No Room for Small Dreams

by Shimon Peres

  Over time this alliance with Al became one of our most important relationships. Whatever planes we purchased in the United States we sent to Al. Sometimes he would fly the finished aircraft to Israel himself, by way of the North Pole—not a particularly safe route, but easily the shortest. We concocted all sorts of schemes to smuggle the planes out of the United States, including a cover story that the planes were part of a movie. (Al actually set up a fictitious movie company, and I hired extras, to create the impression that the planes were taking off as part of a live-action scene. But rather than returning to the runway, they were flown directly to Czechoslovakia, where they were loaded with weaponry and ammunition, bound for Israel.)

  During one of my visits to California, Al asked for my assistance with a rescue operation. One of our best pilots, Roy Kurtz, had gone down over Newfoundland while attempting to transport a plane to Israel. Al wanted to conduct a search-and-rescue operation, but to do so he needed quiet access to an Israeli aircraft. Given Al’s risk-loving reputation, El Al had been reluctant to offer up one of their assets for such a dangerous mission. Eventually, I was able to secure their agreement, as long as I accepted their one condition: that I never leave the plane’s sight.

  For seven days we flew over the icy wasteland, making ever-larger concentric circles around where Al thought the crash might have occurred. At night, we would land on an airstrip in Goose Bay in Labrador, Canada, then return at daylight to the skies. Those hours aloft were tedious yet powerful. As we surveyed the land below, we fell into deep conversations that lasted for days—conversations about our highest aspirations and our deepest anxieties; conversations about Israel and its precarious position given the unsustainable nature of our current defenses.

  After seven days, we had to face the tragic reality that Kurtz was not to be found. But I like to think that the mission was not in vain, that as a posthumous act of patriotism, Kurtz had brought Al and me together. As we searched for him over the tundra, Al and I arrived together at the same ambitious conclusion, one that had the power to transform Israeli security: to defend itself, Israel would need to be able to repair its own planes—and build new ones. We would need to take Al’s California-based operation and move it to Israel, then invest in a massive expansion, transforming the enterprise from a wily start-up into a full-fledged aircraft industry. Doing so would extend the lives of the aircraft we were purchasing (wherever we were purchasing them from); in addition, Israel’s hangars were filled with war-damaged albeit repairable aircraft—if only we’d had the facilities to make such repairs. There was also an opportunity for profit, Al argued: The world was still flooded with thousands of surplus World War II aircraft. Al believed he could buy them, repair them, and then export them to other countries—serving not just a military function but creating a commercial industry. We even fantasized about a time when we would be able to design and build our own planes.

  It was a beautiful dream. I imagined a world where Al and his team were based in Tel Aviv, where his ingenuity could be leveraged without the limitations of distance. I imagined a world where each plane that we purchased could double or triple its flying life, allowing us to increase the size of our fleet many times over. It wouldn’t solve all of our security challenges at once, but it could put us on course to solve many of them. The idea expanded in my mind like an aging star, with a great heat and grand brightness that displaced other thoughts. For the rest of our flights together, and in the days and weeks to come, I was preoccupied with tactical questions, eager to make real the world Al and I had together imagined.

  An idea so bold would surely face headwinds. In the years after the War of Independence, Israel had plunged into financial crisis. We were recovering from a costly war at the same time that we were encouraging—and experiencing—a mass immigration. In three years we had doubled the population from six hundred thousand to 1.2 million, but we hadn’t yet built a state that could sustain it. The new arrivals were forced to subsist in immigrant camps that were little more than tent cities. Food was provided by the government in communal dining halls, but it was strictly rationed. In some new immigrant camps, there was only one toilet for as many as fifty people. The conditions were harsh and unsanitary by any measure, and yet by 1952 more than 220,000 people were forced to live this way. Those who had settled in Israel early also faced intense rationing, instructed by the government about how much food they could purchase—even how many pairs of shoes they could own. Poverty was the central condition of our young state, a national emergency worthy of our urgent attention.

  Given all this, what other response could I expect from my fellow Israelis except skepticism? I knew there would be those who dismissed the idea without a thought, considering it a preposterous notion from an idealistic young man. And yet I also knew that I was right, and that in being right, I should be willing to stand alone, that the doubts of those without imagination were no reason to abandon an important idea.

  And so I made the decision to pursue the building of an aviation industry in a country without enough food for its people. Ben-Gurion had called upon me to help secure the state, and it was him, first and foremost, I hoped to convince. By stroke of luck, I learned that he would be making his first trip to America as prime minister and planned to include a stopover in California. To believe in Al’s idea, Ben-Gurion would first have to believe in Al, and that, I knew, would only be achieved if he could see the possibility for himself.

  When he arrived at Al’s workshop, Ben-Gurion was astonished. Al and I escorted him through the hangar and demonstrated some of the team’s best work. At one point, Al pointed out the equipment the team used to repair and rebuild the aircraft.

  “What?” Ben-Gurion asked in utter surprise. “With this tiny collection of machines, you can renovate planes?”

