Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

The Soviet Union, which was savagely extinguishing the Hungarian uprising at the very moment that the Suez crisis was unfolding, unhelpfully proposed an alliance with the U.S. against France, Britain, and Israel. Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin chillingly pointed out that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union possessed “all contemporary forms of armaments, including atom and hydrogen weapons,” which would allow them to impose their will on the region. Bulganin sent similar letters to the French, British, and Israelis, implicitly threatening nuclear war.

  It was President Dwight Eisenhower who finally brought the war to an end, without the nuclear rattling of the Soviets. He was incensed by what he saw as the treachery of his allies, who had kept him in the dark about their plot. The fact that the invasion happened to coincide with the final week of his campaign for reelection only amplified his rage. Determined to reverse the outcome, Eisenhower took aim at the fragile British economy, blocking Britain’s access to loans from the International Monetary Fund, which it desperately needed to avoid the collapse of its currency. The British capitulated and agreed to accept the cease-fire and withdraw from Egypt. The French soon followed suit.

  The Israelis were harder to deal with. From the outset of the conflict, the Israeli government continually reassured the UN and the Eisenhower administration that it had no aims for territorial expansion; its only goal was to eliminate threats to its security. As soon as the fighting concluded, however, an exultant Ben-Gurion declared to the Knesset, “Egypt has lost its sovereignty over Sinai, which has now become an integral part of Israel.” Eisenhower had little support in Congress for his threat to impose sanctions and withhold aid if the Israelis did not withdraw unconditionally, so he took his argument to the American people. “If we agreed that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of international order,” the president said in a nationally televised address. Ben-Gurion finally bowed to the pressure.

  The 1956 war, called the Suez Crisis in the West and the Tripartite Aggression in Egypt, stands as a tombstone for European colonialism. The unintended consequences for the aggressors were shattering. Both the British and the French governments fell within months of their ignominious departure from Egypt, when their countries were made to step back from long-standing roles as leading players on the world stage and merge into the chorus. In any case, the entire concept of Great Powers was obliterated by the emergence of the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, each declaring a vital interest in the Middle East. Britain had been motivated to join the invasion in part to block Soviet penetration of the region, but within the next two years Iraq, Libya, and Syria had joined Egypt as Soviet clients. France’s colonial empire, already under siege by revolutionary movements in Algeria and Vietnam, formally came to an end in 1960; after that, France withdrew from the Atlantic alliance into old, unattainable dreams of grandeur. However reluctantly, America had inherited the Middle East portfolio and now was the only real arbiter of peace, if that was ever to come.

  Nasser was not toppled; indeed, he emerged as an even more formidable figure as the three musketeers were forced to surrender their prizes. On the other hand, by blocking the canal during the crisis, the Egyptian president had spooked oil suppliers. Within a few decades only a small fraction of Middle Eastern oil passed through Suez; most of it traveled around the African route in supertankers, which were too massive to fit through the canal.

  Ben-Gurion stayed in power until 1963, although he was forced to step back from his territorial ambitions. Israel did achieve its goal of forcing Egypt to open the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping, but it had to accept UN forces along the Israeli-Egyptian border to prevent future clashes. The Arab world was now confirmed in its suspicion that Israel had been created not as a homeland for persecuted Jews but as a base for Western imperialists to maintain their stranglehold on the Middle East. The main lesson Israel learned from the Sinai adventure, however, was that it could not depend on European alliances. There were only two powers that mattered now, and since Egypt and several other Arab countries were in the Soviet orbit, that left only America to turn to.

  As a consolation prize for the fiasco, the French agreed to provide nuclear technology and resources to Israel. The remorseful prime minister Mollet confided to an aide, “I owe the bomb to them.”

