Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Wealthy, indiscreet, vain, and outrageous, Weizman was a kind of Israeli prince, both because of his relation to Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, and because of his role in creating the legendary Israeli Air Force. He and Dayan constantly vied for the informal title of most popular man in Israel, until Dayan fell from grace. Weizman still looked up to Dayan, who was his former brother-in-law (they had married sisters). Dayan, on the other hand, never bothered to hide his disdain for the younger man, whom he considered a playboy and a ne’er-do-well who failed to take life seriously.

  In 1969, Weizman stunned his family and friends by joining Begin’s small Herut party. He called it Menachem Begin’s Sculpture Garden because the party was filled with unquestioning loyalists from their days in the underground. One election loss after another underscored their small franchise on the fringe of Israeli politics. People paid a price for being in a party of outcasts. There were no perks, no spoils, only quizzical looks from outsiders and damning editorials in the newspapers. Begin was thrilled to have landed such a popular and prestigious general. He was always drawn to military figures, and Weizman provided an imprimatur that the party badly needed.

  The contrast between the men was extreme, and not to Begin’s advantage. At six foot two, the robust and handsome Weizman loomed over Begin, who was a head shorter but seemed even more diminished because of his physical frailties. Weizman personified the hip and secular political class that dominated Israeli society, while the austere Begin always had about him the bookish aspect of a yeshiva boy. Both were known as extreme hawks, but where that quality was respected in Weizman as a well-earned lesson from his military background, in Begin it was widely seen as a reflection of racism and what many called his fascist politics. Begin, the Polish lawyer, was stiff and abstemious, but Weizman flaunted his sabra informality, often showing up at morning staff meetings in a T-shirt with a beer in his hand. The exasperated Begin called him “my charming naughty boy.”

  Soon after he joined Herut, Weizman decided to take over the party, but he badly underestimated the extent to which it was a one-man show. Begin booted him out. In 1977, a chastened Weizman returned, and this time he was put in charge of political strategy. Because Begin’s party had gone through eight elections without a victory, Weizman combined Herut with a coalition of opposition groups to form Likud, the bloc that would come to dominate Israeli politics. In the campaign, Weizman downplayed Begin’s radical past; instead, he presented the grandfather, the patriot, the incorruptible public servant living in the little three-room flat in Tel Aviv—a telling contrast to the high-living grafters who embodied politics in the minds of so many Israelis. This new Menachem Begin found a responsive constituency in younger, disaffected voters, and with Sephardic Jews, who identified with his outsider status. The posters showed a bald, smiling man with a new pair of fashionable glasses, over the legend “FAMILY MAN AND DEMOCRAT.”

  Begin campaigned against withdrawing from Sinai, saying that the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement agreement that Kissinger had crafted was a bad deal that compromised Israel’s security. “Such withdrawals could only bring the enemy to our doorstep,” he warned. His policy was simple: “The West Bank, the Golan heights, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai are all ours.”

  Something else was at work in that election, however. Before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Holocaust was a subject rarely treated in Israeli daily life. There was an attitude of embarrassment about Jews who had gone so unresistingly to their deaths—like sheep to slaughter, as was often remarked—as if their submissiveness would contaminate the new Jewish nation. It was exactly such passivity that the nation of Israel was created to overcome. From its inception, the country had been run by bold pioneers and brawny sabras untainted by exposure to genocide. European Jews, like Begin, who carried the Holocaust inside them, were held somewhat apart—separated by an experience that native Israelis wanted to see as alien to them. Israelis were different. Israelis were strong, not weak; aggressive, not passive. Their hands were callused and they had dirt under their nails. They could take apart a machine gun or pilot a jet. Jews, on the other hand, were haunted, complicated, neurotic. They were not always good “human material,” to use a phrase that Dayan and others sometimes invoked—not the kind of people needed to build a muscular new society.

  The Yom Kippur War changed that. The sense of peril that Israelis experienced in the first days of the conflict unleashed the horrifying realization that had always stalked their imagination but which they had refused to acknowledge: it could happen to them. Just because they were Israelis they had not transcended the possibility of extinction that encircled the Jewish people. In this moment of rage and vulnerability, Menachem Begin’s voice began to sound more reasonable. The fact that he had survived the Holocaust and the gulag promised that the Jewish people would survive this threat as well. Without being especially devout he was far more at home with believers than most Israeli politicians, and this also linked him to a cultural tradition that many felt was being lost. The psychological wounds that he carried with him were now seen as ennobling, not crippling; his ferocity and intransigence appeared to be appropriate responses to the dangers Israelis faced. Weizman succeeded in softening Begin’s image, but Israelis knew that under the surface of the kind old Polish grandfather with his baroque manners there was a man who would stop at nothing to save the Jewish people. His rage was a shield against catastrophe.

