The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  “But we have a September first, nineteen seventy-five letter from President Ford assuring Rabin that America would never impose a settlement to Israel’s disadvantage,” I said hotly.

  “Forget that letter; it’s not a binding commitment. And just in case you’re thinking somebody in the Oval Office has put me up to this, think again. This is me, Arthur Goldberg, talking from the bottom of my heart, Jew to Jew. That’s all I have to say. Thanks for listening. And now I suggest you go back to the party. I’m going home.” And off he went, leaving me with the feeling that a stiletto had just punctured my innards.

  When I walked back into the dining room it was resounding with a standing ovation. The president and the prime minister were on the point of leaving, and were waving their farewells. Carter took a step back to allow Begin to fully enjoy the limelight before leading him upstairs to his private quarters for a candid, face-to-face chat. I was now in a position to make an intelligent guess as to what that chat would be about.

  Joining the exiting guests who were proceeding from the dining room to the marble entrance hall, where a string trio was serenading us goodnight, I fell into step with Merry Trash, who was in conversation with a large, sharp-nosed lady in green.

  “Darling, you look stunning,” said the lady, adding conspiratorially, “You know what Aliza Begin is up to tonight, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know,” answered the gossip columnist, as if her professionalism had been called into question. “She’s been taken for dinner at La Grand Scene and then to the Kennedy Center to see Porgy and Bess.”

  “Quite a woman, don’t you think?” said the lady in green.

  “Millicent darling,” exclaimed Merry Trash, flipping a page of her notebook, “if you have a story to tell me about Aliza Begin – speak!”

  “Well, you know that Grace Vance [wife of the secretary of state] gave Mrs. Begin a luncheon today.”

  “Of course I know,” said Merry Trash archly. “What else is new?”

  “Well, I swear you won’t believe what I’m about to say.”

  “Try me.”

  “When Grace Vance got up and introduced Aliza Begin, we all sat there clapping and waiting – there must have been about seventy-five of us – waiting for her to stand up and make a speech. But she just sat there.”

  “Waddyanno?!”

  “I swear! Frankly, it became a bit awkward. There we were applauding, and there was she just sitting there. Finally, Grace prevailed upon her to stand up. So this gray-haired little thing gets up, and she says, ‘Forgive me everybody. I’m the Greta Garbo of the family. I’m the silent one. I don’t make speeches.’ Boy, did we laugh! But then, someone at the next table insisted on asking her what she thought of her husband’s position about the settlements on the West Bank.”

  “And her answer?” Merry Trash was scrawling ferociously.

  “Strike me dead if she didn’t go straight up to that woman, put a hand on her shoulder, and say, ‘You want to know what I think, Madame? Forgive me, but a question like that you have to ask my husband. He was elected prime minister, not me.’ Well, wow! She had us all on our feet in fits of laughter. Talk about class! She’s some smart cookie, that lady.”

  “Alla!” Menachem Begin called to his wife, in the highest of spirits, as he strode into the Blair House lounge, still outfitted as it had been a century-and-a-half ago, with immense, overstuffed, carved and inlaid furnishings. Yechiel Kadishai, General Poran, Dan Patir and I traipsed in after him. We had been killing time in an adjacent room, waiting for his return from his private chat with the president.

  Clasping his wife’s hands, he beamed, “It went very well, Alla, better than I expected. We reached an understanding on important matters. We parted on the most heartwarming of terms.”

  Aliza Begin, dressed in an unpretentious housecoat, laughed her mellifluous laugh, lit a cigarette, and while a fume of smoke coiled from her nose to the ceiling, said in her tobacco-roughened voice, “Excellent! Now sit down and relax, Menachem, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  A table had been set in front of the fireplace. It held a large china teapot surrounded by cups and saucers and, around them, rolls, pastries, cheeses, dips, and homemade bread and butter. A business card with the name of a kosher caterer from Baltimore also sat on the table.

