Chapter 18 / Meanwhile, Back in Israel ...

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'Whether Uri is the amazing phenomenon we tend to believe he is, or the greatest crook of all time, he deserves our admiration. Those grudging Israelis who won't stand for any Israeli making good abroad can get as green as a sour grape. They've lost the battle against Uri once and for all.' (Novelist Ephraim Kishon, writing in Ma'ariv.)

Uri does not know the date his father died, other than that it was around 1980. 'I don't even know the exact year,' he says. 'I try to totally erase it out of my brain. It is only when I have to light a candle that Hanna looks in the diary. I don't want to know. It is totally erased. Another thing which still upsets me is that when I flew for his burial, we were all in the cemetery, and my father was all bundled up in the tallis [prayer shawl] and his wife, my stepmother wanted me to cry and I couldn't. I was almost embarrassed and ashamed that there were strangers around me weeping, and Uri, his own son wasn't. What it was that I really don't believe in funerals. That's why I never go to them, I knew that his soul was out there looking at me and saying I'm here, so tears didn't come to my eyes. Eva, my stepmother, probably never forgave me for that, though. She loves me very dearly and she spent some weeks here now. My father was her great love. One of my few regrets was that my father died before seeing my children.'

'But my father's death was also a huge shock to me,' Uri continues. I knew he had angina, I knew he was smoking, I knew he drank. I was running in Rome with Hanna in Villa Borghese, when my secretary called the hotel she said there's some bad news. I knew that my father was dead. I don't know whether that happened psychically, or just as every son or daughter would know it.'
'But for years, since I was about 16, in Cyprus, I had a recurring nightmare of walking into an apartment. The windows are open, overlooking the Mediterranean, and I walk into the next room, and also the windows are open to the Med, and I look on the floor and I see myself lying there, dead, and then I would wake up. When my father remarried, he rented a tiny little one-bedroomed apartment overlooking the Med opposite the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv. I never connected it until the day he died, because he died exactly on the same spot as I dreamed I was lying overlooking the Mediterranean, with the windows open, the same tiles, the same colour, the same window frames. And that's when the nightmare stopped. I never dreamed about it again. I said to myself, why didn't I recognise it. I'd been to the apartment dozens of times. It was only when he died and I went up there that I realised, my God, this is the place. I get goosebumps.'
Such flying visits, most under less sad circumstances, of course, were the way Uri kept up his link with Israel from the 1970s to the present day. It has been a brilliant way for him to ensure that, despite any unpleasantness that has happened at home in the past, he is still regarded overwhlemingly in Israel - even by people who consider him a fake - as a local boy made good. Only recently, the national telephone and communications company, Bezek, featured him in a big TV and newspaper advertising campaign - it was for an advanced phone that you only had to speak the number to dial, hence the 'psychic' theme. It is thus by skilfully spreading himself thinly, that he has managed to maintain affection and credibility for himself in the one place, one suspects, that it really matters for him. Friends in the US believe the Gellers were happiest there, and will return to live one day, but I would be surprised to find him anywhere but in Israel in old age.

There is, however, something of the return to the nest in every trip Uri makes back to Israel. When adults go to their parents' home, they get their soup just the way they like it, but their emotions also revert to an earlier model. Uri is, by all accounts, just that bit more bumptious - but vulnerable at the same time - the moment he steps off an El Al jet at Lod Airport. It's a familiarity thing. 'I think part of my success in Israel was that people saw some kind of saviour, a man with powers to save Israel from further war,' he told me once. 'Maybe I chose the wrong path by becoming part entertainer, part psychic part teacher, part science experiment. part communicator. Perhaps I should have gone into politics.'

