It was a dreadful job. I had to burrow through the wet soil, shifting monstrous quantities of rock, and the deeper I dug, the more the water collected, until the area was as slimy as a mud pit. At one point, as I slid feebly into the mud with the sickening sensation of life plunging downward, I asked myself what on earth I was doing in this slimy mess. But then somebody came to relieve me, and after downing a plate of hot food, my spirits rose.
In the afternoon, a few minor political bureaucrats showed up to deliver animated speeches, be photographed, and be gone. By then, the sun had broken through the clouds and we could take in the surrounding countryside. It was spectacular. Looking to the right or to the left gave us radically different scenery to enjoy. On the right stretched the distant belt of the fertile Yavniel Valley plateau, a checkerboard of orchards and fields. To the left, northwards, towered a craggy hill with shoulders that resembled horns – hence its name, the Horns of Hittin – where Saladin once trounced the Crusaders. And beyond that loomed the slopes of Lower Galilee, ascending in swells and undulations to their upper ranges, on the crest of which sat the ancient town of kabalistic lore, Safed. A short walk to the east, meanwhile, brought into view the waters of the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, gently lapping the walls of old Tiberias on one shoreline and the purple foothills of the Golan Heights on the other.
Despite the temptation to do so, there was no time to stand and stare. Stones had to be cleared. The only harvest that nature provided in this infertile place, which had not seen a plow for a millennium and a half, were stones – stones in such abundance there seemed to be more of them than there was soil. And buzzing and creeping above and beneath the stones were mosquitoes, flies, scorpions, and the occasional snake.
Rock clearing became our singular preoccupation. The rocks had to be picked up one by one and carried away in baskets, then tossed onto a low trailer that carted them off to some distant tip. And that was what one did from daybreak till dusk – rock harvesting – with blistering hands, and backs that felt at times as if they were stretched on the rack. Even when we picked up the rhythm, and the technique of economizing energy, this was toil without end. And it would go on at Lavi for months; every member of our kibbutz, regardless of occupation, had to take a turn at this labor of rock reaping.
The toil mirrored the primitiveness of Kibbutz Lavi in the virgin terrain of those early days – there was no electricity, no sanitation, hardly a single solid roof; just army surplus tents and a simple basic diet consisting of semolina porridge, raw vegetables, a chunk of bread with margarine, and tea for breakfast; soup, raw vegetables, and half an egg with rice for lunch; and more soup, white cheese, olives and bread with diluted jam for supper. The weekly Shabbat treat was three slices of salami, which was enhanced a few months after our arrival with a piece of chicken.
My weekly letters home to my family in Manchester were full of elaborate lies about Lavi’s dazzling progress. If anyone had happened upon the wooden barrack that served as our communal dining hall in those days, they would have seen a bunch of people in muddy work clothes, heavy boots and dunce-style sloppy hats sitting on benches at tables made of rough deal planks lit by spluttering Tilley lamps, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. Most would be slumped over their tin plates, elbows on table, spooning their soup in silence, too weary to talk.
Nevertheless, there was a poignant fellowship around those tables, and an indefinable quality of lighthearted camaraderie. People cared for each other in an almost mystical measure. We were as close to one another as family. Ours was a volunteer existence of heroic self-deprivation, dictated partly by poverty and partly by our collectivist ideology of mutual support. Above all, we were bonded by an awareness of being engaged in a wildly romantic religious pioneering adventure.
Of course, in a society so small, closely knit and isolated, where everybody inevitably lived under scrutiny and no secret could be hidden, petty quarrels were inevitable. And one such erupted one day over Menachem Begin. Somebody casually remarked that Begin was due to speak that evening in Tiberias and that he would like to go and hear him.
“You can’t do that,” cried another. “He’s a terrorist.”
“He’s no such thing,” retorted the first angrily. “He’s a hero.”
This was the thing about Begin: the mere mention of his name could arouse mighty and conflicting passions. Admirers adored him irrationally, and detractors loathed him irrationally. To some he was a great orator, to others a dangerous demagogue.
