The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  “Both,” answered Levy, amusement lurking in his eyes. “We are both a religion and a people – a nation-faith, so to speak.”

  To this, Berlin added enigmatically, “Remember memory! Don’t forget memory. Jews are steeped in memory. We have longer memories than anybody else. Hence, we are aware of our continuity and heritage more than any other surviving community in the world.”

  “Oh dear,” sighed the woman vacantly. “Now I understand why you Jews are such a clannish lot.”

  Her husband laughed with gusto and remarked in the breathy good-old-boy voice of the high-class alcoholic, “Well said, Ethel.” Then, to us, “You chaps have to admit – calling yourselves Jews, well, I mean, it is a bit thick. Can you imagine me going around calling myself Gentile? It would sound funny, don’t you think? What are you? – I’m a Gentile. Bloody alien it sounds to me.”

  Isaiah Berlin demonstratively turned his back on the awful pair, and said grumpily to us, “I can tell you as a researcher of the history of ideas that anti-Semitism is the most resilient prejudice in all of history. It is one of the strongest forces in world affairs. Amazing how many people are anti-Semites and don’t even know it.”

  To that, Gershon Levy said, “That reminds me of a story. When the Germans conquered Paris they confiscated the grand houses of the French nobility. One such grand house was that of Philippe de Rothschild, and its new occupier was an SS general, a General Halle. Rothschild spent much of the war years in England with the Free French Forces, and when he returned to Paris at the war’s end his mansion was restored to him. ‘Felix,’ said Rothschild to his old butler, who had remained in domestic service in the mansion throughout the war – ‘Felix,’ he said, ‘the house must have been very quiet during my absence. What did you do?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ answered Felix, ‘it wasn’t quiet at all.’ ‘Not quiet?’ asked Philippe de Rothschild. ‘No sir,’ said Felix respectfully. ‘The SS general hosted receptions every night.’ ‘Every night?’ asked Rothschild, baffled. ‘But who came?’ ‘The same people who used to come to your receptions before you fled, sir,’ answered Felix. ‘The very same people.’ ’’

  Isaiah Berlin laughed, checked his watch, and said he had to be off. We escorted him to the exit, where he asked the doorman to hail him a taxi and, waiting, again complimented Levy on his debating skills. He did, however, rumble one stark reservation: “You were far too forgiving of Menachem Begin over Deir Yassin. Remember how your boss, Ben-Gurion, sent a letter of apology to King Abdullah of Jordan over the massacre?”

  “True,” countered Levy, “but from all the available evidence I have seen, a deliberate massacre was never proven, and that’s the point I was trying to make. Besides” – this with a wry smile – “tonight was a no-holds-barred contest over the Jewish State’s right to exist, and I was out to win it with every weapon I had.”

  “And win it you did,” said Isaiah Berlin, crouching to enter his taxi. “But Deir Yassin remains a stain on Menachem Begin, nevertheless.”

  Decades later, in 1977, Begin was to astonish me by saying he knew nothing of the Deir Yassin operation until it was over. He explained that under the conditions of Jerusalem under siege, when he was in hiding and communications with Tel Aviv were at best erratic, he had given the local Irgun commander wide discretion in mounting operations. Nonetheless, as the Irgun’s commander-in-chief, he never shirked in taking full responsibility for the action.

  A few years after that revelation, in 1980, I found myself working alongside the man who had actually commanded the attack on Deir Yassin. His name was Yehuda Lapidot, a soft-spoken professor of biological chemistry at the Hebrew University. At the time he had taken a leave of absence at the prime minister’s bidding, in order to head up something called Lishkat Hakesher, a semi-covert operation that maintained contact with Jews locked behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

  One day, over coffee, I shared with him the diary I’d kept during the Jerusalem siege, and pointed to my entry of Friday, 9 April 1948 – the day of Deir Yassin. He mulled over the pages trying to decipher my boyish handwriting, which read:

  Practically knocked out of bed by explosion at 5 a.m. and then another at 7 a.m. They were explosions from Deir Yassin, a village just across the valley. Told that I.Z.L [Irgun] and Lechi attacked the village. Has always been very quiet and quite friendly. Told that Arab gangs had pushed themselves in. Went at 10 p.m. to investigate. Crawled down valley [and took cover] behind rock. Could see Jews maneuvering to positions. Crashed Jewish lorry [truck] on hill. Hagana asked for reinforcements for wounded etc. The village was captured by 2 p.m. Jewish flag raised over the destroyed mukhtar’s house.

