by Shimon Peres
It didn’t take long before word spread among the Mapai about Ben-Gurion’s anger and intentions. Bahir and I weren’t the only ones who understood the stakes of losing Ben-Gurion in the fight. That evening, they convened a meeting of the Mapai, chaired by Golda Meir. Golda was already a giant in the Zionist cause, and a close friend and advisor to Ben-Gurion. She would later become one of only two women to sign Israel’s declaration of independence, as well as its fourth prime minister. The debate was a brutal back-and-forth of arguments and emotions that went straight through the night. The final vote was called as the sun was coming up. When Golda was finished counting, we learned the result: Ben-Gurion had won with a razor-thin majority. The activist approach had prevailed. The movement remained alive.
It was a tremendously important victory, and not just on the immediate policy front. It felt to me and many others as though Ben-Gurion was unstoppable, that nothing and no one could prevent us from achieving our mission. Indeed, in that moment I felt as though the Jewish state had just been born, along with something new and powerful inside me. For the first time, I admitted to myself that a life of poetry and shepherding was not enough to contain my dreams. I had wanted so badly to join the pioneers. But to fight for a Jewish state in that way Ben-Gurion had just done—with urgent, imaginative, and moral leadership—this, too, was a frontier, and it was calling me to service.
Returning home to Sonia and Tsvia, it was impossible not to look back with enormous admiration at Ben-Gurion’s triumph. Of course, he had won the debate as a result of his brilliant rhetoric and, I firmly believed, the rightness of his claims. But I had seen something else, too, something that would strongly influence my thinking about leadership: when he had been most frustrated, most intent on walking away, he had remained open to the arguments made by two young men with a mere fraction of his experience and wisdom. He had nearly given up on the larger debate, but he had not given up on his belief in debate. During my career, I would encounter numerous situations in which parties found themselves full of mistrust and anger, where it seemed that all doors had been closed. Ben-Gurion had shown me that listening is not just a key element of good leadership, it is the key, the means to unlock doors that have been slammed shut by bitter dispute and resignation.
Little did I know how often I would end up thinking back to that moment in the hotel room—or how soon.
CHAPTER 2
INDEPENDENCE, ALLIANCE, AND THE FIGHT FOR SECURITY
On a bright and beautiful afternoon in May 1947, I sat in a chair at the edge of the mountainside, nursing two goats. A great band of fog was collecting below on the banks of the Kinneret, infusing the wind with a delicate mist.
“Shimon? Shimon!” I heard from behind. I turned to see a close friend running frantically toward me.
I stood up, surprised, concerned. “What is it?” I asked.
“Levi Eshkol is here again,” he said through panted breaths. “He’s here with a letter from Ben-Gurion.”
“What is it about?”
He paused again to catch his breath.
“You,” he stammered. “It’s about you.”
Eshkol, I would soon learn, was there to retrieve me. All the members of the kibbutz were called to a special meeting, where the contents of the letter were shared. He was writing to ask that I once again be relieved of my important kibbutz duties so that I could undertake another effort, allowing me to serve the underground Jewish army, known as the Haganah—which would later become the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Though it was Ben-Gurion making the request, the rules dictated that Alumot’s members would have to vote to release me. And so Ben-Gurion aimed not to command, but to persuade. He was convinced that our War of Independence was coming, which meant that military preparedness and a focus on security would become our next great imperative. “Look at this as one of the many tasks of the kibbutz, a new field to work,” he wrote, hoping to convince the kibbutz membership that this new mission was central to their own. After a brief deliberation, and in common cause, the members voted to honor Ben-Gurion’s wishes. I was to report to Haganah headquarters, an unassuming red house (known, uncreatively, as “The Red House”) on HaYarkon Street in Tel Aviv.
It was a call I was proud to answer, but how I could help, I wasn’t quite sure. I had no training beyond defending Ben-Shemen. I knew nothing of building armies or preparing for war.
When I walked into the Red House, I was relieved to see a person I recognized, a fellow member of Kibbutz Alumot. “Do you know where I’m supposed to go?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No one told me you were coming. Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing?”
“No, I don’t know. Ben-Gurion sent for me.”
“I see. Well, Yaakov Dori, the chief of staff, is quite ill, so his desk and chair are empty. Why don’t you sit there for now?”
A few hours later, Ben-Gurion entered the offices, flanked on either side by military advisors. As he walked by, he caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye.
“Shimon, good, you’re here,” he said, fishing from his pocket a few sheets of well-worn paper, which he handed to me. It was a list in two columns, one short and one long.
“These are the weapons we have,” he said, pointing to the first column, “and these are the weapons we need. If we shall have only what we have, we are finished.”
