by Shimon Peres
By the time it was over, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran had been destroyed, along with nearly all of the Egyptian Air Force. The Fedayeen bases were in shambles. The threat of imminent attack had gone.
In victory, we solidified our partnership with the French, an alliance we could come to depend on until the eve of the Six-Day War. The swift show of bravery by what some deemed “little Israel” gave us newfound confidence and a reputation for tactical brilliance. And it gave us more than ten years without a major war.
It was, for me personally, a time of profound development—a time when wisdom was formed under extraordinary pressure, like a diamond in the depths of the earth’s mantle. I learned about the virtue of imagination and the power of creative decision making. An alliance with France was my “impossible” dream, and I pursued it. The aviation industry was Al’s and my “impossible” dream, and we built it together. We were quick and creative, and boldly ambitious, and in that we found our reward.
But I also learned that there is a cost to dreaming. At first it was my ideas that were ridiculed. Soon, however, it was me—and only by extension, my positions—who took most of the incoming fire. I was attacked and discounted, seen as dangerously naïve, and accused of all manner of terrible things. My detractors couldn’t understand how I had managed to get into Ben-Gurion’s head, or how to get me back out—as if the man they worshipped (as I also did) could be co-opted. And because so much of what I did was in secret—the arms deal, the French alliance, Suez operation—I had little choice but to live in the shadows. My critics often knew—and would only ever know—half of the story.
In this, I came to understand the choice at the heart of leadership: to pursue big dreams and suffer the consequences, or narrow one’s ambitions in an effort to get along. For me, there was only one choice. I knew of no way to become someone else, and so I chose to be myself, and in doing so, to serve a cause greater than myself. I decided that accomplishment mattered more than credit, more than popularity, more than title. It was not that I didn’t want those things; it was that having them in the absence of action and risk and courage would have been empty. There were easier ways to pursue mediocrity. And so I chose not to wallow or to be distracted from my dreams, but instead to think inventively and creatively about a path our young state would follow. I wanted that state to be a flourishing one, a just and peaceful and moral one. And so I let myself dream, and I refused to give in to cynicism.
Were there disappointments along the way? Of course. I’ve had sleepless nights and restless days because of big dreams. I’ve lost elections over them. I’ve lost some friends over them, too. But they never discouraged my imagination. Success built my confidence. Failure steeled my spine.
Experience has taught me three things about cynicism: First, it’s a powerful force with the ability to trample the aspirations of an entire people. Second, it is universal, fundamentally part of human nature, a disease that is ubiquitous and global. Third, it is the single greatest threat to the next generation of leadership. In a world of so many grave challenges, what could be more dangerous than discouraging ideas and ambition?
Throughout my life, I have been accused by many people (in many languages) of being too optimistic—of having too rosy a view of the world and the people who inhabit it. I tell them that both optimists and pessimists die in the end, but the optimist leads a hopeful and happy existence while the pessimist spends his days cynical and downtrodden. It is too high a price to pay.
Besides, optimism is a prerequisite of progress. It provides the inspiration we need, especially in hard times. And it provides the encouragement that wills us to chase our grandest ambitions out into the world, instead of locking them away in the safe quiet of our minds.
CHAPTER 3
THE LEGEND AND LEGACY OF DIMONA
On the morning of September 13, 1993, I stood with a small group in a round, windowless room with walls covered in an intricate mural. As the antique clock struck eleven, we were given instructions to line up in procession. We were about to sign a historic document—the first declaration of principles of peace between Israelis and Palestinians—and the ceremony was about to begin. I exchanged warm greetings with former U.S. presidents George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who were standing just in front of me, and who had both played a role in the long path to peace. Behind me were President Bill Clinton, Chairman Yasser Arafat, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, preparing to make a historic commitment to peace.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States, Albert Gore Jr.; His Excellency, Shimon Peres, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel; Mr. Abbas, Member of the Executive Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”
We stepped out of the White House and onto the sweeping South Lawn, an audience of thousands gathered before us, along with television cameras and reporters from news outlets around the world. As we made our way to the stage where President Clinton would soon welcome us to an occasion of “history and hope,” I thought back to the first decision that had started us down this long, uncertain path toward peace. Not the decision to reach out to the Palestinians in secret, nor our previous attempts to negotiate with our enemies. In that moment, my mind turned to a time nearly forty years earlier—a time when Ben-Gurion and I swam alone in a sea of opposition.
It was October 24, 1956, at the villa in Sèvres where the French and Israeli leadership were meeting to finalize the plans for Operation Suez. Ben-Gurion and I stood in one of the mansion’s sweeping spaces; it was at once a ballroom, an art museum, and a well-stocked saloon. Across the way, French foreign minister Christian Pineau and defense minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury were deep in conversation, but otherwise unoccupied. I sensed an opportunity, perhaps the perfect moment.
I turned to Ben-Gurion and said in the quietest whisper, “I think I can get it done now.” He gave me a subtle nod of agreement. I took a deep, steeling breath.
