Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Part of the Israeli dilemma was that they had never really confronted what they themselves wanted. Perpetual conflict had pushed the issue of permanent borders into some distant future, but the rude prospect of actual peace demanded immediate choices. What was peace worth to them? Swollen with territories seized in 1948 and 1967, Israel now stretched all the way from the hills of southern Lebanon to the Red Sea, and from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. All this space provided strategic depth, something Israel had never had before. Sinai had been a historic concourse for attacking armies; the Golan Heights had been the dominating redoubt for Syrian artillery; the West Bank was a hideout for terrorists. Why surrender any of it? Would peace replace the security that Israel gained from having these territories under military control?

  There was also something deeply appealing about the largeness of the space the occupation afforded; aesthetically, Israel looked properly filled out. Before the occupation of the West Bank, the country had appeared almost bitten in half. The little fishing village of Sharm el-Sheikh, strategically located at the southernmost tip of the peninsula at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, had been turned into an Israeli resort town, with classy hotels and dive shops. Radio stations in Tel Aviv regularly gave weather reports for the Red Sea beaches. Israelis had settled into a comfortable feeling of ownership over all this real estate, even if the threat of war never quite disappeared. Moreover, Sinai had oil, which resource-poor Israel was helping itself to. And finally, there was the issue of Jerusalem, the object and focus of Jewish prayers for millennia. Was peace really worth surrendering any of these precious properties?

  After lunch, Sadat journeyed to the Knesset to make his speech. The eerie and unprecedented moment of his entrance was heralded by bugle calls. For the first time in the institution’s history, members of the Knesset were permitted to applaud—although not everyone did so. A psychological wall still stood between them, which Sadat meant to obliterate. Even his bitterest foes recognized that Sadat had placed his life dangerously on the line. He had made it harder for the two peoples to hate each other, and the loss of that luxurious emotion on both sides stirred up feelings of murderous rage against him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there are moments in the life of nations and peoples when it is incumbent on those known for their wisdom and clarity of vision to overlook the past, with all its complexities and weighing memories, in a bold drive towards new horizons,” Sadat began. He spoke words that no Arab leader had ever said before—words many in the audience never imagined they would hear. “You want to live with us in this part of the world. In all sincerity, I tell you, we welcome you among us, with full security and safety,” Sadat declared. “We used to reject you,” he admitted. “We had our reasons and our claims, yes. We used to brand you as ‘so-called’ Israel, yes. We were together in international conferences and organizations and our representatives did not, and still do not, exchange greetings, yes. This has happened and is still happening.”

  Then his tone sharpened. “Frankness makes it incumbent upon me to tell you the following,” he said. “I have not come here for a separate agreement between Egypt and Israel.” Many in the room, including Begin, hoped to set the Palestinian issue aside; in fact, Sadat himself had occasionally seemed ambivalent on the subject, but now he was adamant. “Let me tell you without the slightest hesitation that I have not come to you under this dome to make a request that your troops evacuate the occupied territories. Complete withdrawal from the Arab territories occupied after 1967 is a logical and undisputed necessity. Nobody should plead for that.” He went on: “Peace cannot be worth its name unless it is based on justice, and not on the occupation of the land of others. It would not be appropriate for you to demand for yourselves what you deny others.… You have to give up, once and for all, the dreams of conquests, and give up the belief that force is the best method for dealing with the Arabs.”

  Sadat promised that Israel could live safely and securely among her Arab neighbors, under certain conditions. “Any talk about permanent peace based on justice, and any move to ensure our coexistence in peace and security in this part of the world, would become meaningless, while you occupy Arab territories by force of arms,” he said, adding, “We insist on complete withdrawal from these territories, including Arab Jerusalem.”

  The mood in the Knesset, which had been so buoyant, quickly deflated. The parliamentarians settled in for what now seemed very familiar Arab demands, although no other leader had ever offered real peace in the bargain. “It is no use to refrain from recognizing the Palestinian people and their rights to statehood and rights of return,” Sadat continued, mopping his gleaming forehead in the stiflingly hot room. “If you have found the legal and moral justification to set up a national home on a land that did not all belong to you, it is incumbent upon you to show understanding of the insistence of the people of Palestine on establishing, once again, a state on their land.” Ezer Weizman, the minister of defense, scribbled a note: “We have to prepare for war.” Begin took it and nodded.

  It was a strange performance. When has it ever happened that the defeated party—defeated in four wars, in fact—has entered the enemy capital to lay down the terms of peace? When Sadat finished, Begin did not applaud.

  Although Begin was well known for his oratory in this chamber, his response was improvised and full of rebuke. The sense of grievance was never far from his lips under any circumstances, and in the curious role reversal that was being played out in this encounter, Begin did not offer his own terms of peace; instead, he defended Israel’s right to exist at all. “No sir, we took no foreign land,” he exclaimed. “We returned to our homeland. The bond between our people and this land is eternal. It was created at the dawn of human history.… Here we became a nation. And when we were exiled from our land because of the force that was applied against us, and when we were thrust far from our land, we never forgot this land, even for one day. We prayed for her. We longed for her.” He mentioned Sadat’s trip to the Holocaust museum earlier in the day. “With your own eyes you saw what the fate of our people was when this homeland was taken from it,” he said. “No one came to our rescue, not from the East and not from the West. And therefore we, this entire generation, the generation of Holocaust and resurrection, swore an oath of allegiance: never again shall we endanger our people.”

