Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Begin seemed to have an aversion to exercise, although unlike Sadat he had managed to give up smoking. He took a number of medications for heart disease and diabetes, which drained his vitality and undermined his mood. He, too, ate a bland diet, preferring boiled chicken and cottage cheese, but he drank tea constantly—in the Russian style, with a cube of sugar in his mouth. He was frequently withdrawn and depressed. In 1951, after one of his many failed elections, he briefly retired from politics and sailed to Italy with Aliza. It was rumored among his staff that he had spent time in a Swiss sanatorium during that period. Throughout his life he would plunge into dark moods, and even in cabinet meetings he was often listless and unable to concentrate.

  Anwar Sadat

  There was concern among the Americans that the stress of the negotiations at Camp David could be perilous for both men. Mortality was an unacknowledged guest but always present.

  CARTER ASKED BEGIN to come to the three o’clock meeting a little early, and when he arrived Carter appeared extremely nervous. “President Sadat brought a written proposal with him,” Carter said, warning Begin in advance that he knew the Israelis would not be willing to accept it. “But I would not want that to break up the conference.”

  Sadat arrived, now showered and dressed, like Begin, in a coat and tie—neither man was willing to adopt Carter’s insistent informality. They sat on the porch of Aspen, around a small wooden table in the mottled afternoon light. Carter intended to participate as little as possible in this meeting, hoping that the two men would get to know each other better and begin to trust one another. At that point, he still saw his role as a facilitator, nothing more.

  Begin started by saying, “We must turn over a new leaf.” But he added, “Negotiations require patience.”

  “It’s true we need time,” Sadat agreed. He wanted a framework for comprehensive settlement, details to be sorted out later by the drafters of the treaty. “I think we will need three months’ work.” Sadat seemed uncharacteristically ill at ease, fumbling over his words several times as he responded. The tension of the first meeting was affecting each of them.

  Begin noted that when the Catholics choose a new pope they say, “Habemus papam.” He hoped that at the end of the conference the three of them would all be able to say, “Habemus pacem”—we have peace.

  After these pleasantries, the moment that Carter had been dreading arrived. Sadat put on his glasses and read from his eleven-page plan. “Further to the historic initiative of President Sadat,” he said immodestly, “the initiative that revived the hope of the entire world for a happier future for mankind, and in consideration of the desire of the Middle Eastern peoples and all peace-loving peoples to end the pain of the past …” He went on in this high-flown vein until he came to the actual proposal. For the next ninety minutes, he read feelingly, gripping the sides of his chair at times as he made his demands for a Palestinian state, an Arab stake in Jerusalem, the return of Sinai, the elimination of all settlements, and Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 lines. Begin sat stony-faced. Carter sensed the lava rising in the volcanic prime minister. When Sadat finally concluded his presentation, there was a moment of complete silence.

  Carter broke the tension by suggesting to Begin that he could save everyone a lot of trouble if he just signed the document as written. Suddenly, all three leaders burst into laughter. Begin made a surprisingly polite response, saying that he appreciated how hard the Egyptians had worked on their document, but now he would have to read it more carefully and consult with his aides. The three leaders agreed to meet again the following day. Everyone parted in high spirits.

  It was odd. Carter had predicted to Rosalynn, “Begin will blow up,” but on the contrary, he appeared strangely relieved. So did Sadat.

  BEGIN’S MEETING with his advisers on his porch at Camp David became a nightly ritual. His assistant, Yechiel Kadishai, would solemnly draw a chair to the center for Begin, “like a rabbi,” Dayan observed. On this chilly autumn evening, as Begin recounted the session with Sadat and Carter, the Israelis were aghast. Begin noted that Sadat had even demanded compensation—as if Israel were the defeated nation, not Egypt. “What chutzpah! What impertinence!” he railed.

  “Chutzpah is an understatement,” Dayan agreed.