I approached the two gentlemen, who by then were dear friends, and raised an issue that caught both by surprise. I had come over to discuss one of Israel’s most ambitious aspirations: to enter the nuclear age. To do so, we would need something from France—something no country in history had ever given another.
Our interest in nuclear energy was not new. It had been a subject of great intellectual curiosity for Ben-Gurion and myself long before that fateful moment in Sèvres. Neither of us was an expert regarding nuclear energy; at best, we were enthusiasts. But we both saw great potential in its peaceful pursuit. For his part, Ben-Gurion believed that only science could compensate for what nature had denied us. Israel had no oil, and it lacked access to sufficient fresh water; nuclear energy held the potential to solve both problems—countries like France were using it not only to create a reliable energy source, but also as a means of desalinating salt water. He also believed, as I did, that there existed great intellectual and economic value at the frontier of technology. By making investments in the cutting edge of science, by building talent and expertise at our universities, we believed we could invigorate the untapped minds of a nation.
There was great power in this idea, to be sure. But in truth, it was a political motivation, more than a scientific one, that animated my interest. If we were to succeed in building a reactor, our enemies would never believe its purpose to be peaceful. Israel was already viewed with such intense suspicion by those opposed to our existence that I was certain neither public statements nor private assurances nor even the presentation of concrete evidence would sway skeptics from believing that we possessed the capacity for nuclear war. As Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan, the “reputation of power is power.” My theory was its corollary: The reputation of nuclear is deterrence. And deterrence, I believed, was the first step on the path toward peace.
At the time, the Arab world had made commitments to Israel’s annihilation a litmus test for leadership; indeed, every Middle Eastern politician or general who hoped to ascend had to prove he was more intent on destroying us th
an his rival was. I believed that sowing doubt in their ability to actually do so was our highest security imperative.
Over time, my conversations with Ben-Gurion shifted from the theoretical to the practical. If we were to even entertain such an effort, we intended to understand exactly what it would require. First, it was to be a massive undertaking—both in terms of the scale of the construction and the scientific capability it required. Second, Israel lacked the raw materials and the engineering experience required to build a reactor. At the same time, we well understood that cutting corners was not an option, either—with nuclear energy, compromise and catastrophe are one and the same.
What we needed was help, and as the country with whom we’d built our closest friendship, France represented an opportunity. As Europe’s most advanced country in the nuclear field, it also represented our best option. Indeed, the French industry had built teams of engineers and scientists with precise expertise. France’s universities were the best place in the world to study nuclear physics. They had at their disposal everything we would need to build a nuclear reactor.
Ben-Gurion had decided it would not be enough for me to raise the issue with the French. I had to make an explicit request: to sell Israel a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes. It was a request without precedent, and one I expected my friends to decline. They were already taking a great risk violating the Western arms embargo to sell us weapons in secret. But something of this magnitude, if discovered, was far more dangerous, with the potential to damage French relations with both its Arab partners and its Western allies. Still, I felt that if such an agreement were possible between any countries, it was possible between France and Israel. And so I set out to try.
After their momentary shock at my question, Pineau and Bourgès-Maunoury excused themselves to the other side of the villa to discuss the matter in private. The timing of the request was not a coincidence, and I suspected they understood this. At the very same moment, Moshe Dayan was in an adjacent room with his French and British counterparts, drafting the Sèvres Protocol, which would govern the Sinai campaign, including the requirement that we attack first. We all knew that Ben-Gurion had agreed to that plan only at the urging of the French. I wanted Bourgès-Maunoury and Pineau to remember that, and to consider it when weighing the risks inherent in my request of them.
A few moments later, the two returned. To my utter surprise, they nodded in agreement.
“I am ready to draft the agreement right away,” said Pineau.
•••
While we had the unanimous support of the French senior leadership, we arrived back in Jerusalem to find near-unanimous dissent. Golda Meir insisted that such a project would hurt Israel’s relationship with the United States, while Isser Harel, the Mossad chief, raised fears of a Soviet response. Some predicted an invasion by ground forces, while others envisioned an attack from the air. The head of the foreign relations committee said he feared the project would be “so expensive that we shall be left without bread and even without rice”—an acknowledgment that in the age of austerity, we were still struggling to feed our people. For his part, Levi Eshkol, then the finance minister, promised we wouldn’t see a penny from him. Among the group, there was disagreement only about which disastrous outcome was most likely.
The response was no more encouraging within the scientific community. Israel’s physicists voiced objections to entangling scientific work with government action, which they feared would stifle their research work and harm their international reputations. But more to the point, they argued that such a pursuit was both unwise and impractical. How naïve they thought I was for believing a state so small could undertake a task so large. This was not vision, it was delusion, and they would have nothing to do with it. When I approached the Weizmann Institute, the most prestigious institute in all of Israel, the head of the physics department said I was dreaming irresponsibly, that surely such an effort would lead Israel down a dark and dangerous path. He made sure I understood that his institute would play no role in whatever I intended.
Innovation, I have come to understand, is always an uphill climb. But rarely does it find so many obstacles arrayed against it at all once. We had no money, no engineers, no support from the physics community or the cabinet or the military leadership or the opposition. “What are we going to do?” Ben-Gurion asked me late one night, as we sat quietly in his office. It was the operative question. What we had was a French promise—only that, and each other.
