by Paul Johnson
Both the Egyptians and the Syrians broke through the Israeli lines. An element of technological surprise in the effectiveness of Arab anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles enabled them to inflict disturbing losses on Israeli planes and armour. For the first time in the quarter-century of the state’s existence, Israel faced the possibility of a major defeat and even of a second holocaust. But the Syrian advance had been stemmed on 9 October; the next day, in response to desperate Israeli pleas, the American President, Richard Nixon, began an emergency airlift of advanced weapons. Two days afterwards the Israeli forces began an audacious counter-attack on Egypt, crossing on to the West Bank of the Canal, and threatening to cut off all the advancing Egyptian forces in Sinai. This was the turning-point and Israel moved swiftly towards a victory as decisive as that of 1967, when a cease-fire came into force on 24 October.33
Israel’s willingness to accept a cease-fire was dictated more by political and psychological than by military factors. In each of the four wars there was a complete lack of symmetry. The Arab countries could afford to lose many wars. Israel could not afford to lose one. An Israeli victory could not win peace. But an Israeli defeat meant catastrophe. Israel had always regarded Egypt as her most dangerous enemy, the one most likely to deliver the knock-out blow. But Egypt was also the most synthetic of Israel’s opponents. Her people were not true Arabs. She was in the struggle to make good her claims to Middle Eastern leadership and to secure prestige rather than from any deep emotional commitment. The Egyptian territory Israel held, however useful (a substantial oilfield was developed there 1967-73), was not part of the historic heritage of the Jews. For all these reasons a peace with Egypt was possible. What prevented it was Egypt’s bruised sense of military honour. But this was healed by her initial success in 1973, which time and propaganda could make seem more substantial than it was.
There was another obstacle. Israel had been ruled since its inception by a Labour-dominated coalition whose flexibility on frontiers was expressed by the pragmatic philosophy already summarized in Abba Eban’s words. But the Opposition maintained the Jabotinsky maximalist tradition on frontiers. Peace with Egypt would involve heavy Israeli territorial sacrifices, actual and potential. That in turn would require a national consensus. The Opposition would deny it. Hence, when Labour’s coalition lost the May 1977 elections and handed over power for the first time to the Revisionists in the shape of Begin’s Likud, the change, by a paradox familiar to democratic societies, made peace more likely. Begin, precisely because of his maximalist commitment, was in a position to trade land for security in a manner which no Labour leader since Ben Gurion would have dared.
Sadat, the first Arab realist since Abdullah, recognized this key point. Less than six months after Likud’s victory, on 9 November 1977, he offered to negotiate peace terms. The peace process was long, complex and hard. It was stage-managed by President Jimmy Carter and underwritten financially by the generosity of the American taxpayer, an indispensable element. It culminated in a marathon thirteen-day session, beginning on 5 September 1978, at the presidential summer home, Camp David—what Begin characteristically called ‘a concentration camp de luxe’. It required a further six months to embody the agreement reached there in a detailed treaty.
The compromise reached was a genuine one; hence it endured. Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist, provided cast-iron guarantees for Israel’s southern border, in effect withdrew from the military equation and thus for the first time gave Israel some measure of genuine security. In return Israel handed over Sinai, including its oilfields, air-bases and settlements, all of profound emotional significance to her. She also undertook to negotiate away much of the West Bank and even to make concessions over Jerusalem, in return for a complementary treaty with the Palestinians and the other Arab states. But these last sacrifices were not, in the event, exacted. Camp David offered the Palestinian Arabs their best chance since the UN partition plan of 1947. Once more they threw it away without even attempting to negotiate. That left Israel with Judaea and Samaria, albeit as ‘occupied territories’ still, rather than internationally recognized freeholds. The treaty, as such historic compromises will, demanded heavy sacrifices from its signatories too. It cost Begin some of his oldest political friends. It cost Sadat, most dangerous-treacherous and courageous-generous of Israel’s enemies, his life.34
In a historical context, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was of incalculable importance not only in itself but in its timing. From the 1920s, the source of Arab power, both economic and diplomatic, had always been the oilfields of the Persian Gulf and upper Iraq. In the second half of the 1970s this oil power increased dramatically. Demand for oil had been rising faster than supply in the 1960s. In 1973 this trend was radically reinforced by political actions of the Middle Eastern oil states in response to the Yom Kippur War. Oil prices tripled, from $3 a barrel to $10. By the end of 1977 the price had risen to $12.68; in 1979-80 it tripled again, reaching a price of $38.63 a barrel at the end of 1980. By raising Arab oil revenues more than tenfold, the oil-price revolution made available huge sums for Arab arms-purchases and for financing anti-Israeli terrorism. It also increased Arab diplomatic leverage with both Western and Third World nations. France, for instance, built Iraq an advanced nuclear reactor, whose rapidly developing war-potential obliged Israel to destroy it by a bombing raid on 7 June 1981. Some Third World states, in response to Arab pressure, broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. At the UN there was an extraordinary growth in Arab influence. As a result, in 1975 the General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racialism. The mufti’s successor, Yasser Arafat, leader of the main Arab terror group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, was accorded head-of-government status by the UN and by numerous states hitherto friendly to Israel. There was a real danger of Israel being driven into an international ghetto occupied solely by South Africa.
