by Shimon Peres
It was in that context that Ben-Gurion put in motion an effort to draft a formal declaration of independence. Though the British lost their mandate in the region as soon as the United Nations resolution had passed in November, a firm date had not been set for them to leave. Now it appeared that they would pull their final troops out of Israel on Friday night, May 14, 1948, at the stroke of midnight. Ben-Gurion intended to make his declaration just prior to their departure, to ensure no gap between the end of the British mandate and the beginning of our independence.
During the rare quiet moments in those otherwise frenetic days, it wasn’t only the work ahead that occupied my thoughts; it was my firstborn daughter, Tsvia, who knew nothing of the world but the love of her parents. Tsvia, who had just learned how to call for her father. “Abba, Abba!” I could hear her say over and over in my mind—a beautiful if haunting reminder of what was at stake in the battle to come.
On the afternoon of May 14, 1948, in the final hours before the Sabbath, I sat at my desk preparing for war, while Ben-Gurion stood at the center of a dais in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, prepared to say the words that would consecrate our state. Because of the extraordinary security risks, we ensured that the guests and journalists present had only learned of the meeting and its location in the minutes before it began. As ministers made their way past the honor guard of the Haganah and through the flashbulbs of photographers, the commotion attracted cheering crowds to the streets. The attendees entered one of the museum’s galleries to the sound of the soon to be named Israel Philharmonic Orchestra playing. The walls were filled with works from the private collection of Tel Aviv’s mayor—Meir Dizengoff—paintings by Jewish artists that depicted Jewish life during two millennia in exile.
The thirteen temporary governing ministers took their place on the dais, on either side of Ben-Gurion. Behind the man who had led the Jewish people to this moment was a portrait of the man who started us on our journey: Herzl was now watching over the culmination of a dream he had for us all.
Ben-Gurion gaveled the room to order and, wildly enthusiastic, those assembled broke out in a spontaneous rendition of “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem that had been banned by the British. Then Ben-Gurion said the words that all who gathered had waited a lifetime to hear: “We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel.” The room erupted with a combination of the boisterous applause of victory, and the gentle tears of grief. It was, at once, a reminder of how far we’d come, and of how much we had lost.
At the end of the ceremony, the orchestra played “Hatikvah” while the audience stood in respectful silence. What they had sung together earlier was a call to action for a nation, dispersed but with a common dream. Now it was so much more—not just a rallying cry of hope, but a melody of historic vindication; not just the anthem of a movement, but the anthem of a sovereign state.
Israel’s public radio station broadcast the event live. The declaration traveled with tremendous speed across the country and around the world. In their modest homes, in the midst of great uncertainty, the people of Israel heard Ben-Gurion’s words. They listened on behalf of the millions who had perished at the hands of the Nazis, and the millions more who remained in constant danger around the world. They listened on behalf of the past—on behalf of the pioneers who first set out on a journey toward home, who found imagination in necessity, and used it to carve a path. And they listened on behalf of the future, on behalf of generations of Jewish children and grandchildren not yet born, from whom our centuries-long fight drew its sole purpose.
Predictably, as soon as we had our independence, we faced war from all sides. On May 15, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq attacked. In the north, Syria sent a brigade equipped with tanks and armored vehicles and an artillery battalion to attack the Jewish settlements on the other side of the Kinneret. The Egyptian military invaded from the south, assailing the nearby cities, settlements, and kibbutzim. They conducted bombing raids of Israeli airfields and southern settlements, and eventually of the central bus station in Tel Aviv, which they destroyed. Jordan, meanwhile, was marching its Arab Legion into Jerusalem, where it instigated some of the heaviest fighting of the war, in the process cutting off supplies and creating a dangerous shortage of food and water, not just for the soldiers but for the people of the city.
Outnumbered and outgunned, we refused to be outmatched, and our forces used whatever they had to defend their positions. At Kibbutz Degania, Syrian forces were stopped in their tracks by a resistance force of Israelis, equipped with Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. So it went in settlement after settlement, where Israelis fought back, repelling the advances of Arab forces. With the arrival of a major weapons shipment from Czechoslovakia, the Israeli Air Force was able to take to the sky and respond with powerful attacks, sending the advancing Egyptians into chaos and effectively ending the Iraqi incursion.
With the British no longer controlling the borders, a flood of Jewish immigrants made their way to Israel. Some had gone straight from Nazi concentration camps into refugee camps, where they had to wait permission to make their way to Israel. In Cyprus, for example, some twenty-two thousand Jews waited for two years. Others had been forced out of neighboring Arab nations more recently. They arrived without homes, after dangerous journeys, and turned right around to fight on behalf of their new state. We had started the war in May 1948 with fewer than thirty-five thousand troops. Before the end of the fighting in 1949, more than one hundred thousand had taken up arms for the Zionist cause.
The IDF battled on the front lines with extraordinary courage, following the orders of Ben-Gurion as he managed strategy from headquarters. War plans were defined and ordered there. Intelligence was processed and analyzed there. It was as if the heroes on the great lines were the beating heart of the effort while the headquarters was its brain. Without spare moments for deep contemplation and patient analysis, we were doing all that we could to shape the modern infrastructure of the military that our new state, under fire, was trying to assemble. At times rest seemed as distant a dream as victory.
