It was there, as the evening drew nigh, that the prime minister called me to his suite to rehearse his speech for the Joint Israel Appeal dinner, soon to begin in the banqueting hall downstairs. Given his partiality for lengthy consultations back home, he had found little time to go over my copy, so he was seeing much of it now for the first time.
I had, in its preparation, torn up a dozen or more drafts, leaving tooth marks on my pen as I wrote and rewrote page after page, scribbling deranged doodles while mentally struggling for concise, rhythmic and alliterative descriptions in my amateur effort to give the prime minister a defining oratory. Thus, in describing Israel’s heterogeneous immigrant society I had written:
Those of you who know our Jewish State know that there is much about Israeli life that is at once grotesque and heroic. We have a penchant for hyperbole and wild passions – visionary firebrands, biblical diehards, Tel Aviv high jinks, secular zealots and, of course, party dogmatists. It is hard to find a footing in the soft moss of composure in our land.
“Stam narishkeiten” – utter nonsense – growled the prime minister as he struck out the paragraph with his heavy fountain pen. “Can’t you write plain English?”
Untutored as I still was in the craft and in his style, I realized I had blundered badly. Nevertheless, even as I acknowledged the extravagance of my language, I urged him to stick with the theme – that as a democracy of migrants we were a noisy and fractious lot, every citizen a prime minister unto himself. To reinforce my point I argued that the Zionist founding fathers had pledged that national freedom would rid us of the “ghetto mentality,” exorcise the ghost of the “Wandering Jew,” cure us of the “eternal victim” syndrome, and transform us into normal citizens of a normal country. Yet here we were, still strapped with a natural tendency to approach even minor matters with an air of suspicion and embattlement.
Levi Eshkol peered at me over the top of his spectacles, his face a severe frown. “Boychik,” he said, “what’s got into you? Don’t you understand we are still at war? We are still beleaguered. We still face terrorism. We still live with menace. We are still absorbing hundreds of thousands of refugee immigrants. So how on earth can you expect us to be normal? We are a motley bunch of tribes trekking home, each with its own pekelech [packages] of neuroses.”
He fell silent after that, presumably mulling over the enormity of it all, until, with a deep sigh, he stretched his shoulders as if to ease the burden, laid himself down on the couch, and, seeking sanctuary in his famed Yiddish wit, added, “Mein teirer yunger man, can’t you understand disputation is in our blood? We’re a stiff-necked people. Shouting at each other keeps us together. Argument is our nationality.”
He then went back to the text, reading it out loud and scribbling numerous corrections as he went, while I naively tried to persuade him to liven up his delivery and put more pep into it. But he fobbed me off, admonishing, “At my age I’m not about to pretend to be what I am not – a performer.”
Clearly exhausted, he leaned his head heavily against the back of the couch, and legs outstretched, closed his eyes and dozed off. After a few minutes his mouth fell open and he began to snore so loudly he woke himself up with a start. He looked uncertainly around the hotel suite, blinking, and then focused on the pages still in his hand.
“I dozed off,” he said superfluously, rising from the couch. He peered at himself in the mirror, combed his fingers through his hair, centered his bow tie, pulled the sleeves of his jacket to restore its fit, and said, “Let’s finish going over the speech.”
“There’s no time for that. All the guests are seated and waiting for you downstairs.” It was Adi Yaffe in the doorway, come to collect his charge.
The prime minister handed me the pages: “Give me these when I go to the podium. I hope for your sake the rest of it makes sense.”
People rose and applauded elatedly as Levi Eshkol entered the banqueting hall. Every seat was taken. So many black-ties and extravagant dresses! So many excited and grinning faces! So many cries of euphoria!
I took my seat at a reserved table up front while the prime minister was escorted to a dais, flanked left and right by big donors. After a long and flowery introduction by the banquet chairman, and upon the cue of a tailcoated master of ceremonies bearing a golden chain of office, I quickly handed over the speech and, gnawed by hang-wringing anxiety, watched the prime minister peer at it as if examining some piece of mumbo-jumbo.