Against this background, the Egyptian peace-treaty and the fact that it was fully implemented on both sides was the great sustaining force of Israel’s position on the world scene. Had the Palestinians negotiated seriously at this time, there can be little doubt that Israel would have been obliged to yield most of the West Bank. But the chance was missed in favour of fruitless terrorism and the window of opportunity closed. From 1981 to 1985 the oil price drifted slowly downwards as supply came into balance with demand. By January 1986 it was $25 a barrel and in April that year it went below the $10 mark, less—allowing for inflation—than it had been before the Yom Kippur War. The balance of economic and diplomatic power once more began to shift back in Israel’s favour. By this stage, in the late 1980s, Israel had been in possession of the West Bank for twenty years and her frontiers, though ‘temporary’ in places, had begun to acquire an air of permanence.
Indeed, the underlying assumption beneath the Arab refusal to negotiate, that time was on their side, not Israel’s, and the misleading analogy with the medieval Crusader states which they were fond of adducing, were both falsified by the first forty years of Israel’s existence. Israel had become a successful maximum-security state without sacrificing her basic aim or freedoms, and while retaining the negotiating flexibility and empiricism of her founding fathers. Time had proved to be on the side not of the Arabs but of the Israelis. Moreover, the very fact that the Arabs continued to prefer the option of war encouraged the habit of thinking, to be found even among Israeli empiricists, in terms of Israel’s historic frontiers. The official Government Year Book 1951-2 had noted: ‘The state has been established in only a portion of the Land of Israel.’ There were many Jews who saw Israel’s repeated victories as a moral mandate for wider boundaries. For pious Jews it was the hand of providence, for secular Jews a form of manifest destiny. In 1968 the Sephardi Chief Rabbi argued that it was a religious obligation not to return the newly conquered territories. The same year the Kibbutz Dati, representing the religious collectives, intoned a prayer for Independence Day: ‘Extend the boundaries of our land, just as Thou hast
promised our forefathers, from the river Euphrates to the river of Egypt. Build your holy city, Jerusalem, capital of Israel; and there may your temple be established as in the days of Solomon.’ Dr Harold Fisch, rector of Barllan University, insisted: ‘there is only one nation to whom the land belongs in trust and by covenant promise, and that is the Jewish people. No temporary demographic changes can alter this basic fact which is the bedrock of the Jewish faith; just as one wife does not have two husbands so one land does not have two sovereign nations in possession of it.’35 The 1967 victory also produced a multi-party movement known as the Land of Israel, which argued that it was not within the moral authority of the Israeli state, representing only Israeli citizens, to give up any conquered portion of the Promised Land, since this was the property of the entire Jewish people, and must be preserved for their eventual ingathering or Aliyah. This form of neo-Zionism, which could quote in its support from Herzl and Ben Gurion as well as Jabotinsky, argued that only one-fifth of world Jewry was yet settled in Israel. The ultimate aim of Zionism must be the return of the entire nation; and to accommodate them the entire land was required.36
