Obituary / Exodus captain Ike Aharonovich was Israel's most daring sailor

Ike would call me and ask if I knew who he was and I would say yes, you're Ike. He would say how did you know? I would say that he was one of a kind, but after all you were with Hamburger - Yossi Harel. I said Yossi's dead, he said he should have died before. I said Ike, you loved him, he would say we used to argue, I would say that was in order to save Jews. He would say, tell me, are you still licking Arafat's ass. I would say, he's dead too, Ike. Then he'd say, do you know who I am?

Ike was the youngest and most daring Israeli sea captain. An expert at tricks on the open sea or on exiting a port, but he never forgave Yossi Harel for what happened with the Exodus. When they reached the shore of the country with the ship, Yossi, who was the ship's commander, decided to stop the resistance to the British warships that were pounding the Exodus, a former packet steamer called the President Warfield. Warfield was the father or grandfather of the woman for whom the king of England abdicated because she was a divorcee. His brother George became the king who later fathered Elizabeth.

All of Zionism is the story of the struggle between Yossi and Ike. Ike wanted Yossi to continue the war to show that we were heroes and in order to beat the British and Yossi said he didn't bring the ship so that 4,500 Holocaust survivors would be killed, and if Ike's Palmach wanted war he should bring the young people from the kibbutzim. Ike didn't forgive him. No logic would get through to him. He accepted the battle that was almost Masada in the sea. Yossi wanted life. Ike wanted struggle and victory.

Without Ike, Yossi Harel would not have succeeded in bring over the Exodus, but without Yossi we would have beat the British but would have died. Ike brought that wretched ship with Jewish sailors from America. He crossed the ocean in that wreck. In other words, he was an exemplary skipper but not a magnificent commander. With him it was die or take the mountain. In innumerable conversations with him he repeated this. It bothered him. He was wise but hot-tempered. Funny, too, but his wisdom was arrested by his stubbornness and his daring. On ships he was an excellent captain. When he thought about the Jews, Hitler was still alive and he didn't trust any Arab whom Hitler appointed against the Jews. He had wisdom when it came to the sea and respected the Jews but he didn't love them the way Yossi loved them and he also got angry at them for not fighting for their lives.

Ike was a complicated man and erred in his desire to continue the battle against the British back then. The broken ship entered Haifa harbor in a pool of its own blood. Ike wanted to beat the British with the lives of the survivors and himself but Yossi Harel, who was also a man of war and wanted to fight for the honor of the Jews decided that it was more important to bring them to Eretz Yisrael alive than to impress the British with the daring of the Jews.