  The diary went on:

  Prisoners taken around town by terrorists in lorry [truck] with their hands up. The idea is to bolster morale. Rumoured they were to be shot…[Later on] Walking home we saw the captured women and children sitting in a truck. They just stared. Many Jews around. I felt ashamed the way they cheered. Told that Haganah were going to hand them over to the British.

  Lapidot sat quietly for a while, no doubt assembling his thoughts and dusting off his grim reminisces. When he spoke there was a tinge of sadness in his voice: No, there had been no deliberate massacre, he said. Things had not gone the way they had planned. They were being repeatedly hit, and the casualties were heavy. He had taken over command when the officer in charge, a fellow by the name of Ben-Zion Cohen, went down early in the fighting.

  He then elaborated: “Our men were ordered to avoid bloodshed as much as possible. We had a loudspeaker mounted on an armored truck which was to drive ahead to warn the villagers, to give them a chance either to flee or surrender. The plan was to smash right into the center of the village with the truck and to blare a warning, but the vehicle plunged into a newly dug ditch at the very first row of houses, and that’s when the calamity began. The overturned vehicle you’d seen on the crest of the hill was that loudspeaker truck. Though it had crashed we switched on the loudspeaker and made the announcement which said: ‘You are being attacked by superior forces. The exit of Deir Yassin leading to Ein Karem is open! Run immediately! Don’t hesitate! Our forces are advancing! Run to Ein Karem. Run!’ Heavy fire was directed at the truck and injuries were reported. When the other units mounted their assault they were met with the most fierce resistance. Every house was a fortress. We had many wounded.”

  And then Lapidot said almost abashedly:

  “We thought the Arabs would surrender. But having been alerted by our truck announcement they opened up with everything they had. Our hard luck was compounded further when one of the Arab sentries, spotting suspicious movements, shouted out: ‘Mahmoud.’ One of our men thought he’d said our password, ‘Achdut,’ so he shouted back the second half of the password: ‘Lohemet.’ That set off an even bigger barrage. We were pinned down. They were better armed than we were. We were about eighty men, and between us we had about twenty rifles, three Bren guns, thirty to forty Sten-guns – most of which were defective – and grenades. They fought from house to house. We had no experience in house-to-house fighting; we’d never been in such a battle before.”

  Each house, Lapidot said, had to be taken individually. There was nothing to do but to toss grenades and spray gunfire. Some of the buildings were dynamited, and those were probably the explosions I’d heard in Beit Hakerem. So instead of smashing right through to the heart of the village as planned, it took two hours of horrific fighting to capture the mukhtar’s house and raise the flag.

  From the author’s diary, sketching what he saw and heard of Deir Yassin attack, 9 April 1948

  “So I say to you again, no, ABSOLUTELY NO: there was no deliberate massacre at Deir Yassin,” swore Yehuda Lapidot. “The dazed and shaken Arabs you saw being driven through Jerusalem on trucks that Friday afternoon were not being taken away to be shot. That was a pernicious lie spread by the anti-Irgunists. They were taken to the Arab side of town and released.”

  The more I worked with Yehuda Lapidot the m
ore I admired his decency and integrity. And so, yes, I readily accepted his version of events. Nevertheless, the misrepresentation of Deir Yassin lives on. Like Scheherazade narrating one of her never-ending tales of the Arabian Nights, Arab storytellers continue to weave their grisly fiction, resurrecting the ghosts of Deir Yassin from generation to generation.

