by Avraham Burg
This historic and unique peace process was completed and destroyed in April 1982, four years after Sadat’s historic visit to Israel. The evacuation of the Sinai settlements was painful and traumatic. Young people barricaded themselves on rooftops. Some of them would soon become my parliamentary adversaries. The settlers greatly increased their resistance, honed in many struggles on the mountains of Judea and hills of Samaria. But the government of Israel was determined to evacuate them and honor its international agreements. Earlier that year, Menachem Begin said in parliament, “We are fighting today for peace. How fortunate we are to have this privilege. Yes, there are difficulties in peace, there are pains in peace, there are sacrifices for peace, but they are all preferable to the sacrifices of war!” And with Begin the rhetoric was always loftier and more important than reality. His readiness to make sacrifices for peace lasted for only a few more weeks.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PUBLIC LIFE (1982–2001)
IN JUNE OF 1982, IT WAS ALL OVER. THE LAST STEP OF THE peace with Egypt was immediately followed by the first step of a long war in Lebanon. This is how the war mentality annihilated the hopes for an expanding peace. Egypt first and the rest of the region right after. No sooner was the last stage of the agreement with Egypt—the painful evacuation of the settlements—completed than we embarked on the path of war. We will never know if Sharon—then a controversial “bully” and deceitful minister of defense—misled everyone, including PM Begin, or if Begin knew. Anyway, the end is known and very painful: Ariel Sharon kicked over Menachem Begin’s bucket and spilled both the water and Begin. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon.
Could it be that Begin and Sharon’s sense of having made a great concession over the expanses and settlements in Sinai required emotional and territorial compensation somewhere else? Did Begin understand, with his sharp political sense, that after the evacuation of Sinai it would be the turn of the West Bank mountain ridge and its settlements? Because if evacuation is possible in one place, it is possible elsewhere as well. Could it be that he thought that the only way to thwart the autonomy of “the Arabs of the Land of Israel”—his euphemism for the Palestinians—was an all-out war against them in their place of refuge in Lebanon? I think so. Begin no longer trusted the maneuvering ability of Dad and his team and instead decided to join Sharon, adding his own kick to the diplomatic bucket to make sure not a single drop of peace was left. Inside him there were at least two Menachem Begins, the statesman and the militarist. We witnessed with our own eyes what happened when the first weakened and the second grew stronger. At the decisive moment, the statesman in him, the democratic man of peace, surrendered to the man of challenge and war.
When that war was declared, I didn’t imagine that because of it I would eventually find myself a public figure, a member of parliament and filling high Israeli and Jewish public posts for decades. I was still a young student then, and we were a private and happy family: a father, mother, and two small children. Like many of my friends, my daily routine was essentially a kind of long hiatus between one stretch of reserve duty and another, from the distant Sinai to the heights of Mount Hermon. And in between we were called up for training and to brush up on our skills.
The only thing I liked about all these “soldier games” were the parachute jumps. I exploited every opportunity to do them. I liked to take to the skies, stand first at the door of the plane, gaze into the distance, control the fear, and jump into the enveloping silence. I parachuted dozens if not hundreds of times in my life, always with the same intoxicating enjoyment that swept me away. Until I was injured in training. A few meters before hitting the ground, the wind direction changed. And while my whole body was poised to roll forward, “calf, thigh, right shoulder,” to soften the impact of the hard ground, the wind carried me in a “reverse glide.” I was dragged along on my back for hundreds of meters, battered by the stones, until one of my fellow paratroopers grabbed the wind-filled parachute and stopped the drag. For many months, I walked around with back pain, refusing to give in, until the lower part of my body was almost completely paralyzed. The hospitalizations and operations became inevitable. In the spring of 1982, after two years of treatment and recovery, my body was still in a cast. I used a cane, and I was being treated in trauma, pain, and rehabilitation clinics. I was a disabled army veteran trying to resume the normal trajectory of life for a young man.
On the Sabbath before the Lebanon War, we—Yael, Itay, our firstborn, and little Roni, who was born only two months earlier, and I—were visiting friends up north. Without any warning a duel between artillery and Katyusha rockets began over our heads. An Israeli provocation meant to unravel the cease-fire agreement with the PLO in southern Lebanon. In the kibbutzes, people went down to bomb shelters. City streets were deserted, and we turned back and returned home, driving alone on the roads going south. In the opposite lane were long convoys of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery guns. Again war, again the old fears. And again, mobilization of all the relevant nationalist rhetoric. When we reached home, I called my parents to report, as always, that we had returned safely.
“Dad, do you know that there are army convoys heading north?” He didn’t know.
“Surely, it’s just skirmishes,” he reassured me. My eyes saw one thing, and my ears heard him saying something else. I wasn’t aware of the contradiction developing between my eyes and ears, my information from the ground and his government, which was deceived by Sharon and deceitful with the Israeli public. A few more days passed, and one evening a call-up order arrived at my house. I kissed Yael and the children and went off to war, disabled, limping, in a cast, and mobilized.