Ben-Gurion’s concerns were not without merit. Developments in the United Nations suggested that the General Assembly was likely to vote on a resolution that would create a partitioned Palestine, and lead to the establishment of a Jewish state. In isolation, this was cause for elation. But Ben-Gurion was deeply worried. He expected that war would be declared on the newly formed Jewish state, both from inside its new borders and from its Arab neighbors. What good is the birth of a new state, he would say, if it’s immediately strangled in its crib? Ben-Gurion set out to transform the Haganah for this very reason: to ensure that the newly formed state wouldn’t find itself without a military to defend itself. “This will no longer be a war of platoons,” he said. “It is essential to set up a modern army.”
“What can I do?” I asked Ben-Gurion as he handed me the extensive shopping list of weapons.
“It’s simple,” he said. “Find these weapons for us as fast as you can.”
I returned to my borrowed desk to review the document, but found it was like reading a shopping list in a language I didn’t speak. I opened the desk drawer to get a notepad and pencil to start taking notes when I noticed, inside the desk, a letter addressed to Ben-Gurion that Dori must have saved. It was written by one of our generals, one who had been offered the position of chief of staff and, as the letter indicated, had chosen to turn it down.
“I don’t desire to be chief of staff for six days,” he wrote, an explanation that made little sense to me until I asked a colleague to explain it.
“Why did the general turn down the job?” I asked.
“A lot of reasons.”
“Like what?”
“The bullets,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the list,” he said, pointing at one of the entries for what we already had. “Six million bullets.”
“That sounds like a lot,” I admitted. The man laughed.
“When the war comes, we’ll need a million bullets a day.” Before walking away, he added, “Not an easy job.”
This was what the general had meant—that he was not willing to wage a defensive war with less than a week’s worth of ammunition. It was stunning to hear for two reasons: First, I knew—all of us knew—that the state would face danger in war. Great danger, even. But grave danger? To be so ill-equipped that we would exhaust our supply of ammunition before week’s end was a terrifying prospect. But even more shocking than the revelation itself was the notion that someone so expert could be asked to assist in such an important cause and would turn it down because it seemed too hard. Ben-Gurion was not asking for help on a side project with li
ttle importance; he was asking the general to help with the most central project of all: the defense of a state not yet born, and the realization of the Zionist dream. The magnitude of the challenge may have seemed overwhelming, but what possible answer was worthy of our history—and our future—other than an emphatic and hopeful “yes”?
I could hear my grandfather’s words echoing in my mind: “Always remain Jewish.” Being Jewish meant many things to me, but first and foremost it meant having the moral courage to do what was required on behalf of the Jewish people. At the time, I may have lacked the experience and rank to know much about the weapons on Ben-Gurion’s list, but decisions needed to be made about ammunition and alliances and weapons and war, and rather than run from the challenge, I fully embraced it.
•••
I am perceived by many to be a man of great contradictions. For the past forty years I have been known as one of Israel’s most vocal doves, as a man singularly focused on peace. But the first two decades of my career were spent not in pursuit of peace but in preparation for war. For a time, it was said that I was one of Israel’s most assertive hawks. In this it is assumed that I must have changed, that my efforts and outlook were defined by a sweeping moral transformation. There is a certain poetry to that narrative, but it invents a paradox where none actually exists. It was not me that changed; it was the situation that changed.
Peace is a purpose—a goal worthy of the chase, while war is a function—born out of reluctant necessity. No rational person could prefer the latter. When peace first appeared possible, I pursued it with all of my energies. When Arab leaders were open to negotiation, I said I prefer negotiation, too. The vision of the prophets was one of peace and justice, of morality and tolerance. “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” the Torah tells us. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” This was the guiding vision of the Jewish people. But it must be remembered that there was a time when our circumstances were quite different; a time when, rather than negotiate, our Arab neighbors sought only to destroy us. There was a time when Israel stood defenseless in a sea of enemies, a time of extraordinary and constant danger. These were the years before peace was possible—the years when I was a hawk without compromise.
Our neighbors’ malign intentions were not the only reason we faced almost certain destruction. The Middle East was under a Western arms embargo, as the United States, the British, and the French pledged to remain neutral in its affairs. In practice, Israel was the only real victim of the embargo; the Soviets were eagerly supplying weapons to the Arab states that were threatening our destruction, even if the West was not supplying us. Thus, our enemies had a free flow of weapons to equip their already vast armies, while we had six days’ worth of ammunition, a militia made up largely of farmers and Holocaust survivors with no formal training—and no clear path to the weapons we would depend upon once attacked.
The only way to protect ourselves was to break the embargo—to purchase weapons illegally, and secretly bring them home.
Days earlier, I had been milking cows on a kibbutz. Now I was being thrown into one of the most dramatic periods of my life. I would build friendships with arms dealers and partnerships with arms smugglers. I would undertake secret missions using fake passports, working in the shadows to purchase as much as I could. In time, I developed an expertise, both in granular details of the arms we were seeking, and in the work it would take to acquire them. I would learn everything from the defects inherent in a particular type of rifle, to the fuel supply needed to carry a warship across the Atlantic. And I would become well versed in the strange combination of deference and demand that was required to get the best equipment delivered on time. But at the beginning, all I knew was that my task was essential and there was no time to waste. I was intensely curious to learn all I could about these technical details, but I was not at all curious about the reason I had to do so: it went without thinking.
