1978 – The Camp David Accords are signed with Egypt, facilitated by President Jimmy Carter.
1978 – Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1979 – Peace treaty with Egypt.
1980 – ‘Operation Moses’ – the initial covert mass rescue of the black Jews of Ethiopia.
January 1981 – Ronald Reagan assumes the U.S. presidency.
June 7 1981 – Israeli air force destroys Iraq’s nuclear reactor.
June 30 1981 – Begin reelected prime minister.
October 1981 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated.
June 1982 – Operation Peace for Galilee.
September 1982 – The Sabra and Shatila massacre.
November 1982 – Aliza Begin dies.
February 1983 – The Kahan Commission report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
October 1983 – Begin resigns the prime ministership and retires from public life.
March 9 1992 – Begin dies at the age of 79.
Photograph credit: Ya’acov Sa’ar & Israel Government Press Office
Prime Minister Designate Menachem Begin praying at the Western Wall upon receiving the mandate to form the new government, 7 June 1977
Chapter 29
Upheaval
At eleven o’clock in the evening of 17 May 1977, I was sitting cross-legged in front of the television in the company of my wife and four kids, listening to the station’s chief anchorman, Chaim Yavin, repeating for the umpteenth time the word “Mahapach! ” – Upheaval! – and breathlessly announcing that according to the television’s sample poll Menachem Begin, leader of the opposition Likud Party, had roundly trounced Labor’s Shimon Peres in the elections that day.
“I don’t believe it,” I cried out in disbelief. “Peres just offered me a job.”
The phone rang. It was General Freuka Poran. In a supercharged voice, he snarled, “Are you watching the tv? Look at them – those Beginites. They’re our new bosses. Ever since I was a youngster in the Hagana I’ve been allergic to that man and his minions. He’s a” – his voice climbed – “he’s a ghetto windbag, an ex-terrorist, a fanatic!”
“Cut it out,” I shot back.
“I won’t work for him,” he shouted.
“But you’re a soldier,” I said angrily. “You can’t opt out because of a political whim. Are you telling me you’re not going to follow the orders of the next prime minister of Israel, which apply to me” – he knew about my last talk with Rabin – “and which apply to you even more so, General Poran?”
He shot back, feisty as hell. “Do they? Well let me tell you something. This is no whim. That man is going to lead us into war, and I want no part of it. I’m quitting the army. Layla tov!” [Good night!] And he hung up.
I went back to join my family, who remained transfixed by the political theater filling the screen. It showed the hall at Begin’s party headquarters in Tel Aviv where hundreds of loyalists were applauding in incredulity and ecstasy, all bellowing in a single voice, “BE-GIN! BE-GIN! BE-GIN!” The din was so ear-battering that the jostled television reporter on the floor had given up trying to describe what the clamor was about. But then, as we watched, he cupped his hand around his microphone and yelled for all he was worth, “Here he comes! He’s coming now,” and the camera zoomed in on the prime minister–elect entering the hall, crowded in on every side. Despite the grainy picture on our black-and-white screen, the signs of his recent heart attack were distinct. His face was sallow, his cheekbones were pronounced, his semi-bald crown was thrown into prominence. Yet his ravaged features were animated by a dazzling smile as he moved with obvious joy into the shoe-stomping, raucous throng crushing in upon him on every side. And as he moved, the thrilled assembly chorused his name ever louder:
“BE-GIN! BE-GIN! BE-GIN!”
Anxious guards, stewards, aides, and policemen pushed and elbowed the adoring crowd, cutting a channel through the crush to let the victor enter. Inching his way toward the stage, Begin waved with both hands high, and when he finally mounted the platform, the entire jamboree exploded into the thumping patriotic chant, Am Yisrael Chai – The People of Israel Live.
His figure was all aglow in camera flashes as he led the throng, clapping his hands and bending his knees up and down to the rhythm of the beat, like a Chasidic rabbi.
