“As much as you need,” he said forbearingly.
I rose, and was halfway to the door when he called me back. “What exactly was your status working with the previous prime ministers? Were you a political appointee or a civil servant?” he asked.
“A civil servant,” I answered, “seconded from the foreign ministry at the request of each of the prime ministers.”
“In that case,” said Begin, emphatically, “I renew that request. This government has come to serve, not to reap. Do you understand that?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Then I shall elucidate. This is the first time there has been a change of political administration in Israel, and we have no intention of plundering power. There has to be continuity. This is a democratic transition. The world must see this; the nation must see this. I will allow no dismissals of the professional civil service except in exceptional cases which I consider reasonable.” And then, wryly, “My model is the British system, where civil servants know to say the right thing in the right way at the right time to the right people in the name of the right government. And the right government is always the elected government of the day. Now do you understand?”
I said that I did, but he was no longer looking at me. He was looking past me, at the door, his eyes bright. “Nehamale!” he exclaimed. “What a surprise! How wonderful! Like the good old days!”
A tea lady in a red cardigan waddled across the carpet with her trolley and shook the prime minister’s hand, her wrinkled face beaming. “Mazal tov, Mr. Begin!” She smiled. “Congratulations! Good to see you back.”
They were obviously old acquaintances from the days when Begin had been minister without portfolio in Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir’s national unity government.
“Same as usual?” asked Nehama archly.
“Same as usual,” answered Begin heartily.
She poured him a plain glass of tea, with lemon and a sweetener.
To me, he said, “Whatever your response, please meet me at four o’clock this afternoon, when we’ll go over my reply to President Carter, and you shall shakespearize it for me.”
Back in my room I picked up the phone to Rabin. “Yitzhak,” I blurted, “Begin has just offered me a job. Should I take it?”
“Of course you should take it. He is an honest man and a responsible man. I’ve known him for a very long time and I can tell you that he always puts the national interest above his own. Besides, he’s your kind of Jew. You’ll enjoy working with him.”
Menachem Begin’s draft reply to President Jimmy Carter covered three pages which had been ripped out of a shorthand notepad, apparently the only paper he had to hand. It was written in red ink, in a handwriting that was tight, taut and cramped. My pen was black, and as I painstakingly navigated my way through his congested scrawl, stylizing as I went, my black ink increasingly superimposed itself upon his red, so that in the end, the pages looked as if a spider had scrawled across it. His way with words was skillful; his syntax less so.
He sat silently as I worked my way down the page, occasionally leaning across the desk to scrutinize my ‘shakespearization.’ And when I handed him the finished product, he carefully studied the corrections and, allowing himself a hint of a smile, complimented me on my touches, but expressed reservations about certain word changes I had made. He didn’t like my ‘misting’ his adjectives, as he put it. For instance, where he had written ‘lofty,’ I had written ‘noble.’ ‘Fruitful’ should be ‘fruitful,’ not ‘constructive.’ And, yes, he deliberately chose to open his letter with ‘Your Excellency,’ and not ‘Dear Mr. President.’ After all, he was addressing a head of state.
Try as I might to persuade him that ‘Your Excellency’ was simply not accurate in this situation, he simply shook his head in disbelief, saying that it was inconceivable not to address the president of the world’s mightiest power other than by such an honorific. So he decided to call the chief of protocol at the foreign ministry to double check. And while he cross-examined the poor man I sat wondering how many times a man stranded for well nigh three decades in Israel’s political wilderness might have had cause to write a letter to the president of the United States. Whatever Menachem Begin’s grasp of international affairs might be – and I was to discover that it was vast – his familiarity with the trivialities of diplomatic etiquette on that first day on the job was inadequate.
