah and encourage his opponents — a fact not lost among America’s potential allies in the Middle East.
For my part, I had no doubt about the strategic importance of Iran for the West. Moreover, although by most definitions only peripheral to the Middle East, Iran, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, had a large potential influence in the region. In any case, I admired the Shah personally and believed that his policy of modernization along Western lines was ultimately the right one. In retrospect, I can see that its success depended upon its being carried out more gradually and taking into account the customs and mores of his people. But it was certainly preferable to the retreat into fundamentalism and medieval economics which have reduced the standard of living of the Iranian people and forced the regime to distract them with political and religious adventurism abroad.
All this was in the future, however, when I arrived in Tehran on the evening of Friday 28 April to be met by Tony Parsons, our Ambassador there. I found Iran to be, on the surface, a bustling, prosperous, Western-style country. There were plenty of new cars in the crowded streets. Shops sold luxury goods to sophisticated, well-dressed women. Moreover, the consumer society was underpinned not just by oil but by new industrial investment, as at the ultra-modern Iran National Automobile works which I visited.