He spent hours in the Cabinet Room and Oval Office trying to explain and demonstrate his commitment to Israeli security to American Jewish leaders. In these private sessions, he ruminated years later, “I would get individual Jewish leaders to say, ‘We understand, Mr. President, you have to deal with Palestinian rights.’ But then when you get those people in a collective group, they are very reluctant to say the same thing where others can hear.” He likened this to other advocacy groups for lawyers, doctors, and even peanut warehousemen. “It is the same way, I think, with the Jewish community … you kind of reach the lowest common denominator and consensus is quite often the safest position.”54
BEGIN THE BEGIN
The Israeli elections of May 17, 1977, were a watershed in Israeli and Middle East political history, and profoundly changed the calculus of Carter’s peace policies, while challenging the views of American Jews. I had been warned by the Israeli Embassy to expect gains by Menachem Begin’s party, and I was anxiously awaiting the returns aboard Air Force One as we returned from California after discussing domestic problems of drought and energy. I went to the communications center on the president’s plane, and was stunned by the news. Begin had run in eight consecutive elections, never garnering enough seats in the Knesset to form a government, and had even sustained a heart attack during the campaign.
But the Likud coalition led by his Herut (Freedom) Party had captured 33.4 percent of the popular vote and enough seats to form a governing coalition with the splinter centrists and the religious parties. But this was no simple political game of musical chairs. It was a historic ideological change of incalculable importance to the peace process affecting the region, the Palestinians, and relations between Israel and the United States ever since. The Israeli television anchor Haim Yavin, announcing the election results to an anxious nation, repeatedly and with disbelief proclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mahapach! Upheaval!”55
I raced into Carter’s cabin, gave him the results, and warned that this could spell trouble. Begin had distinctly different views on the future of Gaza and the West Bank; indeed, he called the latter by their biblical names, Judaea and Samaria, and saw them as “liberated—not occupied—territories.” The president seemed nonplussed but said simply, “I can deal with it.” It would not be so simple. The conservative Likud and its nationalist and religious allies remain Israel’s dominant political force well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and during all that period showed little interest in yielding the large parts of its conquered territories that had been its main bargaining chips for peace with the Arabs.
Begin was Israel’s first leader from the conservative Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement and brought a profoundly different version of Zionism than that of the dominant socialist Labor Party. The differences went back to the very founding of the modern Zionist enterprise by Theodor Herzl at the World Zionist Congress in 1897 and beyond. Begin was a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky from Odessa, who, like Herzl, was convinced by the Drefyus Affair in France and the deadly anti-Jewish Kishinev riots in Moldova in 1903 that European Jewry needed its own state in its ancient homeland. Both sought to found the Third Jewish Commonwealth following two thousand years of exile after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
But Jabotinsky’s vision of how to found a Jewish state in what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine (and was mandated to British control by the allied victors of World War I) was dramatically different from the mainstream secular Zionism of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. At the 1933 World Zionist Congress a bitter battle broke out between Jabotinsky’s faction, which wanted to campaign openly for a Jewish state, and Ben-Gurion’s majority, which wanted first to build upon and expand the small Jewish community in Palestine known as the Yishuv, already formally recognized by the British and by the Ottomans before them. Although he was not personally religious, Jabotinsky’s goal, and that of his young follower Menachem Begin, was fulfilling what they believed was God’s biblical promise of a Jewish homeland from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and even beyond. Jabotinsky founded the Betar movement in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, which would later become the Herut and then the Likud Party we know today. While the Zionist slogan always was “A land without a people for a people without land,” the argument between the two factions was about how to obtain that land and how large it would be—with the status of its Arab inhabitants little discussed.
When Jabotinsky died in 1940, the mantle of leadership passed to Begin. The sharp divisions continued after the end of World War II, as Begin formed a militant underground group, the Irgun, to drive the British out of Palestine by violent means. Their most notorious act was blowing up the British headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946.
After the United Nations partitioned Britain’s Palestine Mandate into Jewish and Arab territories on November 29, 1947, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, and accepted the partition, while Begin objected to it as a rump state, and the Arabs rejected it outright and went to war against the new Jewish state. The division between the Revisionists and the Labor Zionists was fierce and at times deadly, because it was based not just on the usual politics that divide parties in any thriving democracy, but on competing visions of the Jewish State. In June 1948 the ship Altalena, bringing men and arms for the Irgun, was shelled off the Tel Aviv harbor by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as Ben-Gurion was determined to end all prestate militias. The commander of the IDF on the Tel Aviv shore was a young officer, Yitzhak Rabin, whom Begin would succeed as prime minister in 1977, Carter’s first year in office.
When Israeli troops conquered the Arab remainder of the partitioned land in their defensive Six-Day War of 1967, for the Labor Party, these territories and the handful of trip-wire settlements they erected in the Jordan Valley were important security buffers that could be traded in part for peace and security guarantees. For Begin and his followers they were much more: a historical redemption of their claim to the whole of the occupied territory, as much a part of Israel as Tel Aviv and Haifa. The Likud-led governments dramatically expanded settlements in the conquered territory, creating facts on the ground to establish the right of Israelis to live there permanently.