There are inevitably a million stories about Uri Geller - Israel is a village, and everybody there has one Geller encounter to relate - but the two which follow, I feel, reveal a lot about the man as he matured. Both are from the 1980s, when Uri was approaching 40, had young children, and was in the transition between living in the States and in England. The first was told me in England, by Roni Schachnaey, his imitator and admirer, but one-time enemy, talking with the gloves off at his home in Yorkshire.
In 1980, Roni Schachnaey says, Geller came after several years' absence to do a show at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv. 'I think it was a mistake, because the magicians were after his blood. I brought along 40 magicians to sit at the show, right at the front. I insisted that we behave properly; I would allow no disrespect for a fellow artist, but I thought the show was very poor, seventies stuff. It was like chewing gum, stretching everything out. Then, when he was bending the spoon, something extraordinary happened. Uri threw a spoon in to the aisle right next to me and said, "Even HE can't bend a spoon like I can." Now what has always puzzled me was, how did he know I was there. He had never met me, he didn't even know me. That incident to me was proof that he plants people in the audience.'
'So after the show, I was leaving, and his manager came across and said, "Uri Geller wants a word with you." I was taken into his dressing room, face to face after all these years of opposing him. He seemed very nervous. The first thing he said to me was. "You have very kind eyes." That took me by surprise. He then said he knew I didn't want to hurt him. I said, "Look, I know enough about you. I don't need to hurt you. You're hurt enough.' But then he took me by the shoulder and took me into the bathroom. He wanted somewhere quiet where we could speak.'
'Then he said this,' the magician continues, 'And I promise that this is the gospel truth, told completely without venom. Uri said, "I'm going to tell you something I've not told anybody before. I swear on my mother's life I was lucky. You know, the thing with the oil. I really did get lucky and I made a lot of money. So now you know the truth, why not let me carry on working without disturbances?" Now for me, that was enough. I said, "Well, if you want to be one of us," and I had a little lapel badge for our association, which I took off and pinned on his shirt and told him, "You are one of us." As long as you wear this badge whenever you're up on stage, we won't trouble you. But he didn't, and it always made me laugh that he wrote later that I gave him a medallion, like it was an award, and he couldn't be sure whether I thought he was the greatest illusionist or a true psychic.'
The second of these snapshots of Uri as he was growing older is by Zvi Bentwich, an eminent professor of medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Bentwich, a clinical immunologist, is one of the world's leading authorities on AIDS, and is based at the AIDS Centre at the Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot, which is affiliated to the University's Medical School - hence Dr. Bentwich's chair there - and the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. He was introduced to Uri as early as 1969 by his secretary, who happens to be Uri's old friend Leah Peleg, and because of this connection Bentwich had the distinction nearly 20 years later of being the last scientist anywhere to have conducted tests on Uri Geller. Uri had not been inside a laboratory for over a decade, and he has not done so since.

'What I saw Uri Geller do in the laboratory,' he attests, 'Was a truly mind-blowing experience which cannot be overlooked, and should be made common knowledge once we have established it. I have no doubt that he manifests an extreme case of some unusual power, capacity or energy, which I believe is genuine and not magician or performer based - and which probably represents what all human beings have in much lower intensity.'
'To start with, when we were younger' Bentwich told me, 'I was impressed with the regular things he can do, the telepathy he showed me, the bending of spoons and the seed sprouting. What was most impressive in my mind was that the spoon continued to bend when it was clearly out of his touch. The seed sprouting, I found intriguing, rather than disturbing. I approached him at that time and asked him to give himself to further testing within our medical school, and I was amused by his almost paranoid reaction. He was extremely anxious at my suggestion. I felt there was something problematic in his coping with his powers not being under his control, in his attraction to showbusiness, which I thought did him a big disservice.'
'However, to my delight, in 1987, Uri agreed to come and be tested in my laboratory, and at the Weizmann Institute, which is nearby. My colleagues and I designed three experiments to test if he has any special effects when he concentrates and puts his hands over a culture of cancer cells. The bottom line of these experiments was they were all negative, so there was another guy, an endocrinologist, who came in and said, "I have some ox sperm cells. Maybe this would affect the sperm."'
The sperm, Bentwich explains, were in frozen vials. 'They were put into a plate and were swimming around very energetically, and then we had two similar culture plates that contained sperm in more or less in the same amount as a control. Uri put his hand over one and, without touching it, concentrated. It was hot, in summer, so he wasn't wearing long sleeves or anything, an we checked out his hands for anything hidden. And, lo and behold, the sperm cells stopped moving. Most of them became either very slow in movement or dead. We repeated this three times. It was very impressive, so we did it again and again. However, when he asked what it was we were doing and told him, he was extremely upset. He really thought he had a destructive power. This was a dramatic result, but he wasn't happy with it, and at that point, he said he didn't want to do anything more.'
'After seeing such results, I told him, look we should continue testing. It is so interesting and amazing. But he didn't like the idea at all. At a later stage, I suggested that if he was concerned about negative forces, maybe we could try out some healing effects. He said that he liked that much more, but I didn't insist beyond a certain point, and we did nothing more, which I think is very regretful.'
'I think Uri is a very fine person, I like him personally, but in a way, I always considered him as an immature personality with an exceptional power that somehow he doesn't know how to cope with. He is attracted too much to showbiz and to performance, and not to more important things. Eleven more years have now gone by, and nobody has been studying him on any similar things, which is ridiculous. . There was too little to go on, but what we had already seen was probably the most significant piece of evidence ever in terms of biological effect of what he is capable of, yet he refrained and said forget about me, try it with somebody else. He is far from being systematic. He is chaotic, so he didn't make the connection with AIDS and cancer, or even think about it. It was like missing the main point while looking round for nonsense.'