Swiftly seizing the opportunity as the champion raised his palms to quell the applause, the television commentator explained that Menachem Begin was sixty-three, and had been in Israel for thirty-five years.
The singing and shouting gradually settled into a deep hush, and those pressing around the prime minister-elect peeled aside to give him center stage, leaving him standing alone beneath the giant portraits of his two ideological heroes, Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. And there he stood, isolated in the stillness, drinking in the crowd’s adoration, a slender, frail-looking figure in a dark suit, his face pale yet his eyes bright.
With deep reverence, he drew from his pocket a black yarmulke and recited the Shehecheyanu blessing, thanking the Almighty for enabling him to reach and celebrate this day. A resounding “Amen!” roared around the hall with such energy it caused the microphone to shriek with feedback. Next Begin recited a psalm of gratitude, and, after that, his victory address, an oration of reconciliation, in which he appealed for a spirit of national unity, capping his address with the compelling phrases of Abraham Lincoln: “With malice toward none; with charity to all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in.”
As the applause swelled again, Menachem Begin turned toward his wife, Aliza, a petite woman with springy gray hair and thick glasses, wearing a simple gray suit, who all this while had been standing modestly behind him. One could see the embrace in his eyes as he told her, in a voice husky with emotion, of his eternal love and his everlasting debt toward her, for the way she had stood by him through thick and thin, in unbounded devotion and sacrifice, for forty years.
“I remember you, the kindness of your youth,” he lauded, quoting the Prophet Jeremiah. “I remember you, the love of your betrothal, when you followed me into the wilderness, into a land that was not sown.” And then, paraphrasing, “I remember you when you followed me into a land that was strewn on every side with deadly minefields, and yet you followed me.”
These deeply passionate feelings spoken so openly stood in such sharp contrast to Yitzhak Rabin’s famed emotional austerity that they triggered shouts of approval from the entire assembly. The clapping and the whistles went on for so long that many probably missed Begin’s invocation of the memory of his “master and teacher,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the charismatic nationalist ideologue, founder of the Revisionist Zionist Movement, in whose footsteps he devoutly walked.
“Prodigious and startling were Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s gifts,” he declared. “He was decades ahead of his time, a giant Zionist warrior-statesman, a true prophet of his people, the man who led the movement for the settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, who was the first to sound the alarm of the coming holocaust, and the war cry for a Jewish army to fight for freedom and a sovereign Jewish State.”
Ending with a promise to fulfill Jabotinsky’s legacy, he bowed low, and the whole hall rose to chant the anthem of national hope, “Hatikva.” People pumped hands and hugged each other, not wanting the moment ever to end, even though it was three in the morning. But end it did, and Begin, shielded once more by a cordon of security personnel and officials, waved his way off the platform, beaming, shaking every palm he could reach and kissing the knuckles of every woman who thrust her hand at him, with all the gallantry of a Polish peer.55
Instantly, the camera shifted to the floodlit street outside, where loudspeakers blared patriotic music and devotees milled around singing and dancing under blue and white paper bunting. Men and women of every age were there, from youngsters to oldsters, most of them olive-skinned. They originated from places like Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Kurdis
tan, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, and India. Commentators would later explain that it was they, these Oriental immigrants, who had catapulted Menachem Begin into power after almost thirty years in the political wilderness. They were the impoverished and the God-fearing, Sephardic Jews mainly, who, having felt left out and passed by, fed up of slum life and handouts, had finally flexed their muscles, put their energy behind Mr. Begin, and settled their score with the paternalistic and elitist European Labor old-timers of whom Shimon Peres was the epitome.
Scores gathered eagerly around a television commentator who had thrust his microphone into their faces.
“Why did you vote for Menachem Begin?” he asked. “What makes him so different from Shimon Peres? Peres’ name was originally Perski. Both were born in Poland. Is not Begin as much an Ashkenazi as Peres?”
“Ashke-NAZI!” yelled somebody off-camera.