In his rumbling accent, he began reading the text in fits and starts, his tongue twisting around wily consonants and tricky vowels in a hapless bid to anglicize his Yiddish diction, pausing frequently to double-check what he was saying. Soon enough he came to the paragraphs he had not yet had time to review, which spoke of the heavy drain on Israel’s national economy caused by the mass inflow of penniless and unskilled refugee immigrants.
After all, this was a fund-raising occasion.
Incredulity crept into the prime minister’s eyes and his voice trailed off in disbelief. Leaning across the podium, his eyes boring into mine, he called out in Hebrew, “What’s this supposed to mean?”
I cringed in mortification as audible rustlings, murmurings, titters, nods, and nudges spread from table to table.
“What I just said is not true,” declared Levi Eshkol to his baffled audience, without a trace of awkwardness. “The very opposite is the case.” And then, syntax be damned, he proceeded to elaborate how each new immigrant was not a burden but an indispensable asset to the future growth of Israel’s economy.
When he sat down he was greeted with a sprinkling of clapping that swelled incrementally into a crescendo. They gave him a standing ovation. They loved him. They loved his honesty, his authenticity, and his refreshing spontaneity. Face aglow, Levi Eshkol watched as they extracted their checkbooks, unscrewed their fountain pens, and upped their generosity abundantly.
The adoration done, Mr. Eshkol beckoned me over, and in a thin whisper, his nose almost touching mine, rasped, “Boychik, if you don’t stop writing your fancy-schmancy nonsense and start writing what I want to say in the way I want to say it, I’ll find somebody else who will.”
“Yes, Prime Minister,” I mumbled, eating a piece of humble pie I would spend a lifetime digesting.
During the days that followed, Eshkol made appearances on television, spoke to parliamentarians, visited a Jewish day school, briefed editors, academics, business barons, and Jewish leaders, and, at the very hub of it all, spent close to an hour and a half closeted with Prime Minister Harold Wilson behind the classic facade of the world’s most famous black door, in Whitehall’s most renowned cul-de-sac, Number 10 Downing Street.
Number 10 appears deceptively small from the outside, but behind its famous door there are more than sixty rooms – offices mainly – above which the prime minister and his family live in a self-contained apartment converted out of the attics by Mrs. Neville Chamberlain. And it was there, outside Number 10, that I once again got egg on my face.
Nowadays, for reasons of security, iron gates at the entrance to Downing Street obstruct public access, but not then. In those days, demonstrators were allowed to assemble on the sidewalk at the corner of Downing Street and Whitehall, and some twenty such demonstrators, Arabs carrying crude placards, were assembled when Eshkol’s limousine swept into the street. The car in which I was traveling was the last in the motorcade, and by the time we turned to enter the street, the demonstration had become unruly, interfering with the traffic flow. So, inexperienced as I was in the logistics of prime ministerial motorcades, I decided to proceed on foot. It requires tremendous agility to sprint from a rear car to catch up with the one up front, which meant that by the time I reached Number 10, the door was closed.
“Move on,” said the sergeant in charge.
“I’m with the Israeli party,” I explained.
“Are you now?” He looked me up and down, peered at my lapel, and asked sanctimoniously, “So where’s your security pin?”
; Damn! Stupidly, I had left it attached to the dinner jacket I had worn the evening before.
“Shove off,” he spat, and then, arms akimbo, planted himself in front of the Arab demonstrators who had meanwhile surged forward, shouting profanities.
“No you don’t. Back you go,” he hollered at them. “Nobody’s going to demonstrate in this ’ere bloody street. You there, you in the black ’at” – he was looking at me – “move away from that door NOW, or I’ll ’ave you arrested.” He approached me menacingly, loosening the truncheon at his belt.
As I fell back into the crowd of Arabs, the policeman faced us squarely, fanning the air with his truncheon like a pendulum. One of the demonstrators tilted his placard as though to charge, and the sergeant instantly whacked his shoulder, causing him to yelp and his placard to clatter to the ground.