  Peace had seemed so close at hand when Sadat’s plane had landed in Israel, but when he left it was still very far away.

  CARTER HAD MET Begin when he came to Washington in July 1977, only a month after the Israeli had taken office. Carter immediately recognized the man’s formidable intellect—“His IQ is probably as high as anybody I’ve ever met,” he noted—as well as his biblical knowledge, which Carter hoped would help them find common ground. On the other hand, he was shocked by Begin’s arrogance and evident indifference to the effort that the president of the United States was putting into making peace in the Middle East. In Carter’s opinion, Begin made it clear from the beginning that “he wasn’t going to do a damn thing.”

  Begin was slightly built, with a large balding head and a long chin, which gave his head something of the shape of a light bulb. Behind glasses with heavy frames, his eyes were blue-gray; the thinning strands of hair that remained were reddish brown. When he smiled, he exposed a prominent gap in his front teeth. His disinterest in fashion had become a trademark, but on the other hand he was elaborately formal by nature and addicted to ceremonies. Dignity was an obsession with him. His stiff-necked code of honor and rococo manners encouraged caricature and ridicule among his opponents. “Begin is absolutely convinced that he holds the truth in his back pocket,” Ezer Weizman observed. “Consequently, in addressing others—including the heads of great nations—he adopts the manner of a teacher talking to his pupils. There is something overbearing in his manner.” Views that did not correspond to his ironclad philosophy of life were rejected as naive or subversive. “Begin simply drives anyone who disagrees with
him up the wall,” noted Samuel Lewis, the American ambassador to Israel. Lewis considered it merely one of Begin’s many tactics. “He exhibited a rich arsenal of tools: anger, sarcasm, bombast; exaggeration, wearying repetition of arguments, historical lessons from dark chapters of Jewish history; and stubbornness.”

  The prime minister carried an emotional burden that was particularly acute for Holocaust survivors. “Against the eyes of every son of the nation appear and reappear the carriages of death,” he said in one of his despairing proclamations from the underground. “The Black Nights when the sound of an infernal screeching of wheels and the sighs of the condemned press in from afar and interrupt one’s slumber; to remind one of what happened to mother, father, brothers, to a son, a daughter, a People. In these inescapable moments every Jew in the country feels unwell because he is well. He asks himself: Is there not something treasonous in his own existence. He asks: Can he sit by and allow the terrible contradiction between the march to death there and the flow of life here.” He concluded: “And there is no way to run from these questions.”

  In private, Begin was guarded and suffered frequent mood swings that would prompt him to retreat into his office and cancel meetings. The prime minister surrounded himself with aides who were little more than acolytes, most of them drawn from the underground, who humored him and dared not question his authority. He was by no means a skilled administrator. He had little understanding of the economy or international affairs beyond his region. In his entire career, he had one main political idea, which was to expand Israel’s borders. His attitude toward the Arabs who lived inside those borders was ambivalent. He devoutly believed that the State of Israel itself belonged entirely to the Jewish people; on the other hand, he suggested that if Israel annexed the territories it acquired through war, the country should award citizenship to every Arab who desired it.

  He was not intensely religious. He went to temple mainly on the holidays. Still, he was totally absorbed by the tragic conundrum of Jewish history. Other countries could be multireligious, and other religions could be multinational, he believed, but with Jews there was only one nationality and a single religion, and neither could be separated from the other. His adviser and speechwriter, Yehuda Avner, recalled an evening of Bible study in Begin’s home, the night before he was flying to Washington. Begin proposed to discuss the text from Numbers 22–24. In the story, forty years had passed since the Jews fled Egypt, and their wandering in the wilderness was nearly at an end. The fearful Moabite King Balak attempted to bribe the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites before they could enter the Promised Land, where the Moabites resided. Balaam refused. “How shall I curse, whom God has not cursed?” he tells the king, and then he adds, referring to the Israelites, “Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among nations.”

  “Is this not a startlingly accurate prophecy of our Jewish people’s experience in all history?” Begin asked the assembled guests. Why did Israel endure such solitude in the world? There were many Christian states, and Muslim states, and Buddhist states; there were many countries that spoke English, French, Arabic, and so on; but there was only one Jewish country in the world, and only one that spoke Hebrew. Israel stood alone. “Why have we no sovereign kith and kin anywhere in the world?” he asked. “No other country in the world shares our unique narrative.” The only bond Israel enjoyed with any other people was with fellow Jews in the Diaspora, “and everywhere they are a minority and nowhere do they enjoy any form of national or cultural autonomy.”

