Chapter 10: The right to exist
Ben Gurion and Sharett
"Ben-Gurion was an activist, a man who believed in doing rather than explaining and who was convinced that what really mattered in the end - and what would always really matter - was what the Israeli's did and how they did it, not what the world outside Israel thought or said about them...Being liked or not - or even being approved of or not - was not the kind of thing that interested Ben-Gurion. He thought in terms of sovereignty, security, consolidation and real progress, and he regarded world opinion, or even public opinion, as relatively unimportant compared to these."
"Sharett, on the other hand, was immensely concerned with the way in which policymakers elsewhere reacted to Israel and what was likely to make the Jewish state look 'good' in the eyes of other foreign ministers or the United Nations. Israel's image and the verdict of his own contemporaries - rather than history or future historians - were the criteria he tended to use the most often. And what he really wanted most for Israel, I think, was for it to be viewed as a progressive, moderate, civilised European country of whose behaviour no Israeli, least of all himself, ever needed be ashamed."
Method of retaliation
"Sharett was just as convinced as Ben-Gurion that the incessant incursions across our frontiers by gangs of Arab infiltrators had to end, but they disagreed sharply on the method that should be used. Sharett did not rule out retaliation. But he believed more strongly than most of us did that the most effective way of dealing with this very acute situation was by continuing to put maximum pressure on the powers-that-be so that they, in turn, would put maximum pressure on the Arab states to stop aiding and abetting the infiltrators. Well-worded protests to the United Nations, skilful and informed diplomatic notes and clear, repeated presentation of our case to the world would, he was sure, eventually succeed, whereas armed reprisals by Israel could only result in a storm of criticism and make our international position even less comfortable that it was. He was 100 per cent right about the criticism. It was more than just a storm, it was a tornado. Whenever the Israel Defence Forces retaliated against the infiltrators - and sometimes, unavoidably, innocent Arabs were wounded or killed along with the guilt - Israel was promptly and very severely censured for 'atrocities'.
But Ben-Gurion still saw his primary responsibility not to the statesmen of the West or to the world tribunal, but to the ordinary citizens who lived in the Israeli settlements that were under constant Arab attack. The duty of the government of any state, he believed, was first and foremost to defend itself and to protects its citizens - regardless of how negative the reaction abroad might be to this protection. There was also another consideration of great importance to Ben-Gurion: the citizens of Israel...had to be taught that the government, and only the government, was responsible for their security. It would have obviously been much simpler to have permitted the formation of a number of anti-terrorist vigilante groups, shut an official eye to private acts of retaliation and vengeance and then loudly disclaim all responsibility for the resultant 'incidents'. But that was not our way. The hand extended in peace to the Arabs would remain extended, but at the same time the children of Israeli farmers in border villages were entitled to sleep safely in their beds at night. And if the only way of accomplishing this was to hit back mercilessly at the camps of the Arab gangs, then that would have to be done."
Terrorism/Fedayeen
"The Arab states had long ago explained their position. 'We are exercising a right of war,' an Egyptian representative had said in 1951 in defence of Egypt's refusal to let Israeli ships go through the Suez Canal. 'An armistice does not put an end to a state of war. It does not prohibit a country from exercising certain rights of war.' That these 'rights' were still being fully upheld in 1955 and 1956 we know all too well. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power in Egypt in 1952 and was now the most powerful figure in the Arab world, openly applauded the Fedayeen. 'You have proven,' he told them, 'that you are heroes upon whom our entire country can depend. The spirit with which you enter the land of the enemy must be spread.' Cairo Radio also praised the murderers endlessly in language that was crystal clear: 'Weep O'Israel,' was one refrain, 'the day of extermination draws near'.
The United Nations did nothing effective to put a halt to the Fedayeen outrages. The UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, did succeed in arranging a ceasefire that lasted for a few days in the spring of 1956, but when the Fedayeen went back to crossing the border, he let it go at that and didn't return to the Middle East."
1956: Suez
"Despite all this - and the unconcealed Soviet-Arab preparations for another war - the United States and Britain refused to sell us arms. It didn't matter how often of how loudly we knocked on their doors. The answer was always negative, though at the very beginning of 1956 the United States - still refusing to sell us arms - indicated to France and Canada that it didn't mind if they did so."