  Schwimmer nodded.

  “We need something like this in Israel,” Ben-Gurion replied. “Even more, we need a real aviation industry. We need to be independent.” It was exactly what I had hoped to hear.

  “I think you’re right,” Al replied.

  “I’m glad you think so,” said Ben-Gurion. “We’ll expect you to come back to Israel to build one for us.”

  Ben-Gurion returned shortly after to Israel, where he began to have initial conversations with his military advisors and cabinet about pursuing our aviation effort. Not long after, he sent a cable to New York: it was time for Al to go to Israel—and it was time for me to come home, too.

  I was eager to return—to shift from one ambitious mission to another, even grander one (though I was admittedly disappointed to be doing so just a few credits shy of my degree). As Sonia and I packed our bags, we reminisced about our time in the city—what a blessing it had been for both of us. We knew in some ways it would be hard to leave, and we expected we’d return to visit. But as bittersweet as leaving New York would be, it was nothing compared to the excitement with which we imagined stepping back onto Israeli soil.

  Back home Al and I took meetings with military leaders who, as expected, were certain that such a program was a folly. The chief of the air force thought the idea ludicrous, that Israel had neither the need nor the capacity to do what we described. We met with economists and industry experts who thought it laughable that we would ever be able to export planes to foreign markets; they were convinced that the world would look with a skeptical eye on any Israeli-made products. “Our only industry is bicycles,” one shouted, “and you must know it recently shut down! What madness is it to think we can build planes when we can’t even build bicycles?”

  We spoke to engineers who were certain that Israel lacked the expertise needed to build and manage such a complicated operation. We spoke to cabinet ministers who fumed about costs.

  “With what money shall we pay for this?” one minister barked. “Israel isn’t America, in case you have forgotten. We don’t have the budget. We don’t have the manpower. And we certainly don’t have the need!”

  In almost every meeting, we found
the same set of circumstances—a courteous but firm dismissiveness. “The idea was too big to be true,” I wrote many years ago, “and nebulous enough for them to try and stifle it on the spot.” And yet I knew that we would never achieve great things if we let austerity become an obstacle to audacity. To build a stronger, more prosperous state, we had to set our gaze higher than our temporary limitations.

  In normal circumstances, these reactions would have been the likely deathblow, delivered before we’d even begun. But in those days, Ben-Gurion had extraordinary influence, and could exert enormous pressure. I pleaded with him to do so in this case. What he offered was far more than I had expected. He not only agreed to move the project forward, but also told me I was expected to oversee it myself. I was just twenty-nine years old, and suddenly I was being appointed deputy director of the Defense Ministry.

  In January 1952, my family and I returned from the States and moved into a small apartment in Tel Aviv. Two months later, Sonia gave birth to our first son, Yoni. It was a time of celebration and anticipation. At home, I had a beautiful family and incredible love. At work, I spent my days side by side with my mentor and hero, who gave me his blessing to chase an improbable plan.

  We faced repeated obstacles. I’ll never forget the day that the Ministry of Finance told us that they would be cutting our initial budget in half. What a shortsighted decision it was, and a symptom of a dangerous way of thinking—for a young country or a young business. When you are small and weak, you must ask: What kind of investments will let you grow? “Investments” can mean many things: time, money, and—perhaps the most important of all—heart. So many times in our lives we struggle to confidently leap forward, averse to the possibility that we will fall flat. Yet this fear of taking risks can be the greatest risk of all.

  Of course, when you are part of a team, others might have an apprehensive veto power. What then? Rather than shutter our effort, I searched for another way. I’d come to believe that when you have two alternatives, the first thing you must do is look for a third—the one you didn’t think of, that doesn’t yet exist. Within my authority, I set aside a modest amount of defense ministry funds to make up for a fraction of the shortfall. Then I reached out to private donors, people who instinctively knew the necessity of the risk I wanted to take. We raised millions of dollars from those channels, allowing us to work around bureaucratic resistance and jump-start our initiative. We named the company Bedek Aviation, which means “maintenance” in Hebrew, and started construction on our first hangars in 1954.

  Breaking ground didn’t stop the criticism. Nor did the maintenance work we started before even finishing construction. Still, from the moment we began our work, I knew we would succeed. And within five years, when the aircraft industry became Israel’s largest employer, the wilting criticism trailed off into a quiet murmur on the margins. The idea, born in the skies, was well on its way.

  In 1959, we would manufacture our first aircraft, which would be used to defend the state during the Six-Day War. In time, we would realize even the most ambitious parts of our vision, building aircraft we would export all over the world—in recent years, even to Russia. Decades after Al first started wielding his wrench, the Israeli aviation industry would be renamed Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), to commemorate the addition of space satellites to its product line. Today, most countries around the world use satellite services, but Israel remains one of a small handful capable of launching their own satellites into orbit.