“Right! That’s it,” he bawled at us. “Off you go the lot of you, or I’ll have you all in the clink. SCRAM!” He watched in contempt as the protestors slinked away, mumbling curses in a language neither he nor I understood.
“You too!” he hollered at me.
In desperation, I fumbled for my diplomatic passport. He glanced at it, consulted another constable, leafed through its pages and, satisfied I was who I claimed to be, said, “Sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. Please follow me.”
Mustering my last shreds of dignity, I followed him to the door of the official residence, where he snapped to attention and gave me a whirling salute as I walked inside.
I was ushered into a red-carpeted parlor upstairs, where the two prime ministers were sitting by a grand marble fireplace under a portrait of a man attired in the uniform of an eighteenth-century admiral. Surrounded by their aides, they were exchanging small talk while a maid in a black dress and a lace collar poured tea with fastidious care from a silver teapot. To the raised eyebrows of Adi Yaffe, I planted myself as inconspicuously as I could on a chair by the door, and flipped open my pad to take notes.
“In my view, the main essentials of a successful prime minister are lots of sleep and a sense of history,” Harold Wilson was saying genially to Levi Eshkol, in his rich northern accent. “Take this old house, for example. It’s not the quietest of places to sleep in. It originally goes back to the sixteen-eighties. In 1732, I believe it was, King George the Second offered it to our first prime minister, Robert Walpole, but Walpole didn’t like it. It was an uncomfortable place, poorly constructed on boggy soil, just like my Labor Party is today – shaky, unstable, and noisy.”
“Not as noisy as mine,” laughed Eshkol. “Put three Israelis in a room and you’ll have four political parties.”
The two men were jousting like the old socialist comrades they were, Harold Wilson looking very dapper in a powder blue shirt, pinstriped suit and bright red tie – nothing like your typical British prime minister. I had learned from a briefing paper that he was not yet fifty, came from a humble background, and had risen through scholarships to become one of the youngest Oxford dons of the century.
“Now, for our getting down to business,” he went on with an impish smile, “I have to warn you, I’m a thoroughbred Yorkshireman, and we Yorkshiremen are a blunt lot. We’re straight-talking, open, honest, and careful with our money. So, you and I will talk to each other as good friends must, candidly and honestly, and say exactly what’s on our minds. And I know what’s on your mind, Mr. Eshkol – this Syrian mischief over the Jordan River. Tell me about it.”
Wilson’s expression stilled and became somber as, for the next hour, while one sipped English and the other Russian tea, the two men earnestly mulled over the dangerous implications of the Syrian Jordan River diversion scheme.
“We’ve just completed what we call our National Water Carrier,” Eshkol summed up grimly. “And now that it’s up and running, the Syrians are doing their level best to dry us out. No country in the world would tolerate such premeditated aggression. If they go too far, things could easily escalate into full-scale war.”
“A hot potato if ever there was one,” remarked Wilson, puffing on his pipe. And then, “Tell me again, where exactly are the Syrians digging?”
Adi Yaffe jumped up and unfurled a map on the coffee table between the two men. Bending low over it, Eshkol pointed out two Jordan River tributaries tucked just inside the Syrian border, on the Golan Heights – the Banias and the Hazbani.
“If they succeed in diverting these,” said Eshkol, “they will deprive the Jordan of about half of its annual flow. And that, as far as we are concerned, would be an act of war.”
“My, my!” said the British prime minister, familiar enough with Middle East complexities to display genuine concern. “Is there nothing you can do to stop this, short of war?”
A parade of emotions raced across Levi Eshkol’s face. “We are trying our best – our very best. We are using our guns to zone in on their earth-moving equipment – tractors and dredgers – without inflicting casualties. We want to hit their equipment to bring them to their senses. But who knows? They are retaliating, shelling our villages in the Hula Valley from their Golan Heights above. The engagements are sometimes fierce. They could easily escalate.”
