“Oh yes, I fully understand your feelings,” said Golda cynically, arms folded as tight as a drawbridge. “I fully understand the feelings of a European prime minister saying, ‘For God’s sake, leave us out of this! Fight your own wars on your own turf. What do your enmities have to do with us? Leave us be!’ And I can even understand” – this in a voice that was grimmer than ever – “why some governments might even decide that the only way to rid themselves of this insidious threat is to declare their countries out of bounds, if not to Jews generally then certainly to Israeli Jews, or Jews en route to Israel. It seems to me this is the moral choice which every European government has to make these days.”
And then, in a voice hardened ruthlessly, she thundered, “European governments have no alternative but to decide what they are going to do. To each one that upholds the rule of law I suggest there is but only one answer – no deals with terrorists; no truck with terrorism. Any government which strikes a deal with these killers does so at its own peril. What happened in Vienna is that a democratic government, a European government, came to an agreement with terrorists. In so doing it has brought shame upon itself. In so doing it has breached a basic principle of the rule of law, the basic principle of the freedom of the movement of peoples – or should I just say the basic freedom of the movement of Jews fleeing Russia? Oh, what a victory for terrorism this is!”
The ensuing applause told Golda that she had gotten her message across to a goodly portion of the Council of Europe, so off she flew to Vienna.
She was ushered into the presence of the Austrian chancellor, an affluently dressed, bespectacled, heavy-set man in his mid-sixties whom she knew to be the son of a Jewish clothing manufacturer from Vienna. She extended her hand, which he shook while rising with the merest sketch of a bow, not emerging from behind the solid protection of his desk. “Please take a seat, Prime Minister Meir,” he said formally.
“Thank you, Chancellor Kreisky,” said Golda, settling into the chair opposite him, placing her copious black leather handbag on the floor. “I presume you know why I am here.”
“I believe I do,” answered Kreisky, whose body language bore all the signs of one who was not relishing this appointment.
“You and I have known each other for a long time,” said Golda softly.
“We have,” said the Chancellor.
“And I know that, as a Jew, you have never displayed any interest in the Jewish State. Is that not correct?”
“That is correct. I have never made any secret of my belief that Zionism is not the solution to whatever problems the Jewish people might face.”
“Which is all the more reason why we are grateful to your government for all that it has done to enable thousands of Jews to transit through Austria from the Soviet Union to Israel,” said Golda diplomatically.
“But the Schoenau transit camp has been a problem to us for some time,” said Kreisky stonily.
“What sort of a problem?”
“For a start, it has always been an obvious terrorist target – ”
Golda cut him off, and with a strong suggestion of reproach, said, “Herr Kreisky, if you close down Schoenau it will never end. Wherever Jews gather in Europe for transit to Israel they will be held to ransom by the terrorists.”
“But why should Austria have to carry this burden alone?” countered Kreisky with bite. “Why not others?”
“Such as whom?”
“Such as the Dutch. Fly the immigrants to Holland. After all, the Dutch represent you in Russia.”
It was true. Ever since the Russians had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War the Dutch Embassy in Moscow had represented Israel’s interests there.
“Oh, I’m sure the Dutch would be prepared to share the burden if they could,” responded Golda, trying to sound even-tempered. “But they can’t. It doesn’t depend on them. It depends entirely on the Russians. And the Russians have made it clear that they will not allow the Jews to fly out of Moscow. If they could we would fly them directly to Israel. The only way they can leave is by train, and the only country they will allow Jews to transit through is yours.”
“So let them be picked up by your own people immediately upon arrival in Vienna, and flown straight to Israel,” argued the Chancellor, holding his own.
“That’s not practicable. You know and I know that it takes guts for a Jew to even apply for an exit permit to leave Russia to come to us. They lose their jobs, they lose their citizenship, and they are kept waiting for years. And once a permit is granted most are given hardly more than a week’s notice to pack up, say their goodbyes, and leave. They come out to freedom in dribs and drabs, and we never know how many there are on any given train arriving in Vienna. So we need a collecting point, a transit camp. We need Schoenau.”
