Chapter 13: The prime minister
"But my term of office began with one war and ended with another, and I can’t help thinking how symbolic it was that the very first instruction I gave to anyone in my capacity as prime minister was to tell my military secretary, Yisrael Lior, that I was to be informed as soon as the reports from any military action came in even if it was in the middle of the night.
‘I want to know the moment that the boys get back,’ I told him, ‘and I want to know how they are.’ I didn’t use the word ‘casualties’, but Lior understood and was horrified by the request. ‘You don’t really want me to phone you at 3 a.m.,’ he said. ‘Afterall, there is nothing you can do about it if there are any casualties. I promise to call you first thing in the morning.’ But I knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear the idea of sleeping soundly through the night not even knowing if soldiers had been killed or wounded, and I forced poor Lior to obey me. When the news was bad, of course, I couldn’t fall asleep again, and I spent more nights than I care to remember padding around that big, empty house waiting for morning and for more detailed information. Sometimes the bodyguards outside the house would see that the kitchen light was on at 4 am., and one of them would look in to make sure that I was alright. I’d make us both a cup of tea and we’d talk about what was happening at the Canal or in the north until I felt that I could go back to bed again."
"Then in August 1970 Mr Rogers’s ceasefire materialized. Nasser said that as far as he was concerned, it would only last for three months, but - as though the timing were symbolic —he died in September and Anwar Sadat became the president of Egypt. Not only did Sadat seem, at first glance, to be a more reasonable man who might soberly consider the benefits of an end to the war to his own people, but there were also indications that he wasn’t getting along too well with the Russians. And in Jordan, King Hussein, having happily sheltered the Palestinian terrorists for months, suddenly found himself so threatened by them that in September he turned on them and crushed them. So though it may have been a Black September for the Fatah, to me it looked, at long last, as if the US peace initiative and Dr Jarring might have some slim chance of success. The Arab leaders didn’t modify their statements about Israel in any way or alter their demands for a total withdrawal of our troops, but there was talk about re-opening the Suez Canal and rebuilding the ruined Egyptian towns along its banks, so that normal life could be restored in them —all of which gave rise to some optimism in Israel. Well, the ceasefire held; we stayed where we were; the Arabs continued to refuse to meet us or deal with us in any way, and the optimism in Israel slowly died down —but it didn’t vanish altogether and war didn’t break out in 1971 or 1972! But neither did peace, and Arab terrorism mounted both in its ferocity and its inhumanity."
Terrorism
"Certainly no one in the civilized world approved of the gunning down, at Lydda airport, of Catholic pilgrims from Puerto Rico and one of Israel’s most distinguished scientists, of the horrifying public kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games or of the slaughter of Israeli children trapped in the school building in the development town of Ma’alot. No one approved, and each outrage brought me its flood of official condolences and expressions of shock and sympathy. But nonetheless we were expected (and still are expected by many) to come to terms with the murderers in the way that other governments had, as if these suicidal fanatics should have been allowed to blackmail us and bring us to our knees. It has certainly been proven time and again that giving in to terror only leads to more terror. No one will ever know, however, what it cost the government of Israel to say no to the demands of the terrorists or what it was like to feel that no Israeli official working abroad was entirely safe from death by letter bomb, to say nothing of the fact that any quiet border town in Israel could be turned (as several were) into the scene of massacres caused by a few demented men who had been reared on hatred and the belief that they could drain Israel of its ability to stand firm in the face of grief and pain.
But we learned to hold out against the terror, to protect our aircraft and passengers, to turn our embassies into small fortresses and to patrol our schoolyards and city streets. I walked behind the coffins and visited the bereaved families of the victims of Arab terrorism and I was filled with pride that I belonged to a nation which was able to take these blows - these cowardly and evil blows - without saying 'Enough. We had had enough. Give the terrorists whatever they want because we have taken all that we can take.' Other governments surrendered to the demands of the terrorists, put planes at their disposal and released them from jail, while the foreign press and the New Left called them 'guerrillas' and 'freedom fighters'."