This of course was hyperbole and ideological politics of the kind which, in practice, Israel always rejected. On the other hand, in some respects the Israeli state was constitutionally idealistic. It accepted the inescapable duty to receive as an immigrant any Jew who wished to come as an oleh, defined as ‘a Jew immigrating to Israel for settlement’. This was the primary purpose of its creation. It was so laid down in the original Basel Programme of 1897, in Article 6 of the 1922 mandate, in the Declaration of Independence, 14 May 1948, and formally enacted in the Law of Return of 1950.37 Section 4B of the Law defined a Jew as ‘a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion’. But settling in practice who was a Jew was not easy. It was one of the most vexed problems of Jewish history, from the time of the Samaritans onward. With the growth of secularism it became even more difficult. In modern Europe Jews were often defined not by themselves but by the anti-Semites. Karl Lueger used to say: ‘A Jew is anyone I say is a Jew.’ Most modern Jews agreed that a Jew was someone who felt himself Jewish. But that was not good enough for the courts. Halakhic law insisted on the religious element. This meant that in Israel the offspring of a mixed marriage where the mother was non-Jewish, though an Israeli citizen, speaking Hebrew, educated in the spirit of Jewish history, and serving in the Israeli army, could not legally be called a Jew without going through a specific process of conversion. On the other hand, halakhic law laid down that even a converted Jew remained a Jew. The inability to achieve a purely secular definition of a Jew led to cabinet crises and litigation. When a born Jew, Oswald Rufeisen, who had converted and become a Carmelite as ‘Brother Daniel’, sought entry under the Law of Return, the case went to the Supreme Court (Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior, 1962). Judge Silberg (for the majority) held that the Law of Return was a secular enactment. For its purposes, a Jew was defined not according to halakhah but as Jews in general understood the term: ‘The answer to this question is in my opinion sharp and clear—a Jew who has become a Christian is not deemed a Jew.’38
But in the overwhelming majority of cases there was no problem of definition. Israel was thrown open to the oleh from her inception. She had to receive not only the refugees from Arab countries but all the Jewish DPS of Europe who wished to come. In Israel’s first three and a half years a rush of 685,000 immigrants, 304,000 from Europe, doubled the population. There was a second great wave of immigrants (160,000) in 1955-7, a third (215,000) in 1961-4. The Six Day War stimulated the immigration figures yet again. Jews from Arab lands were balanced by Jews from Europe, nearly 600,000 European Jews reaching Israel in the twenty-two years 1948-70. The largest group came from Rumania (229,779), the next from Poland (156,011), but there were big contingents from Hungary (24,255), Czechoslovakia (20,572), Bulgaria (48,642), France (26,295), Britain (14,006) and Germany (11,522). There were also 58,288 Jews from Turkey, over 60,000 from Persia and about 20,000 from India. Russia continued to be the great reservoir of would-be immigrants, but the numbers who actually came from there depended on fluctuations in Soviet policy. In the period 1948-70, only 21,391 Jews reached Israel from Russia, but in the four years 1971-4 more than 100,000 were released.39
In its first quarter-century, largely through immigration, Israel’s population rose from the initial 650,000 to well over three million. Receiving, housing, educating and employing the new arrivals became a priority second only to basic security and, after defence, the biggest item in Israel’s budget. Getting Jews out of what were termed ‘lands of stress’ sometimes involved special efforts, such as the sea- and air-lift which brought 43,000 Jews out of the Yemen in a single year, June 1949-June 1950, or the secret air-lift of 20,000 Falasha Jews from Ethiopia in the mid-1980s.
