One day, Ze’ev Dov was walking with a rabbi in the street when a Polish policeman tried to cut off the rabbi’s beard. “It was a popular sport among anti-Semitic bullies in those days,” Begin explained, when he told the story to Carter in their first meeting. “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 Ze’ev Dov got off with a beating. “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.” Begin went on: “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.” Later, Begin told his private secretary that he had related the story to Carter because he wanted him to know “what kind of a Jew he was dealing with.”
Menachem was a small, pale child; with his thick, round spectacles, and his full, sensual lips, he was a natural target for bullies. Instead of fleeing, he learned to fight back against the anti-Semites in school—“to beat those who beat us, and to insult our insulters.” He was too frail to inspire caution in his tormenters. “We returned home bleeding and beaten, but with the knowledge we had not been humiliated,” he recalled. What he lacked in physical strength he made up for in his gift for public speaking. Even as a precocious young child, he would recite poetry at the Zionist rallies his father organized, and by the time he was a teenager he was speaking to crowds of hundreds who marveled at his ability to stir powerful and unsettling emotions.
Menachem Begin in his Betar uniform, Warsaw, 1938
In 1929 Begin experienced a political transformation. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian journalist who advocated an expansive form of Zionism called Revisionism, was speaking at a theater in Brisk. The Revisionists opposed the gradualism that mainstream Zionists endorsed; they insisted on gaining the entire land of Israel rather than compromising with the Arabs already living there. The event was sold out, but Begin sneaked into the orchestra pit. Jabotinsky believed that the Diaspora had left the Jewish people so weakened that they no longer knew how to act in their own interest. Only a state could provide the sanctuary Jews needed to become a people once again. One of his responses was to found Betar, a paramilitary Jewish youth group. The mission of Betar was to create a new species of Jew, one that could quickly build—and ably defend—a Jewish state. He wrote songs for the movement to reach the young minds he hoped to form:
From the pit of decay and dust
Through blood and sweat
A generation will arise to us
Proud, generous, and fierce.
Crowded into the orchestra pit, fifteen-year-old Menachem Begin may have imagined that Jabotinsky was describing him. He felt a spiritual connection with the Betar leader that he later compared to holy matrimony. “Jabotinsky became God for him,” one of Menachem’s friends later remarked.
At the time Jabotinsky was speaking, Jews were outnumbered in Palestine by about eight to one.4 “Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations—polite indifference,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1923. “Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine—which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority.” He recognized that it was “utterly impossible” to persuade the Palestinian Arabs to surrender their sovereignty. “Every native population, civilized or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always,” he observed. There is not “one solitary instance of any colonization being carried out with the consent of the native population.” Because a voluntary agreement with the Arabs is an illusion, he wrote, there had to be an “iron wall” erected between the Jews and the Arabs—in other words, a powerful military force, which most Zionists believed would have to be their British protectors. Jabotinsky maintained instead that it could only be the Jews themselves. An agreement would not be possible until the Arabs understood that there was no longer any hope of getting rid of the Jews; only then would the leadership pass to more moderate Arab voices, who would ask for mutual concessions. “Then we may expect them to discuss honestly practical questions, such as a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity.
“And when that happens,” he emphasized, “I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both peoples can live together in peace, like good neighbors.”
Half a century after Jabotinsky wrote these words, his most famous acolyte was being forced to decide whether that day had finally arrived. Sadat’s gesture had left Begin confused and distrustful, groping in the air. It was far easier to deal with violence than it was with peace. Begin later admitted to Carter that Sadat’s bold move had reminded him of Jabotinsky—as if the Egyptian were the actual heir to his idol’s legacy and not Begin himself.
AFTER THIRTY-SIX HOURS Sadat departed Jerusalem convinced that he had scored a great triumph. “All you journalists are going to find yourselves with nothing to do,” he teased reporters in Cairo. “Everything has been solved. It’s all over.” What about the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem? “In my pocket!”
Sadat was being hailed in the international media as a modern prophet or even a savior. “It was as if a messenger from Allah had descended to the Promised Land,” Time magazine gushed. Sadat believed every word. “The Middle East after my initiative to Jerusalem will never be the Middle East that was before,” he exulted on ABC. But the transformation he had wrought came at a cost. The Arab world turned its back on Egypt. There were demonstrations against his visit in several Arab cities, and Egypt Air offices were bombed in Beirut and Damascus. Palestinians in Athens attacked the Egyptian embassy there, killing one person; another was killed in a rocket attack on the embassy in Beirut.
There was an obvious key player excluded from talk of peace: the Palestinians. Sadat was not authorized to represent their interests, and Carter was constrained by a secret U.S. pledge to Israel, made during the Ford administration, not to talk to the Palestinian Liberation Organization—the only authorized representative of the Palestinian people—as long as it failed to recognize Israel’s existence and accept UN Resolution 242. Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the PLO, refused to accept 242 unless the U.S. would guarantee that a Palestinian state would be established and the PLO would lead it. That was too much for Carter, who lost interest in engaging with Arafat.