  One other factor played a role in Begin’s election. The Americans had just picked Jimmy Carter to be their president, a man scarcely known in Israel. He spoke about Israel in a worrisome way. When he talked about establishing “secure and recognized borders,” it awakened the anxiety many Israelis felt about defining borders at all. The eventual size and shape of the country was still in flux and subject to bitter arguments about the very nature of the state. To have it be a matter of interest to a naïf from Georgia was unsettling, especially when he mentioned two months before the Israeli election that “there has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who had suffered so many, many years.” No American president had ever advocated for the Palestinians.

  In the middle of the campaign, Begin suffered a heart attack. When he came out of the hospital and resumed his campaign several weeks later, pale and haggard, Weizman’s main concern was how to persuade voters that Begin was sufficiently healthy and in command of his faculties to carry out the duties of office. The opportunity came two days before the election in the form of a debate with the favored candidate in the race, Shimon Peres, one of Ben-Gurion’s protégés, who had served in government almost since the beginning of the state. Peres was urbane, witty, and deeply knowledgeable—a formidable opponent, but one who seemed ready to inherit the office as a matter of right. He arrived at the debate accompanied by a motorcycle police escort; Begin appeared unannounced in his small car with his immediate family and a single aide. Peres adopted the casual look typical of the sabra political class—jacket, open shirt, no tie—whereas Begin was typically attired in his dark suit, looking more statesmanlike. There was one critical addition to Begin’s meager wardrobe: a blue shirt, thought to be more suitable for television, which would also make him appear less pallid. All the other shirts in his closet were white. Although the debate was scored a draw, the fact that Begin was able to hold his own helped many voters make up their minds.

  Begin’s victory shocked Israelis, who simply didn’t believe he would ever actually win. His election was dubbed “the Reversal,” a vote against decades of Israeli political history. “Tonight, the history of the Jewish people and the Zionist movement took a turn, the likes of which we have not known for forty-six years, since the seventeenth Zionist Congress, in which Jabotinsky proposed that the goal of Zionism was to establish a Jewish state in our time,” Begin said. Then he put on a black silk yarmulke and read from the Book of Psalms. Later, a stunned Peres summed up the results: “The Jews beat the Israelis.”

  Weizman had engineered a brilliant v
ictory. Although he enjoyed the credit for Begin’s election, Weizman subsequently encouraged speculation that he might replace him because of the latter’s ill health and depression. On occasion he had disrespectfully referred to Begin as the manoach—meaning “the deceased.” Ever since Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, Weizman had grown increasingly disillusioned with Begin’s hard line. Many in Israel agreed with him, which had boosted Weizman’s popularity over the prime minister’s. Six months before Camp David, without consulting Begin, Weizman had even proposed creating a national “peace coalition” government—a poor gamble on his part, which Begin easily brushed back. Now, at Camp David, it seemed to Weizman that the bitter result of his success in getting Begin elected marked the end of any real chance for peace.

  CARTER WOKE UP on the eleventh morning knowing that the situation was hopeless. He absolutely could not afford to spend any more time away from the White House. He told the Egyptians and Israelis to prepare their final position papers and instructed his advisers to outline a speech he would make to Congress on Monday, explaining why the summit had failed.

  While Carter was working with his defense secretary, Harold Brown, Cy Vance suddenly burst into the presidential cabin, his face totally white. Carter had never seen him so shaken. The first thought that came to mind was that the Soviets had attacked Egypt.

  “Sadat is leaving,” Vance said. “He and his aides are already packed. He asked me to order him a helicopter!”

  The last bit of hope Carter held on to was that the delegations would at least part in an orderly and dignified fashion. Instead, the summit was going to blow to pieces.

  Carter asked Vance and Brown to leave him alone. He went to the window of the little office where he had been working and stared out at the Catoctin Mountains, pondering the fallout. There would be no way to cover up the discord, the hopeless rifts that remained. It would be an international and historic fiasco. The Israelis would blame him for the failure. American ties to the Arab world—and its oil producers—would be shredded. The Soviets would be back in the game. And, of course, his own political career would be destroyed. He prayed, asking God to prevent Sadat from leaving and to somehow open up a pathway to peace. Then he changed out of his T-shirt and jeans and put on a suit and tie.

  He was angrier than he had ever been in his life. It came rushing in on him. Sadat had deceived him. Until that moment, Carter had thought they were as close as brothers. They had walked together almost daily during the last eleven days, and Sadat had never confided anything that would lead him to believe that he would desert him in this fashion.

  When Carter found Sadat, he was dressed for travel; his baggage was waiting on the porch of his cabin.

  “I understand you’re leaving,” Carter said flatly.

  “Yes,” Sadat said defiantly.

  “Have you really thought about what this means?” Carter asked, not waiting for an answer. “Then let me tell you. It will mean first of all an end to the relationship between the U.S. and Egypt. There is no way we can ever explain this to our people. It would mean an end to this peacekeeping effort, into which I have put so much investment. It would probably mean the end of my presidency because this whole effort will be discredited. And last but not least, it will mean the end of something that is very precious to me: my friendship with you. Why are you doing it?”

  Sadat swallowed hard. Carter’s cold blue eyes were only twelve inches from his. He said that Begin never intended to make peace. “We are wasting our time with this man!”