In the business of blending this new national community together the two most important instruments were the army and Hebrew. The Israel Defence Force, thanks to Arab intransigence, succeeded the kibbutz as the most characteristic product of the Zionist state, and was most influential in transforming the world’s vision of the Jew. It also became the means whereby the children of immigrants achieved emotional equality within society. The acceptance of Hebrew was an even more remarkable achievement. Until late in the nineteenth century no one at all spoke Hebrew as his or her first language. Indeed as a spoken language it had been succeeded by Aramaic (except for liturgical purposes) in late Biblical times. It remained of course the primary written language of Judaism. Jewish scholars meeting in Jerusalem found they could speak it to each other, though the varying Ashkenazi and Sephardi pronunciations made understanding difficult. The Zionist state might easily have spoken German or Yiddish, both of which would have proved disastrous. Eliezer ben Yehuda (1858-1922), who went to Palestine in 1881, made the adoption of Hebrew possible by his vigorous campaigning. When he and his wife, born Deborah Jonas, arrived in Jaffa, he insisted that henceforth they spoke only Hebrew to each other. Theirs was the first Hebrew-speaking household in the country (indeed in the world) and Ben Yehuda’s first son, Ben Zion, was the first Hebrew-speaking child since antiquity. Hebrew succeeded as a modern tongue, where many other linguistic revivals, such as Irish, failed, partly because Judaism, working in Hebrew, had always dealt in infinite detail with practical matters: work, housing, cooking, lighting and heating, travelling and living. Of course its main power was as a language of prayer, but it was also a language of conduct. Once people forced themselves to speak it they found it met the needs of everyday life remarkably quickly and soon displayed an organic capacity to grow. Its development as an official language of government was dramatically assisted by the British decision (1919) to give it equal status with English and Arabic under the mandate. The rival claims of German were destroyed by Hitler, and of Yiddish, spoken by over ten million Jews in the late 1930s, by the mass immigration of Sephardi Jews from Arab countries after 1945. Hebrew worked because the new army spoke it. The army worked because it spoke Hebrew. Thus Israel went against all the laws of modern linguistic sociology and made the revival into a self-sustaining process.
There was some bullying, especially over names. Of course since Abraham’s time Jews had been inured to name changing, in order to make religious, patriotic or cultural points. Ben Yehuda began the new Hebrew practice, changing his own name from Perelman. Many of the settlers in the first three Aliyahs followed suit at the same time as they began to learn Hebrew. Thus David Gruen, or Green, became David Ben Gurion. Later an element of compulsion was added. There were poignant ironies in this. In the nineteenth century German- and Austrian-ruled Jews had been forced to Teutonize their names. Hitler reversed the process. In 1938 German Jews were forbidden to change their family names and forced to resume Jewish ones. For given names, Jews were limited to ‘official Jewish names’, 185 for men, 91 for women. These excluded certain Biblical names fancied by German non-Jews, s
uch as Ruth, Miriam, Joseph and David. Jews with forbidden names had to assume in addition the name Israel if male, Sarah if female. The Vichy regime in France and the Quisling regime in Norway passed similar laws. But none of this deterred Ben Gurion, whose vigorous, indeed belligerent, support for Hebrew was one of the factors that ensured its success. Hearing that a visit to South Africa had been paid by an Israeli ship commanded by a Captain Vishnievsky, he laid it down that from then on ‘no officer will be sent abroad in a representative capacity unless he bears a Hebrew family name’.40
The Israeli ruling establishment followed Ben Gurion’s lead. Moshe Sharett changed his name from Shertok, Eliahu Elath from Epstein, Levi Eshkol from Shkolnic. A Commission for Hebrew Nomenclature was set up and produced lists of Hebrew names, together with rules for changing, for instance, Portnoy into Porat, Teitelbaum into Agosi, Jung into Elem, Novick into Hadash and Wolfson into Ben Zev. The iniquities of malevolent Austrian bureaucrats were expunged by changing Inkdiger (lame) into Adir (strong) and Lügner (liar) into Amiti (truth-teller). Given names were Hebraized also. Pearl became Margalit, for instance. Jews proved less willing to change their given than their surnames. Goldie Myerson, in accordance with Israeli Foreign Office practice, changed her surname to Meir when she became Foreign Minister in 1959, but she refused to switch to Zehavah, simply turning Goldie into Golda. The need for Hebrew given names led to a scouring of the Bible for novelties. Thus Yigal, Yariv, Yael, Avner, Avital and Hagit came into fashion, and even Omri and Zerubavel. There were also invented names: Balfura after Balfour, Herzlia after Herzl. According to Rabbi Benziob Kaganoff, the leading expert on Jewish names, the Biblical revival led to deliberate defiance of many Judaic taboos, especially the ban on Biblical names before Abraham. Israelis broke this by calling their children Yuval, Ada, Peleg and, above all, Nimrod, referred to in the Talmud as one of the five wickedest men in the entire history of mankind. Other ‘wicked’ names which became fashionable were Reuma, Deliah, Ataliah and Tzipor. Begin himself was called after Menachem, of whom the Bible said: ‘And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.’