He acknowledged as much when, replacing the receiver, he threw me an amiable shrug and owned up, “You’re right!” and with a chuckle added, “but I’m in good company. When Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States he received letters of congratulation from the kaiser of Germany and the king of England. Not caring about diplomatic protocol, and never having communicated with either of them before, he blithely addressed the kaiser as, ‘My Dear Emperor William,’ and the king as, ‘My Dear King Edward,’ instead of ‘Your Royal Majesty,’ which was appropriate for both. Eyebrows were raised in the royal courts and American ambassadors were sent in to apologize.”
Menachem Begin related this nugget of gossip with absolute delight, and when I asked him whether history was his preferred reading, he concurred, saying, “History and political biographies are my favorite topics, and these I generally read in English.” By way of illustration, he cited four different authors he had recently read, and by the offhand way he tossed out their names I realized that here was a man of many parts: not only meticulous, but erudite, an intellectual of the Polish mold but in the Jewish idiom.
Waiting for his letter to be typed up, he entertained me with the tale of how he had perfected his command of English. It was during his days in the Irgun, when he was hiding from the British – a time of sharp wits and subterfuge, when survival hung on knowing what the other side was thinking, saying, planning, writing, reading, and broadcasting. Words were weapons; he had to learn them. So day by day, night by night, he sat glued to the BBC World Service, frenetically mastering the news and the King’s English. He loved the BBC’s economy of style, its unexcitable precision, and its clarity of speech.
He developed a lush English vocabulary; one could sense his love of words for their own sakes. As in the underground, so too, throughout all his years in opposition, words were his sole arsenal. He was a man of passionate polemic and gripping oratory. He loved the Knesset. He loved to debate. He loved to write. He loved to read. He loved to preach. He loved journalism. He loved letters. Letter writing, he lamented, was a dying skill. Language was being robbed of precision and clarity. Politicians were the prime pirates of this despoilment. Parliamentary debate was on the wane everywhere. Congress and Westminster were still relatively decent chambers, and the Knesset, too, had its rare moments. Too rare! But, generally speaking, good talk for good talk’s sake was gone. A man or woman gets up to speak, and says nothing. Nobody listens – and then everybody disagrees. Duels occur without real cause. Politicians had become hard-nosed, bottom-line pragmatists, bereft of humor. “Where is the parliamentarian today,” he remarked cuttingly, “who can dispose of an opponent with the elegance of Benjamin Disraeli calling across the aisle to Gladstone, ‘The Honorable Gentleman is a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity?’”
The exactitude with which he pronounced this quote was so stunning I asked him how on earth he remembered it. Smugly, he replied, “I learned it by heart from the BBC when I was in the underground. I used it as a vocabulary exercise. To this day, the first thing I do on rising at five in the morning is to switch on the BBC.”
Indeed, in the fullness of time I would discover that there were occasions when Menachem Begin based his political decisions partly or wholly on what he’d heard on the BBC, aware that while its commentators did not spare the rod in criticizing Israeli policy, they were, for the most part, impartial, accurate, and bound by the ethic of fair play. Indeed, to Menachem Begin, the British Broadcasting Corporation was the gold standard of faithful reporting.57
In the late aftern
oon the prime minister asked if his letter of reply to President Jimmy Carter was ready for checking. It was not. Norma, my secretary, was understandably edgy, trying her best to make sense of Begin’s red scribbles and my superimposed black ones. Her typing was taking much longer than usual, and by the time the letter was done, the prime minister had to leave for his next appointment. He and Mrs. Begin were hosting a tea at the King David Hotel in honor of close friends who had flown in from overseas. He suggested I accompany him to the hotel, and he would go over the letter en route.
Once we were sitting in his official limousine, he settled back and, head cocked in concentration, began reading. He disapproved of a word here and added a phrase there, and was still hastily scribbling some final corrections when the car drew up at the hotel’s entrance. Switching on a smile, he bounced out to be met by well-wishers with outstretched hands, and such was the crush inside the lobby that I had to insinuate myself behind his phalanx of security men, trying to edge my way forward in a vain attempt to retrieve the letter. As he reached the elevator he recognized a familiar face among the crowd of applauding guests. His smile widened, and with an outstretched hand, he called, “Sir Isaiah, welcome to Jerusalem!”