  BEGIN SAVORED the company of women, which allowed him to fall into domestic chatter, telling stories about his eight grandchildren, as he did with Rosalynn that Shabbat evening. He shared very few of the pastimes that men might talk about; he had no interest in sports; he didn’t care to go drinking; and he had never actually fired a gun in his life, despite serving in the Polish army and leading a terrorist movement. Indeed, he was quite squeamish about blood. Whenever he served as a godfather at a circumcision he would turn his face away at the crucial moment. Like Sadat, he loved American movies, especially westerns, and before he took office he and Aliza went to the cinema twice a week. Sentimental scenes would bring him to tears. At home, the Begins would watch the television shows Starsky & Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, and their favorite, Dallas. So far, the only movie the two of them had watched at Camp David was An Unmarried Woman, but he had fallen asleep before the end.

  The other side of him was as hard as iron. He relished the bare-knuckled intellectual combat of the Knesset, where his formidable memory and scathing wit made him a dreaded adversary. He became most alive, however, when speaking to crowds. Despite his antiquated, flowery Hebrew, he was a mesmerizing and provocative orator. “He is intoxicated with the love of the masses,” one of his old comrades admitted, blaming it on the isolation Begin endured during his years underground. Harkening to the glory of Israel’s imagined past, the frenzied crowds would call to him, chanting, “Begin, the King of Israel!” He had a kind of “magic influence” on his followers, Aharon Barak, one of the Israeli lawyers at Camp David, observed. “He would talk and they would listen and start to cry.” Begin seemed to be something other than a political leader; he had a kind of religious authority—“more a pope than a Caesar,” Barak believed.

  Begin was implacable when his sense of Jewish honor was offended. Such was the case when Israel demanded reparations from Germany in 1951 to compensate it for the cost of absorbing half a million survivors of the Holocaust. Israel desperately needed the money. The young country was struggling to accommodate both the crush of Jewish immigrants and the cost of the 1948 war. Begin, however, was outraged. “They say that Germany is a nation and not what it actually is: a herd of wolves who devoured our people as prey,” he thundered. “How will we look when our disgrace is exposed, as we turn to our fathers’ murderers to receive money for their spilled blood?” While the subject was being debated in the Knesset, Begin incited a mob to stone the parliament and attack the guards who defended its members—his own colleagues. The next morning, Begin stood in the Knesset and proudly boasted of his action. His speech that day would reveal the passions and themes that guided him throughout his political career:

  In Zion Square, to fifteen thousand Jews, I said: “Go, surround the Knesset, as in the days of Rome. When the Roman procurator wanted to set up an idol in the Holy Temple, the Jews came from all corners of the country, surrounded the building and said, “Over our dead bodies!” And to the Knesset I say, there are things in life that are worse than death. This is one of them. For this we will give our lives. We will leave our families. We will say goodbye to our children, but there will be no negotiations with Germany. I know that you have power. You have prisons, concentration camps, an army, a police force, detectives, artillery, machine guns. It makes no difference. On this matter all this force will shatter like glass against a rock. I know you will drag me off to a concentration camp. Today you have arrested hundreds. Perhaps you will arrest thousands. We will sit together with them. If necessary we will die together with them but there will be no reparations from Germany.

  None of the dreadful events he forecast came to pass. The b
ill to negotiate for reparations passed by a large majority; and for his actions, Begin was suspended from the body for three months. German money helped build the electrical and communications networks in Israel, along with roads, housing, and the national airline. Begin’s implicit comparisons of the Ben-Gurion government to Rome and the Nazis typified the low demagoguery that he was willing to stoop to, and the lifelong hatreds he engendered by doing so. He invariably painted himself against such tragic historical backdrops, as if the Jewish story were his alone.

  AFTER THE 1956 WAR, Begin barnstormed through Israel campaigning against the withdrawal from Sinai. “Much of the land remains to be possessed,” he said, quoting the Book of Joshua. It is interesting to consider what a post-Holocaust Jew such as Menachem Begin made of the biblical account, since the gift of the Promised Land is tied to the campaign of ethnic cleansing that Joshua waged.

