by Herman Wouk
“Oh, come on, Max! It’s not the hijacking, it’s the rescue.”
“My dear, exactly. Over and over the Arabs create these occasions, and the Israelis rise to them, thrill mankind, and compel very reluctant admiration.”
The Mozart piano concerto ends. The first news bulletin is, “A report just in, not yet confirmed by the Israeli government. In the daring Entebbe rescue three hostages and one Israeli soldier were killed.”
Yael turns scared eyes to Roweh. He takes her hand. “Yael, my dear, you don’t know that that’s true, you don’t know that your son took part. And if he did, that he was that one soldier is very, very long odds.”
She mutely nods, but her eyes remain scared. Back in his River House apartment, she tries and tries to call Kishote, and keeps getting the maddening high ding-a-ling that signals overloaded circuits. But she persists, figuring he will stay late, though by now it is ten at night there. At last comes the welcome bleep of a call going through. “Oh, Yael, hi!” Miriam, his longtime secretary sounds exhilarated. “He’s speaking to the Ramatkhal. Can he call you back?”
“No, no, I’ll hold. God knows when he’ll get another overseas line. Miriam, how about Aryeh, is he all right?”
“Why not? He’s fine. He was here in the office an hour ago.” Yael gasps with relief. “Wait, here’s the general.”
Earlier that afternoon, on the outer fringe of the dancing, singing, cheering mob at Ben Gurion airport, Don Kishote was watching and waiting for Aryeh. When he espied his son wearily descending from the Hercules, he darted over the tarmac and caught him in a fierce long bear hug. Haggard, hoarse, Aryeh gestured at the hundred raggle-taggle hostages coming down the ramp of the leading Hercules. “The question is, Abba,” he said bitterly, “whether all of them are worth one Yoni.”
“They’re Jews, Aryeh,” Kishote said. “Yoni thought so.”
Benny Luria and his son Danny, now a Phantom pilot, were also watching the jubilation. Towering over his father, his flaming red hair clipped air force style, Danny had searched for and found Luria on the thronged airfield, the Talmud volume under his arm. As they watched the hostages stream out on the tarmac to be rushed, embraced, and tearfully kissed by their families, Benny Luria said to his son, “Now I know why Dov died.”
In the early days of cinema, a much-used comic device was to reverse the film. A diver would fly up out of the water and land dry on the board, or a collapsed building would rise out of its rubble and stand upright. With the Entebbe rescue, something like that happened to Israel’s smashed Humpty-Dumpty image, as Cookie Freeman had put it to Don Kishote. The shattered egg pulled itself together, the shell fragments coalesced around the albumen and yolk, the cracks disappeared, the egg leaped up on the wall, and behold, there was Humpty-Dumpty again, smooth, whole, smiling. And the world now knew that whenever and wherever Jews were threatened because they were Jews, Humpty-Dumpty would have to be reckoned with.
39
The Peacemaker
November 16, 1977
Dearest Queenie —
As always, hearing your voice for a few minutes has brightened my day. I’ve just this minute hung up, and as promised I’m writing in more detail about the incredible Sadat development. By every indication the man is really coming. Not an hour ago, for instance, the Foreign Ministry notified me that poor sick Golda wants me to escort her to the airport to meet him. So I have to try on the uniform I’ve put on only once or twice since Rabin relented after Entebbe and let me retire. I hope it still fits.
You ask, what is the mood in Israel? I would say, “dumb-founded.” The public can’t believe that it’s happening. Rumors and guesses are flying. At one extreme people say it’s Messiah’s time, at the other that it’s only one more Arab trick before another surprise attack. I myself cautiously hope it’s a real peace move, based not on Egyptian good will but on the bizarre shift in our politics that’s put Menachem Begin into power after nineteen years. He’s been our ultrahawk and perpetual opposition leader, and Sadat may figure that if anyone can sell our people a tough peace deal, Begin can.