Sir Isaiah Berlin, the celebrated British thinker, philosopher and Oxford professor, whom I had met briefly many years before at an Oxford Union reception, flushed darkly, threw the prime minister a jaundiced look, and contemptuously turned his back on him. Begin stiffened, pressed his lips together, lifted his chin, and assuming all the dignity he could muster, stepped into the elevator, the letter crumpled in his hand. I watched, frozen, as the door glided shut in my face.
I suddenly felt the need for a drink.
The bar off the main lobby was jam-packed, and I had to elbow my way to the counter, where everybody was talking loudly, sipping drinks and munching peanuts, pretzels and potato chips. Suddenly, out of the crush, Sir Isaiah Berlin emerged, his jowled face cold and hard-pinched. In a dark-colored three-piece suit and a somber tie, he looked totally out of place among this high-spirited crowd with their shirts, cotton slacks, and blue jeans.
“Have I not seen you in the past?” he called out to me, above the hubbub.
I reminded him of the brief encounter at the Oxford Union, but he had no recollection of it.
“I have, however, seen you with Yitzhak Rabin when he was prime minister, have I not?” he pressed.
I confirmed that he had, in London and in Jerusalem.
“But did I not see you just now in the company of Menachem Begin?” he asked, a frown of disapproval on his face. With his large bespectacled eyes, scholar’s stoop, thick whitening brows, graying hair, and balding scalp, he looked like an aggrieved proctor.
I verified that he had, and I could almost taste the distaste in his voice when he growled, “So what are you doing now with Begin?”
He listened, aloofly at first, as I explained how I had become a member of his staff, but then he suddenly began to contemplate me closely, as if I represented some sort of a philosophic conundrum. “I understand,” he muttered. “You’re a civil servant, eh? Tight spot! You have no choice. Proper thing to do.” Whereupon he sternly downed a whisky and, after that, a long glass of soda, and then promptly dived into a monologue spoken so rapidly that it was partly incomprehensible. Whether this was his regular manner of speech or an emotional outburst, I could not tell. The gist of it was that, though he considered himself a well-tempered and composed Oxfordian, not given to vehement public stands, he could not, as a Jew, stand the sight of Menachem Begin as prime minister. He could not shake the man’s hand. It was too much to ask of him. He feared what harm Begin would do to the country. He feared for Israel’s Zionist dream. He feared for his own Zionist dream. He was terribly shaken and perplexed.
All his life, he said, he had been a two-state Zionist – a Jewish State alongside a Palestinian State. Moral life could entertain nothing less. The Arab-Israel quarrel was a conflict between two rights of self-determination of equal validity. Israel, therefore, had to concede territories. Partition! This was his profound philosophical view as a Jew.
And, as a Jew, he loathed violence. Terrorism of any kind, for whatever noble a goal, was abhorrent. In the 1960s he had condemned the French for their brutal war of counterinsurgency against the Algerians, and then had condemned the Algerian FLN for their counterterrorism against French civilians. So how could he shake the hand of Menachem Begin who, in 1946, had ordered this very hotel to be blown up, which resulted in the loss of ninety lives?
I cut in to insist that there were different versions of that old episode, but he kept on going at such a helter-skelter pace he could not have heard me. Only when I raised my voice to argue that, at the end of the day, we Israelis had democratically elected our own prime minister in a free and secret ballot, did he pause to concede: “Well, yes, that’s true. Besides, who am I to offer you people advice? You would never want to accept it anyway. I’m no better understood in the Jewish State than I am in other places. As often as I come here, I don’t know if I understand Israel at all. I don’t know how many Jews in the Diaspora really understand Israel. I don’t know how many Israelis understand the Diaspora, for that matter.”
With this thought, he fumbled with a tiny magnifying glass that was dangling on the end of a chain from his vest pocket, placed it close to his eyes to check his watch in the dim light of the bar, and apologized that he had to run.