The Chancellor settled his elbows on the desk, steepled his fingers, looked Golda Meir directly in the eye, and said sanctimoniously, “Mrs. Meir, it is Austria’s humanitarian duty to aid refugees from whatever country they come, but not when it puts Austria at risk. I shall never be responsible for any bloodshed on the soil of Austria.”
“And is it also not a humanitarian duty not to succumb to terrorist blackmail, Herr Chancellor?”
What had begun as conflicting views between opponents was now becoming a nasty cut and thrust duel between antagonists.
Kreisky shot back: “Austria is a small country, and unlike major powers, small countries have few options in dealing with the blackmail of terrorists.”
“I disagree,” seethed Golda. “There can be no deals with terrorism whatever the circumstances. What you have done is certain to encourage more hostage-taking. You have betrayed the Jewish émigrés.”
The man’s brows drew together in an affronted frown. “I cannot accept such language, Mrs. Meir. I cannot – ”
“You have opened the door to terrorism, Herr Chancellor,” the prime minister spat, undeterred. “You have brought renewed shame on Austria. I’ve just come from the Council of Europe. They condemn your act almost to a man. Only the Arab world proclaims you their hero.”
“Well, there is nothing I can do about that,” said the Austrian in an expressionless voice, looking uncomfortably still. And then, with a hint of a shrug, “You and I belong to two different worlds.”
“Indeed we do, Herr Kreisky,” said Golda Meir, in a voice cracked with derisive Jewish weariness. “You and I belong to two very very different worlds,” and she rose, picked up her handbag, and made for the door. As she did so, an aide to the Chancellor entered to say the press were gathered in an adjacent room, awaiting a joint press conference.
Golda shook her head. She asked herself, what was the point? Nothing she could say to the media could make any difference. Kreisky wanted to stay in the good books of the Arabs – it was as simple as that. So, she turned and hissed in Hebrew to her aides, “I have no intention of sharing a platform with that man. He can tell them what he wants. I’m going to the airport.” To him she said contemptuously, “I shall forego the pleasure of a press conference. I have nothing to say to them. I’m going home,” and she exited through a back stairway.
Five hours later she told the waiting Israeli press at Ben-Gurion Airport, “I think the best way of summing up the nature of my meeting with Chancellor Kreisky is to say this: he didn’t even offer me a glass of water.”
As feared, Schoenau was shut down, and for days the Kreisky crisis made international headlines, focusing interest on the question of how the rights of Russian Jewish émigrés could be protected against the outrages of Arab terrorists. Golda Meir’s remonstrations had triggered such an international whirl of protest, however, that the Austrian Chancellor had no choice but to offer alternative arrangements. These were more discreetly administered than the previous ones, and the intermittent exodus of Jews from communist Russia via Austria continued. But the prime minister of Israel was quickly distracted by another and far more urgent crisis on returning home. Intelligence reports i
ndicated large scale Egyptian and Syrian troop movements which her military experts explained away as mere maneuvers – a calamitous misinterpretation that swiftly exploded into a war of Vesuvian proportions – the Yom Kippur War.24
Chapter 20
The SAMs of Suez
The overture to the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 came in the form of a now all-but-forgotten conflagration called the War of Attrition. It was orchestrated by the thousands of Soviet instructors in Egypt who were rapidly retraining and reequipping that country’s battered army after the debacle of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The Six-Day War ended with the idf controlling the east bank of the Suez Canal, and in the autumn of 1968 Egyptian artillery bombardments across the Canal started up again, one of them killing ten Israeli soldiers. In retaliation, Israeli aircraft bombed bridges over the Nile, and the construction of fortifications along the whole of the Canal’s length began. It was dubbed the Bar-Lev line, after the then Chief of Staff, Chaim Bar-Lev. From that day forth bursting shells rained ever more relentlessly and lethally upon the idf’s forward Canal positions, and as casualties mounted, Israel hit back with ever-escalating and deeper-penetrating ferocity. Yet the Egyptians pounded on, intent on compelling the idf to abandon the Bar-Lev line while pushing forward with their sophisticated Soviet surface-to-air missiles – the SAMs – to neutralize Israel’s overwhelming air superiority. The one hope the Egyptians had of regaining the Sinai Peninsula by force was by first knocking out Israel’s aircraft from the skies over the Canal so as to enable their amphibious forces to cross it. The Soviet-manned SAM missile umbrella was designed to do just that. By the mid-1970s not only were some two hundred Soviet pilots flying Egyptian aircraft, but another fifteen thousand Soviet officers and men were manning eighty SAM missile sites.