You also ask what my work at Rafael is all about. Well, Rafael is the Armament Development Authority, and it produces advanced weaponry for one of two reasons: either to give us an edge in battle, or because our enemies have acquired stuff which no big power will sell us. I’m a political appointee, my lump of sugar for my long service as Rabin’s military secretary. My dream of going back to biochemistry is forgotten, I can’t make up those thirty years as a soldier. This is as near to science as I can come, but the genius and self-sacrifice of the scientists and engineers under me make me feel humble. I’m not in their class, and never could have been. Half of them could go abroad for two or three times the salary we pay them, but they love Israel. My brother Michael, may he rest in peace, was the scientist in the family. If he’d lived he might have been up for a Nobel Prize, and I’m an idiot by comparison. I did well to serve in the army, after all.
I must be doing this job well because Begin is keeping me on, though I’ve become a crusading dove, making speeches, signing petitions, organizing rallies. Was it Napoleon who said no king could sit long on bayonets? A democracy certainly can’t. There must be a political solution to the historic bind we’re in. I’m as suspicious about Sadat as any hawk, like my son Noah, but at least I’m willing to hear the man. Noah and I can’t talk about the territories anymore. He would hang on to every square inch and make the Arabs learn to like it or leave, if it takes a hundred years. I would withdraw even unilaterally. I know we can’t keep a million helots in perpetual subjection. So my rising sea commander and I don’t talk politics, Nakhama and I delight in our two granddaughters, and all’s well.
The big family news is that Galia’s engaged at last to “Jackie,” a rich American such as Israeli girls dream of, making good money in Haifa real estate. He’s a distant relative of ours, and they’ve been going together for years. He lost an arm during the war, but that was more of an obstacle for him than for her. It’s taken her a long time to convince Jack that she didn’t just pity him. The cousin business also gave them pause, but it’s on, and Nakhama and I are happy about that. He’s a good man. We’re happy about Ruti, too. She’s been in Galia’s shadow for years, but now that she’s turning seventeen she’s come to life, and the boys swarm. She’s beautiful enough to be a model, and almost as tall as I am.
Yes, Queenie, I assure you Nakhama did love Paris. She still talks about it. She told me she’d never forget her lunch with you in the restaurant boat, but she’s never said anything more about it. I know she came back to the hotel that day stone drunk. I presume that you were in a comparable state, and that you two ladies dissected me between you like an anatomy class cadaver. Anyway she’s had some kind words for you since, which is all to the good.
(Pause while I try on that uniform. I’ll give a truthful report.)
Guess what, it fits! Barely. No matter, I need it only on such ceremonial occasions. Unless, God forbid, another war comes along, then I’ll be invited to stand around the War Room and give advice. Through four wars, I’ve smiled at those poor has-beens in their tight old uniforms. Now I’m one of them. So I pray to our old Jewish God that Sadat is serious, and that I’ll never have to put it on in earnest.
Love always,
Wolf
“She talked me into it,” said Sam Pasternak, holding out his glass to Amos. His son had brought a full bottle of cognac to the maternity ward lounge, and it was now half-empty. The wall clock showed past 3 A.M. “She changed my mind.”
“Eva talked you into it? Eva, your slave? Abba, Eva couldn’t talk you into changing your shirt.”
“Oh, no? Wait till you’re married, my boy,” mumbled Pasternak, downing cognac. He had been there alone on the shabby couch of the lounge since almost midnight, and Amos had come at half-past two. “Just you wait. You’ll find out about these women who are your slaves. We had agreed on no kids. Then she wanted one. The doctor warned her about a
first baby at her age, with her pelvic problem. I said forget it, aren’t we happy enough? No, no, she didn’t feel fulfilled, so — Well?” A dark skinny young nurse was looking in. “What now, Sister?”
“She’s doing better, but the doctor urges you to go and get some sleep, it’ll be a long time yet. He has your telephone number, and —”
“What about the baby’s heartbeat?”
“It’s all right. False alarm.”
“Look, Amos, just leave that bottle and run along,” Pasternak said. “You’ve got your hands full with the Sadat business. I’m all right.”
“You do believe he’s coming, Abba?”
“Who, Sadat? Oh, he’s coming all right.”
“To address the Knesset in Jerusalem? You really believe that?”
“Why do you ask? Does military intelligence have contrary information?”
By habit Amos glanced around and spoke low. “Even if he’s serious, and that’s doubtful, he may be prevented. Of course his parliament applauded the speech, why, even Arafat did, but nobody there could conceive that his offer was serious, let alone that Begin would take him up on it. His Foreign Minister and Chief of Staff are threatening to resign. That’s hard intelligence, Abba, and they’ve got the bureaucracy and the army with them.”