  Begin started his first meeting with Carter in the White House with an overview of the modern history of Israel, recounting the attacks by Arabs on Jews in the 1948 War of Independence. “There were only 650,000 Jews [in Palestine] in those days, and we had to fight three armies, plus the Iraqis,” he said. “I am not exaggerating when I say that sometimes we had to fight with our bare hands and sometimes with homemade arms that didn’t always work. We lost one percent of our population in that war, 6,000 people.” Begin grew emotional as he spoke about the terror attacks on the part of the Palestinians. “The bloodshed has gone on permanently. My grandchild was bombed in Jerusalem.3

  “In May of 1967, I remember being at the Independence Day parade when we got news of Egypt’s mobilization in Sinai,” Begin continued. “For two weeks we were surrounded by a ring of steel. There were more tanks facing us than those that Germany had sent against the Soviet Union in 1941. All of the Arab capitals were calling for our death, and wanting to throw us into the sea.” Faced with such a threat, he said, “we decided to take the initiative. The Six-Day War was an act of legitimate self-defense to save ourselves from total destruction.”

  Begin had brought along Dr. Shmuel Katz, a trenchant ideologue and a colleague from their days in the Jewish underground. The meeting took a turn into the dark forest of anxiety that enshrouded Begin and his intimates. Katz unrolled a map of the region, showing the small state of Israel in blue surrounded by twenty-one Arab countries in red—roughly like New Jersey compared to the rest of the United States. Katz asserted that it was a pure myth that there were Palestinians living on the land before Israel was established, and to prove it, he referenced Mark Twain’s dyspeptic account of his travels in the Holy Land in Innocents Abroad, in which he described Upper Galilee in 1867. (“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation.”) Katz went on to say that the Arabs who fled after 1948 had no real roots in the country. “Peasants after all do not flee, even in the midst of war,” he said airily.

  Yehuda Avner observed Carter’s clenched jaw and pinched expression as the indefatigable Katz continued his obtuse attempt to undermine any claims that Palestine was ever home to anyone but the Jews. Finally Begin put a restraining arm on his old comrade. “I want to discuss the question you raised about settlements,” he said to Carter. “I want to speak with candor. No settlements will be allowed to become obstacles to negotiations.” However, his policy was that Jews should be allowed to live anywhere they pleased. The West Bank was dotted with towns of historical importance to Jews. “There are many towns named Hebron in the United States, and many named Bethel and Shiloh,” he pointed out. In Genesis, Bethel is the place where Jacob fell asleep and dreamed of a ladder into Heaven. When he climbed to the top, God was waiting and promised him the land of Canaan. Shiloh was a capital of the ancient Israelites before Jerusalem.

  “Just twenty miles from my hometown there is a Bethel and a Shiloh, each of which has a Baptist church!” Carter pointed out.

  “Imagine the governor of such a state declaring that all American citizens except Jews could go to live in those towns,” Begin exclaimed. “Can we be expected, as the government of Israel, to prevent a Jew from establishing his home in the original Bethel? In the original Shiloh? These will not be an obstacle to negotiation. The word ‘non-negotiable’ is not in our vocabulary. But this is a great moral issue. We cannot tell Jews in their own land that they cannot settle in Shiloh.”

  THE CIA PROFILERS HAD scrambled to prepare the dossier on Begin. The analysts read his two memoirs: White Nights, about his imprisonment in Soviet labor camps; and The Revolt, which chronicled his experience as the head of Irgun Zvai Leumi (the “National Military Organization,” known in Israel as Etzel, but abroad as Irgun), an underground group that carried out terror strikes on British forces before independence and then against Palestinian villagers afterward. In his autobiographies, Begin comes off as intransigent, supremely sure of his great intelligence, passionate, riven with guilt, and full of rage. He presents himself as a “new specimen of human being” born out of the ashes of the Holocaust: “the Fighting Jew.” His eloquence teetered on the edge of sophistry and bombast, but he had a genius for picking away at a single word until he had turned its meaning inside out. For instance: “It is axiomatic that those who fight have to hate—something or somebody,” h
e wrote.

  We had to hate first and foremost, the horrifying, age-old inexcusable utter defenselessness of our Jewish people, wandering through millennia, through a cruel world, to the majority of whose inhabitants the defenselessness of the Jews was a standing invitation to massacre them.… We had to hate … foreign rule in the land of our ancestors.…

  Who will condemn the hatred of evil that springs from the love of what is good and just? Such hatred has been the driving force of progress in the world’s history—“not peace but a sword”—in the cause of mankind’s advancement. And in our case, such hate has been nothing more and nothing less than a manifestation of that highest human feeling: love. For if you love Freedom, you must hate Slavery; if you love your people, you cannot but hate the enemies that compass their destruction; if you love your country, you cannot but hate those who seek to annex it.

  The author of this statement was deaf to the same argument made by Palestinians about their own struggle to overcome weakness and achieve justice. His life had hardened him to the suffering of others. He told Carter that his earliest memory was of Polish soldiers flogging a Jew in a public park. His father, Ze’ev Dov, a wood merchant, inculcated Zionist doctrines into his three children, but insisted on sending them to the Polish high school rather than the private Jewish one. The state school was free, and the Begins had little money to spare; also, in Ze’ev Dov’s opinion, the Polish school would give his children a better chance of getting into a profession. He wanted his youngest, Menachem, to be a lawyer. (Eventually, Menachem would graduate with a law degree from Warsaw University.)