* * *
The tensions between Carter and Begin and between Israel and the United States today have their roots, in part, in the dominance of Begin’s vision. The internal ideological quarrel was left unsolved at Camp David and festers even now. As Carter would soon learn, Begin held a similar view of the conquered Egyptian territory: Although not a part of what Begin considered the God-given land of Israel, the Israeli settlements that had sprouted in the Sinai after the Six-Day War were also critically important. Had the Carter administration better understood these profound differences, Rabin might have been supported more positively during his first visit to Washington, although that still might not have ensured the election of his successor Shimon Peres as the leader of a tired Labor Party, which had been in power for thirty years.
But no American in authority, nor American Jews who had known only Labor governments since the founding of the state, imagined that Begin might win. He rejected the land-for-peace trade embodied in UN Resolution 242. When the Labor government agreed to participate in the Geneva conference convened by Kissinger in 1973, Begin railed: “Your policy will lead us to destruction.”56 This was the Israeli leader Jimmy Carter faced in Begin’s first year in office—and his own.
Like virtually everyone in Washington’s high places I was no expert on Menachem Begin, but I knew enough to realize how the election of this classic political outsider would transform the president’s Middle East policy. I became increasingly informed about this remarkable man, whose views differed so greatly from what had been for decades established Israeli policy and from the direction in which Carter wanted to move. What I did not immediately appreciate was that Begin’s election was not simply a rejection of the fatigued and complacent Labor Party with the bagg
age of its near-defeat in the Yom Kippur War. It represented a profound demographic and philosophical shift in the Israeli electorate, which increased over the decades.
Although a thoroughly European Ashkenazi Jew, who dressed more formally than most Israelis, with a starched shirt, tie, and suit, Begin appealed to the Sephardic Jews as an outsider. By the hundreds of thousands they had been expelled from the Arab lands of North Africa, Iraq, and Syria, whence they poured into Israel. The Ashkenazi Labor Party establishment, overwhelmed by the flood so soon after the founding of the Jewish state, dumped them into newly built development towns, often barren and windblown, at the edge of the desert. In their native Arab countries, many had been prosperous merchants and professionals with Orthodox beliefs and a distinctive Jewish culture they could trace back many centuries, but here in their homeland they felt abandoned and discriminated against by the successors of the dominant, secular Labor Party pioneers. In Begin they saw a kindred spirit, observant and respectful of their culture, who had skillfully campaigned on providing them equal treatment. With the dramatic growth of the ultra-Orthodox haredim, who interpreted literally the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and the emigration of one million Jews from the former Soviet Union, who brought hawkish Russian views on security with them and applied them to the Arabs, a strong and enduring Likud political base had been built.
This base remains in power right down to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu today, but with significant intervals of moderate governments in between. Begin’s most important political move was his choice of foreign minister—Israel’s most famous soldier, Moshe Dayan, who was seeking to rehabilitate himself after his forced resignation following the Yom Kippur War. The other fateful choice was his defense minister—Ezer Weizman, the nephew of Israel’s first president and architect of its air force. Their appointments were designed to help Begin shake his reputation as an underground terrorist leader.
The American press saw Begin as an extremist. Shortly after the election, Time’s foreign editor penciled into a story on one of the magazine’s signature pronunciation guides: “Begin (rhymes with Fagin).” He later claimed he never realized it would be seen as offensive, but even the magazine’s Jewish editor did not stop it from reaching print to an inevitable outcry of anti-Semitism.57 On May 19, Brzezinski and I met informally with the president in his study to discuss the implications of Begin’s election. The president expressed “deep concern” about his views. Brzezinski took an optimistic position that “precisely because Begin is so extreme, the President will be able to mobilize on behalf of a settlement a significant portion of the American Jewish community.”58 I firmly disagreed and warned them that was not how things worked in the organized part of the American Jewish community: Jewish groups would rally to Begin’s views as a demonstration of their unyielding support for Israel, and that any effort to peel them away from Begin would be a grave and costly political mistake.
