For days, the Knesset had been permeated with a rising tension as muscular, stocky men roamed its corridors and canteens, and approached its committees, their numbers rising daily. These were the El Al union bosses, accompanied by their whispering lawyers, intent on scotching Prime Minister Begin’s plan to halt the carrier’s flights on holy days. Without letup, they pressured, pestered, and petitioned the parliamentarians. Even the strictly observant interior minister, Dr. Yosef Burg, was collared. He was waylaid by a union man who placed an amicable arm around his shoulder and then jabbed a forefinger into his chest and barked into his face so sharply that Dr Burg’s head was jerked backward, as though the arguments were being shoved physically down his throat.
“Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, members of the Knesset,” Begin began, “the government has decided that following a time lapse of three months, the aircraft of our national airline, El Al, will no longer fly on the Jewish Sabbath and festivals.”
This announcement resulted in looks of sheer hatred appearing on the faces of the union men, who sat watching the proceedings in the public gallery. The opposition benches erupted into paroxysms of heckling:
“So why don’t you shut down the television on Shabbat, too?” screamed one.
“Are you going to stop Israel merchant ships at sea, too?” yelled another.
The derision fazed the premier not one bit. On the contrary, it supplied him with new inspiration. “Shout as much as you want,” he taunted, scanning the opposition faces with scorn, his gaze finally settling on the young radical leftist, Yossi Sarid. “I have nothing to say to you and your kind. In fact, I have nothing to say to anyone who supports a Palestinian state, which is a mortal danger to our people.” And then, changing his tone, altering his voice to a muted, sonorous pitch, this man who believed in oratory as the supreme weapon, an artful combination of style, cadence, and the application of formidable intellectual energy, argued, “Forty years ago I returned from exile to Eretz Yisrael. Engraved in my memory still are the lives of millions of Jews, simple, ordinary folk, eking out a livelihood in that forlorn Diaspora, where the storms of anti-Semitism raged. They were not permitted to work on the Christian day of rest, Sunday, and they refused to work on their day of rest, Saturday, for they lived by the commandment, ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.’ So each week they foreswore two whole days of hard-won earnings. This meant destitution for many. But they would not desecrate the Sabbath day.”
“So, stop football on Shabbat, too?” heckled Sarid, triggering off yet another squall of jeers, hissing and name-calling.
Adroitly, cutting through the pandemonium, Begin told the tale of Salonika, and as he did so the House listened. “In Greece there is a port city called Salonika, which had an extensive Jewish population before the war. Most of the port workers there were Jewish, and on Shabbat they did not work. Those stevedores would forego their pay rather than desecrate the Shabbat. The goyim accepted this as a fact of life, and the port was closed on the Sabbath day. Imagine that!”
“And you want to close down the whole country, turn us back to the Dark Ages,” yelled somebody.
“Ah, the Dark Ages,” echoed the prime minister sarcastically, and to the delight of his supporters, he calmly raised his right hand as if to catch a ball, tossed it back toward the heckler, and resumed his rhetorical flow. “The Dark Ages, you say. Well let me tell you something, my dear socialist friend: Shabbat enshrines a social-ethical principle without peer. Shabbat is one of the loftiest values in all of humanity. It originated with us, the Jews. It is all ours. No other civilization in history knew a day of rest. Ancient Egypt had a great culture whose treasures are on view to this day, yet the Egypt of antiquity did not know a day of rest. The Greeks of old excelled in philosophy and the arts, yet they did not know a day of rest. Rome established mighty empires and instituted a system of law which is relevant to this day, yet they did not know a day of rest. Neither did the civilizations of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, India, China – not one of them knew a day of rest.”
Photograph credit: Chanania Herman & Israel Government Press Office
Prime Minister Begin with Minister of the Interior Dr. Yosef Burg
Photograph credit: Chanania Herman & Israel Government Press Office
An enthused and dynamic Prime Minister Begin using his powers of persuasion on Knesset Members
“So, put on a yarmulke,” sneered somebody.
“Chutzpah!” boomed Begin, bristling. “I speak of our people’s most hallowed values and you dare stoop to mockery. Shame on you!” With arms held high, he thundered, “One nation alone sanctified the Shabbat, a small nation, the nation that heard the voice at Sinai, ‘so that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you.’ Ours is the nation that bequeathed to humanity the imperative of a day of rest to apply to the most humble of beings. Ours is the nation that gave the laborers the dignity equal to that of their employers, that both are equal in the eyes of God. Ours is the nation that bequeathed this gift to other faiths: Christianity – Sunday; Islam – Friday. Ours is the nation that enthroned Shabbat as sovereign Queen.”
A chorus of approval from the government benches went up, muffling every last vestige of dissent. Begin, idol of the common folk, caught up in his enthusiasm and sense of mission, rose to a crescendo. “So are we, in our own reborn Jewish State, to allow our blue and white El Al planes to fly to and fro, as if to broadcast to the world that there is no Shabbat in Israel? Should we, who by faith and tradition heard the commandment at Sinai, now deliver a message to all and sundry through our El Al planes – ‘No, do not remember the Sabbath day. Forget the Sabbath day! Desecrate the Sabbath day.’ I shudder at the thought that the aircraft of our national carrier have been taking off the world over on the seventh day over these many years, in full view of Jews and Gentiles alike.”