  In the biblical legend, when the Israelites finally emerge from the Sinai wilderness, they camp on the banks of the River Jordan. God draws Moses to the top of Mount Nebo and shows him the Promised Land, which stretches out before him, from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean. “This is the land about which I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your descendants,’ ” the Lord tells him. “I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross over.” Moses dies, at the age of 120, having delivered his people to the border, where the land of milk and honey beckoned.

  The Lord instructs Joshua, Moses’s successor, to take the Israelites into the Promised Land, saying, “Every place where you set foot I have given you.” That land was not vacant, however. The Canaanites, Hittites, and many other tribes already occupied the vast tract God awarded to the Israelites. “Be strong and steadfast!” God tells Joshua. “For the Lord, your God, is with you wherever you go.”

  The River Jordan stops flowing long enough to allow Joshua and the Israeli horde to cross into Canaan, where they pause on the outskirts of Jericho. Before proceeding, the Lord commands Joshua to circumcise all the men; in this way they would be cleansed of the “reproach of Egypt”—in other words, the memory of their enslavement. The Lord advises Joshua to surround Jericho and march around it seven times; then a priest should sound a blast from a ram’s horn, whereupon the walls of the city would fall down. “And it came to pass,” the Bible says, “that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” After looting the valuables, the Israelites burn the city. Joshua then leads his legion to the city of Ai, where all the men and women—12,000, according to the Bible—are put to the sword and the city burned, “made it an heap for ever, even a desolation unto this day.” Only the king of Ai is spared, in order to be hanged from a tree.

  Word of the massacres spreads. The king of Jerusalem calls together the monarchs of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon to band together for mutual defense. The Israelites rout even this great army, aided by a hailstorm the Lord inflicts on the fleeing warriors, killing more of them than the Israelites have done with their swords. At Joshua’s bidding, God holds the sun still so that the Israelites can finish the carnage in the daylight.

  From there, the Israelites take Makkedah, killing “all the souls that were therein”; and Libnah, once again killing “all the souls that were therein”; and so on, and so on. “Joshua conquered the entire land; the mountain regions, the Negeb, the Shephelah, and the mountain slopes, with all their kings. He left no survivors, but put under the ban every living being, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.” The twelfth chapter of Joshua has a tally of all the kings that Joshua slew: thirty-one.

  But the Lord is not done yet. Even when Joshua is old and “stricken in years,” God upbraids him, using the phrase that Begin quoted: “a very large part of the land still remains to be possessed.” He provides Joshua with a lengthy list of new territories, including “all the Lebanon,” to be parceled out among the tribes of Israel.

  When he is close to death, Joshua calls all the elders together and relates the words of God: “I gave you a land you did not till and cities you did not build, to dwell in; you ate of vineyards and olive groves you did not plant. Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve him completely and sincerely.” The Israelites agree to this covenant, and Joshua passes away, at the age of 110.

  For many believers, the account of the annihilation of the peoples of Canaan is one of the most troubling stories in the Bible. For Begin, however, Joshua was the original incarnation of the Fighting Jew. Joshua’s mission was to carve out a living space for the Israelites, much as modern Jews sought to do in the Arab world. Over the long horizon of Jewish history, so scarred by the pogroms and death camps of Europe and semi-servitude in the regions of Islam, Joshua is a singular and daunting paragon. Begin certainly wasn’t the only Israeli leader who believed that spilling blood was a necessary ritual for the unification and spiritual restoration of the Jewish people, and that enacting revenge on the Arabs was a way of healing the traumas of the Jewish experience in Europe and elsewhere. Even many secular Israelis, such as Dayan, saw Joshua as a model for the post-Holocaust new Jewish man. “Look at these Jews,” David Ben-Gurion told his biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, when explaining the policy of massive Israeli reprisals against any Arab attacks that Dayan was carrying out.