  But in those early months, I was reminded that the aircraft industry was a solution to only some of our problems. The planes lining up for repair looked more like they belonged in an aviation history museum than in a maintenance shop—a curated collection of retired aircraft from all over the world not intended to return to the sky. The question I had considered over Newfoundland—of how to make our security sustainable—had only been partially answered. In the meantime, we remained vulnerable.

  I wrestled with the question interminably in the early 1950s—even more so when Ben-Gurion took a brief hiatus from government in 1954. He was understandably exhausted from the years of fighting, both physical and intellectual, and had chosen to retire to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the desert of the Negev. At the time, we didn’t know that his retirement would only last little more than a year; we thought, perhaps, the Old Man was finished forever. Before he left, Ben-Gurion made his minister without portfolio, Pinhas Lavon, the new defense minister and me the director general of the Defense Ministry. Moshe Dayan was appointed as its chief of staff. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett became prime minister.

  There are few people I have ever known whom I admired as much as Moshe Dayan. He was a brilliant military strategist and one of my closest friends. But it weighed on us both to know that Ben-Gurion would no longer be at our side—and that he had placed in our hands the task of defending Israel from annihilation. This was the reality that kept me at the office late into the evening, and sleepless for so many nights at home. At least we’d had his leadership while struggling to build our military capacity. Without it, my confidence that I could find a reliable source of arms before we again came under attack plummeted.

  What we needed, I knew, was a partner—an ally. The closest thing we had to a functional international alliance was our shadowy relationship with Czechoslovakia, which was based entirely on military purchasing and kept secret from the world. In some ways we had taken great pride in going it alone, building our state from the ground up partly as proof that despite our persecution, we Jews were not beaten down. All along we would have accepted the friendship of other nations, but by now it was clear that they were not going to make the effort; we were. We needed to change our standing in the world, to be seen in the eyes of other countries as a friend.

  For a state of fewer than two million people, the idea of standing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s major powers demanded chutzpah, to be sure. We could not be seen as a mere vassal, but as a sovereign state. But the British still treated Israel with distrust and ill will, holding firm on their embargo to sell weapons to the Middle East. In recognizing Israel, the United States had given Israel legitimacy in its most important hour. But President Dwight Eisenhower didn’t want to involve the United States in the Arab-Israeli conflict, preferring that his country maintain a neutral position. It was a settled matter—and would be for some time. We were engaged in an uncertain fight for our lives—for the very existence of a Jewish state—and we were doing so while the world closed its doors to us. In this essential pursuit of an ally, it seemed there was only one possibility. After much consideration, I set my sights on France.

  Like the British and the Americans, the French had an embargo in place. But I suspected we could find an emotional connection with the French, one that might persuade them to help us in secret. The Radical Party, which controlled French government in those years, had as its leaders many heroes from the Resistance who had lived under the brutal clutch of Nazi occupation. Some had been in concentration camps themselves. Our scars were not the same, but they were caused by the same evil. In this, I hoped we might find common bond.

  I also saw practical reasons why France might abide. Their private defense industry manufactured a wide range of weapons, including airplanes and tanks, and Israel represented a potential new customer. Furthermore, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, had become a threat to us both, as Egypt was now funneling weapons to rebels in Algeria, which was still a French colony at the time. Nasser, meanwhile, was still speaking of the great virtue of destroying the State of Israel and ordering regular incursions on our border. If a common bond were insufficient, I thought we might find alliance with France over common cause.

  Ben-Gurion had always been skeptical about any partnership with France. “The French?!” he would yell, every time I mentioned them. “The French? They lost the war! Ask them why they lost the war. I want to know.”

  “I checked on it, and I have my conclusions,” I replied. “The enemy didn�
��t cooperate.”

  Now that he had left for Sde Boker, I met a similar reaction from Sharett and Lavon. Lavon called the French strategy “silly.” Any effort not focused on changing the minds of the British and Americans was a waste of time, he argued.

  In Jerusalem, I had the support and confidence of Moshe Dayan, but of nobody else. I definitely lacked the backing of the Foreign Ministry, which under normal circumstances would have taken the lead on all such international outreach. And yet I was still alit by the spark of imagination. Despite the obstacles, off I went.

  •••

  When I first left for Paris, I didn’t speak a word of French or know anything about French custom and style. I was unkempt and ill-equipped, on an errand that seemed designed by a fool—that is, myself. And yet I boarded the plane filled with hope, eager to see if I could arrange what everyone else declared impossible. Soon after arriving, I phoned the office of the deputy prime minister, Paul Reynaud, whom I knew to be in charge of foreign arms sales. I told him, through a translator, that I was in town and hoped we could speak. He invited me to his office straightaway.

  We had a warm and winding conversation—and a productive one at that. By the time we were finished, he was ready to sell Israel long-range cannons. We would need a great deal more than that, to be sure, but an agreement of this nature was still a watershed moment. It was our first arms deal with a major world power—and the first of many steps we would take toward genuine alliance. What else could I feel but elation?

  I got up from my chair and shook hands with Reynaud, thanking him for his empathy and assistance. As he escorted me to the door of his office, I paused, suddenly struck with a question.