The War of Attrition went on for more than two years until, in August 1970, the Americans, under President Richard Nixon, and through his Secretary of State William Rogers, brokered a ceasefire. The Rogers initiative, as it was called – as opposed to the earlier Rogers plan which Golda Meir had categorically rejected – was a political-military package in which both sides agreed to stop shooting and start talking under UN auspices. The envisaged talks were to be essentially based on the famous Security Council Resolution 242 which called, inter alia, for Israeli “Withdrawal from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict.”
To Menachem Begin, still serving in the national unity government, this language was anathema, but after much wrangling, Prime Minister Golda Meir accepted the initiative, prompting Begin and his Party colleagues to resign. As Begin saw it, Israel was being asked to commit itself to a withdrawal before a concrete peace proposal was even in sight. This, to him, was irresponsible – a squandering of precious territorial assets whose loss could be justified only within the framework of a fully fledged peace treaty.
However, worse was to follow when, hours after the ceasefire came into effect in August 1970, Egypt brazenly violated it by rushing its SAM missile umbrella into what was designated as the “standstill zone” adjacent to the Canal, thereby achieving by stealth what it had failed to accomplish by attrition. Cairo finally had the means to clear the skies of Israeli aircraft whenever it felt strong enough to strike across the Canal.
Golda fumed. She demanded the missiles be removed forthwith. But President Nixon, embroiled in the war he was losing in Vietnam, and fearful of a direct confrontation with the Soviets, procrastinated. He showered the prime minister with hopeful reassurances until she ultimately succumbed for the sake of Israel’s critical strategic relationship with Washington. This ignited Begin’s fury even more, particularly when Washington refused to even officially acknowledge that a violation had taken place at all. His indignation launched him into a barrage of dire Jeremiah-like prophecy as he told a packed Knesset:
The Egyptians, with the aid of their Russian advisers, have violated the ceasefire in a manner so gross it threatens our security and future. They have already deployed nine batteries of their enhanced SAM missiles, and are presently installing a further nine, all penetrating to a depth of ten to fifteen kilometers over our side of the Canal. Hence, the conclusion has to be drawn, and the Knesset and the people have to be aware of the implications of this conclusion, that when President Nasser of Egypt decides to reopen fire – and knowing the realities as we do we have to assume such a day shall surely come – he will have a decisive advantage over us…. Given his expanded missile umbrella it will be very difficult for our Air Force to hit back without sustaining substantial losses in pilots and aircraft. This is the reality, and the Americans know it to be so.
In other words, the United States had misled Israel and had placed its security in jeopardy.
After ending his speech in a crescendo of righteous indignation, Begin stepped down from the podium into a crowd of admirers who showered him with praise, to which he responded with grace. He then made his way to the Knesset dining room where Prime Minister Golda Meir was conversing with Yitzhak Rabin, then still Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
“That was some fire and brimstone,” hissed Golda derisively as the Opposition leader walked by. She had heard his address over the loudspeaker in her office.
“And I hope you took note of my every word, Madame Prime Minister,” said Begin with an air of impudence and gravitas in delicate balance.
“What you don’t seem to understand,” scolded Golda, “is that there would be no ceasefire unless we accepted all the conditions of the Rogers initiative. We couldn’t choose half the package without the other.”