  They come from countries where their blood was unavenged, where it was permissible to mistreat them, torture them, beat them. They have grown used to being helpless victims. Here we have to show them that the Jewish people has a state and an Army that will no longer permit them to be abused. We must straighten their backs and demonstrate that those who attack them will not get away unpunished, that they are citizens of a sovereign state which is responsible for their lives and safety.

  In the modern era, archeologists have excavated nearly all of the cities mentioned in the Old Testament account of Joshua. Neither Jericho nor Ai was inhabited in the Middle or Late Bronze Age (1550 BCE to 1200 BCE), when biblical scholars date the Israelite invasion. Jericho was not a fortified city, so there were no walls to fall down. Ai had been destroyed a thousand years before. Other cities mentioned in the Book of Joshua were either not inhabited at the time or not destroyed. The story was probably derived from earlier Canaanite or Mesopotamian legends, which are replete with similar details. The Egyptian empire firmly ruled over Canaan during the entire period when the Israelites might have invaded, if the biblical account is to be accepted as true. The kings mentioned in Joshua were all vassals of the Egyptian state, which collected taxes and maintained garrisons and administrative centers in the region. In contrast to the absence of archeological support for the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan, there is a rich trove of evidence of the Egyptian occupation.

  The most likely explanation for the origin of the Israelites is that they were themselves the Canaanites. The first time that the Hebrews or Israelites are mentioned in any texts from the ancient world is 1207 BCE, in a stele now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The stele celebrates the many conquests of the Pharaoh Merneptah, including those in Canaan. Israel is scarcely treated as a great power:

  The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe:

  Ashkelon has been overcome;

  Gezer has been captured;

  Yano’am is made non-existent.

  Israel is laid waste and his seed is not;

  Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt.

  All lands together, they are pacified;

  Everyone who was restless, he has been bound.

  North of the Egyptian mandate of Canaan, in present-day Turkey, was another great empire, the Hittites. The Egyptians and the Hittites met in a great battle at a place called Kadesh in western Syria around 1259 BCE, to determine who would control the eastern Mediterranean—the same land the Lord was supposed to have promised Moses and Joshua. The Egyptian
s were led by Merneptah’s predecessor, Ramses II, perhaps the most powerful pharaoh of them all, but he was fought to a standstill by the Hittite king Mutwatallis. They then signed the oldest written peace treaty known to history, pledging “peace and brotherhood for all time.” A copy of the text appears above the entrance to the United Nations Security Council in New York.

  1 In Arabic, the Philistines are called “ancient Palestinians” (filistini qadim).

  2 The Suez Canal Company claimed that the number of Egyptian workers who died was 1,390. Neff, Warriors at Suez, p. 268.

  Day Five

  Menachem Begin and Zbigniew Brzezinski playing chess on the porch at Camp David

  MOST OF THE ISSUES on the table at Camp David were the unforeseen consequences of Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. Leading up to the war, many Israelis had decided that the Israel experiment was another historical trap they had fallen into. There was a sense of foreboding that led to a rush for the exits. Then the war came, and Israel defeated three Arab armies in six days. At once, the country experienced an explosive burst of Jewish immigration, especially from America. Scripture foretold an “ingathering of exiles” in the Land of Israel before redemption: “Thus says the Lord God: I will soon take the Israelites from among the nations to which they have gone and gather them from all around to bring them back to their land. I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel.” There was a sense that a miracle had occurred and a prophecy was fulfilled. Forces were set loose in the religious world that would prove to be difficult to contain as the fundamentalists took the floor. Formerly secular Jews were increasingly drawn into the messianic cults of the ultra-Orthodox, which spearheaded the settler movement. The seizure of the holy places was seen as the prelude to redemption, soon to be followed by the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of Israel and the rule of Jewish law (Halakha). For Christians as well the war was full of auguries and portents. It seemed that the hand of God had reached out of the Old Testament and once again tipped the scale in favor of his Chosen People, heralding the approach of the End of Days. Surely the Messiah was soon to come.