In the long run it made little difference to the initially shocked American Jewish leadership that Israel had exchanged the practical idealism of its Labor Party founders for a new leader who reflected the sharp divisions within the Zionist movement. Ordinary American Jews were hardly aware of the Revisionist wing founded by Begin’s idol, Jabotinsky, who died before he could settle in Palestine. But Jabotinsky’s goal of a greater Israel was literally sewn into the Irgun flag: it extended even beyond the Jordan to the full territory of the old British Mandate, with a rifle overlaid on the map. Begin publicly kissed that flag at a ceremony when he emerged from hiding. As Carter learned more about Begin through a CIA profile and, shortly after his election, watching him in a televised interview, he found it “was frightening to watch his adamant position on issues that must be resolved if a Middle Eastern peace settlement is going to be realized.”59
What most observers did not know was that Begin began pursuing better relations with Israel’s Muslim neighbors almost immediately after his election. He secretly met with the Shah of Iran in Tehran, then with Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian Communist dictator who had good contacts with the Arab countries. Begin went further, instructing Attorney General Aharon Barak to draft, with Foreign Ministry legal adviser Meir Rosenne, a peace agreement with Egypt, but not a Carter-style comprehensive peace settlement.60
Meanwhile, the president told the Democratic leadership in May that the Israeli elections had “done a lot to dramatically moderate Arab leaders’ expectations,” and that while he frankly did not know what Begin would do, he planned to press ahead toward peace in the Middle East.61 Later that day we met with Brzezinski, who concluded that it would be better to deal with Begin and his “hawkish coalition,” since they could make any agreement stick with the Israeli public. This replay of the Nixon-in-China turnabout simply did not apply here and never would. There was no way that Begin would yield on his principles, as we all would soon learn.
The American Jewish leadership, at least initially, was also worried about the impact of Begin’s election. Hyman “Bookie” Bookbinder, the head of the American Jewish Committee’s Washington office and a colleague in the Humphrey presidential campaign, called to report “unanimous concern and dismay” at meetings of mainstream American Jewish groups (but not what he called the “ultra-groups”). All were wrestling with the profound change in Israeli politics. But he warned us to avoid any lobbying that might split the Jewish community, whose leaders believed that Carter’s own statements had helped cause the political upheaval in Israel.62 But soon enough the administration’s positions would unite the American Jewish leadership behind Begin, whatever qualms may have initially existed. Bookbinder called back in early June to tell me that Ambassador Dinitz was informing them that the Arabs believed Carter would force Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders and accept an independent Palestinian homeland.63 What Carter and Brzezinski did not fully understand was that support for any incumbent Israeli government was the ultimate litmus test of Jewish identity for mainstream Jewish leaders. It remains so, even when sorely tried by Israeli politicians. Many leading American Jews fear that publicly undercutting Israel’s leaders would weaken Israel itself and impair their own ties to the Jewish homeland and the Israeli leadership, which is a symbol of their clout.
I began to observe a pattern developing in which the president seemed to overlook negative positions of the Arab autocrats in order to accentuate what he saw as their positive side. At a cabinet meeting on May 23, he applauded Saudi Arabia’s restraint on energy prices and declared: “The Saudis have been the most gratifying to me since starting office in every way.” I put in my marginal notes “JC’s love affair with the Saudis.”64 Things were not going well with Israel. The Israeli press published a so-called fifteen-point American plan supposedly emanating from the White House. Brzezinski told me that there was no such plan, although ideas were being developed, adding that anyone giving them away “was hurting relations.”65
The political atmosphere was growing heated, and Ham convened a meeting including Brzezinski and several Jews serving in the White House. We decided that to restore calm we had to explain to Jewish groups that our definition of peace for Israel lay well beyond Nixon’s and Ford’s limited idea of ending Arab belligerency, and extended to full normalization of diplomatic and commercial relations.
The most troubling question since Begin’s election was the political status of the West Bank, and we realized that the administration had to back away from Carter’s unscripted commitment to a Palestinian homeland, certainly at least until the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist on the other side of an agreed border. I was about to get an up-close-and-personal lesson in how the Jewish community works in Washington and how a White House deals with it.66
HAM’S BLUNT WARNING
To achieve the president’s goals, we were going to reach out to Vice President Mondale and his political mentor, former vice president, now-senator, Hubert Humphrey, both of whom were trusted champions of Israel. Humphrey issued a helpful press
release describing Carter as “an unswerving supporter of the State of Israel, who was carefully moving in the right direction in the Middle East.”67 Mondale had his staff spread it throughout the Jewish community and Congress.
Then, to tamp down tensions, Ham, Mark Siegel, and I met early in June with Morris Amitay, the executive head of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC as it is universally known in Washington. With his fierce visage, framed by bushy eyebrows and a thick black mustache, and his blunt manner, he had made AIPAC into the effective spearhead to promote stronger Israel-U.S. ties that it remains to this day. His argument was that “the more secure Israel is, the more willing it is to concede,” and he raised the reports of the supposed secret plan to pressure Israel into concessions and split off the West Bank. We told him that there was no such plan, but he continued to stress Israel’s need for American support: “The Arabs think the U.S. will push Israel without their doing it, and this makes Israel feel vulnerable.… [But] if the Arabs realize the U.S. won’t abandon Israel, they’ll come to terms with Israel.” I was surprised at Ham’s candid response conceding that Carter had not given Israel the assurances it needed, adding that the administration wanted to “disabuse the Arabs of the notion that Israel will be pressured into a quick fix.”68 None of this was enough to dampen the increasing nervousness of the Jewish community.
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