And He shall reign For ever, and ever -
Danny is pouring himself another whiskey, and feeling as though he himself may reign for ever and ever. Tomorrow he'll be back at the controls of an F-16, a squadron commander in Heyl Ha'avir. He looks up at the stars, and raises his glass with the silent thought, To you, Dov.
King of Kings,
(Boom!)
And Lord of Lords
(Boom!)
For ever, and ever!
Hallelujah!
And now yet more gorgeous and astonishing effects! All along the base of the wall, fireworks pour forth a red cascade, as the lasers vividly paint a white dove of peace, winging along the wall with a green olive branch in its mouth. And on top of the wall there blaze forth on flaming frames the Star of
David, the Cross, and the Crescent. The four old comrades in arms are standing with Max Roweh when this gaudy climax lights up the sky above and the valley below.
And He shall reign, King of Kings! And Lord of Lords! Hallelujah, Hallelujah, HAL-LE-LU-JAH!
"There's Teddy for you, and his togetherness," Luria growls, referring to the mayor of Jerusalem. "Questionable taste, that."
"That's what Teddy believes," Barak says.
"Even with the intifada?" says Pasternak sadly.
"Davka," says Kishote, "with the intifada."
"So is that it?" Lee Bloom inquires. "It's over?"
"Not till they play 'Hatikvah,' " says Pasternak.
"Oh, of course," says Lee, " 'Hatikvah.' "
"Forty years," says his brother. "But the main thing is, we were gone for nearly two thousand years. Now we're back, and there's Mount Zion before our eyes, in our possession. I call that an unusual circumstance, Max, don't you?"
"Decidedly unusual, yes."
"And think of this," says Pasternak. "About a hundred years ago a few crazy Russian Jews dreamed of a Jewish State. Now that State is taking in Russian Jews in the hundreds of thousands. Wouldn't you call that unusual?"
"Unusualler and unusualler," says Max Roweh, who likes to drink freely on such occasions.
Now the orchestra strikes up "Hatikvah," "The Hope." The guests on the Roweh balconies join the powerful choral voices below, and voices are sounding from everywhere, singing the minor-key melody borrowed from Eastern European folk music, the mournful-triumphant anthem of the Jewish State. Lee Bloom sings along with the others in his rusty Hebrew,
We have not lost our Hope Of two thousand years To be a free people
In our land Land of Zion And Jerusalem...
There follows a prolonged trumpet flourish, and a giant shower of fireworks. "Independence Day ends," says Barak, and he goes off to the roof.
Aging and frail, Max Roweh still stands erect, as he did while singing the anthem. If he had a beard and a broad-brimmed rusty black hat, Kishote thinks, he could be taken for the Ezrakh. "Well, the Great Trumpet has sounded," Roweh says to the others, and with a twinkle in his eye he quotes Maimonides. "Yet the Messiah tarries..."
"... And all the same," Don Kishote completes the quote as a last dazzling burst of blue-and-white fire rises to the stars, "I will wait every day for him to come."
Historical Notes
And so our story ends, though the saga of Israel continues to the present day, when pink streaks of a dawning peace seem to be appearing in a sky darkened for half a century by war.
Some readers turning the last page of The Glory may well wonder, "How much of all this has been accurate, how much imaginary? Did that fireworks display, for instance, really happen in Jerusalem on Independence Day 1988, with lasers painting changing pictures on the walls of the Old City, and Handel's Messiah thundering from the ravine below?"
It happened, all right. I was there, consulting with knowledgeable Israelis about the historical novel I had just begun, which in time became two books, The Hope and The Glory. Even then those Israelis were asking me, "How can you possibly end the story, when it's still going on?" Standing there on a Yemin Moshe balcony, as voices from everywhere sang "Hatikvah" and colored fire poured from Mount Zion, I said to myself, "This is where it will end."
As in The Hope, the history in The Glory is offered as reliable, but accuracy about the recent past has a built-in limit, especially in a country still in a state of war with several neighbors. As one approaches the present day, stubborn con-
troversy accumulates. The facts dramatized in this novel are drawn from the available serious sources in English and Hebrew, and from consultations in depth with experts, Israeli and American. Where head-on disagreements persist, I have told the truth as nearly as I could discern it. One caveat: my characters do sometimes occupy posts held in those days by real very different people, many of whom are still alive; and for this dramatic license I must beg the indulgence of some distinguished Israelis.