The ensuing rumpus was terrific. The Speaker sat, vainly banging his gavel, which thudded as soundlessly as a velvet mallet. So Begin himself raised his palms and then lowered them gently, once, twice, thrice, until the furor quieted. Once it had, he fixed his eyes on the public gallery and cast a solemn stare at its occupants. “Let me say this to you, the good workers of El Al. The government has been the object of threats from some of you if we go ahead with our decision. We disregard these threats. In a democracy, government decisions are not made under threat. We cannot engage in profit-and-loss calculations when it comes to the eternal heritage of the Jewish people. There is no way of assessing the religious, national, social, historical, and ethical values of the Sabbath day by the yardstick of financial loss or gain. In our revived Jewish State we simply cannot engage in such calculations. If it were not for the Shabbat that restored the souls and revived the spiritual lives, week by week, of our long-suffering nation, our trials and vicissitudes would have pulled us down to the lowest levels of materialism and moral and intellectual decay.” And to hammer his point home, he ended his speech with the celebrated saying, “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath day, the Sabbath day has kept the Jews.”
With that he turned to limp back to his seat, amid cheers and jeers, but hardly had he taken a step when, struck by a sudden additional thought, he hobbled back to the microphone, and declared, “Mr. Speaker, allow me just one further point. This House should know, it is not necessary to be an observant Jew to appreciate the full historic and sacred aura that enshrines this ‘perfect gift’ called Shabbat. Its prohibitions are not arbitrary. They provide insulation against corrosive everydayness, they build fences against invasions by the profane, and they enrich the soul by creating a space for sacred time. In a word, one need not be pious to accept the cherished principle of Shabbat. One merely needs to be a proud Jew.”
The Speaker bellowed that he was putting the prime minister’s statement to a vote, and instructed the tellers to start counting. The tally was 58 in favor and 54 against, and Menachem Begin exhaled a long sigh of relief as he limped his way out of the hall.92
Hi
s sense of satisfaction at this moral victory was short-lived when, back in his office he met at length with Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon who painted him a stark picture of the situation along Israel’s border with Lebanon.
This mountainous frontier had long been a tinderbox, ever since Yasser Arafat had established his PLO headquarters in west Beirut in the late nineteen seventies, and then sent his men to occupy southern Lebanon, which they quickly transformed into a Palestinian ministate, dubbed Fatahland. The townships and villages of the northern Galilee were bombarded from its strongholds, sporadically but consistently, often bringing normal life to a standstill. Many fled southward, and those who remained spent many long and anxious days and nights huddled in shelters. As the escalation intensified, an apprehensive President Reagan dispatched a special emissary, Philip Habib, to try and broker a truce. This he had done, in July 1981. It lasted for eleven months, but it was honored mainly in the breach. Thus it was that when Sharon met Begin, on the day of his El Al speech, the first thing he did was to hand him a dossier registering two hundred and forty ceasefire violations – shellings, incursions, and outright terrorist attacks, some horrendous.
“Unless they stop and calm is restored,” the defense minister warned, “the situation could well deteriorate into full-scale war.”
Photograph credit: Ya’acov Sa’ar & Israel Government Press Office
Prime Minister Begin with Knesset Member Ariel Sharon
Chapter 52
Waging War, Preaching Peace
If the amber light for the war in Lebanon flashed on when the PLO persisted in its terrorist attacks in direct violation of an American-sponsored ceasefire, it turned red on 3 June 1982, when an assassination attempt was made against one of Israel’s most senior and gifted diplomats – Israel’s ambassador to Great Britain, Shlomo Argov, who was shot in the head as he left a banquet at the Dorchester Hotel in London. In the words of one pundit, not since the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 had a hit squad – this one Palestinian – made war such a likely outcome.
The morning after the shooting, the prime minister sought out Dr. Yosef Burg, head of the National Religious Party, and invited him to his office for an urgent consultation. He wanted to persuade him to support the plan drawn up by Defense Minister Sharon for a massive IDF incursion into south Lebanon to drive the PLO terrorists out. Begin wanted unanimous cabinet consent, and he knew that Burg, an influential minister, had sharp reservations.
“Strike them by all means,” said Burg, “but not a full-blown ground invasion.”
Dr. Yosef Burg was a witty man, with chubby cheeks and a permanent twinkle in his sharp eyes. He was also an ordained rabbi, a doctor of philosophy, a master of eight languages and a Knesset member since the founding of the state. He had headed multiple governmental ministries under six prime ministers. With credentials like those, he knew enough to know that once the Lebanon curse struck it would be hard to get rid of it.
Beautiful Lebanon, once a tranquil country, had years before become bitterly factionalized, smitten with ethnic and religious insanity. Havoc, slaughter and treachery were by then a way of life: Shiite against Sunni; Sunni and Shiite against Druze; Christians against Sunni and Shiite; Druze and Christians against Syrians; in short, Lebanon had become a cursed land where the PLO had found it easy to carve out a formidably armed fiefdom – literally, a state within a state.