  Interregnum

  Seven years are a goodly chunk of a person’s life. The seven years between the Oxford Union debate and my joining the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1959 were energetic, high-strung, edgy, crowded, and rich. These were the Truman and Stalin years, the Eisenhower and Khrushchev years, the King Hussein and Gamal Abdul Nasser years; the time of the global nuclear arms race, the 1956 Suez War, the advent of the PLO’s Yasser Arafat; and in my own personal life, the time when I met and was smitten by Esther Cailingold’s younger sister, Mimi, whom I married in grand style in London in 1953. A year or so later I introduced her to life in a one-room cabin in the still fledgling Kibbutz Lavi (with the latrine I had dug on its first day still in general use) and gathered from her reaction that we would soon be building our future elsewhere. Hardly a year went by and we moved – living with a growing family on a shoestring in a rented, cramped Jerusalem apartment amid a regime of diapers, kindergartens, food rationing, kerosene stoves, and ultimately, by a stroke of good fortune for me, a career in the Foreign Service which was to bring me into the orbits of Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Menachem Begin.

  Part II 1959–1977 Coalitions and Oppositions

  Prime Minister Levi Eshkol

  1963–1969

  1895 – Born of Chasidic stock in the Ukrainian village of Oratova.

  1920 – An early pioneer of Kibbutz Deganya.

  1937 – A founder of Mekorot, Israel’s water utility.

  1951 – Minister of Agriculture.

  1952 – Minister of Finance.

  1963 – Prime Minister and Minister of Defense.

  Key Events of Prime Ministership

  1964 – National Water Carrier is inaugurated.

  1964 – Syria seeks to thwart National Water Carrier by diverting the headwaters of the Jordan River.

  May 23–June 5, 1967 – Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser mobilizes forces, blockades Eilat, assumes command of combined Arab armies, and declares intent to destroy Israel.

  June 2, 1967 – Menachem Begin joins emergency national unity government.

  June 5, 1967 – The Six-Day War begins.

  September 1967 – Arab summit at Khartoum rejects Israeli peace overtures.

  November 22, 1967 – UN Security Council Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal and establishment of defensible boundaries.

  January 1968 – As the Soviet Union re-arms Egypt and Syria, Eshkol pleads with President Johnson to help re-arm Israel.

  February 26, 1969 – Prime Minister Levi Eshkol dies at the age of 74; is succeeded by Golda Meir.

  Chapter 7

  A Novice in the Foreign Ministry

  I got into the Foreign Service by a fluke. Every major public establishment in those days was a padlocked fiefdom of Mapai – the Hebrew acronym for the Workers’ Party of Eretz Yisrael, Ben-Gurion’s all-dominant Labor Party. Mapai was no mere political entity. It had but one idea of government – to preserve intact its absolute grip on the political power bequeathed to it by its historic dominance over the entire Zionist movement. It constituted the natural ruling class of Israel, and the body and soul of its socialist governorship. Mapainiks married into each other’s families, supported each other, appointed each other, and kept outsiders outside. Climbing a career ladder was largely a matter of party allegiance, and the right connections – protekzia, in the vernacular. Mapai members filled the ranks of the civil service, the city halls, the local councils, the university senates, the officer corps, the industrial plants, and every other significant job on offer.

  A branch of Mapai even operated within the Foreign Ministry itself, and the more senior you were, the more advantageous it was to be an active comrade. This Mapai branch not only determined the staff committee’s annual elections but, by extension, all diplomatic appointments as well.

  Menachem Begin was branded the drum major of everything reactionary in the still-new country, and any mention of his name in a positive context could land you on the other side of the door, or on the other side of the world in some dead-end posting. So, to get on in the fledgling Israeli diplomatic service you had to be resourceful, a master of a couple of languages, and a good Mapainik – or you were a bit of a freak, as I was. For not only was I not a Mapainik, I was a supporter of a left-leaning religious Zionist party called Hapoel Mizrachi, loosely translated as the “Religious Zionist Workers’ Party.”