"There is already so much literature (some of it fact and some of it fiction) about the Sinai Campaign that I think my own contribution can be quite modest. But I must stress one fact. Regardless of the abortive French and British attempt to seize the Suez Canal, Israel’s own strike against the Egyptians in 1956 had one goal and one goal only: to prevent the destruction of the Jewish state. The threat was unmistakable. As I later said at the UN General Assembly, ‘Even if no one else chose to do so, we recognized the symptoms.’ We knew that dictatorships —including those given disarmingly to informing the world of their plans —usually keep their promises, and no one in Israel had forgotten the lesson of the crematoria or what total extermination really meant. Unless we were prepared to be killed off, either piecemeal or in one sudden attack, we had to take the initiative —though, God knows, it wasn’t an easy decision to make."
"We had counted on surprise, speed and utterly confusing the Egyptian army, but it was only when I myself flew to visit Sharm el-Sheikh at the southernmost tip of Sinai and toured the Gaza Strip by car afterwards that I really understood the extent of our victory —the sheer size and desolation of the territory through which those tanks, half-tracks, ice-cream trucks, private cars and taxis had raced in under seven days. The Egyptian defeat was absolute. The nests of the fedayeen were cleaned out. The elaborate Egyptian system to defend Sinai —the fortresses and the battalions concealed in the desert —was put totally out of commission. The hundreds of thousands of weapons and the millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition —mostly Russian —stock-piled for use against us were worthless now. A third of the Egyptian army was broken. Of the 30,000 Egyptian soldiers whom we found pathetically wandering in the sand, 5,000 were taken as prisoners to save them from dying of thirst (and eventually exchanged for the one Israeli the Egyptians had managed to capture).
But we hadn’t fought the Sinai Campaign for territory, booty or prisoners, and as far as we were concerned, we had won the only thing we wanted: peace, or at least the promise of peace for a few years, perhaps even for longer. Although our casualties were ‘light’, we desperately hoped that the 172 Israelis who were killed (some 800 were wounded) would be the last battle casualties we would ever have to mourn. This time, we would insist that our neighbours come to terms with us and with our existence."
"I have always thought that had the Anglo-French attack on Suez been more swift and efficient, the storm of protest in those countries would have died down in the face of afait accompli. But as it was, the combined assault failed, and the French and British backed down as soon as the United Nations, under intense US and Soviet pressure, demanded that they withdrew their troops from the Suez Canal zone. It (UN) also demanded Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
That was the beginning of the four and a half heart-breaking months of diplomatic battle that we waged - and lost - at the United Nations in our attempt to persuade the nations of the world that if we retreated to the armistice lines of 1949, war would again break out in the Middle East one day. Those people, those millions of people who even today have still not quite grasped the realities of Israel's struggle to stay alive, and who are so quick to condemn us for not being 'more flexible' and for not retreating pleasantly to our former borders each time we are forced to go to war, might do well to ponder the course of events following 1956 and ask themselves what was gained by the fact we did reluctantly withdraw then from Sinai and the Gaza Strip. The answer is: only more wars, each one bloodier and far more costly than the Sinai campaign had been. Had we been allowed to stay where we were until the Egyptians agreed to negotiate with us, the recent history of the Middle East would certainly have been very different. But the pressure was intense, and in the end we gave in. President Eisenhower, who had been kept totally in the dark by his European allies, was furious and said that unless Israel withdrew at once, the United States would support sanctions against her at the United Nations."
UN
"In December 1956 I left for the United Nations filled with forebodings. But before I went, I wanted to see Sinai and the Gaza Strip for myself, and I am glad that I did, because otherwise I would never have really comprehended the full gravity of the situation we had been in prior to the Sinai Campaign. I shall never forget my first sight of the elaborate Egyptian military installations —built in defiance of the United Nations itself- at Sharm el-Sheikh for the sole purpose of maintaining an illegal blockade against our shipping. The area of Sharm el-Sheikh is incredibly lovely; the waters of the Red Sea must be the bluest and the clearest in the world, and they are framed by mountains that range in colour from deep red to violet and purple. There, in that beautiful tranquil setting, on an empty shore, stood the grotesque battery of huge naval guns that had paralysed Eilat for so long. For me, it was a picture that symbolized everything. Then I toured the Gaza Strip, from which the fedayeen had gone out on their murderous assignments for so many months and in which the Egyptians had kept a quarter of a million men, women and children (of whom nearly 6o per cent were Arab refugees) in the most shameful poverty and destitution. I was appalled by what I saw there and by the fact that those miserable people had been maintained in such a degrading condition for over eight years only so that the Arab leaders could show the refugee camps to visitors and make political capital out of them. Those refugees could and should have been resettled at once in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East —countries, incidentally, whose language, traditions and religion they share. The Arabs would still have been able to continue their quarrel with us, but at least the refugees would not have been kept in a state of semi-starvation or lived in such abject terror of their Egyptian masters.