The fracas occurred shortly after Israel’s first national election, in which Begin, having disbanded the Irgun, was now leader of his newly-founded political party, Herut – the Freedom Party.
With tempers at flash point it was left to a fellow called Wolfe to calm things down. “Anyone who wants to hear him should go and hear him,” he arbitrated. “We could all do with a bit of a break anyway.”
Wolfe was a sort of village counselor, a short, frail-looking man with thick-lensed glasses on a furrowed face which expressed strength, intelligence, and mildness. Everybody trusted Wolfe.
The public meeting took place in a ramshackle cinema, occupied mainly by Sephardic Jews and weary pioneers like ourselves, from the newly established kibbutzim and moshavim round about. Some of us dozed off when Begin began to talk, until a sudden downpour of rain pelted the corrugated iron roof, drowning out the speaker and snapping us all to attention. Above the rat-a-tat of the downpour, Begin, unfazed, raised his hands heavenward and recited at the top of his voice a blessing for the abundance of rain in its season, at which he had the Sephardic crowd on its feet, stomping and applauding with delight.
This prompted me to focus more intently on the man, and to pay closer heed to what he was saying. He was a gifted orator, driving home his points with devastating clarity, at once moving and witty, inspiring and intimate. In appearance he looked to be in his mid-thirties, middle-sized, lean, and dressed in a baggy gray suit that looked as though it might smell of camphor balls. His clever, bright eyes – and it was my destiny, in time, to get to know them well – were framed by wire-rimmed spectacles. He had a tall brow capped by straight black hair that tended to fall backwards, and a round, pale face ornamented by a thick mustache. He did not look at all like the fearful man his enemies portrayed him to be.
He devoted the first part of his address to his claim that the Irgun, more than any of the other Jewish underground militias, had been the force that had compelled the British to evacuate the country, thus enabling Ben-Gurion to declare independence.
“Ben-Gurion had the privilege of declaring independence,” he said, “but he did not set up the State. The nation set up the State. And without the Irgun in the lead we would still be living under the British yoke.”
This issue was a source of agitated national debate between leaders of the Hagana and the Irgun, who constantly vied for the credit of having expelled the British. Indeed, the debate goes on to this day. In those days, all parties invested considerable energy in the argument, enlisting historians, educators, journalists, and other shapers of memory and myth, for in that first election of 1949 the political stakes were particularly high, the assumption being that whoever had expelled the British had, thereby, won the moral high ground, and the national right to lead the country.
Menachem Begin sought to mount an even higher plateau of moral certitude by invoking his personal intervention in saving the country from certain civil war. With the zeal of a prophet he told how twice he had pulled his irascible people back from the brink.
“We were almost at each others’ throats,” he declared, “not only in the matter of the Altalena arms ship, but even before that, in nineteen forty-four, when the Irgun rose up in revolt against the British, in defiance of Ben-Gurion’s command.”
Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he led us deep into the beleaguered world of his Irgun underground, to shine a light on that black hole of 1944: “It was a year of unspeakable torment,” he said forlornly. “Our si
sters and brothers in Europe were being slaughtered in the millions. But Ben-Gurion insisted we join the Allies in defeating the Nazis before rebelling to expel the British from our land. My colleagues and I thought otherwise. Ben-Gurion was so hostile to our revolt he tried to squash it by unleashing his Hagana men to round up our fighters and hand them over to the British. It was madness. It was tearing Jews apart. I could smell the stench of civil war.”
Here he paused, his voice quivering slightly as he caressed his next words:
“So I told our men to go quietly, not to resist. It was extremely hard to order our men to restrain their natural instinct for revenge, but I had to do it. I had to do it, Ki Yehudim anachnu!” [Because we are Jews]
A tremendous applause shook the rafters of the tumbledown cinema, but Menachem Begin seemed not to hear. He wiped the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand, his pallid face fixed in an expression of gloomy recollection: “Oh yes, it was very hard. Yet our fighters understood my command and humbled their natural instinct for reprisal. They surrendered quietly, many of them to be transported to British detention camps in Eritrea. This roundup was given a name. It was given the name of a hunt. They called it ‘open season,’ and we were the fair game.”