“But they hardly consulted us, Mrs. Meir,” countered Begin, his voice gentle in order not to make his reproof too offensive. “Rogers gave us a document to sign. We initially rejected it. We had reservations and you rightly sought to insert changes, but in the end, it was all but dictated to us.”
“Nonsense!”
“Is it? Remember the earlier Rogers plan when he wanted to impose upon us a withdrawal from virtually all the territories we legitimately occupied in the Six-Day War, and you instructed Ambassador Rabin” – this with an approving glance at him – “to launch what was a highly successful public campaign against it? Why not launch such a campaign now?”
“Because the situation is entirely different now, that’s why.”
“In my view there is the stench of an imposed U.S.-Soviet settlement brewing in the air,” huffed Begin. “Nixon is going to sell us out!”
This irked Golda so much she raised her voice: “You know very well I’ve totally rejected any whiff of an attempt to impose a settlement on us. I will not go back to the nineteen sixty-seven lines, and I’ve made this plain both to Rogers and to the president. I told them both that Israel will neither be a victim to American appeasement of the Arabs nor of their big power politics with Russia.”
“True, but you should have never given in to their appeasement over these latest ceasefire violations. We shall pay a heavy price for those violations one day. Moreover, I genuinely believe your acceptance of the language of Resolution 242 on ‘withdrawal’ is the beginning of a major unconditional retreat from all the ceasefire lines.”
“Goodness gracious, Begin, how you get carried away by your own rhetoric!” scorned Golda, her eyebrows arching challengingly. “If only you stammered or hesitated occasionally.”
Unperturbed, Begin countered, “This is an instance when you have gotten carried away by your own wishful thinking. Nixon, I fear, is playing chess with the fate of Israel. This could be a Middle East Munich. America seems to be more interested in Arab oil than in Israel’s future.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Begin, President Nixon recently told me the very opposite of what you’ve just said.” It was Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin speaking, his voice respectful but firm.
Begin sat down uninvited. “So how does that square with Rogers’ ceasefire initiative, which is tantamount to appeasing the Arabs?” he asked.
“It squares,” said Rabin in his deep bariton
e, “because all along Nixon and Kissinger have known that in the War of Attrition the Soviets and the Egyptians were putting us both to a test – not only us, but America as well. The Americans know the Soviets are feeding and manipulating the entire Egyptian war effort. That’s why I strongly advocated the use of our Air Force to strike hard deep inside Egyptian territory, to prove to the Americans that we have the mettle to stand up to them. Just about the most encouraging breath of fresh air the Nixon Administration has been enjoying recently has been our military operations against Egypt and the Soviet advisers and weaponry there. Our actions have undermined both Nasser’s and the Russians’ credibility and standing in the whole of the Middle East. I will go further: the American willingness to supply us with arms is dependent upon our giving the Egyptians and the Soviets a bloody nose. Our deep penetration raids into Egyptian airspace during the War of Attrition not only changed the balance of power along the fighting front, but also tipped the scales of the superpower confrontation in America’s favor. But with all that, Nixon still has to strike a balance so as not to lose the Arab world entirely to the Russians because of us.”
Rabin extracted a sheet of paper. “You will recall Eban recently met with Nixon in my presence. He asked us, I quote, ‘In view of the Soviet involvement, is Israel’s position still – as I once heard Ambassador Rabin say – “Give us the tools and we’ll do the job?”’ Much to Eban’s chagrin, I gave the answer. ‘Yes, it is,’ I said. Listen to how the president replied.” Rabin read:
Good! That was all I wanted to know. If it were just a question of you and the Egyptians and the Syrians, I’d say, “Let ’em have it! Let ’em have it! Hit ’em as hard as you can.” Every time I hear about you penetrating into their territory and hitting them hard I get a feeling of satisfaction. But it’s not just a problem of Egypt and Syria. The other Arab states are watching also. I don’t have the slightest doubt about that. We don’t have any choice. We have to play it so that we don’t lose everything in the Middle East. We want to help you without harming ourselves.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 25