“So do I,” I said.
I took the elevator up to the prime minister’s suite on the sixth floor, knocked, and was greeted by a smiling Mrs. Begin, who beckoned me inside with a motherly invitation to have a cup of coffee.
“Ah, there you are,” called the prime minister, detaching himself from his guests and extracting the letter to President Carter from his pocket. I began to apologize for my tardiness, but he apologized back, handing me the letter and saying, “I’m sorry it’s so crumpled. There were so many hands to shake when I walked into the hotel lobby I inadvertently stuffed it into my pocket.”
He drew me into the lounge to introduce me to his guests – a half dozen middle-aged, extremely well-dressed couples, talking to each other in an admixture of Yiddish, Polish, and English. They had the look of affluent Holocaust survivors, from America.
“I was just talking to my friends here about Sir Isaiah Berlin,” said Begin, sardonically.
“Stop taking it to heart, Menachem,” chided Mrs. Begin. “For more than thirty years you’ve had so many people turn their backs on you, and suddenly you’re surprised that some still do. Sit down. Relax. Try one of these.” She proffered a tray of rolls, pastries, and cookies, together with a glass of steaming tea.
“Sir Isaiah has, of course, an extraordinary mind,” granted Begin, seating himself on a couch surrounded by his admirers. Between a sip of tea and a nibble of a cookie, he continued, “As a philosopher, he’s a genuinely original theorist. But as a Zionist thinker he’s a…” – a rascally look lurked in his eyes – “he’s a J.W.T.K.”
“A what?”
“A Jew with trembling knees.”
The people around him laughed.
“Those utopian Zionists like Berlin wove a fantasy that bewitched the Zionist movement for decades,” continued Begin, in a voice that had gone absolutely earnest. “Had we followed the Isaiah Berlin path we would never have had a Jewish State. Their flight of fancy led them to the delusion that the Arabs would eventually come to terms with us for the sake of their economic progress. What utter nonsense! Ze’ev Jabotinsky had too much respect for the Arabs to believe they would come to the peace table for the sake of a mess of pottage.”
The mention of Jabotinsky’s name prompted a number of these old Revisionists to begin reminiscing about their late leader with all the adoration of disciples. I, standing on the periphery, heard Menachem Begin muse about his “master and teacher,” as though he were a prophet. He reminded his guests how Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism was the only unblinking realism in the c
rumbling Jewish world that ended in the Holocaust. He was the first to warn against the coming European catastrophe; the first to organize illegal rescue boats to Eretz Yisrael; the first to sound the warcry for a Jewish army; the first to maintain that we have to fight for a Jewish State; the first to advocate the building of an ‘iron wall’ of deterrence that would ultimately convince the Arabs that they had no alternative but to come to terms with a Jewish State.
“Ze’ev Jabotinsky foresaw this ‘iron wall’ doctrine already in the twenties,” concluded Begin. “And ultimately, it was to become the strategic imperative of all of Israel’s leaders. What are the Israel Defense Forces if not an iron wall? Surely, few men have been so vindicated by history.”
I deemed this an appropriate moment to take my leave and ready the prime minister’s letter for dispatch to the American president. And as I did so, the thought occurred to me that what I had just witnessed was high drama – Begin and Berlin: two extraordinary men, perfectly representing the warring sides of the Jewish character and the contradictory visions of the Jewish narrative and Jewish survival.
An echo of this was reflected in the contents of the letter to the president, which read:
Dear Mr. President,
Thank you for your warm letter of congratulations. My colleagues and I are deeply grateful for your wishes for the success of the new government of Israel. On May 17 our free people decided by the ballot upon a change of administration. Since then, three acts took place in accordance with our constitution. The president of the republic charged me with the task of forming a new government. The Knesset expressed its confidence by a majority vote in the government presented to our parliament. My colleagues and I took in the House the oath of allegiance to our country and to its constitution.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 41