“You can go home, it’s a mistake, you’re injured,” the commander told me.
“Forget it,” I replied in typical Israeli fashion, “I’m with you.”
On June 6, 1982, we crossed the border into Lebanon. Soldiers equipped with ammunition belts, guns, and self-confidence, and me, with a cane and a cumbersome metal brace to stabilize my back. The first week of June is deeply symbolic—on June 6, 1944, the allied armies invaded Normandy; on June 5, 1967, the Six-Day War broke out; and here we were again in the week of wars. This symbolism likely did not escape the keenly aware Menachem Begin. He was a man of symbols and gestures, the greatest Israeli gestologist of all. He may have wanted to go to war on that date in order to erase the humiliation of the Yom Kippur War waged by the hated Labor Party with his own glorious campaign, which was supposed to evoke the victorious war of June 1967.
I was away from home for many days. We moved a bit and camped a bit. We fired a little and were fired on. We were shaken by thunderous artillery and saw the contrails of jets. We heard loads of rumors: about friendly fire by our planes on our forces, about comrades killed, about other forces at the gates of Beirut. Here and there civilians would give themselves up to us. I photographed children emerging from a pit in the ground with their hands raised.
“Like Warsaw,” someone said.
“Only the opposite,” someone else said, “this time it’s not us.” And everyone laughed. There was talk of a battle that went wrong on an adjacent route. Something didn’t work out. They—PM Begin and his Ahitophel, Sharon—said forty-eight hours and it’s been a few weeks already. They talked about forty kilometers, but who’s counting? The radio broadcast certain things, and in reality, other things happened. We excused it all as the “fog of war.” In the end, we were discharged. I remember only a few details: Fatima Gate near Metulla, the cold pizza in Kiryat Shmona in the middle of the night. But actually, it was all erased, because the minute I entered the house, my parents’ home, Mom’s scream pierced the air. She, who never lost control, who never got too angry or too happy, gave a full-throated yell. A great and liberating shout of a mother’s joy, the likes of nothing else. And my mother, who wasn’t with me when I was inducted into the army, and did not understand so many of the twists and turns of my life, was with me when I returned from the war. My heart goes
out to her even now, when she is no longer alive, and to that special moment like no other. The moment in which a mother was born to me, and I was born again, differently, to her.
Later we met friends and friends of friends. Everyone told a bit of the story and a big picture started to form. A giant picture. The government of Israel knows nothing about the war it declared, and which Ariel Sharon is waging on its behalf. At home Dad is talking to me about forty kilometers and forty-eight hours, and we are already deep inside on the Beirut-Damascus road, with no departure on the horizon.
“We ordered the army to stop at the forty-kilometer limit,” he tells me authoritatively.
“The guys are many kilometers to the north of this imaginary line. We are already in West Beirut,” Alon tells me, the son of Yehiel Shemi, the sculptor from Kibbutz Kabri.
“IDF vehicles are moving on the Beirut-Damascus highway,” Nahum Karlinsky, the pilot, tells me.
“We were given a briefing with maps,” Dad tells me at night in a call from the government meeting room.
A great many contradictory reports move through our human network, which played an organizing and decisive role before the PC and Google, before WhatsApp groups, faxes, and speedy email. Despite all the fog and deception, the denials and deceit, everything became known and exposed. The government is lying, and my comrades are killing and being killed—just like that, as if it were nothing.
One by one I brought my friends to Dad, people the likes of which he had never met: secular, young, direct, and blunt. So different from Isi Eisner, Eugen Michaelis, and Yaakov Tzobel, his dignified and serious German immigrant friends. Secular Israel—which had never been in our house, and which we did not learn about in the yeshiva, and which we did not get to know in the youth movement—came in to stop that war, the first war of the Israeli right wing.
Minute by minute I was drawn in. I broke all my oaths in terrible anger. So many times, I had sworn to myself that I would never be like my father, that I would not get involved in politics. And now, facing the enemy—the government of Israel—I was sucked in by forces I could not resist. We began collecting signatures, we created a movement called “Soldiers Against Silence,” and in the process, we discovered that we were not alone: soldiers, in mandatory service and reserves, came without fear, added their signatures, and organized demonstrations and meetings. We traveled around the country and tried to persuade people. Unwittingly, my small cog meshed with the large machine of real national politics. Without noticing, I became an active, full-time politician.
After a few weeks of rallying support, we requested a meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin. We wanted to personally present him with the soldiers’ signatures. To our surprise, we received a positive answer. On the appointed day, three of us arrived at the prime minister’s office: Alon, a veteran of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, Nahum, a pilot, and me, a limping paratrooper with a cane. For the first time in my life I entered that office. The prime minister’s room is small and modest relative to the grand offices of important people and world leaders. Begin was lying on the couch. I seem to recall that a few days earlier he had slipped in his bathtub at home and broken his hip. His large glasses further magnified his vacant eyes. In some moments, I had the feeling that he was not with us. We gave him the signatures and explained to him what was happening on the ground, that he was losing the support of the soldiers on the battlefield.
