Jon Kimche

Jon Kimche (1909) was a Swiss-born British journalist.

Early life

Kimche was born in St Gall, Switzerland. His father, a fervent Zionist, later brought the family to London.

His father was a liberal Zionist who had been the youngest member present at Theodor Herzl's first Zionist Congress held at Basle in 1897.

During the 1930s, he worked in a Hampstead bookshop with George Orwell. From there he moved to the Independent Labour Party bookshop off Fleet Street.

World War Two

According to the Guardian's obituary, "Kimche used his Swiss passport during the second world war to travel throughout Europe on mysterious assignments for Britain and the Zionist movement."

Kimche was recruited as a writer for the Observer by David Astor. He became the military correspondent, a role he also served for Reuters and the Evening Standard. He covered Spain, Austria and the Middle East.

He served as Deputy Editor of Tribune from 1942 to 1994, running the paper under the nominal editorship of Aneurin Bevan. where he appointed George Orwell as literary editor and columnist.

He spent the final year of the war with Reuters.

Post-war

At the beginning of 1946, Michael Foot recruited Kimche as editor of Tribune.

Kimche lost the job after disappearing from the office in December 1946, when he was called upon by the Zionist underground to negotiate the release of a ship full of holocaust survivors travelling to Palestine from Turkish waters.

He covered the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and established good relations with David Ben-Gurion.

He wrote the book Seven Fallen Pillars (1950) on British policy in Palestine. Together with his brother David, he wrote The Secret Roads (1956), on illegal immigration to Palestine and Both Sides Of The Hill (1960), on Israeli and Arab attitudes in the 1948 war and after.

In the early 1950s, he again worked for Reuters, visiting capitals across the Arab world.

Jewish Observer

From 1952 to 1967, he was editor of the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review. He was sacked by the journal's publisher, the Zionist Federation, after a personal intervention by the Israeli Prime Minister, reportedly over a story about unemployment and emigration in Israel.

Journalist Leon T. Hadar offers a slightly different version of this period, stating:

His close ties with the leaders of the new Jewish state, including Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, helped him secure Israeli government funding for a magazine on Middle Eastern affairs which he began to publish in London in the late 1950s. The magazine folded in 1965 after Israeli financial support was withdrawn.

According to Hadar, the real reason for the withdrawal was the split in Mapai in the wake of the Lavon Affair:

Jon Kimche sided with Ben-Gurion. As a result, Kimche incurred the wrath of the Old Man's more moderate political rivals who, under the leadership of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, took control of the party and the government in the mid 1960s.

What directly triggered the decision to stop the funding for the magazine, however, was an editorial written by Kimche which accused Eshkol of ordering the Mossad to assassinate the Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, in 1965. (Eshkol argued that it was Mossad chief Meir Amit, Ben-Gurion's ally, who gave the order without consulting Eshkol, even though he was prime minister at the time.)

Later career

The Six Day War, and the subsequent War of Attrition led to new writing opportunities with the Evening Standard. In 1968, Zionist backers including Marcus Sieff and George Weidenfeld set him up as editor of the New Middle East but this role ended in 1971, when he clashed with his editorial board over contributions from three leading members of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.

In 1973, shortly before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Kimche reported in the London Evening Standard that the Egyptians had moved their Soviet SAM missiles umbrella on the Suez front in defiance of the American-brokered agreement. This prompted some to wonder if he had received a tip-off from Mossad where his brother David Kimche was a senior officer. He was nevertheless dropped by the Standard at around this time because his reports of secret meetings were regarded as increasingly dubious. He was criticised for not citing sources, while he was in turn critical of academics who relied too much on official documentary records.

His last editorship was at a newsletter initially entitled Afro-Asian Affairs and subsequently Arab-Asian Affairs which ran for four years from 1975.

In 1978, he forecast the success of the Camp David talks, when others were predicting their failure.

Affiliations

Connections

• David Kimche - brother
• Edith Christina (Toni) Bromige - wife
• Elkana Galli - co-founder of L'Observateur du Moyen Orient