As I’ve mentioned, I started writing in 'Haaretz'.
I wrote especially against the expulsion of Arab villagers
which continued after the war.
I wrote editorials against it,
until one day [Gershom] Schocken told me that he didn’t want one of my articles
about the expulsion from some village in the Upper Galilee.
I think it was the village of Achbara, near Safed. or Husan...
He did let me write one but no more.
Why? Because!
I knew Schocken. Schocken was a very strange individual.
Schocken the father.
He was bald from an early age.
His father had been very wealthy,
very important in Germany before Hitler.
He owned department stores around Germany. Very rich.
He sent his son Gustav to England
to study at university in London..
at the London School of Economics.
I had a friend, Medad Schiff, who also studied there.
He told me that Schocken had stood out there
for one reason.
In England it is customary… when there is an examination
there are those students who finish first
and those who take a little longer.
The custom was that whoever had finished quietly closed their notebook
and did not get up out of consideration for others,
so as not to add pressure on those who had not finished.
One person got up and left. It was Gustav Schocken.
So Gustav Schocken
was a man who did not have one worldview,
but had a thousand worldviews.
That is to say, he had a view about you and a view about himself,
without there being any connection between the two.
He could decide that you are wonderful
or he would invalidate you altogether.
And once he had an opinion about something,
no force on earth would budge him.
How did he form these opinions?
It depended who he met on the street.
His brother was a general in the IDF,
rear-guard general who influenced him greatly in these things.
A general or lieutenant colonel,
there were no brigadier generals yet.
And I realised more and more that it was not going to work between us.
It was very pleasant, very nice, true respect between us,
but I could not write what I wanted.
[Schocken] hired me based on what I had written
knowing what my opinions were!
Then one day he decided, ‘It’s not working.
I want to publish a magazine
called 'Visage'.
I’ve formed a preparatory team and
I want you to be part of the preparation’.
Okay, great. He gave me a photographer, Paul Goldman,
and we prepared news items in readiness
for that magazine.
For the very first time in Israel,
we photographed a birth.
We prepared a lot of stories like that.
And it went on and on,
but I couldn’t see it really happening.