“We’ve already carried out air strikes against their bases in Beirut, and yet they are still bombarding our towns and villages along the border relentlessly. It’s intolerable!” Begin replied in response to Burg’s cautionary advice.
“But full-scale war will be even more intolerable,” said Burg with determination.
“Yosef, we simply cannot allow an attack on our ambassador to go unanswered,” countered Begin with impatience. “Ambassador Argov was chosen as a target because he is a Jew, because he is an Israeli, and because he is a symbol of the state. An attack on an ambassador is tantamount to an attack on the state itself.”
“That’s as may be, but we are not dealing here with international protocol,” said Burg, in a tone of biting irony.
Begin gave him a solemn look: “And I tell you, we would have to bury our heads in shame were we not to respond in force and clear the killers out.”
A thought drifted across Burg’s face and his eyes darkened. “Supposing I support the plan,” he said, “what are the casualty estimates?”
Begin stared back at him sadly. “My feelings of trepidation are no less than yours, believe me. We will suffer casualties. Only a fool would say this is a cut-and-dried affair. The PLO thugs have modern Soviet-supplied armaments, and they will put up a fight. But our IDF will put up a stronger fight, and we’ll vanquish them.”
“Yes, we shall. But again I ask, at what cost?”
In slow, solemn tones, Begin answered. “Everything will be done to prevent casualties. Given the limited nature of the operation, which is to remove our towns and villages from beyond the range of the terrorists’ fire – that is to say, to push the enemy back forty kilometers from our border – I am assured the casualty rate will be relatively small. But nobody can deny that military action means losses, and losses mean bereavement and orphans. If Operation Peace for Galilee – that is the code name of the intended operation – succeeds in freeing northern Galilee from perpetual threat, that in itself will be a worthwhile accomplishment, even if the quiet doesn’t last indefinitely.”
“But how can you call it an accomplishment when, once we’ve withdrawn, the terrorists will regroup and come back to harass us?”
Begin’s eyes went hard. “I tell you that even though I cannot promise anything conclusively, by launching this operation now we will make sure to destroy and uproot the bulk of the terrorist infrastructure. If thousands of terrorists are killed in the process that, too, will be an accomplishment.”
“And what of the Syrians?” argued Burg. “They have thirty thousand troops in northern and eastern Lebanon, as well as ground-to-air missiles.”
“Our intention,” said Begin cautiously, “is to make every effort to avoid confrontation with the Syrians, unless the Syrians decide to confront us.”
“Fine! And what about the day after Operation Peace for Galilee? Where do we go from there?”
“None of us can answer that question now. I am not going to play charlatan. I certainly cannot give a guarantee of what will come after. Perhaps our intervention will enable the Lebanese Christians to gain the upper hand. Perhaps it will break the back of the Nazi-PLO organization altogether. All I can say now is that once we’ve completed Operation Peace for Galilee we can then review how best to consolidate it. One thing for sure, we’re not in Lebanon to stay. Israel certainly does not seek a single centimeter of Lebanese territory.”
Burg threw him a melancholy smile, and said, “And have you put our American friends on notice so that they won’t complain we’re taking them by surprise again?”
The prime minister breathed an exasperated sigh, and said, “Yes and no. Sharon was in Washington last month and he all but forewarned Secretary of State Haig and others that they shouldn’t feel we’ve taken them by surprise if we respond massively to the incessant violations of the ceasefire which they themselves brokered.”
“And what was their response?”
“Haig is certainly sympathetic to our problems. He doesn’t doubt our inherent right to self-defense. But he gave us no green light. Perhaps he gave us an amber one, but I wouldn’t count on that either.”
Burg mulled this over in silence, his face studying the framed map on the wall by the prime minister’s desk. Its uppermost sector, marking the Galilean mountains, was colored a deep brown, which merged into the even deeper brown of southern Lebanon, with its craggy slopes, deep ravines, and dry stream beds. Perhaps Burg was thinking of his son, Avrum, a parachutist officer in the reserves, who would almost assuredly be conscripted to fight in that forbidding and fractured terrain.
Begin, as if reading his colleague’s mind, fixed his eyes unblinkingly on him, and in a voice full of the irrepressible drama always present in his rhetoric, said, “Yosef, the question is, who is going to prevail – the brutes over us or we over the brutes? The decision is ours to make. I don’t believe we have a choice. We will be nobody’s cowering Jew. We won’t wait for the Americans or the United Nations to save us. Those days are over. We have to defend ourselves. Without our readiness for self-sacrifice, there will be another Auschwitz. And if we have to pay a price for the sake of our self-defense, then we will have to pay it. Yes, war means bloodshed, bereavement, orphans – and that is a terrible thing to contemplate. But when an imperative arises to protect our people from being bled, as they are being bled now in Galilee, how can any one of us doubt what we have to do?”93
On Saturday night, 5 June, the prime minister convened the cabinet for a final vote on Operation Peace for Galilee, set to begin the following morning. There were three abstentions, one of them Dr. Burg’s. The next day, Ambassador Samuel Lewis rushed to Jerusalem to hand the prime minister an urgent letter from President Reagan:
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 65