There was only one country that was willing to send us arms directly: Czechoslovakia. The other satellite nations behind the Iron Curtain had joined the arms boycott against us, but Stalin saw opportunity in the Western embargo, believing that a show of support might bring our young socialist country closer to his communist empire. And so he let the Czechs supply us with the arms we desperately needed. There was a stunning symbolism to what we received; most had been manufactured at facilities set up by the Nazis in occupied Czech territory. The very same weapons that had once been used against us would now be used to try to protect us.
Within six months of my having arrived at the Haganah headquarters, I had helped stockpile an incredible trove of arms—and just in time. During the last week of November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly’s two-month-long debate on UN Resolution 181 came to a head. If the resolution were adopted, it would put an end to the British mandate and partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, thereby leading to our declaration of independence, and likely to armed conflict. But none of us knew, inside or outside government, if the resolution had the votes to prevail. Its adoption required a two-thirds majority of member nations, a challenge more akin to scaling a cliff than climbing a mountain. On November 26, we listened to the debate on our radios, as the representatives of nation after nation came to speak, holding our destiny in their hands.
The Arab nations were uniformly opposed to the resolution, making the case that the UN lacked the authority to even consider the matter. The representative from Saudi Arabia referred to the resolution as a “flagrant aggression,” and was followed by the Syrian representative, who called it “the greatest political scandal of all time.” The USSR, which had once opposed the partition plan, was the first to support the resolution, arguing that the one-state solution was “unworkable and impractical.” In the same speech, the representative dismissed the claims of the Arab nations, insisting that the UN not only had the right to intervene in the name of international peace, but was duty-bound by its charter to do so.
When the debate was over, it remained unclear whether we had enough support. Even on the day of the vote—November 29, 1947—there were still seven nations that hadn’t announced their intentions. And though we had gotten commitments from a great many nations, we weren’t convinced that all would be kept.
As dusk settled over Tel Aviv, scores of people gathered in Magen David Square, where loudspeakers had been set up to broadcast the vote. As the static cleared, we could hear Osvaldo Aranha, the president of the General Assembly, call for a vote on the resolution. We listened attentively, along with Jewish communities from all over the world.
“Afghanistan? No. Argentina? Abstention. Australia? Yes.”
Every nation called, every answer called back, rang in our ears until it felt we had stopped breathing entirely. Ben-Gurion and I paced as we listened, as though our steps had the power to speed up time.
“El Salvador? Abstention. Ethiopia? Abstain. France? Yes.” At this there was a sudden commotion in the hall, followed by an aggressive banging of the gavel.
“I call on the public, and I hope that you will not have any interference on the voting in this debate,” the president of the General Assembly warned, apparently addressing the gathered crowd in the gallery. “I am confident in the way you will behave regarding this serious decision taken by this assembly,” he continued sternly, “because I have decided not to allow anybody to interfere in our decision!”
The moments passed. People held tight to each other in the square as the remaining votes were cast, hoping, if not yet believing, that something extraordinary was about to happen.
“Uruguay? Yes. Venezuela? Yes? Yemen? No. Yugoslavia? Abstain.” Again we heard the gavel bang, this time to signify the end of voting. And then, the simple words that would change the course of Jewish history: “The resolution . . . was adopted by thirty-three votes; thirteen against, ten abstentions.”
A raucous cheer explode
d from the crowd. There were warm embraces and incredulous laughter, tears of hope and of joy, moments of reflection. As word traveled through Tel Aviv, Jews took to the streets in a spontaneous outpouring. Ben-Gurion and I stood together as we watched thousands of Jews joining hands with one another, dancing the hora over and over again. Never once, in our two thousand years of exile, had there been a more ambitious dream for our people than the dream to return home. It had been just over fifty years since Theodor Herzl started the movement “to lay the foundation stone of the house which is to shelter the Jewish Nation.” By the standards of world history, we had achieved this with remarkable speed. But by the standards of our recent history, most immediately the murder of six million innocents and near extinction of European Jewry, we could never forget that we were nearly too late.
It was easy to get swept up in the wonder of the moment, but Ben-Gurion and I knew the celebration was premature. A United Nations resolution alone would not guarantee us our state.
“Today they are dancing in the street,” he said to me with a wariness in his voice. “Tomorrow, they will have to shed blood in the street.”
He was right. In the days after the resolution, we began to get reports of Arab militiamen attacking Jews in the settlements. We received harrowing cables from around the Middle East, of Jews being attacked in retaliation for the vote. There were detailed accounts of devastation—of synagogues and homes turned to ash in Syria, of mobs chasing down Jews from Egypt to Lebanon. The Arab League had declared its intentions—to prevent the resolution from being enacted and force the Jews out—to destroy the State of Israel before it could ever be drawn on a map. They had begun the process of carrying through on that dark pledge.