kayak here.”
“It would be suicide to try it alone,” Alfie said.
But another man at the club told me that I should not be intimidated.
“Ees there, Morocco,” he said. “Ees eesie.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You can’t loose eet.”
That night I went to the NAAFI at one of the military barracks near the harbor and watched a World Cup qualifying match, England versus Holland. The room was packed with hundreds of screaming, chanting England fans. At first England seemed to be holding its own. The whole room was united in its howling, but when Holland scored two goals in quick succession and England had no reply there was disappointment and then real anger among the soldiers who earlier had been screaming for blood. That loss cast a pall over Gibraltar, and the next day the Rock was in mourning for England’s interment by the Dutch.
Hearing nothing from Sir Joshua Hassan, I called his office and told him I was planning to leave soon. He apologized and said I could visit him that same afternoon.
He is the grand old man of the Rock, the father of modern Gibraltar. “Sir J. Hassan & Partners,” was on the top floor of a bank. On the wall of Sir Joshua’s office there was a large photograph of the man himself, at the time he was Chief Minister, addressing a vast crowd in Gibraltar’s main square. A framed charter signed by the queen. A gilded document: “We have inscribed your name in the Golden Book of Jewish Unity.” And a telegram from Prince Philip: “Congratulations on your well-deserved honour”—Sir Joshua’s knighthood.
He was dark and small and stout and lined, a kindly sloping presence, and he had the softest hands, and the limp handshake of an old woman. His Ladino accent and his solemn face made him seem at times not Jewish but Spanish, but his confidence and fits of sudden jollity transformed him into a Dickensian barrister. He was seventy-eight.
Realizing I did not have much time, I bluntly asked him about the status of Gibraltar.
“The person who says ‘I want Gibraltar to be Spanish’ does not exist in Gibraltar,” he said. “If Gibraltar is not my country, where is my country? Ha! We consider ourselves Gibraltarians irrespective of where we came from. We get along very well together.”
“So you are totally committed to Gibraltar,” I said.
Sir Joshua said, “Jews have a second loyalty—to Israel. But that is an emotional loyalty. My daughter lives there.”
His own people, he said, the Hassan family, had emigrated to the Rock in 1788, from Morocco—from a town just across the water, Tetouan. On his mother’s side, the Cansino family came from Minorca. “We’re all settlers here,” he said, “dating from roughly 1704.”
I said, “It amazes me how everyone quotes the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht when they talk about Gibraltar.”
“Because of the clause about Jews and Moors being forbidden to stay in Gibraltar more than a month. But they needed us. They had to look to Morocco for vittles. Because of realities they drove a coach and horses through the treaty.”
He shuffled some documents.
“I wrote a paper about it. My thesis was that Gibraltar developed despite the treaty.”
“Do you think the Chief Minister made any headway the other day at the U.N.?”
“Joe Bossano doesn’t know what he wants,” he said, and leaned towards me. “When people go berserk they ask for something they don’t understand. The idea of a colony smells bad.”
“So what’s the best solution?”
“It is very difficult! There are three choices for Gibraltar. Independence is one. Or, to be part of a state—but Spain is out of the question. Or free association, like the Cook Islands and New Zealand.”
“The Cook Islanders go fishing and New Zealand pays the bills. Something like that?”
This made Sir Joshua wince. He said, “The best solution would be the utmost autonomy in internal matters, and a treaty with Britain that would remove the wide powers of the
“It would be suicide to try it alone,” Alfie said.
But another man at the club told me that I should not be intimidated.
“Ees there, Morocco,” he said. “Ees eesie.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You can’t loose eet.”
That night I went to the NAAFI at one of the military barracks near the harbor and watched a World Cup qualifying match, England versus Holland. The room was packed with hundreds of screaming, chanting England fans. At first England seemed to be holding its own. The whole room was united in its howling, but when Holland scored two goals in quick succession and England had no reply there was disappointment and then real anger among the soldiers who earlier had been screaming for blood. That loss cast a pall over Gibraltar, and the next day the Rock was in mourning for England’s interment by the Dutch.
Hearing nothing from Sir Joshua Hassan, I called his office and told him I was planning to leave soon. He apologized and said I could visit him that same afternoon.
He is the grand old man of the Rock, the father of modern Gibraltar. “Sir J. Hassan & Partners,” was on the top floor of a bank. On the wall of Sir Joshua’s office there was a large photograph of the man himself, at the time he was Chief Minister, addressing a vast crowd in Gibraltar’s main square. A framed charter signed by the queen. A gilded document: “We have inscribed your name in the Golden Book of Jewish Unity.” And a telegram from Prince Philip: “Congratulations on your well-deserved honour”—Sir Joshua’s knighthood.
He was dark and small and stout and lined, a kindly sloping presence, and he had the softest hands, and the limp handshake of an old woman. His Ladino accent and his solemn face made him seem at times not Jewish but Spanish, but his confidence and fits of sudden jollity transformed him into a Dickensian barrister. He was seventy-eight.
Realizing I did not have much time, I bluntly asked him about the status of Gibraltar.
“The person who says ‘I want Gibraltar to be Spanish’ does not exist in Gibraltar,” he said. “If Gibraltar is not my country, where is my country? Ha! We consider ourselves Gibraltarians irrespective of where we came from. We get along very well together.”
“So you are totally committed to Gibraltar,” I said.
Sir Joshua said, “Jews have a second loyalty—to Israel. But that is an emotional loyalty. My daughter lives there.”
His own people, he said, the Hassan family, had emigrated to the Rock in 1788, from Morocco—from a town just across the water, Tetouan. On his mother’s side, the Cansino family came from Minorca. “We’re all settlers here,” he said, “dating from roughly 1704.”
I said, “It amazes me how everyone quotes the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht when they talk about Gibraltar.”
“Because of the clause about Jews and Moors being forbidden to stay in Gibraltar more than a month. But they needed us. They had to look to Morocco for vittles. Because of realities they drove a coach and horses through the treaty.”
He shuffled some documents.
“I wrote a paper about it. My thesis was that Gibraltar developed despite the treaty.”
“Do you think the Chief Minister made any headway the other day at the U.N.?”
“Joe Bossano doesn’t know what he wants,” he said, and leaned towards me. “When people go berserk they ask for something they don’t understand. The idea of a colony smells bad.”
“So what’s the best solution?”
“It is very difficult! There are three choices for Gibraltar. Independence is one. Or, to be part of a state—but Spain is out of the question. Or free association, like the Cook Islands and New Zealand.”
“The Cook Islanders go fishing and New Zealand pays the bills. Something like that?”
This made Sir Joshua wince. He said, “The best solution would be the utmost autonomy in internal matters, and a treaty with Britain that would remove the wide powers of the
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