  Begin added a bit of uncharacteristic Israeli slang: “If I’m wrong about the Egyptian document, I’m a flowerpot!”

  It was clear in Begin’s tirade that he felt that Sadat’s opening gambit breached the normal boundaries of diplomacy, and that somehow Israel’s national honor had been called into question. He was acutely sensitive to such slights. His life and career testify to his ceaseless effort to promote Jewish dignity—the word he used was hadar, which actually means glory or splendor, in any case the extreme opposite of the degradation and victimization that Jews had experienced in modern history. His attempt to embody this quality accounted not only for his grandiose manners and love of ceremony but also for his absence of sympathy for cultures that were not Jewish. Such flintiness made him a daunting figure in the underground but a difficult man to reason with at a peace conference. “There is only one thing to which I’m sensitive,” he admitted to Carter. “Jewish blood.”

  THE ISRAELIS REALIZED that there was a relationship between Begin and Kadishai that could not be understood in the usual terms of employment or friendship. It had begun in Tel Aviv in the early days of the Second World War. Kadishai was part of a group of Jews who had joined the British Army. About twenty of them would meet secretly in a cellar under King George Street, trading rumors about what was happening in Europe. They all had families there, and word was spreading that the Germans were massacring Jews. Was it true? What could they do? They had so little information.

  One day, the door to the cellar opened and a slender young man—the others at first thought he was a boy—entered. He was wearing round glasses and an army uniform with a Scottish cap and knee shorts with buttons on his socks. On his cap was the emblem of the Polish eagle, signifying his membership in the Anders’ Army, made up of former prisoners who had come out of the Russian gulags. After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin had released the Polish prisoners, including Jews, and allowed them to form their own army under General Wladyslaw Anders. Eventually, the Anders’ Army came under the British High Command in the Middle East.

  The young man brought appalling news to Kadishai and the Jewish soldiers gathered in the cellar in Tel Aviv. The Jews in Poland—more than three million—were already condemned, the mysterious messenger said. But the Jews in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria could be rescued because the Germans had not yet turned their attention to them. “We can save them, but there are no savers,” he said. If Great Britain would only open the doors to Palestine, Jews from all over Europe would come pouring in—on bicycles, trucks, they would even walk through Turkey and Persia. But the only way to persuade the British was to cause trouble.

  Kadishai—who was nineteen at the time—turned to one of his military comrades. “Who is this boy?” he asked. One of the soldiers replied, “He came now from Siberia. His name is Menachem Begin.”

  Soon after that, Kadishai signed up to become one of Begin’s troublemakers. In 1946, during the Irgun campaign to drive the British Mandate out of Palestine, Kadishai would help blow up the British embassy in Rome. Three decades later, Kadishai was still at Begin’s side, attending him with a kind of spousal tenderness that no one questioned or entirely understood. Only those who had been with Begin in the underground grasped the moral cost of his journey, and no one knew better than Kadishai. But who could ever have imagined that it would bring them to this wooded mountain retreat to talk about peace?

  IN DECEMBER 1943, when he was thirty years old, Begin became the head of Irgun. The idea of waging a Jewish insurgency at a time when the British were fighting the Nazis seemed like madness to many Jews. However, the British, freshly awakened to the value of oil and hoping to maintain productive relations with Arab countries, agreed to seve
rely restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine. The Irgun was smuggling Jews out of Europe, but British authorities were blocking ships carrying refugees to Palestine and sending them back to the European slaughterhouse.

  The organization that Begin took over was nearly defunct; there were about a thousand members in Irgun at the time but only a third of them were trained fighters; between them they had one machine gun, five submachine guns, a number of pistols and rifles, along with a hundred hand grenades and five tons of explosives. With that meager inventory, Begin declared an armed rebellion against the British Mandate. “We shall fight, every Jew in the homeland will fight,” he proclaimed. “There will be no retreat. Freedom—or death.”