Romania
"Many of the trips I took and talks I held must still remain secret, but I think that today I can write about one of them. At the beginning of 1972, the deputy foreign minister of Rumania came to Israel on a visit, ostensibly just to meet with people in our Foreign Office. But he made one special request: he asked to see me, and he stressed that he wanted to see me alone; no one else should be present at our conversation. We had very good relations with Rumania. It was the only East European country that hadn’t severed diplomatic relations with us after the Six Day War and that consistently refused to take part in the Soviet Union’s vicious anti-Israel propaganda campaign or join in the Soviet bloc’s denunciations of our ‘aggression’. We had entered into mutually profitable trade agreements with the Rumanians, exchanged art exhibitions, musicians, choirs and theatrical groups, and there was some immigration from Rumania. I had met (and liked) the attractive and energetic president of Rumania, Nicolai Ceaucescu, in ‘1970 and I admired him for not giving way to Arab pressure and for managing to retain diplomatic links with us as well as with the Arab states. I knew that Ceaucescu was anxious to promote a Middle Eastern peace settlement, and I wasn’t really surprised when his deputy foreign minister announced to me as soon as we were alone that actually he had come to Israel only in order to tell me the following:
‘I have been sent by my president,’ he said, ‘to inform you that when he visited Egypt recently, he saw President Sadat and that, as a result of their meeting, my president has a most important message for you. He would like to bring it to you himself, but since he can’t [he was going to China], he suggests that you come to Bucharest. You can come either incognito or, if you prefer, we will gladly issue you a formal invitation.’ I didn’t accept that going to China automatically ruled out a visit to Israel, but I said that, of course, I would come to Bucharest as soon as possible. Not incognito —that didn’t appeal to me as a way for the prime minister of Israel to travel (unless it was absolutely essential) —but just as soon as I got an official invitation. Ceaucescu’s invitation arrived shortly afterwards, and I flew to Rumania.
I spent fourteen hours (in two long sessions) with Ceaucescu, who told me that he understood from Sadat himself that the Egyptian leader was ready to meet with an Israeli —maybe with me, maybe not; maybe the meeting would be on a slightly lower level than the heads of state, but a meeting of some sort could take place. I said, ‘Mr President, this is the best news I have heard for many years’ —as indeed it was. We talked for hours about it, and Ceaucescu was almost as excited as I was. There was no question in his mind that he was delivering an historic and absolutely genuine message. He even talked to me about details. ‘We won’t work through ambassadors or Foreign Offices,’ he said, ‘not mine and not yours.’ He suggested that his deputy foreign minister maintain personal contact with me through Simcha Dinitz, then my political secretary, who had come with sue to Bucharest.
After so many years, it really looked as though the ice was about to break. But it didn’t. When I came back to Israel, we waited and waited —in vain. There was no follow-up at all. Whatever Sadat had told Ceaucescu - and he had certainly told him something —was totally meaningless, and I suspect that the reason I never heard anything more from Ceaucescu about the meeting with Sadat was that he couldn’t bring himself to confess, even to me, that Sadat had fooled him."
Criticism
"Even in Israel itself:, there were people who thought —and said loudly —that the government wasn’t doing ‘enough’ to fInd common ground with the Arabs, though they never managed to suggest anything that we hadn’t tried ourselves.