I couldn’t help comparing what I saw in the Gaza Strip to what we had done —even with all the mistakes we had made —for the Jews who had come to Israel in those same eight years, and I suppose that is why I began my statement to the UN General Assembly on 5 December 1956 by talking not about the war we had won, but about the Jewish refugees we had settled:
Israel’s people went into the desert or struck roots in stony hillsides to establish new villages, to build roads, houses, schools and hospitals; while Arab terrorists, entering from Egypt and Jordan, were sent in to kill and destroy. Israel dug wells, brought water in pipes from great distances; Egypt sent in fedayeen to blow up the wells and the pipes. Jews from Yemen brought in sick, undernourished children believing that two out of every five would die; we cut that number down to one out of twenty-five. While we fed those babies and cured their diseases, the fedayeen were sent in to throw bombs at children in synagogues and grenades into baby homes.
Then I went on to those celebrated ‘rights of war’, to that discredited excuse of a ‘belligerent status’ against Israel, the screen behind which Colonel Nasser had trained and unleashed the fedayeen:
A comfortable division has been made. The Arab states unilaterally enjoy the ‘rights of war’; Israel has the unilateral responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one-way street. Is it then surprising if a people labouring under this monstrous distinction should finally become restive and at last seek a way of rescuing its life from the perils of the regulated war that is conducted against it from all sides?"
"Over and over again the Israeli government has held out its hand in peace to its neighbours. But to no avail. At the ninth session of the General Assembly, the Israeli representative suggested that if the Arab countries were not yet ready for peace, it would be useful, as a preliminary or transitory stage, to conclude agreements committing the parties to policies of non- aggression and pacific settlement. The reply was outright rejection. Our offer to meet the representatives of all or any of the Arab countries still stands. Never have we heard an echo from across our borders to our call for peace."
"'The countries of the Middle East are rightly listed in the category of the 'underdeveloped': the standard of living, disease, the illiteracy of the masses of people, the underdeveloped lands, desert, and swamp - all these cry out desperate for minds, hands, financial means, and technical ability. Can we envisage what a state of peace between Israel and its neighbours during the past eight years would have meant for all of us? Can we try to translate fighter planes into irrigation pipes and tractors for the people in these lands? Can we, in our imagination, replace gun emplacements by schools and hospitals? The many hundreds of millions of dollars spent on armaments could surely have been put to a more constructive purpose. Substitute cooperation between Israel and its neighbours for sterile hatred and ardour for destruction and you will give life and hope and happiness to all its people'
But walking back to my seat, I could see that no one else in that vast hall had shared the brief vision of the future with me, and I remember how surprised I was when a delegate sitting somewhere behind me applauded me as I sat down. The seating at the United Nations is always alphabetical; lots are drawn at the first meeting of each session as to which country should be seated first, and all the others are then seated in alphabetical order. At that session, Holland happened to be behind us. I nodded my head very gratefully to the Dutch delegate - one of the few not to vote against us - but I still took my place with a sense of great emptiness and utter disbelief. I had spoken to the United Nations and one would have thought from the expression on the faces of most of the delegates that I had asked for the moon, when in fact all I had done - all that Israel has ever done at the United Nations - was to suggest that the Arabs, fellow-members of that organisation, recognise our existence and work together with us towards peace. That no one had jumped up to seize the opportunity, to say: 'Alright, let's talk. Let's argue it all out. Let's make an effort to find a solution' was like a physical blow to me - not that I had many illusions left about the kind of family that family of nations was."
Withdrawal from Sinai
"Those were terrible months. Our phased withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Sinai was going on all the time, but nothing was being said or done to force the Egyptians to agree to enter into negotiations with us, to guarantee the lifting of the blockade of the Straits of Tiran or to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip. The four questions we had asked in November 1956 were still unanswered in February 1957. And I still couldn’t get through to the Americans —least of all to the US secretary of state, that cold, grey man, John Foster Dulles —that our very life depended on adequate guarantees, real guarantees with teeth in them, and that we couldn’t return to the situation which had existed before the Sinai Campaign. But nothing helped. None of the arguments, none of the appeals, none of the logic, not even the eloquence of Abba Eban, our ambassador to Washington. We just didn’t talk the same language, and we didn’t have the same priorities. Dulles was obsessed by his own ‘brinkmanship’, by his fear of a looming world war, and he told me in so many words, and more than once, that Israel would be responsible for that war, if it broke out, because we were so ‘unreasonable’"
"There were many days during that period when I wanted to run away, to run back to Israel and let someone else go on hammering away at Dulles and Henry Cabot Lodge, the head of the US delegation at the United Nations. I would have done anything just not to have to face another exhausting round of talks that always seemed to end in recriminations. But I stayed where I was, tried to swallow my bitterness and sense of betrayal, and at the end of February we arrived at a compromise of sorts. The last of our troops would leave the Gaza Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh in return for the ‘assumption’ that the United Nations would guarantee the right of free passage for Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran and that Egyptian soldiers would not be allowed back in the Gaza Strip. It wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t what we had been fighting for, but it was the best we could get —and it was better than nothing.