  Begin intuitively understood that terror is theater. Murder was not the object, even if it was the inevitable result. His idea was to create a number of showy attacks that would make headlines in London and New York and provoke repressive countermeasures. Predictably, British authorities would resort to mass internments, brutal interrogations, and exemplary executions; the Jews of Palestine would be increasingly alienated and aroused; and Britain’s standing in the world community would suffer, as would support for the Mandate in Britain itself. “History and our observation persuaded us that if we could succeed in destroying the government’s prestige in Eretz Israel, the removal of its rule would follow automatically,” Begin writes.

  Thenceforward, we gave no peace to this weak spot. Through all the years of our uprising, we hit at the British Government’s prestige, deliberately, tirelessly, unceasingly.

  The very existence of an underground, which oppression, hangings, torture and deportations, fail to crush or to weaken must, in the end, undermine the prestige of a colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence. Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow at its standing. Even if the attack does not succeed, it makes a dent in that prestige, and that dent widens into a crack which is extended with every succeeding crack.

  Begin’s brilliant improvisations created a terrorist playbook that would be followed by groups around the world—including Palestinian organizations—that hoped to emulate his success.

  Begin was fortunate in that he was dealing with a weakened and distracted adversary that was still enmeshed in a war with Germany. During its entire history in Palestine, Britain never formulated a coherent policy in fighting Jewish terrorism, which unlike Arab revolt a decade earlier took place largely in the cities, where it was easy for the insurgents to fold back into the surrounding communities. Begin’s goal was not to win battles but to prove to the British that Palestine was ungovernable. He concentrated on highly symbolic targets, starting with simultaneous attacks on three British immigration offices, which were in charge of blocking illegal Jewish immigrants. That was followed by similar attacks on four police stations. He raised money through extortion and theft. In January 1945, Irgunists snatched a shipment of diamonds from a post-office wagon in Tel Aviv, which they later sold for forty thousand British pounds. A year later, they stole a similar amount in cash during a train robbery. Weapons were obtained from raids on British arsenals and eventually supplemented by Irgun’s own weapons factories. In July 1945, the British placed a reward of two thousand Palestinian pounds on his head. Begin went into hiding. He grew a beard and disguised himself as a Hassidic rabbi named Israel Sassover, with a long black coat and a narrow-rimmed hat. He lived with his family in a small apartment in Tel Aviv, where the terrorism impresario spent much of his time changing diapers and washing dishes. Except for his daily newspaper delivery and his prayers in the synagogue, few other people ever saw him during this period.

  One who did meet him was Moshe Dayan, who was by then a trusted officer in Haganah, the Jewish defense organization. Relations between Haganah and Irgun were always fraught. Haganah was working at the direction of the official Jewish Agency, then headed by David Ben-Gurion. Almost from the moment Begin entered Palestine, Ben-Gurion saw him as a rival. Haganah had a history of accommodation with British authorities, which Begin infuriatingly compared to the diffidence of the European Jews during the rise of Nazism. Ben-Gurion had vowed to shut down Irgun at any cost, and he sent his protégé Dayan to deliver a message.

  Begin was dazzled by the dashing young officer, his contemporary but his opposite in so many ways. Dayan was a native-born Israeli—a sabra—who embodied the Fighting Jew that Begin had summoned in his imagination. “He had lost his eye in Syria, but he certainly had not lost his courage,” Begin observed admiringly. Begin, on the other hand, still had the refined air of a Polish lawyer. Dayan noted that, although Begin was in hiding, he still managed to present a neat appearance. “He has large and parted front teeth and is well dressed,” Dayan reported. The message that Dayan came to deliver was that Irgun should stay in line. “You have no right to act without coordination and approval,” he said. This was not the time for a freelance insurgency. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had promised to allow Haganah to form a brigade to fight the Nazis, which Ben-Gurion hoped would form the basis of a future Jewish army. Begin replied that only military force would drive the British out of Palestine. Then he asked, “Are you also in favor of violence against us?”