  I decided this was the moment to tell Begin about my encounter with Arthur Goldberg. He said nothing for a while, leaning forward and burying his face in his hands, deep in thought. Eventually he said, “Azoy! So that’s Goldberg’s reading, is it? Well, it’s not mine. Despite our differences, I think my meeting with Carter went encouragingly well, and so I shall report.”

  He settled himself on the gold couch by the fireplace, took a hearty sip of the cup of lemon tea his wife had poured for him, and then said he wanted to compose a cable for Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman immediately. They would be waiting to hear what had transpired.

  It was close to midnight, but despite his long day, Begin was fully alive, energetic, aggressive. Leaning back into the couch he recounted by way of prologue how, after the dinner, the president had given him a tour of the Treaty Room where President Ulysses Grant’s cabinet used to meet. Grant’s table was still there. It had seven drawers in it, one for each member of the cabinet to stow his papers. “Now, that’s what I call economical government,” Carter had joked. And the prime minister, in retelling the tale, divulged with a chuckle that he had the strongest sense that the president, in taking him to see the treaty room, was out to flatter him, win him over, soften him up. Indeed, as they were walking up to the president’s private apartment, Carter had put a friendly hand on his shoulder, and said, “I’m glad we have this opportunity to get to know each other a little better. You’ll find me a straightforward man. I like to speak openly.”

  “For sure, Mr. President, but do you also like to listen openly?” Begin had responded. This seemed to have broken the ice between them, and got them off to a good start.

  Still chuckling at the memory, Menachem Begin took a pastry, and eating with a slow circular motion, told us about how the president had asked him about his role in the War of Independence, of which he knew little. “I told him that our proclamation of revolt against the British in forty-four was to me no less an imperative than was the revolt of the American founding fathers against the British two hundred years before – perhaps even more so. Then, Carter asked me about my youth in Brisk and I told him about what it was like to live among anti-Semites, and how my father, Ze’ev Dov, taught me never to stand by when a fellow Jew was being persecuted. I told Carter how, one day, my father was walking in the street with a rabbi when a Polish police sergeant tried to cut off the rabbi’s beard – a popular sport among anti-Semitic bullies in those days. My father did not hesitate. He hit the sergeant’s hand with his cane which, in those times, was tantamount to inviting a pogrom. The rabbi and my father were arrested, I told the president. They were taken to the River Bug, threatened with drowning, and then beaten until they bled. My father came home that day in terrible shape, but he was happy. He was happy because he had defended the honor of the Jewish people and the honor of the rabbi.”

  Concluding this account on a pugnacious note, he said, “I looked Carter straight in the eye, and told him, ‘Mr. President, from that day forth I have forever remembered those two things about my youth: the persecution of our helpless Jews, and the courage of my father in defending their honor.’ And I made it plain to him that these were the bedrock of my thinking to this very day. I wanted him to know from whence I came and what kind of a Jew he was dealing with.”

  He then got stiffly to his feet, braced himself, told Yechiel he was ready to dictate his cable to his ministers, and began slowly to prowl the room in thought. As he did so, his features became ever more firmly set. Those who knew Begin well recognized that look: he was mentally organizing what he wanted to report, paragraph by paragraph. This was how he prepared his speeches, how he crea
ted his amazing rhetorical flow as an orator, his beautifully structured passages – all pre-assembled and composed in the alcoves of his mind.

  The first thing he wanted his ministers to know – thus did he dictate to Yechiel – was that, contrary to speculations, there had been no direct confrontation with the president of the United States, no pressures. They had reached understandings on important issues. And on those issues on which understandings had not been reached, “we behaved as friends do – we agreed to disagree.” Thus, he could inform his ministers that, thanks to Israel’s new approach to Middle East peacemaking as formally embodied in the document “The Framework for the Peacemaking Process,” he had succeeded in dispelling the lingering effect of the very serious confrontation that had marred the relations between Carter and Rabin in their March meeting.