I was often reminded about how unusual my relationship with Ben-Gurion had become—how rare it was to have a prime minister place so much trust in a young man with a junior title. Again and again, he had taken a risk in putting me in charge of important and controversial projects. And so while the reasonable answer to his question would have been to admit defeat, I decided that I owed it to him to find another way. Failing honestly and with integrity was something I could accept—but only if I was sure that my efforts to succeed had been worthy of the trust he had placed in me. In this case, that trust was so vast that, rather than surrender, I proposed an alternative plan.
That plan drew upon my experience with Al Schwimmer. The lack of public resources could be made up for with private resources, I argued. And with the right kind of recruiting effort, I believed we could build a team of Israeli engineers who could work alongside their French counterparts.
“If we fail to secure the money and the team, we can accept defeat,” I said. “Until then, I think it would be foolish not to make the attempt.”
Ben-Gurion agreed. “Go then,” he told me. “Give order to the story.”
We took to the phones and made passionate, personal (and highly confidential) appeals to some of Israel’s most reliable donors from around the world. In short order, we had raised enough money to cover half the cost of the reactor—more than enough to start building our team.
We were lucky to count Yisrael Dostrovsky as one of our early members. A decorated Israeli scientist, Dostrovsky had invented a process for manufacturing heavy water and sold it to the French years earlier. But even he could not compete with the brilliance of Ernst David Bergmann, whom I approached to join the mission. In 1934, legend has it, Chaim Weizmann sought Albert Einstein’s recommendation for a scientist to lead his newly created institute outside Tel Aviv. Einstein gave him only one name—that of Ernst Bergmann, who had earned his total confidence. As one of Israel’s only physicists in favor of our efforts, he would quickly earn my confidence, as well.
With Bergmann and Dostrovsky, we had scientific know-how. But what we needed even more was a project manager whom we could trust with such a delicate task. We needed a pedantic stickler, someone allergic to compromise—especially given the dangers involved in radioactive work. And yet we also needed someone who was agile, someone willing to take on a project for which he would certainly lack expertise. There was a natural tension that existed between those requirements, one that quickly whittled down my list of candidates to one.
Manes Pratt was a decorated academic with a wealth of real-world experience. We met during the War of Independence, when we worked together on the frantic building up of the IDF. He was consistently and insistently precise, the kind of man for whom perfection is not a distant pursuit, but a minimum ante. He was quick-footed and quick-witted, and he demanded in those around him the same relentless work ethic he practiced.
When I explained my proposal and the position I wanted him to consider, he looked as though he could have struck me. He couldn’t disguise his disbelief.
“Are you crazy?” he demanded. “I don’t have the slightest idea what it would take to build a reactor. I don’t know how it looks; I don’t even know what it is! How could you expect me to take charge of such a project?”
“Manes, look: I know that you don’t know anything yet. But if there is somebody in this country who can become an expert after studying it for three months, that person is clearly you.”
His agitation started to subside. �
��And what exactly would that entail?”
I suggested that we would send him to France for three months to study nuclear reactors alongside the experts who would help us build one. And I promised that if he returned to Israel after that time still uncomfortable with his fluency in the topic, he could simply return to his previous work. With no requirement for a permanent commitment, Pratt ultimately agreed. And to no one’s surprise, when he returned from France, he did so as the finest nuclear expert we would ever come to know.
With the leadership in place, I turned to the work of building the rest of the team. I knew that the older generation of physicists was deeply opposed to our efforts, but I suspected that we could find students and young graduates who were eager to pursue such an ambitious project. Having been turned away by the Weizmann Institute, I turned to the Israeli Institute of Technology, in Haifa, known as the Technion. There I found a group of scientists and engineers who were eager to take the leap alongside us. Like Pratt, I intended to send each Technion recruit to France for a period of study.
The next part of the challenge lay less in convincing the young scientists to sign up and more in helping them convince their own families. We intended to locate the reactor in the Negev, near Beersheba, which at the time was like the end of the world. The young Israeli families were understandably reluctant to leave the modern cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv for a harsh and distant desert. And if this was how the Israelis felt, I suspected the French contractors would be apoplectic. So I pledged to them not just to build an industrial facility, but to build a community—indeed, a whole separate suburb in Beersheba with all they needed for a high quality of life: good schools, a modern hospital, a shopping court—even a hair salon.
After some reluctance, the families put their trust in me and the work began. The students went off to France to study nuclear engineering—and I joined them, not as the leader of the project but as a peer. Chemistry and nuclear physics were challenging subjects, to be sure, and I came to them without any previous training. But I felt it essential to gain a degree of mastery in the science that would be driving the project. In previous endeavors, I had come to understand that in addition to a clear vision and strategy, true leadership requires intricate knowledge—a facility with the granular details of every aspect of the mission. If I were to lead a group of scientists and engineers, I had an obligation to understand the work I was asking them to undertake. And so, alongside these young physicists, I spent day and night studying atomic particles and nuclear energy, and the process required to harness its power.