On 3 March 1957, having first had each last comma of it checked and cleared by Mr Dulles in Washington, I made our final statement.
The government of Israel is now in a position to announce its plans for full and prompt withdrawal from the Sharm el-Sheikh area and the Gaza Strip. In compliance with Resolution i of 2 February 1957, our sole purpose has been to ensure that on the withdrawal of Israeli forces, continued freedom of navigation will exist for Israel and international shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran.
And then, as I had promised myself I would do, I said:
Now may I add these few words to the states in the Middle East area and, more specifically, to the neighbours of Israel? Can we from now on, all of us, turn a new leaf, and instead of fighting among each other can we all, united, fight poverty, disease, illiteracy? Can we, is it possible for us to pool all our efforts, all our energy, for one single purpose —the betterment and progress and development of all our lands and all our peoples?
But no sooner had I taken my seat than Henry Cabot Lodge got up. To my astonishment, I heard him reassure the United Nations that while the rights of free passage for all nations through the Straits of Tiran would indeed be safeguarded, the future of the Gaza Strip would have to be worked out within the context of the armistice agreements. Perhaps not everyone at the United Nations that day understood what Cabot Lodge was saying, but we understood all too well. The US State Department had won its battle against us, arid the Egyptian military government, with its garrison, was going to return to Gaza. There was nothing I could do or say. I just sat there, biting my lip, not even able to look at the handsome Mr Cabot Lodge while he pacified all those who had been so worried lest we refuse to withdraw unconditionally. It was not one of the finest moments of my life."
"During my term of office as foreign minister, I visited the United Nations often. I was there at least once a year as head of Israel’s delegation to the General Assembly, and there wasn’t a single time that I didn’t make an attempt to contact the Arabs somehow —or, to my sorrow, a single time that I succeeded. I remember once, in 1957, seeing Nasser there from a distance and wondering what would happen if I just went over to him and began to chat. But he was surrounded by his bodyguards, and I had my bodyguards, and it obviously wouldn’t work. But Tito was at that same session, and I thought perhaps I could talk to him and he would arrange something. So I asked someone in our delegation to talk to a member of the Yugoslav delegation and try to set up a meeting between Tito and me. I waited and waited and waited. I even postponed my return to Israel, but there was no reply. Then, the day after I had left New York, we got an answer: Tito would meet me in New York. But I was already back home. We tried again —there was silence again."
"There wasn’t one possible intermediary whom I didn’t approach during that period. At one Assembly session, I became quite friendly with the wife of the acting head of the Pakistani delegation, that country’s ambassador to London. One day, she approached me, of her own accord, and said: ‘Mrs Meir, if we women are in politics, we ought to try and make peace.’ Well, that was just what I had been waiting for. I said to her: ‘Let me tell you something. Never mind about peace. Invite a few of the Arab delegates to your home and invite me. I promise you, on my word of honour, that as long as the Arabs don’t want anyone to know about our meeting, no one will know. And I don’t want to meet them for peace negotiations. Just to talk. Just to sit in one room together.’ She said: ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll do it. I’ll start to organize it at once.’ So I waited and waited, but nothing happened. One day I asked her to have a cup of coffee with me in the Delegates’ Lounge, and we were sitting there when the foreign minister of Iraq came in. (He was the gentleman who had once pointed at me from the General Assembly rostrum and said: ‘Mrs Meir, go back to Milwaukee —that’s where you belong.’) She turned white. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘he’ll see me talking to you,’ and she got up in a panic and left. That was the end of that.
And so it went, even down to the casual meetings we might have had at diplomatic luncheons. Every head of a UN delegation learned very quickly that if he wanted the Arabs to come, then he mustn’t invite us. There was one foreign minister who was new to the game and who did invite both the Arabs and the Israelis. He not only invited us, he even seated an Iraqi delegate across the table from me. Well, the Arab sat down, started to eat his smoked salmon, raised his eyes, saw me, stood up and left. Of course, at the large receptions or the cocktail parties for hundreds of people, it was possible for a host to invite Arabs and Israelis, but for a dinner or a luncheon —never! As soon as an Arab delegate caught sight of one of the Israelis, he Ad walk out of the room, and there was nothing we could do about it."