  Here he paused, downed the remainder of his tea, and before proceeding with the rest of his dictation, shared with us his thinking as to why his meeting with the president that day had gone well, whereas Rabin’s March meeting had not. Wagging a finger like a rabbi reprimanding a student, he sighed, “Rabin invited pressure on himself in March. He should never have gone to that meeting. It was folly! He knew Carter was bent on a comprehensive settlement through a Geneva conference, but Rabin was still stuck with his step-by-step doctrine, as advocated by Kissinger. So what was the point of him even trying to reach an understanding with Carter on territorial matters ahead of Geneva when they were miles apart? The timing was all wrong. For all of Rabin’s readiness for territorial compromise he, like me, refuses to withdraw back to the sixty-seven lines. That’s precisely what Carter is asking for – our virtual total withdrawal. So what made Rabin think Carter would support his peace map more than he would support mine? To have asked him to do so ahead of Geneva was merely to invite pressure. And that’s precisely what Rabin did. And that’s precisely what I’ve avoided by elaborating a concrete Geneva proposal – ‘The Framework for the Peacemaking Process.’”

  Satisfied he’d been well understood, he went back to dictating to Yechiel. “I invited no pressure since I proposed no prior agreement of substance. On the contrary, I made it plain to the president that the negotiations in Geneva about peace would be between Israel and our Arab neighbors, not with our American friends. And the Geneva format will have to guarantee this. With respect to that, I emphasized that negotiations which are direct are not just a matter of form but constitute, of themselves, content and substance. President Carter accepted this approach. The important thing is that there is now an Israeli initiative on the table – ‘The Framework for the Peacemaking Process’ – to which our Arab neighbors will have to address themselves.”

  Further, “The president pledged to avoid statements [of the sort he made after his Rabin talks] that would preempt Israel’s negotiation positions at Geneva, such as talking publicly of Israel having to withdraw back to the sixty-seven frontiers with minor rectifications, or using the term, ‘the right of the Palestinians to a homeland.’ In return, the president wanted a commitment from me that all settlement activity be halted until the Geneva Conference. I refused to make such a commitment.”

  With regard to Geneva itself, “The president expected the Arabs and the Israelis to come to the conference without prior conditions. I assured the president that this was exactly our view. Israel has no conditions, only positions. Moreover, the president thought “The Framework for the Peacemaking Process” was a solid proposal, and he undertook to bring it to the attention of the Arabs for their reaction. Most significantly, the president agreed that the goal of the Geneva negotiations would be full-fledged peace treaties, not mere short-term, interim accommodations as in the past. I also indicated to the president that, independently of Geneva, I would put out feelers for meetings with top Arab leaders, beginning with President Sadat of Egypt.”

  Menachem Begin then informed his ministers – for their eyes only – how he had disclosed, “with absolute discretion and in a highly confidential fashion, the Top Secret section of ‘The Framework for the Peacemaking Process,’ about which I had said nothing at the morning session, because so many aides were present. There, I had spoken about procedure. Now, alone with the president, I spoke about substance. Before reading to Carter this highly classified page composed of three short paragraphs, I said I thought it proper that he, the president, should know about them as a friend and as the leader of the free world. I told him that they deal with the substantive principles of how Israel visualizes conditions of peace with each of our neighbors, and I emphasized that brief though each paragraph be, each has a vital bearing upon our future. I then read him the principles:

  “One – regarding Egypt: In view of the large area separating the two countries, Israel is prepared, within the framework of a peace treaty, to make a significant withdrawal of its forces in Sinai.

  “Two – regarding Syria: Israel will remain on the Golan Heights. But within the framework of a peace treaty we shall be prepared to withdraw our forces from their present lines and redeploy them along a line to be established as the permanent boundary.

  “Three – regarding the ‘West Bank’: Israel will not transfer Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District to any foreign sovereign authority. There is a dual basis for this position: the historic rights of our nation to this land, and the needs of our national security which demand a capacity for the defense of our state and the lives of our citizens.’