The distance between Ben-Gurion’s responsibilities and my own were vast by any measure. But the distance between our offices was, for a time, only the width of a thin piece of plywood. This made it possible for Ben-Gurion and me to build a relationship during those stressful months, one that eventually transformed me from one of his greatest admirers to one of his closest advisors.
Such a surprising turn of events I could not have imagined only months earlier. But the bonds formed during times of crisis are unusually strong. At first, our partnership developed quite informally. Ben-Gurion seemed to like how hard I could work, and how little sleep I tended to need or desire. (I even kept one of his handwritten notes on my desk, which read simply, “Shimon, don’t forget to turn off the lights!”) Over time, he began to trust me and to rely on me, in ways that surprised those who were more experienced and senior than I.
“Why do you trust that boy?” I would overhear them asking. His answer was always the same.
“Three reasons,” he would say. “He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t say bad things about other people. And when he knocks on my door, he usually has a new idea.” It was too simple an answer to persuade my detractors, but for me, it was the perfect response to a question I had so often asked of myself: Why me? In time, my relationship with Ben-Gurion would expand, both in personal trust and in formal responsibility, as I rose through the ranks of government. But for as long as Ben-Gurion lived, my formal position never reflected the scope of my influence or the depth of our bond.
By early 1949, the Arab nations were on the defensive—injured, in retreat, and exhausted from war. What Israel had lacked in resources we had made up for with ingenuity and organization. And what our enemies had bountifully possessed they thankfully had squandered in the chaos. In February, the Egyptians relented, signing an armistice agreement and giving up the fight. One month later, Lebanon signed, and in April, Jordan
did the same. The last holdout—Syria—gave in on July 20, 1949. By then we had run through our weapons stockpiles, leaving us vulnerable and exposed. For the time, though, the war was over, replaced with an armistice we knew to be fragile and uneasy. For all that was lost—all the lives that were lost—there was to be no doubt of what was gained: control of our own territory and, indeed, our own destiny.
•••
During my first days at Haganah headquarters—before the War of Independence, before the United Nations resolution—I had an unusual encounter. I had been sitting at my desk reviewing documents when I heard a thundering commotion erupt from inside Levi Eshkol’s office. Teddy Kollek, who at the time headed the Haganah’s mission in the United States, had flown back to Tel Aviv for the very fight he was now engaged in. For months he had grown increasingly furious about the disorganization at headquarters. He had come to complain vigorously to Eshkol, citing, among other things, dozens of cables he’d sent to Tel Aviv that had gone ignored and unanswered. Our underground contacts in the United States had become one of our most important sources of arms, Kollek reminded Eshkol, and such disarray, he insisted, could be our undoing. Finally, Kollek gave Eshkol an ultimatum: assign someone to respond promptly to all of his cables, or accept his resignation.
I didn’t know any of this when I heard Eshkol shouting my nickname through the door.
“Jungermann!” he yelled, Yiddish for “young man.” “Jungermann!”
When I entered Eshkol’s office, Kollek was still visibly angry.
“Oh good, here he is,” Eshkol said in Hebrew. “Jungermann, do you know English?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Have you been to America?”
“No,” I replied again.
Eshkol cracked the slightest smile. “Perfect,” he said. “You’re just the man I need.”
Kollek was incredulous—and instantly enraged—but Eshkol paid him no attention.
“Don’t worry,” he replied coolly. “He’ll do a better job than anyone.”
With this, he excused me from his office and I returned to my desk, a bit embarrassed by the scene. Eventually, as the war went on, Kollek would learn that he could trust me, that I would respond to his cables with diligence and deliberateness. Nevertheless, the memory of that morning stayed with me like a pinched nerve in my spine, a prodding reminder of my own deficiencies.
And deficiencies there most certainly were. Without English, I lacked a common language with most of the world, and that, I knew, would hamper me. But English was just a small part of it. During the war, Ben-Gurion had come to rely on my advice, and I feared the well I’d been drawing from was insufficiently deep. I had been thrown into a world where knowledge of global affairs and of history was essential, where facility with economics and political science was the prerequisite of wisdom. I hadn’t gone to university. I hadn’t even earned a high school diploma. What talents I naturally possessed had been sufficient to this point, but it seemed inevitable that I would hit a ceiling; for all I knew, I already had.
In the spring of 1949, with our independence secured, I approached Ben-Gurion and explained my concerns, and asked his permission to rectify them. I told him that I wanted to go to New York to finish my education, and at the same time, represent Israel as part of the Defense Ministry’s mission in America. With his enthusiastic blessing it was settled. On June 14, 1949, Sonia, Tsvia, and I made our way to the other side of the world.
Once in New York, we moved into a seven-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at the corner of Ninety-Fifth Street and Riverside Drive. We called our apartment “the kibbutz,” because we shared it with several others, mostly men who worked for the Israeli government. Sonia would cook breakfast for everyone on Sundays, and each of our roommates took turns babysitting Tsvia. From our windows we could see bands of majestic elm trees, and behind them the glittering reflection of the sun on the Hudson River.