  Carter accused Sadat of violating his pledge to stay till the end of the summit. He said Sadat had betrayed him. Sadat had lied to him. The responsibility for the failure of the conference would be placed entirely on Sadat. After this, Egypt would be cut off from America and reeled back into the Soviet orbit. More radical elements would be in control. Sadat’s reputation as a peacemaker would be ruined, and his trip to Jerusalem would be seen as a historic dead end. His enemies in the Arab world would crow that they were right all along.

  Sadat said he didn’t know what else he could do.

  “What you could do is stay here and let me be the one to decide when it’s over,” Carter said sternly. He promised that if Sadat remained, the U.S. would support the Egyptian position on settlements.

  Sadat finally revealed what had caused him to decide to leave. Dayan had convinced him that Begin would never agree to any further changes at Camp David, so it was pointless to go on. Dayan had also said that the Israelis would meet with Egyptians at a future date and start negotiations all over again. Sadat envisioned that any concessions he made at Camp David would be pocketed by the Israelis, who could then say, “The Egyptians have already agreed to all these points. Now we will use what they have signed as the original basis for all future agreements.” Sadat felt cornered, he told Carter; his only escape was to go home.

  Carter pledged to write a letter saying that if either party rejected a portion of the accords, the entire agreement would be null and void.

  Sadat was quiet for a long time; then he said, “If you give me this statement, I will stick with you to the end.”

  WHILE CARTER confronted Sadat, the Egyptian delegation waited anxiously in another cabin. They didn’t know if they were leaving or staying. They argued about whether Sadat was just making a show of his displeasure in order to extract some unknown compromise. They knew that Sadat was capable of staging a purely theatrical tantrum. They were alarmed by the latest American draft, which proposed that the entire Sinai Peninsula would become a demilitarized zone monitored by UN forces; thus it would be Egyptian in name only. Tohamy was furious that there was nothing in the draft about Jerusalem being returned to the Arab world. They feared that behind those closed doors Carter would wring another irreparable concession from Sadat, but they also worried that in his hotheaded state Sadat would damage Egypt’s relations with the U.S. Nothing good could come from this.

  Half an hour later, Sadat sent for his delegates. He met them on the patio of his cabin. He was lively and happy—completely transformed from the man they had just seen. “President Carter is a great man,” he informed them. “He solved the problem with the greatest of ease.” He explained that Carter suggested that any agreement arrived at during the summit could be made dependent on the approval of the People’s Assembly in Egypt and the Knesset in Israel. If either party rejected the agreement, all commitments would be canceled and not binding in any future arbitration. Then he added, “I shall sign anything proposed by President Carter without reading it.”

  The shocked delegates were quiet for a moment. One of them finally spoke up. “Why, Rayyis, sign without reading? If it pleases us, we sign; otherwise, we do not.”

  “No,” said Sadat, rising defiantly to his feet. “I shall sign it without reading it.” Then he retreated to his cabin.

  Kamel was distraught. The president was a cipher to him. If Sadat were merely the head of a small family, Kamel thought, perhaps the court could revoke his legal competence. But he was the head of the entire Egyptian family, and the fate of forty million people rested on whatever decision might erupt from his fevered mind.

  As the Egyptians were stewing over what to do next, Begin appeared at their lunch table with an invitation to the Israeli Philharmonic in Washington the following day. This seemingly simple invitation filled the Egyptians with new alarm. What could that possibly mean, they asked themselves. Was Begin implying that the summit was over? Why wasn’t anyone telling them anything?

  After lunch, Kamel went for a long walk with Boutros-Ghali. Kamel unburdened himself. He spoke about the special friendship he had shared with Sadat in prison. Out of loyalty he had agreed to become foreign minister, a post he never sought, but now he found himself compromised by a president who was making decisions behind his back. “Sadat agrees to something in the morning, and an hour later he rejects what he had previously agreed to, and then in the afternoon he agrees to the same thing again!” Kamel seemed close to a nervous breakdown.


  Sadat’s masseur arrived with a message that the president wanted to see Kamel in his cabin. When he arrived, Sadat was on the phone with his wife in Paris. Kamel heard Sadat telling her that there was a good possibility that an honorable agreement could be reached soon. How could that be? Then Sadat spoke to his grandson. “Sherif, you bad boy!” he said several times as he laughed and bantered with the child. Finally, the president hung up and turned his attention to his waiting foreign minister. He triumphantly produced a handwritten note from Carter and asked Kamel to read it aloud.

  Kamel read that Carter intended to close the conference on Sunday, and that each side should submit its final comments. Carter himself would draw up a prospective “Framework for Peace”; in the meantime, neither side should publicly comment. That was it.

  “Well, what do you think now?” Sadat asked.

  “Think about what?” Kamel said. “It deals with matters of procedure and is completely worthless.”

  Sadat grabbed the paper out of his hands. “No, it’s a very important document, and in Carter’s handwriting, too,” Sadat said. “I intend to take it with me and lock it away in my private safe until the time is ripe.”