All political figures, and all military personnel of general staff rank - except, of course, for my four fictional leading men - appear by their right names.
A few comments follow on sources, reliability, and ongoing controversy in specific scenes of The Glory.
part one: the dreamers
The Eilat sinking and the reprisal against the oil refineries happened as described, causing the frantic acceleration in the Security Council debates which led to Resolution 242, with the famous dispute over the "two little words."
The ' 'Wild West show'' of Israeli derring-do during Nasser's War of Attrition, such as the Green Island raid, the armored incursion across the Gulf of Suez, and the capture of the Soviet radar, are documented in Israeli military literature. The Boats of Cherbourg, by A. Rabinovich, gives a full account of that sensational escapade, and much other history of the Israeli navy as well.
The victory of Israeli fighter pilots over the Soviet air force in 1970 was not publicized at the time by either side. Former chief of the air force Avihu Bin Nun, who fought in this engagement, helped me with facts and color. For air combat tactics I consulted former ace Ran Ronen.
The move of the missile sites to the Canal, a clear violation of the War of Attrition cease-fire, gave Egypt a decided advantage three years later in the Yom Kippur War. After it was a fait accompli, our State Department laggardly acknowledged that it had occurred, but that nothing could be done about it.
The raid on terrorist headquarters in Beirut in April 1973 made world headlines. No declassified records are available at this writing of the secret elite strike force called "The Unit," or Sayeret Matkhal. It is known that Ehud Barak, the present (1994) Army Chief of Staff, took part, as did Muki Betzer, later important in the Entebbe rescue, and Yoni Netanyahu, the unit commander killed at Entebbe. This chapter is based on journalism and personal interviews. Invention has perforce filled out the account, and though the general facts of the exploit are correct, details are improvised. Amos Pasternak is of course an imaginary character. Unofficial accounts mention a blond woman who aided the raiders, but Madame Fleg is a figure of fiction.
The Concepzia which lulled "The Dreamers" before the Yom Kippur War remains a matter of much rueful analysis by Israeli strategic savants.
The roller bridge scenes are dramatized from a detailed unpublished report by Lieutenant Colonel Fredo Raz, the officer in charge of the bridge. Scattered references to this extraordinary structure occur in the literature on the war. It is presented here as a picturesque instance of Israeli improvisation, late in arriving but still important in the crossing.
part two: the awakening
The controversies about the sanguinary Yom Kippur War are to this hour many and bitter. The last word about some matters in dispute may not be spoken in our lifetimes, and the account in The Glory is not to be taken in any way as such a last word. I tell the tale as I have come to understand it, after an arduous effort to master the almost infinite, often terrible facts of Israel's fateful test of fire.
Avigdor Kahalani, the "Black Panther" of the Syrian front, is today a Knesset member and an author. He was awarded the Medal of Heroism, Israel's highest
military honor, and his books are valuable sources on the Golan Heights campaign. Yanosh Ben Gal and Yossi Ben Hanan today are retired major generals.
Chaim Bar-Lev, former Ramatkhal and cabinet minister, has been one of Israel's eminent leaders. As pictured in the book, he was in deep disagreement during the war with General Sharon, a figure of enduring controversy.
General Avraham ("Bren") Adan's memoir, On the Banks of the Suez, is a key military treatise on the Sinai battles; a formidable field commander, he was also an early peace advocate. Henry Kissinger's Years of Upheaval is an indispensable source for the diplomacy of the war. In these memoirs both authors give themselves the best of it, of course, as did Churchill, De Gaulle, and for that matter Julius Caesar. Dado, a meticulous biography of General David Elazar by H. Bar-tov, offers a unique day-by-day, hour-by-hour account of the command aspect of the war. An expert combat overview is The War of Atonement by Chaim Herzog, former President of Israel.
The nuclear alert on Thursday, October 25, now virtually forgotten, caused a great international tumult. I was in London at the time. I met my wife at a theater where we had tickets for a comedy, and rushed her back to the hotel so that we could pack up, and board the next plane to our home in Washington. Since Washington was Ground Zero for a nuclear attack, my conduct in retrospect cannot be called cool. I get growls about it from her to this day.