The speaker removed his spectacles and rubbed them vigorously with a handkerchief in an effort to subdue his emotions: “Many of you might remember that ‘hunting season.’ Our men were dismissed from their jobs. Their children were expelled from schools. Hagana men kidnapped our Irgun men. They were often treated grimly before being turned over to the British police. Lists of our members, officers and rank-and-file, were handed in by Jewish informers. There were daily roundups. Our arms caches and safe houses were exposed.”
His voice caught again, but he turned it into a slight cough, a throat clearing, and in velvet words he went on: “All the love of which the human heart is capable wells up within me as I recall our underground fighters, unflinching, fearless, moved by a supreme fighting spirit, and who, nevertheless, allowed themselves to be flung into detention camps, thrown into dark cellars, starved, beaten, and maligned. And not one of them” – he rose to his full height, his eyes fierce with pain – “NOT ONE OF THEM broke his solemn oath not to retaliate! From the depths of Jewish history came the order not to fight back, and it was obeyed to the very last man.”
He trumpeted this with a stab of the finger, his face as granite as his eyes, and the audience responded with another mighty wave of applause. But then a sudden rigidity came over him, and his shoulders lifted in the manner of a soldier at a march: “Now hear this each and every one of you, and hear it well. I live by an iron rule: a Jew must never lift a finger against a fellow Jew, NEVER. A Jew must never shed the blood of another Jew, NEVER. Twenty centuries ago we faced the bitter experience of the destruction of our Second Temple, the destruction of our capital Jerusalem. And why? Because of our senseless hatred of each other, a hatred that led to civil war and to our utter ruin: bechiya ladorot – generations of tears. And, therefore, I long ago took a solemn oath that no matter the provocation, no matter the circumstances, I would never ever be a party to a civil war, NEVER!”
He was standing ramrod straight, his face fearless, his hands balled, his voice choking with sincerity: “Do we not know from history what civil war does to a nation? Do we not know that generations pass before a nation at war with itself can ever heal? Therefore, I say to you tonight, a curse on him who preaches civil war. Let his hand be cut off before he raises it against another Jew. There will never be a civil war in Israel – NEVER!”
People jumped to their feet in excitement, I among them. I felt something I had never felt before. I could neither describe it nor name it. Only years later did I understand it. That night, in that run-down Tiberias movie house, I was listening to a leader possessed of a unique, all-encompassing sense of Jewish history. Menachem Begin’s Jewish memory went back thousands of years, and his vision forward, thousands of years. The Jewish past nurtured his deepest convictions and instincts. It fed his fierce Jewish self-respect. It empowered him as a future premier to declare to kings and princes, to rulers of the world, “A Jew bows to no one but God.” And something of that rousing feeling communicated itself to me that evening in Tiberias.
When the ovation subsided he struck a lighter pose, and in the easy tone of one whose authority on the matter was not to be disputed, said, “You know, ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you in all honesty, there’s a bright side to life in the underground. For living in the underground enforces seclusion, and that can be a good thing, because seclusion makes for clarity of mind and for deep thinking. Living in the underground can do wonders in turning a dark cellar into a high watch tower.”
We, the audience, gazed up at him puzzled, and he smiled back at us, an intriguing little smile that narrowed his deep-set eyes and lit up his shrewd Jewish Polish face.
“Oh yes, we could see very far from the top of our watchtower in our cellar,” he went on beguilingly, a bittersweet edge to his voice. “The visibility was excellent. From our watchtower in our cellar we could see that morning cometh after the night. But first we had to get through the night. And what did we see in that night?”