What he was really saying was that in the Middle East, butterfly wings can become typhoons, but Mr. Wilson was clearly not inclined to see it that way. He eyed a memo lying in front of him – composed, presumably, by his Foreign Office – on which he had made margin notes. With great solemnity, he sermonized, “I’ve no doubt you will display a responsible attitude and show maximum restraint to prevent this situation from getting out of hand. The last thing we need now is another fireball in the Middle East.” And then, with a gust of goodwill, “I shall inform Parliament about this. I shall send a warning shot across the Syrian bow, to make plain our dissatisfaction with Damascus’s behavior.”
But when the Israeli prime minister raised the possibility of acquiring British Chieftain tanks so as to deter the enemy before it became too late, pointing out that Britain was already supplying such heavy armor to Arab countries on a considerable scale, the British prime minister suddenly looked visibly uncomfortable. Raising his hands in a dramatic gesture of reassurance, he began to speak elliptically about “silver linings” and “military balances,” and “Israeli pluck,” and “never letting an old socialist comrade down.” And then, having exhausted his reassurances, he escorted his guest to the front door, where he bid him a fond farewell, waving a boisterous goodbye for the cameras to catch. Responding, Mr. Eshkol returned the wave with a forced smile and, entering his car, muttered to us in Yiddish under his breath, in a voice full of foreboding, “Mir ret, mir ret und keiner hert nisht zu ! ” [One talks and one talks, and nobody listens].10
Chapter 11
The Gathering Storm
The Syrian water diversion stratagem continued to menace Israel like a floating mine, and by the late spring of 1967, the situation had deteriorated so drastically that war correspondents began descending on Israel in droves. With mounting audacity, provocation followed provocation as Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser made common cause with Syria, moving his vast army and air force into the Sinai, ousting the United Nations peacekeeping forces, blockading Israel’s Red Sea port Eilat by closing the narrow Straits of Tiran, and signing a war pact with King Hussein that put the Jordanian Army under Egyptian command. Other Arab states quickly adhered to the alliance, which Nasser told cheering Egyptians was designed to “totally annihilate the State of Israel once and for all.”
Even before this dire peril, Israel’s mood had been low. The nation was suffering from an unprecedented economic slump that put tens of thousands out of work. Record numbers had left the country, and the macabre joke of the day told of a sign at Lod – now Ben-Gurion – Airport, reading, “Will the last one to leave please switch off the lights.”
As enemy forces mobilized in the north, the south, and the east, and mobs in Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus howled “Death to the Jews!” and “Throw the Jews into the sea!” people spoke with chi
lling seriousness of the possibility of total physical annihilation.
The Government Press Office, straining under the weight of processing accreditations to the seemingly endless flow of arriving war correspondents, asked me to pitch in, translating official communiqués and giving pro forma briefings in my spare time. This was what brought me to the King David Hotel’s coffee shop on the afternoon of 27 May, to keep an appointment with two correspondents, one from the Houston Chronicle, and the other from the London Guardian. They were interested in an overall review and a quick tour of the shattered frontier zone that had sundered Jerusalem’s heart in the battles of the 1948 War of Independence, and which, ever since, had been a looming front line, with East Jerusalem occupied by Jordan.
The coffee shop was packed with journalists sitting around like vultures, munching on peanuts, pretzels and potato chips, waiting for the war to begin. They ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties, and traded gossip at the tops of their voices in German, French, Spanish and English. By the looks of them, a good many might well have been plucked straight from an Ivy League yearbook. Most were casually dressed in sport shirts and jeans, or safari suits, and their easy chitchat made it plain they had met before, in other war zones. The hum of the place gave it the air of a theater bar crammed with critics waiting for the curtain to rise.
And rise it did.
The idf reserves were fully mobilized, bringing normal life to a standstill and transforming usually bustling thoroughfares into eerie war zones. As we exited the King David Hotel, into St. Julian’s Way – now King David Street – an air raid siren went off. It was only a test, but it prompted the few pedestrians in sight to scurry into the nearest sandbagged doorways. Posters on the shutters of the closed shops advertised advice about civil defense, bomb shelters and first aid. As we reached the street corner, a military policeman on a motorcycle gruffly stopped us to allow a number of armored vehicles to turn the bend leading to the border area where Israeli west Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem met.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 15