I enrolled in night classes at the New School for Social Research, which turned out to be a most remarkable institution. Its faculty included some of the world’s most decorated intellectuals, people like Justice Felix Frankfurter, who could enchant the whole student body with his ambitious, if occasional, lectures. The New School would become one of the most formative places of my life, a source of learning I still depend on more than six decades later.
The early months were difficult. Taking courses that required a fluency in English at the same time that I was learning the language proved frustrating at times. But within a few months, I could comfortably engage someone in conversation. That’s when the real New York became fully alive to me. I was taken by how highly people spoke of one another, how willing they were to give credit to others. I loved how generous they were with subtle acts of kindness. I loved, too, the myriad accents that punctuated the city—so many of us still learning to speak English. It seemed the ambitious promise of the United States was alive in the minds of all who had come there—as though the “American Dream” were its own force of nature.
I would often return to the “kibbutz” after class and continue reading my textbooks well into morning. Those hours alone were an enchanted intellectual ballet—but no matter how few hours that left for sleeping, I still arose every morning with a job to do.
Though the war was over, the posture of the American mission hadn’t changed. Israel did not have the weapons to defend itself. Our stockpiles had been decimated by the war, leaving us with mismatched artillery and makeshift aircraft, our defensive chances almost entirely reliant on a team of engineers of robust will and expert repair skills. Yet the Western embargoes remained in place. Even the United States, whose early recognition of the state had been so generous, refused to sell us weapons at these most vulnerable early moments. We were left without choices at a time of unparalleled stakes. And so we took the only path forward, as I rejoined the strange world of black market dealings, and set about building a national defense force.
It seemed there were countless adventures. Once, I arranged to meet with arms dealers in Cuba at the Tropicana Hotel. They had set the meeting for twelve o’clock. But when I arrived at the hotel that afternoon and asked to be let in, the guard laughed in my face. Through his broken English, I realized what he thought was so funny: the meeting wasn’t scheduled for noon; it was scheduled for midnight. What a novice I must have appeared to be. It was certainly an early lesson about the kind of work—and kind of people—I was dealing with. On another occasion, I arranged to purchase two British destroyers that the Colombian government no longer needed. I worked out the deal with the Colombian president and foreign minister in Bogotá, but before signing, I needed to fly to the port of Cartagena to inspect the ships myself. A senior Colombian general escorted me to a small airport, where we boarded a well-worn plane. About an hour into the flight, somewhere over the dense rain forest, the left engine of the plane burst into flames. The burly general looked to me with panic in his eyes.
“You have to decide what to do,” he said.
“What are our options?” I asked him, trying to remain calm.
“We can crash-land in the jungle, but I think it could take us weeks to hike out.”
“And the other option?”
“Keep flying to Cartagena and hope the plane doesn’t explode.”
I paused for a moment. “I’ll take option two.” We continued on our dangerous journey, each silenced by fear. Thankfully, the trip ended safely on a runway (and the destroyers were in excellent condition).
Still, for all the international excitement, most of our work was focused on deals we could broker in the United States. There we bought tanks and airplanes and all kinds of artillery, often from suspiciously sinister characters. We then had to smuggle them out of the country in parts, something made possible only by a partnership we had forged with the Teamsters, the labor union that represented the truckers. One of our most sympathetic and helpful advocates was the head of Detroit’s local Teamsters chapte
r, a man named Jimmy Hoffa.
But of all the characters I worked with during those years, none was more fascinating, more boisterous, or more singularly invaluable to our efforts than a decorated Jewish-American pilot and aviation engineer named Al Schwimmer. During the War of Independence, Al joined the Israeli Air Force along with a raucous crew of fellow American pilots, where they quickly developed a reputation for being uncommonly brave, if a bit reckless and rowdy.
When the war was over, Al returned to California, but he remained deeply committed to the cause of our newborn state. On a remote corner of a quiet airfield just north of Los Angeles, he rented a modest airplane hangar—not much more than an oversized shed. He purchased a sparse collection of tools and hired a small crew he knew he could trust, among them his fellow pilots from our war. Inside the hangar, in what looked—at best—like a makeshift operation conceived of by amateurs, Al and his team had created, in secret, an impressively agile maintenance shop on our behalf.
It seemed impossible, at first glance, that Al’s team could build the first aircraft for El Al, the newly created Israeli airline, whose name means “to the skies.” And yet this was the very thing they intended to do. In retrospect, this is less surprising than it was then. I have known a great many people of tremendous talent in my life—but I don’t know that I’ve ever known someone as good at their craft as Al Schwimmer was at his. With a remarkable lack of resources, he and his team seemed capable of fixing and flying any plane in any circumstance. I remember a time when I had tried and failed to purchase thirty surplus Mustang aircraft before the U.S. military destroyed them (as was standard with such matériel). Having escaped my grasp, the planes had been cut in two, and had their wings amputated for good measure. But to Al’s team, this was merely a minor detail: they quickly purchased the parts from a Texas junkyard, reassembled and tested the planes, then disassembled them for shipment to Israel.