  I got in thanks to a man called Adi Yaffe, who was head of the Ministry’s Political Information Department. I was earning my bread at the time in an underpaid job editing an obscure Jewish Agency magazine. However, as luck would have it, I had a connection with a friend who had a connection with Adi Yaffe, and was able to supplement my income by moonlighting for his department, creating propaganda material calculated to woo the newly independent states of Africa.

  One day, Adi, a bright, brisk and jolly sort of fellow, who exuded an irrepressible optimism, called to say that his boss, Golda Meir, the foreign minister, had launched an ambitious new initiative in Africa, putting such strain on his department that he had been authorized to recruit extra staff. “Are you interested?” he wanted to know.

  “Very,” said I, thrilled at the prospect.

  “Then I shall recommend you to the Foreign Service appointments committee.”

  “But I’m not a Mapainik,” I blurted out.

  Adi laughed. “True, but you’re an ex-kibbutznik, and that should be socialist enough for Golda Meir.”

  My kibbutz credentials, command of English, and a superficial familiarity with African affairs enabled me to pass muster with the appointments committee, and soon thereafter I became a probationer in the Jerusalem compound of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Commensurate with the austerity of the beleaguered little country it spoke for, the Ministry consisted of an assortment of huts as drab as a barracks.

  On that very first day in 1959, I was one of fifteen greenhorns sitting stiffly upright in straight-backed chairs listening to Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Israel’s most celebrated model of straight-laced probity, confessing to us that she was in the throes of a love affair with Africa.

  In a tone full of conviction and in a Hebrew filled with Milwaukee-sounding pronunciations, she told us there were two things she wanted to drum into our heads. “One is, coming to the aid of African States now winning independence after decades of colonial rule is an emotional thing for me,” she said. “It is the drive toward universal self-determination and international justice which lies at the heart of my socialist Zionist values. Indeed, my newly initiated African policy is a logical extension of the socialist principles in which I have always believed. And the second thing is, we Jews share with the African peoples a memory of centuries-long suffering. For both Jews and Africans alike, such expressions as discrimination, oppression, slavery – these are not mere catchwords. They don’t refer to experiences of hundreds of years ago. They refer to the torment and degradation we suffered yesterday and today. Let me read to you something to illustrate my point.”

  She picked up a book and opened it at a marked page. “What I have here is a novel called Altneuland – Old-new Land – written, as you should know, in nineteen hundred and two, by the founder of the Zionist movement, Dr. Theodor Herzl. In it…” She paused to rummage inside her copious black leather handbag, from whose depths she extracted a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles which she perched on her nose. “In it, Dr. Herzl describes the Jewish State of the future, as he imagined it might be. I shall read you what he said about Africa. And remember, this was in nineteen hundred and two. ‘There is still one question arising out of the disaster of the nat
ions which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold. Their children grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say, though I may expose myself to ridicule in saying so, that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my own people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.’”8

  Golda Meir’s matriarchal features wore an earnest and dedicated expression, and her voice went husky as she avowed, “It has fallen to me to carry out Dr. Theodor Herzl’s vision. Each year, more and more African States are gaining national independence. Like us, their freedom was won only after years of struggle. Like us, they had to fight for their statehood. And like us, nobody handed them their sovereignty on a silver platter. In a world divided between ‘the haves’ and the ‘have-nots,’ Israel’s nation-building experience is uniquely placed to lend a helping hand to the new African States. We have a vast amount of expertise to offer. For this purpose I have set up a new division for international cooperation – note what I say: international cooperation, not international aid – and you people are going to help staff it. We are going to send out to the new African states scores, even hundreds, thousands of Israeli experts of every sort – technologists, scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers, agronomists, irrigation experts. They will all have but one task – to unselfishly share their know-how with the African people.”