Meanwhile, the world awaited Israel’s response to Sadat’s historic overture.
Begin came up with a proposal he called the autonomy plan. He presented it to Carter in another White House meeting the month after Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem. Under this plan, the Palestinians would continue to live on the West Bank and choose whether to be citizens of Israel or Jordan. A handicapped local administrative authority would be able to locate sewer pipes and issue building permits but could not print money or raise an army—anything that might resemble a functioning state. The Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza would remain, along with the Israeli military presence. Egypt would have sovereignty over the entire Sinai, but the Israeli settlements there would also remain, as well as two Israeli airfields in a buffer area controlled by the United Nations. “It’s a very interesting plan,” Carter conceded. Begin returned to Israel, exhilarated. “I haven’t met such an intellect since Jabotinsky,” he said of Carter. As for his autonomy scheme, “All who beheld it praised it,” Begin reported.
But any goodwill he might have accumulated with the Americans he promptly exploded when he endorsed a scheme by General Ariel Sharon to place a number of dummy settlements in Sinai—specifically, in places that the Israelis had previously pledged to restore to Egypt under a prospective peace agreement. The idea was to swiftly create “facts on the ground” in order to enh
ance Israel’s claim on the peninsula. The “settlements” were nothing more than phony water derricks and rusted old buses. If nothing else, Sharon argued, these props could be used as bargaining chips to preserve the actual settlements that Israel hoped to keep. It was a stunning misstep. International scorn was heaped on Begin, even in Israel, where he was accused of trying to destroy the peace process. Sadat’s predictable reaction was to issue an ultimatum: “Not a single Israeli settlement shall remain in the Sinai!” If the Israelis insisted on leaving the settlements in place, he said, he would personally set them afire.
Carter was also enraged. He made it clear that the settlements in Sinai and the West Bank were illegal; moreover, he publicly rejected Begin’s autonomy proposal except as a basis for negotiation. Even as this was happening, Begin authorized Sharon to send bulldozers to the West Bank to build an entirely new settlement. Only a rebellion in the Israeli cabinet brought the plan to a halt.
While everything was falling apart, the PLO shouldered its way into the discussion.
On February 18, 1978, two Palestinian terrorists entered the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia, Cyprus, and murdered Youssef el-Sebai, a popular writer who was the editor of Egypt’s main daily newspaper, Al-Ahram. He was also a close friend of Sadat’s and had traveled with him to Jerusalem. The killers then hijacked a plane, but it was forced to return to Cyprus when several Arab governments refused to give them asylum. “Everyone who went to Israel with Sadat will die,” the hijackers told their hostages, “including Sadat.”
Sadat responded by sending Egyptian commandos to capture the terrorists and take them to Egypt for trial. Evidently, he did not inform the Cypriots of his intentions. As soon as the Egyptian plane landed, the commandos raced toward the hijacked aircraft and immediately came under fire from Cypriot forces, who thought they were being invaded. Fifteen Egyptian soldiers were killed. It happened that the hijackers had already agreed to surrender just before the surprise attack. Egyptians largely blamed the Palestinians for the fiasco, accusing them of ingratitude for the hundred thousand casualties Egypt had suffered in the wars against Israel.
One month later, on March 11, eleven Palestinian militants landed a Zodiac boat on a beach forty miles north of their intended destination, Tel Aviv. They were carrying Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and explosives. The first person they encountered was Gail Rubin, an American photographer and the niece of Senator Abraham Ribicoff. She was taking pictures at a nature preserve. The terrorists asked her where they were, and after she told them, they murdered her. Then they ran to the highway, shooting at cars and throwing grenades. They hijacked a taxi and then two buses, taking the passengers hostage. Most of them were shot in cold blood, even children who were clinging to their parents. The episode ended in a wild shootout with police. Thirty-eight Israelis were killed, including thirteen children; more than seventy were wounded. It was the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
The assassination of Sadat’s friend and the massacre of Israelis on the Coastal Highway were clear messages that the PLO sought to capsize the negotiations. By themselves, however, the attacks were not enough. The terrorists were counting on a violent reprisal from Begin that would inflame the Arab world and subvert Sadat’s initiative. They understood as well as anyone the spell of enchantment that had taken over the Middle East, in which violence could only be answered by greater violence. The actors by now were playing out their roles in a trance. The terrorists calculated that Begin would be incapable of a measured response. “Those who killed Jews in our times cannot enjoy impunity,” Begin said in a trembling voice, his eyes rimmed in red. Three days later, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon with the declared mission of punishing Palestinian forces there, but in the process killing more than a thousand civilians, leaving a hundred thousand homeless, and raising Arab fears that Israel would annex the southern part of the country.
Carter was appalled by what he saw as a terrible overreaction and upset by the use of American weapons that were specifically forbidden for such conflicts, including highly indiscriminate cluster bombs intended for a large-scale war against military targets. When Begin visited the White House again, ten days after the attack, with Israeli troops still in Lebanon, he sought to enlist Carter’s understanding. He said he was “wounded in the heart” when Carter backed away from his autonomy plan. Begin claimed that Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem was merely a grand gesture, and that what Sadat really wanted was a Palestinian state and Israel’s total withdrawal from its captured territories.