Instead of answering us directly, the prime minister got up with difficulty and leaned on his cane, hobbling over to a wall with a map of the Land of Israel. We also rose, I with my cane. “I see that we have something in common,” he joked with me. He waved a limp hand and pontificated with a weak voice, the voice of the exhausted, a faint echo of his vanished demagogic powers and rhetoric about the Land of Israel. We had come to speak to him about Lebanon, but he was preoccupied with issues of Greater Israel. We talked about war and the senseless sacrifice, and he was busy with unrealistic dreams and fantasies about kingdoms of Israel, the one that was, and the one to come. While he was whipping himself up into a frenzy near the map, I went over to the adjacent bookcase and took out a Bible. I opened it and quoted the resounding verses from the book of Ezekiel (33:23–25):
The word of the Lord came to me: O mortal, those who lie in these ruins in the land of Israel argue, “Abraham was one man, yet he was granted possession of the land. We are many; surely, the land has been given as a possession to us.” Therefore say to them: “Thus said the Lord God: You eat with the blood, you raise your eyes to your fetishes, and you shed blood—yet you expect to possess the land! You have relied on your sword, you have committed abominations, you have all defiled other men’s wives—yet you expect to possess the land!”
Begin, with the remaining lucidity he could muster, said, “Well, if you’re going to the Bible, let’s return to the couch.” We returned.
As if on a director’s cue, the door opened and the prime minister’s shrewd media advisor entered and whispered something in his ear. “Of course! Of course! Bring them in,” Begin blurted out. Three women entered the room. Their dresses were long, severe head-scarves hid every hair on their heads, and they wore sickly sweet smiles. Three stereotypical settlers. The weakened Begin did not even get up to greet them, and they, in keeping with Jewish purity customs, did not shake his limp hand.
“We wanted to bring the prime minister signatures of thousands of Jews who support him, the government, and the war.” They concluded with a few words about the lands of the biblical tribes of Naftali and Asher, liberated in the north of the country as part of the “Peace for Galilee” war, and about the yeshivas and settlements they intend to establish there with their husbands, sons, and daughters.
“Did you see them?” Begin said with pleasure after they left. “So demure, so… chaste, so supportive. Well then, you are not alone,” he said, banishing us from his consciousness before dozing off for a moment. The media advisor, who was in the room, tried to hustle us out before there was further embarrassment. When we got up, Begin opened his eyes and said, “How can I stop now, when eighty-five saintly fighters have already been killed?” and ended the meeting.
Outside the office, still stunned by the weakness of the most powerful man in Israel, we agreed with the media advisor that the meeting would remain undisclosed. I was not yet familiar then with the power-plays and deceit of that office. In those days, it was very difficult for a young citizen to be cynical about his government. We believed in the wisdom of the government and its integrity. Though we were blunt, we didn’t doubt. And government offices, as they have always done, invested much of their energy in deception. Sometimes the deception is meant to camouflage big moves, and sometimes it was meant to cover up small mistakes. But at that time, the whole government of Israel was mobilized to hide from the people the fact that there was no leader at the helm. Who knows if Begin was manic-depressive or just depressive. Who knows whether it was the medications he took or the burden which had become too much for him. Maybe the truth had struck this honest man and stunned him. We will never know. One thing is clear: In those days Israel had no prime minister, and everyone did what they liked. Ariel Sharon did many things, and it is doubtful if even one of them was honest.
We, as young patriots, people whose belief in the state and its institutions and love for the place and its fate were stronger than any other public feeling, kept our meeting with Begin secret—as we had promised. But it didn’t last long—the next day the meeting was disclosed in a headline in one of the morning papers. Overnight I went from being an anonymous Jerusalem youngster to something between a media ploy and a new political prospect. Even though I was supposedly born into politics, I wasn’t ready for it. Actually, my life until then had flowed in the opposite direction. I lived in the deep anonymity and privacy that were made possible by the walls my parents had built between the public and the private. All the strings I had tried to cut between the trajectory of Dad’s life and the life I planned for myself came
together, as if on their own. As soon as the lights went on, I was on center stage. The media and the public could not ignore the strange combination of someone wearing a kippah being a leftist, an injured paratrooper being a pacifist, and especially an activist in a protest movement against a war waged by a government in which his father served.
It was now my turn to negotiate the space between public and family life. I did this with caution, searching for a way to be true to myself and to the mission I had partly pursued and which had partly been thrust on me, while maintaining the warm ties with my parents’ home, with my small children, with the wonderful friendship between my wife and my mother. Those days marked the start of atonement for all the pain between us during previous years. Dad said almost nothing, and whatever was important for him to convey he conveyed through Mom. “They’re using you,” she said, meaning the sudden interest of cynical politicians and the media, and she was right. But I also used them, and I was also right. Standing one day on the long and narrow porch at the entrance to my childhood home, Mom told me, “I don’t know why you need all this ‘Peace Now.’”