  “This, in summary, is what I told President Carter.”63

  The judicious crafting of these three sensitive paragraphs were meant to create the trails up the tough mountain track toward Geneva, and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan had been a tenacious scout in helping to blaze them. For days he had closeted himself with the prime minister prior to the Washington visit, hammering out the ‘Framework’ document. The hardest nut to crack was paragraph three, the one dealing with the hypersensitive issue of the West Bank. Begin had wanted to declare outright and without obfuscation Israel’s manifest moral, legal and historic right and claim to the whole of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. To him this was the very kernel of the ‘Framework.’ Even while the mule in him reared up against any West Bank concessions, the statesman within him strained to rein in his own impulses as he rummaged for a formula that would make plain his claim to the whole of Eretz Yisrael without tipping over the president’s Geneva apple cart. As he mulled over words and weighed up idioms, Moshe Dayan finally persuaded him to swallow a bitter pill, which he did reluctantly, in the knowledge that if he refused, there might be a far more unpalatable one to digest further along the trail. He acquiesced, therefore, to the use of Dayan’s shrewd formula that stated, “Israel will not transfer Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District to any foreign sovereign authority.” This formula was not an outright avowal of Israeli sovereignty, but nor was it a concession to anybody else’s, and for the moment Menachem Begin could live with that.64

  Breakfast with Brzezinski

  Although President Carter had accepted Begin’s proposed “Framework for the Peacemaking Process” as a reasonable passage to a negotiation, we knew that his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had advised against it. Carter, anxious to get to Geneva as speedily as possible, had overridden him. “We’ll cross the sovereignty bridge when we get to it,” he said.

  All of us on the prime minister’s staff were curious to know what sort of a man this national security adviser was – this Democrat version of Kissinger, with the almost unpronounceable name. We wondered if there might be some sort of cultural affinity, some natural rapport between him and Begin, both of them being of Polish origin. But other than their accents, we found none. How could there be? Theirs was not a shared Polish background; one was the son of a Catholic diplomat, the other of a downtrodden yet proud Jew.

  “Poles apart!” cracked Yechiel.

  And indeed, they were. Between them lay the ghosts of pogroms past, and the bleak, immeasurable distance of one thousand years of Polish Jewish civilization obliterated alm
ost overnight. Yet despite this, Menachem Begin did find a powerful way to touch Brzezinski’s emotions. He invited the national security adviser to breakfast at Blair House on the second morning of his stay, and on arrival, Brzezinski was surprised to find a crowd of tv cameras and photographers awaiting him – surprised because he had been given to understand that the breakfast was to be a tête-à-tête. He was even more astonished when the prime minister greeted him with a smile so effusive it was obviously meant for the cameras.

  Menachem Begin was holding in his hand a dossier. Raising it high for all to see, he announced to the media that the documents it contained had recently come to light in a Holocaust archive in Jerusalem. They testified to the fact that when Zbigniew Brzezinski’s father, Tadeusz Brzezinski, had served as a Polish diplomat in Germany between 1931 and 1935, he had been witness to the rise of the Nazis and had been involved in efforts to rescue European Jews from Nazi concentration camps. Wishing now to bring this to world attention he, Begin, had invited the press to record his presentation of the dossier to Brzezinski the son. And doing so, the prime minister pronounced words of such high praise to the memory of the father, that the son was almost in tears.

  Over breakfast, Brzezinski confided that the prime minister’s gesture had touched him all the more because it came at a time when he was the subject of harsh personal attacks from certain sections of the Jewish community, and the media at large. A number of dailies, magazines and tv correspondents had been casting him as the anti-Israeli of the president’s team.

  “I am not,” he said. “Some have even insinuated I’m an anti-Semite, making much of my Polish-Catholic ancestry. I am not.” And, as if to emphasize he was not, he solemnly declared, “I cannot but express to you, Mr. Prime Minister, my admiration for the degree to which you live the suffering of your people and yet are, also, the personification of the triumph of Israel. May that triumph soon become permanent under your leadership through a peaceful accommodation with your neighbors.”