“Shut up!” bellowed a man with the sloped shoulders of a boxer, dressed in a waiter’s jacket. “You want to know why we voted Begin? We voted Begin because he’s not a godless socialist like Shimon Peres and his atheist lot. Begin never lined his pockets the way they have. He’s humble and honest. Begin speaks like a Jew, the way a Jew should speak. He’s not ashamed to say ‘God.’ He speaks with a Jewish heart. That’s why Labor always ridiculed him, and treated him the way they always treated us – like scum.”
“Are you saying that Peres and the entire secular Labor crowd are not really Jews?” asked the interviewer, provocatively.
The man spat. There was contempt in his eyes. “They may be Jews, but they behave like goyim. Have you ever seen one of them inside a beit knesset – a synagogue? What’s a Jew without a synagogue sometimes? Where’s their self-respect, their pride?”
“Ya, habibi,” cut in someone else, sporting a thick crown of greased black hair, also wearing a waiter’s jacket. “Thirty years ago those Labor bigwigs duped us. They brought us here telling us this was the Geula, the Redemption. Cheap labor, that’s what they brought us here for. In Casablanca my father was an honored member of the community. He was the patriarch of our family. He had kavod – respect.”
“KAVOD!! ” the crowd chorused in corroboration.
“Everybody gave him kavod because he ran his own spice shop in the Kasba. Now what does he do? He breaks his back on a building site. Who’s going to give him kavod now? In Morocco only Arabs work on building sites. His kavod has been stolen.”
Heads nodded vigorously.
“What’s your name?” asked the interviewer.
“Marcel.”
“So, tell us Marcel, what did you do in Casablanca?”
“I was a bookkeeper. That’s an occupation of kavod. Now I’m a waiter. In Morocco, only Arabs are waiters. In Casablanca we lived in a big house with a courtyard. Now, I, my wife, my three children, my mother, my father – all of us live in four ramshackle rooms. Our kavod has been trampled upon. The Ashkenazi Labor bosses did that. And now Menachem Begin is giving us our kavod back.”
He said this in such a triumphant tone that one man began jumping up and down in front of the camera, clapping his hands in excitement and shouting something in a Moroccan Hebrew I could not understand. Other people cheered and burst forth into a rousing singsong. Spontaneously, they formed a chain, hands on each other’s shoulders, and ecstatically weaved around and about, singing at the tops of their voices, “Begin, Melech Yisrael ” – Begin, King of Israel.
This, assuredly, was their field day. To them – half of Israel’s population – the name Menachem Begin had an almost mystical appeal. Without sycophancy or pretense, he had won their hearts, knocking down the high walls of arrogance and sectarianism which had cut them off from mainstream Israel since their mass immigration two and three decades before. Ever since national independence, and long before that as well, the country had known only one ruling party – Mapai, the Labor Party – and it saw itself as an all big-guns political battleship designed to rule the political seas forever. But it went off course and was caught off guard by a vessel captained by Menachem Begin who, running silent, running deep, rose incrementally from election to election – from fifteen, to seventeen, to twenty-six, to thirty-nine – until he surfaced with a spectacular showing in the battle of 1977 with the largest number of Knesset seats of any single party, forty-three: enough to form a coalition.
The shocked Laborites drew up petitions, held meetings, organized protests, made speeches, wrote articles, and convened conferences. Many insisted that their downfall was really the fault of President Jimmy Carter. He had publicly tilted toward the Arabs. He had publicly challenged Yitzhak Rabin. He had publicly produced what was tantamount to a unilateral peace plan. He had stabbed Labor in the back by making nonsense of the accepted axiom that they, and they alone, with their vast experience in international affairs, could win and retain the trust of the White House and the American people. But at the end of the day, the truth was much simpler. Labor lost because it had defeated itself. It had been in office for far too long. Its blood was tired and its rank and file flabby.