Grimly, he pounded out each of the next sentences with a thump of the podium. “In that night we saw our people in Europe in an endless procession of death. We saw the ghettoes going up in flames. We saw our enemies plotting against us all – the Hagana and the Irgun alike. And from down the corridors of time we heard the hideous echoes of that catastrophic civil war of almost two thousand years ago, which was Jerusalem’s downfall. So seeing all that, we were seized by a profound Jewish instinct – an instinct that is as old as our nation. And that instinct cried out to us – nay, commanded us: Do not retaliate! Be abducted, be imprisoned, be tortured, but do not raise a finger against your tormentors, your fellow Jews.”
He took a breather, had a sip of water, and, eyes still watery, began to speak of the arms ship, the Altalena.
“History teaches us,” he intoned, “that on the heels of most wars of liberation, bloody civil strife almost inevitably breaks out. The fall of a regime resembles an earthquake, and an earthquake, even after it has spent itself, is often succeeded by a chain of subterranean aftershocks.
“Our Irgun revolt did, indeed, create aftershocks, at least in the minds of our detractors. So much so the British predicted that on their departure there would, indeed, be a Jewish civil war. It did not happen for the reasons I have already given. And because of those reasons we never indoctrinated our Irgun fighters to hate our political opponents. On the contrary, we impressed upon them that a day would come when they would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle for the Jewish State’s defense, soldiers of a single Jewish army.”
Again he paused, patted his forehead with a handkerchief, drank, and went on: “Remember, the singular goal of the Irgun was to achieve Jewish statehood, not political power. We broke away from the Hagana to revolt against the British because our national subjugation left us no alternative. We dissented in order to fight for our people, not to rule them. But Ben-Gurion never believed us. For years he and his colleagues maligned us. He and his colleagues insisted our struggle was nothing but a struggle for power. He spread libel throughout the Jewish world when he stated that we were planning a putsch. That’s why he ordered the shelling of the Altalena. He spread the word I was launching a coup when, in fact, we were bringing in desperately needed arms and volunteers to assist in the general war effort.”
He illustrated this by enumerating the particulars of the Altalena’s cargo: 5,500 rifles, 300 Bren guns, 50 Spandau machine guns, 4 million bullets, 10,000 aerial bombs, 50 anti-tank guns, 1,004 armored track vehicles, all this in addition to 900 volunteers.
Back and forth he swayed as he rolled off this manifest.
In his speech that night he made no mention of what befell him personally on board the burning Altalena. Eyewitnesses told me about that much later on. They told me
how a loudspeaker was rigged on the ship to enable Begin to address the many people lining the Tel Aviv beach, some watching the crippled ship, others firing at it.
“People of Tel Aviv,” Begin roared, “we of the Irgun have brought you arms to fight the enemy, but the Government is denying them to you.” And then, to the soldiers firing at him from the beach: “For God’s sake, help us unload these arms which are for our common defense. If there are differences among us, let us reason together.”
One of the people who heard him say this was Yitzhak Rabin, then deputy commander of the Palmach – the Hagana’s crack striking force. Thanks to the UN truce, he had taken a few days leave, and he happened to be at his Tel Aviv headquarters on some minor errand when, suddenly, he found himself in full view of the grounded Altalena, wedged on the rocks, helpless and immobile, some seven hundred yards from dry land.
“I honestly believed what Ben-Gurion was saying, that Begin was mounting a coup,” he would tell me years later. “So when ordered to take command of a Palmach unit and open fire, I did. There was a gun battery nearby, a very old cannon, unequipped with sights and with a very slim chance of a direct hit. But clearly, this was no mere shelling to frighten off the people on board; it was meant to strike home. And strike home it did. The gun progressively zoned in on its target and the third shell hit it, setting the ship ablaze. And what a hit that was!”
Eye witnesses described Menachem Begin standing on the burning deck like some figure in a parable, black from the acrid smoke, flinging up his arms and yelling frantically to his men, “Don’t shoot back! Don’t open fire. No civil war!”
Fearful that the munitions packed below would explode in the spreading flames, the white flag was raised and the captain gave orders to flood the holds and abandon ship. Begin insisted on being the last man off, but his colleagues hurled him overboard. He was picked up in the water and carried ashore, a pitiful sight to behold, by all accounts.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 10