  Dayan said he was a soldier, and would follow orders.

  This first meeting was the beginning of a fateful relationship. The two men stood across a wide divide of ideology and tactics that would threaten to bring the Jews to civil war. In November 1944, Haganah cracked down on Irgun and an even more violent splinter group known as the Stern Gang (also known as Lohamei Herut Yisrael or LEHI). Ben-Gurion saw them as a threat to the consolidation of power in the incipient Jewish state and tried to crush them. Irgun members were kidnapped; some were locked up in makeshift dungeons and others turned over to the British. Some were even tortured. Children of Irgun members were expelled from school; Irgun sympathizers were fired from their jobs. Although his followers were howling for revenge, Begin refused to retaliate. He decreed that Jews must not be harmed. His ability to keep his men in line made a profound impression, even among the Haganah. A new picture of Begin was emerging—that of a patriot with a nearly mystical attachment to Jewish lives. If he had chosen to respond in kind to Haganah’s attacks, the community would have been torn utterly apart, but his willingness to endure persecution for the sake of peace among Jews lent him and his movement an aura of martyrdom.

  When the Second World War came to an end, Europe was overrun with Jewish refugees, but Western democracies closed their doors to them. In some cases, refugees who had gotten as far as the docks of Palestine were turned around and sent to “displaced persons” centers in Germany right next door to the concentration camps where they had formerly been imprisoned.

  In July 1945, Churchill suffered a surprising defeat. Zionists were thrilled because the incoming Labour Party had been so supportive of their cause, but they were quickly disillusioned when the new government decided to maintain the same restrictive immigration policies of its predecessor. In the minds of many Jews in Palestine, Begin—the fanatic, the terrorist—had been proved right.

  Ben-Gurion decided that Haganah should temporarily join forces with Begin’s Irgun and the Stern Gang in a united resistance against the British. The pace and scale of the attacks ramped up dramatically, and so did the British response. By 1946, there were more than a hundred thousand troops in Palestine—about one British soldier for every adult male Jew in the country. In a single immense sweep on June 29, which came to be called “Black Sabbath,” the British picked up three thousand suspected members of the resistance. At that point, Ben-Gurion decided the revolt had become too hazardous. But he had allowed one last operation to be put in motion, the biggest one of all.

  The elegant King David Hotel in Jerusalem was not only the center of the country’s social life, it was also the headquarters of the British Administration, which had set up offices on two floors of the southern wing of the highly secure building, which the hotel had been designed to withstand earthquakes a
s well as aerial bombardment. There had been numerous threats made against the facility but the British chief secretary, John Shaw, chose to ignore them. “We must retain, as far as possible, normal conditions,” he told his subordinate, “and you can’t take a last place of amusement away from the people.”

  Posing as Arab waiters, Begin’s men smuggled seven large milk churns, each packed with seventy pounds of TNT, into the basement through the kitchen of the restaurant. Upstairs, diners were being seated for lunch in the posh Café Régence. At 12:10 p.m., an anonymous woman called the switchboard and said that the hotel had been mined. “Evacuate the entire building!” But somehow the news did not reach the diners or the hotel guests. Begin would later blame the British for not heeding the warning, and in particular, John Shaw. He spread a rumor that Shaw had declared he was there “to give orders to the Jews and not to receive them.” Shaw claimed there was no warning at all.

  At 12:37, the city was shaken by the blast, which sheared off the southern wing of the once impregnable six-story hotel and left a mound of smoking rubble in the street. The silence that followed the great noise was soon broken by the cries of the wounded. Two weeks later, when emergency workers had finally sorted through the shattered stones, twisted girders, splintered furniture, and the detritus of offices and hotel rooms and kitchenware and plumbing pipes, they counted ninety-one dead, including twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, seventeen Jews, two Armenians, a Russian, a Greek, and an Egyptian.