Carter enumerated the prime minister’s main positions: Begin was “not willing to withdraw politically or militarily from any part of the West Bank; not willing to stop the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements; not willing to withdraw the Israeli settlers from the Sinai, or even leave them there under UN or Egyptian protection; not willing to acknowledge that UN Resolution 242 applies to the West Bank-Gaza area; not willing to grant the Palestinian Arabs any real authority, or a voice in the determination of their own future.” Carter’s accurate summation of the Israeli position came to be known as “the six noes.” The next day, he told a delegation of top U.S. senators that Begin’s intransigence had destroyed the prospects for negotiations. Begin was shaken by the exchange. He told his aides it was the worst moment of his life. But as soon as he returned to Jerusalem, he became defiant. There would be no Israeli response to Sadat’s peace overture. He would get “nothing for nothing.”
This was the situation Carter faced at the end of the summer of 1978, less than a year after Sadat had visited Jerusalem and the whole world had believed that peace was within easy reach. Now it seemed a foolish dream. The remorseless legions of war were awake again and on the march. Terror was rampant. Bombs were falling. Populations were being uprooted and scattered. Ancient ethnic hatreds, always boiling under the surface, erupted once more, prompted by the twentieth-century struggle to create modern nation-states and fueled by savage memories and losses so profound it seemed that history could never bury the bodies.
THE THREE MEN WHO now placed themselves at the center of this endless tragedy had arrived in their offices largely by accident or luck. Sadat’s radical reforms had shaken his country and alienated Arab oil sheikhs, whose economic support was badly needed. His overture to Israel had stirred Islamic extremists into frenzy. Several Arab leaders were actually scheming to have Sadat assassinated. He seemed to court their hatred, calling his rivals “pygmies.” Despite the forces rising against him, Sadat had become alarmingly grandiose. There was a sharp increase in his use of the first-person singular; he spoke about “my economy” or “my army.” The CIA profilers noted that his circle of advisers had shrunk to a handful of sycophants, allowing him to wander further away from political reality. He had delusions about Carter’s ability to impose a solution on Israel. “If the Middle East is a deck of cards, America holds ninety-nine percent of them,” he said again and again, as if Carter could wave a wand and persuade Menachem Begin to willingly abandon his lifetime project.
Begin had spent his political career in the opposition, where he was expected to remain, until Sadat launched the 1973 war and a shocked Israel turned to the man who embodied the most wounded and aggressive qualities in the Israeli psyche. Obstruction, not leadership, was his nature. Rather than becoming more accommodating and flexible in order to gain political consensus, Begin stayed rooted in his ideology. The CIA profilers noted an increase in his provocative remarks and antagonistic behavior. The worst traits in both men were seizing control of their personalities, wrecking any chance that they could work together, or even understand each other.
Of the three, Carter was in the weakest position. His presidency was sliding toward failure. He had come into office by defeating an unelected president, Gerald Ford, who had pardoned Richard Nixon, the most reviled figure in modern American politics. The very qualities that had persuaded people to vote for Carter—his earnestness, his outsider
status, his pledge to “never lie”—now read as the grating naïveté of a political amateur. He was intelligent but impersonal, with a kind of mechanical affect that made it difficult for people to like him. He frequently displayed a huge, toothy smile—the subject of countless caricatures—but rather than warmth or humor the effect was often goofy, or insincere, or even menacing to people who saw the wrath behind it. Carter was by nature cool and reticent, but when he was angry he turned icy. His voice would go quiet, his eyes hardened into bullets, and he would smile inappropriately in what looked like a rictus. People who encountered him in this state rarely forgot it.
He was personally virtuous, but there were other important qualities that he lacked. “If I had to choose one politician to sit at the Pearly Gates and pass judgment on my soul, Jimmy Carter would be the one,” James Fallows, his disaffected former speechwriter, observed. Fallows portrayed Carter as unsophisticated, passionless, trapped in a maze of details, and unable to prioritize or even articulate his goals. “I came to believe that Carter believes fifty things, but no one thing,” Fallows wrote after his resignation. Carter made lists of to-dos without any priorities, discussing everything from abortion to zero-based budgeting in alphabetical order. He would take the time to correct the spelling of memos he received, and he left his staff with the feeling that they could never do enough to please him. Fallows described him as being as smart as any president ever elected but not a real intellectual. Carter’s exceptional self-discipline expressed itself in typed lists of the classical music he would listen to during the day; he would quote Reinhold Niebuhr or Bob Dylan to show off the range of his influences; and yet, these references tended to be shallow and unexplored, a way of countering the insecurity that constantly shadowed him, despite the know-it-all manner that he affected. His attempt at Camp David to solve a conflict that no one had ever been able to bring to a conclusion displayed his impressive tenacity but also a stunning degree of hubris. His major task would be to overcome his own limitations.
Thirteen Days in September Page 5