There was also a constant uproar from a numerically small but exceedingly vocal segment of the population about such things as the government’s decision, after the Six Day War, to allow a number of Jews to settle in Hebron, a town on the West Bank of the Jordan River (some 35 kilometres south of Jerusalem) in which, according to Jewish tradition, the biblical Patriarchs are buried and which was King David’s capital before he moved it to Jerusalem. The Crusaders had expelled the Jews from Hebron, but during Ottoman role in Palestine some Jews had returned there, and the town bad had a Jewish community right up to the time when a terrible Arab massacre finally drove the surviving Jews out of the town in 1929. After 1948 the Jordanians wouldn’t even let the Jews visit the holy Cave of Machpelah to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. But Hebron remained holy to the Jews, and on Passover eve ig68, after it had come under Israeli administration, a group of young and militant orthodox Jews, defying the military ban on settlement in the West Bank, moved into the Hebron police compound and remained there without permission. There was no question but that they were behaving most improperly and in a manner that was very damaging to Israel’s ‘image’. The Arabs at once set up a great hue and cry about the ‘Jewish annexation’ of Hebron, and Israeli public opinion was very divided on the subject. On the one hand, the would-be settlers were obviously trying to create a fait accompli and force the Israeli government to make up its mind prematurely about the future of the West Bank and Jewish settlement there. On the other hand, though I deplored the way in which they had taken the law into their own hands, as though they were in the Wild West, I thought that the real issue was not really what they had done or even how they had done it, but something far more serious.
Was it logical, I asked myself and my colleagues, for the world (including our own super-pious ‘doves’)to demand of a Jewish government that it pass legislation expressly forbidding Jews to settle anywhere on earth? I didn’t know any more than anyone else did exactly what would happen to Hebron eventually. But let’s suppose, I said, that one day, please God, we will sign a peace treaty with Jordan and ‘return’ Hebron. Would that mean that we would agree that no Jews would ever be allowed to live there again? Obviously, no Israeli government could ever obligate itself to a permanent banning of Jews from any part of the Holy Land. And Hebron was not an ordinary market town; it meant a lot to believing Jews.
We debated and argued and examined the pros and cons for months and then, in 1970, we permitted the building of a limited number of housing units for Jews in an area on the outskirts of Hebron that the settlers named Kiryat Arba (‘The Town of the Four’, Hebron’s other Hebrew name) —and that particular storm died down. But other subsequent attempts at illegal settlements were more firmly dealt with —however painful it was for the government to have to order Israeli soldiers to drag Jews away from places in the West Bank in which they wanted to settle. We did allow Jews to settle in certain spots in the administered territories, but only when such settlement was fully in accordance with our political and military interests."
"I was immensely impressed —it is impossible not to be —not only (or even mostly) by the Vatican, but by the pope himself by the simplicity and graciousness of his manner and the penetrating gaze of his deep-set dark eyes. I think I would have been much more nervous about our talk if he hadn’t started it by telling me that he found it hard to accept the fact that the Jews —who, of all people, should have been capable of mercy towards others because they had suffered so terribly themselves —had behaved so harshly in their own country. Well, that is the kind of talk that I can’t bear, and particularly since it is simply not true that we have mistreated the Arabs in the administered territories. There is still no death penalty in Israel, and the most we have ever done is jail terrorists, blown up the houses of Arabs who have gone on sheltering terrorists, despite repeated warnings, and sometimes, when we have had no alternative, even expelled Arabs who have openly incited and encouraged the terrorists. But I challenge anyone to cite chapter and verse about brutality or repression. I was very tempted to ask the pope what his sources of information were, since they were obviously so different from mine, but I didn’t. Instead I said, and I could hear my own voice trembling a little with anger: ‘Your Holiness, do you know what my own very earliest memory is? It is waiting for a pogrom in Kiev. Let me assure you that my people know all about real “harshness” and also that we learned all about real mercy when we were being led to the gas chambers of the Nazis.’
It may not have been a conventional way of talking to the pope, but I felt that I was speaking for all Jews everywhere, for those who were alive and for those who had perished while the Vatican maintained its neutrality in the Second World War. I had a sense of participating in a truly historic confrontation, and the pope and I stared at each other for a second. I think he was quite surprised by my words, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, right into my eyes, and I looked back at him in the same way. Then I went on to tell him, very respectfully but very firmly and at some length, that now that we had a state of our own, we were through forever with being ‘at the mercy’ of others. ‘This is truly an historic moment,’ he said, as though he had read my mind."