“He’s coming, all the same,” said Pasternak, “I know.”
“L’Azazel, Abba, what do you know about Sadat that army intelligence doesn’t?”
Pasternak drank, and said with a mulish headshake, “Never mind. You’ll find out about these women who are your slaves, Amos. Now, how are you getting on with Ruti Barak?”
“Why do you keep harping on Ruti Barak? She’s cute, yes, but young, young. I happened to take Ruti to a movie once, you saw us there, and now you’ve got us engaged.”
“Lovely girl, Amos. Great family. Sure, she’s very young. But compared to that Parisienne yenta of yours —”
Amos held up a flat palm, and bit out three words, “No more, Abba.”
“I’ll put it to you short and clear, my son, you’ll have to choose very soon between the lady and your future. I told the lady herself that once, and —”
“Yes, I know you did, and you had your nerve.”
“I’m your father. You’ve got an outstanding record, and an intrigue like this —”
“Abba, how about Dayan’s intrigues, did they ruin his career?”
“Dayan’s been a rotten model for a whole generation of army officers, and I was no model myself, but standards were looser in our time, and —”
The nurse came scurrying in. “Well, what do you know, things are starting to happen. Surprising, but good.”
“Aha!” Pasternak jumped up. “And the doc wanted me to go home! How much longer?”
“You may as well stay. She’s very brave, your wife, and very sweet. Gorgeous, too.”
“You’re telling me?”
As the nurse left, Amos baldly cut off the Irene Fleg topic by saying, “Abba, do you know that Motta Gur intends to speak out tomorrow to denounce Sadat’s visit, call it a trick to disarm us?”
“So? Well, I love Motta, and it’s his job to be suspicious and on guard. All the same, Sadat’s coming to make peace.”
“Is he? The Japanese were in Washington talking peace, remember, when they bombed Pearl Harbor. Egyptian deployments these days are damned disquieting, I can tell you that as a fact.”
Pasternak fell silent, emptied his glass, and held it out for more. “Very well. I can tell you something, too. Right now three people in Israel know what I know. The other two are Begin and Dayan. I’ll make you the fourth, since I know you can control your tongue, if not your yetzer horah [sinful urge].”
In low tones, Pasternak described two trips to Morocco that he had arranged for Moshe Dayan, now Begin’s Foreign Minister. The King of Morocco had invited Dayan, he had gone disguised in a beatnik wig, mustache, and dark glasses, and there he had met with emissaries from Sadat. What had emerged was that, if Begin was interested in exchanging the Sinai for a peace treaty, so was Sadat. But President Carter had unexpectedly called the Soviet Union, the Arabs, and Israel to a conference in Geneva next month, and his State Department had drafted a “comprehensive peace plan” for the Russians and Americans to cosponsor. This had thrown a huge monkey wrench into Sadat’s secret separate deal.
“Whatever possessed Carter to drag the Soviet Union back into the Middle East,” said Pasternak, “when for years Anwar Sadat and the Nixon and Ford administrations had been pushing them out, remains a mystery, Amos. But that’s why Sadat’s coming to Jerusalem.”
Comprehension was dawning on Amos’s intent face. “Elohim! So that’s it. Sadat saw his secret negotiations through Dayan going down the drain.”
“You’ve got it. Sadat’s torpedoing that Geneva conference, whatever it costs him in the Arab world, by coming out into the open as a peacemaker. Carter’s driven him to it. But this way of doing it — flying to Jerusalem to address the Knesset — is a stroke of absolute political genius. He’s a great man, damn him. We’re going to have a peace. At high cost, but a peace.”
“By my life,” Amos pounded fist into palm, “then I win the argument we were having at Intelligence, when you phoned me that Eva was in labor. You’re the one who made me study American history so hard, Abba, and I was comparing this visit to Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Half of them didn’t know what I was talking about, and the others said I was crazy.”
“Appomattox? You are crazy. Sadat will get the Sinai back for a piece of paper. Some surrender!”