This was why much of the nation was ready to give Menachem Begin his chance. His integrity shone through. Even his opponents acknowledged his modest, almost monastic lifestyle, and his strict personal uprightness. So, many a moderate gave him the vote as well, on the assumption – and in the hope – that the burdens and realities of office would mellow his passionate vow never to surrender a single inch of the beloved moledet – the biblical homeland: Eretz Yisrael. And so they, too, dumped Labor and with the untested Begin at the helm, slipped the national anchor from its familiar moorings, and pushed off on an untutored course into uncharted waters.
Cables from our Washington Embassy reported dismay at Menachem Begin’s victory. Some of President Carter’s aides suggested he snub the prime minister-elect by not inviting him to Washington. After watching a Begin interview on ABC’s Issues and Answers, Jimmy Carter was so aghast at what he heard that he wrote in his diary on 23 May 1977:
I had them replay the Issues and Answers interview with Menachem Begin, chairman of the Likud Party and the prospective prime minister of Israel. It was frightening to watch his adamant position on issues that must be resolved if a Middle Eastern peace settlement is going to be realized…. In his first answer he stated that the entire West Bank was an integral part of Israel’s sovereignty, that it had been ‘liberated’ during the Six-Day War, and that a Jewish majority and an Arab minority would be established there. The statement was a radical departure from past Israeli policy, and seemed to throw United Nations Resolution 242, for which Israel had voted, out of the window. I could not believe what I was hearing.56
The international media pilloried Begin; Time magazine even headlined its election story with an anti-Semitic slur: “BEGIN (rhymes with Fagin) WINS,” and the London Times led its comment on the election result with the Roman proverb: “Whom the gods want to destroy, they first drive them mad.” Prominent Diaspora community leaders, unused to any Israeli leadership but the pragmatic Laborites, were startled at Begin’s electoral success and urged him to moderate his public statements, particularly on settlement policy. The day after his victory, Begin had traveled to an IDF encampment called Kaddum, near Nablus, in the heart of the densely Arab populated hill country, and in the course of an impromptu press conference announced a settlement drive to embrace the whole of the West Bank, which he insisted on calling by its biblical name – Judea and Samaria.
“In that case, what is the future of the occupied territories?” asked a journalist.
Like a patient schoolteacher gently correcting an uninformed pupil, Begin replied, “These, my friend, are not occupied territories. You’ve used this expression for ten years, since sixty-seven. But now it is seventy-seven, and I hope that from now on you’ll start using the term liberated territories. A Jew has every right to settle in these liberated territories of the Jewish homeland.”
“And what about the Arabs living here?” somebody asked.
B
egin answered, “We don’t want to evict anyone from his land. In this beautiful country there is room for the Arabs who are working their lands, and for Jews who will come to make the homeland blossom.”
“Do you actually plan to annex these territories?” queried another.
“We don’t use the word annexation,” chided Begin. “You annex foreign territory, not your own country.”
“But what about international law – the Fourth Geneva Convention, which expressly forbids settling occupied land?” pressed the questioner.
Begin would not be provoked. Gently, patiently, he explained, “I advise you to look carefully into the legal status of the territories of which you speak, and you will then understand that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply. The UN 1947 partition resolution, which the Arabs refused to recognize, is null and void. The area which you call ‘occupied’ remains a part of what the League of Nations Supreme Council defined on the twenty-fourth of July nineteen twenty-two as the area to be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people; and Jews have lived in, owned land, and tilled their soil here in these areas for hundreds of years prior to being evicted because of Arab wars of aggression.”
“So will Israeli law be introduced into the West Bank?”
Begin benignly replied,” My friend, what you call the West Bank is Judea and Samaria. Please use these terms in the future. They are, after all, their original biblical names. As for Israeli law, this is a matter for consideration. Once I have formed a government, we shall go to the Knesset and ask for a vote of confidence, and then we shall consider what steps to take. Thank you,” and off he went to join a group of would-be settlers, who were singing and dancing as they celebrated installing a new Torah scroll in their makeshift synagogue, which event is what had brought Begin to Kaddum in the first place.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 38