The project of an American airlift to the trapped Egyptian Third Army was dropped when, just before Kissinger's visit to Cairo, Golda Meir agreed to a second "humanitarian convoy."
The Agranat Commission's verdict remains a sore subject in Israel. Its subtle distinctions between the responsibilities of "the political echelon" and "the military echelon" did not convince a large sector of the public; and for them the forced resignation of Dado made him a heroic figure unjustly treated, while the exoneration of Dayan damaged him.
part three: the peace
The main facts of the Entebbe rescue are beyond challenge; the terrorists in the terminal were wiped out, the Jewish hostages were saved, and Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu was the only Israeli fighting man killed. Disagreement has sprung up about details of his death, about the attack on the terminal, and most of all, about the credit due to the many participants in the exploit. The peripheral adventure of the fictitious Aryeh Nitzan is based on facts not in serious dispute.
Yoni Netanyahu has become a mythical hero not only of Israel, but of the diaspora, and to some extent of the world. Revision of myths is part of every nation's historiography. Yoni fell at Entebbe no flawless superman, but a thirty-year-old commander with human faults and blazing courage. In my view his myth is imperishable, and in essence true.
The exchanges of Sadat with Golda Meir, Dayan, and Sharon on his arrival at Ben Gurion airport are culled from the memoirs of all four.
My portrait of Dayan in The Hope and The Glory is based on the available literature including his memoirs, on unpublished academic material, and on consultation with eminent Israelis who knew him best. The paradox of this great man of war is that he rose to his full stature only near the end of his life, in the Camp David negotiations, as a main architect of Israel's first peace treaty. The character Eliakim at Camp David is a real person, Eliakim Rubinstein, appearing on television screens as I write, as Rabin's chief aide in negotiating peace with Jordan.
The 1981 air strike which destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor evoked worldwide criticism. The American government even held up deliveries of aircraft to Israel, to signal its disapproval. Ilan Ram-On, the youngest of the eight pilots who made the strike, was my source for many details. At one point I asked Ilan, who had risen to command an F-16 squadron, what he would have my book say about the attack, if he were to write it himself. He replied after a pause, very seriously, "That it took the Gulf War to prove the need and worth of the operation."
Right on target. Only when Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles were falling on Israel, and on American troops in Saudi
Arabia, were all questions answered about an exploit that deprived Iraq of nuclear warheads.
DESTRUCTION AND RESURGENCE
A final word to the readers of The Glory.
Menachem Begin once told me that when his term as Prime Minister was over, he would retire from politics to write a book about the Jewish epic of the twentieth century, which he would call Dor Hashoah V'hat'kumah, literally The Generation of the Destruction and the Resurgence, embodying both the Holocaust and the rise of Israel. The mischances and tragedies of the protracted Lebanon War overwhelmed him, and he retired into a depressed solitude and died. The book might have been a great one, but he never wrote it.
Though I have had no such conscious plan or ambition in mind, the historical novels I have written over the past thirty years - The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, The Glory, and Inside, Outside - come near at least in scope to the scheme Menachem Begin envisioned. The Winds of War began, in fact, as a book about the Battle of Leyte Gulf; yet the art of fiction has its own strange workings. As they finally evolved, my two World War II novels tell of the Holocaust in the only way I believe that the unparalleled crime can be grasped, if never completely understood; that is, as the covert deed of an outlaw major power governed by mass murderers, and screened off too long from the rest of mankind by the fog of a global war. In The Glory and its prologue, The Hope, I have tried to limn Israel's early heroic half century; and in Inside, Outside, a novel of the American Jewish experience during those years, I have as it were scrawled my small signature in a corner of the panorama.
These five books have occupied the central years of my working life. Their merit is for others to judge, today and in years to come, if they last. Looking back, I perceive them as a single task of bearing witness, my Generation of Destruction and Resurgence. That task is done, and I turn with
a lightened spirit to fresh beckoning tasks; concluding my work on The Glory with old words often found at the close of our rabbinic commentaries, which express what is in my heart.
Finished and complete, Praise to the Lord Eternal.
Herman Wouk
1964-1994
5724-5754
The End
Herman Wouk - The Glory Page 75