“Abba, he’s coming here to surrender the entire Arab war aim. Can’t even you see that? He’s breaking the perimeter. He’s recognizing that we’re back in the Land to stay. Just watch the Arab response! No matter what he says to the Knesset, no matter how tough he talks, they’ll call it a catastrophe, a complete abandonment of the cause. They’ll ostracize him for twenty years, wait and see, and from their viewpoint they’ll be right. But it’s a bad cause, just as slavery was a bad cause, and that’s why I compare the visit to Appomattox. Sadat’s abandoning a bad lost cause, and Robert E. Lee had to do the same —”
“It’s a girl.” The nurse darted in, looking as happy as if she were one of the family. “Big and pretty, and your wife is fine.”
“Thank God!” Pasternak embraced his son. “Can we see her?”
“Your wife? No, not yet. The baby, sure. Come with me.”
In a glassed-off room full of bassinets, a basket freshly labelled PASTERNAK was at the window, with a yawning wrapped pink baby in it, blinking brilliant blue eyes.
“By God,” murmured Amos, “how beautiful.”
Barely getting the words out of his throat, Pasternak said, “I’m too old for this.”
“Glad you changed your mind, Abba?”
“Might as well be glad. There she is.”
Barak sat in a worn red armchair, in the parlor of Golda’s little house outside Tel Aviv, remembering the old crisis days when she had slept here instead of in the Prime Minister’s Jerusalem residence. Many an hour he had spent in this chair, and some entire nights, too. Now, though Golda was out of public life and under a cloud in Israel, she remained a favorite of American Jews, and she had cut short a fund-raising tour to fly home for Sadat’s arrival. The same cigarette smell came wafting down the stairs, and hearing her tread, much lighter than in former days, he stood up. “How do I look?” she said as she descended.
A hard question to handle. The leukemia had been thinning her terribly, yet in a strange way it was now restoring an ethereal semblance of the beauty which had long ago made her romances the talk of the Yishuv. Her best blue wool suit hung very loose on her, her hair was carefully styled, and he thought her cheeks were touched with rouge.
“Very elegant, Madame Prime Minister.”
“Yes, I’m sure. Belle of the ball,” she said in her sarcastic cigarette rasp. “At least that man is not going to see me looking down and out. Will I need a
coat? This suit is warm.”
“It’ll be windy at the airport, Golda.”
She grumbled, pulling a dark cloth coat from the hall closet. “Now he comes. Did he need a war, with nearly three thousand of our boys killed and maybe twenty thousand of theirs, to convince him? Why did he keep making those tricky peace proposals that I couldn’t possibly accept? Why didn’t he just do this long ago?”
“I guess he’d answer that his people first had to redeem their honor,” said Barak, helping her on with the coat.
“What honor? We crushed them, didn’t we? They were pleading for mercy at the end. They had the whole world forcing us to let them off.” Barak did not comment, and she turned on him. “Well, am I right or wrong?”
“Golda, what they remember is October sixth. It’s their new national holiday, October Sixth. They name bridges and boulevards after it. That’s when they shattered our Six-Day War image and almost beat us.”
“Almost.” Sharp snap.
“Yes, but it took us three weeks to recover, and in their version only America saved us. So they got back their honor.”
“Yes, I know that version. Ha! And now they’ll get back the Sinai, too.” She was tucking in her collar at a mirror. “And that they could have had, all of it, without bloodshed. Poor Levi Eshkol offered it for a peace treaty, right after we won the Six-Day War. And what was their answer? All those no’s of Khartoum. ‘No negotiation, no recognition, no peace, no nothing!’ ”
“That was Nasser’s doing, Golda.”
“Nasser, Sadat, is there a real difference? I hope I’ll live to find out. Well, let’s go.”
Guli Gulinkoff possessed not only the one silver Lincoln in Israel, but also the one Hollywood-style villa with a private screening room, and the only supernew Japanese TV system projecting images the size of theater films. Invitations to watch basketball, soccer, or American miniseries at Guli’s villa were much sought after among Haifa’s smart set; but for the greatest TV spectacle in Israel’s short turbulent history — the arrival of the President of Egypt at Ben Gurion airport to offer peace — no invitations could be had. Daphna Luria and Guli had invited, for that same night, a small party of families and friends to announce their engagement. They considered calling off the party, but decided not to. “After all, how long will it take the mamzer to land,” said Guli, “and go through all the ceremonial shit? Half an hour? No reason to cancel. That’s bad luck, anyway.”
