The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  But there was something else in Begin’s eyes that Eshkol did not divine that night: relentless resolution. Unbeknownst to him, Menachem Begin had come not only to be briefed, but more importantly, to persuade the prime minister to resign. He wanted him to step aside in favor of David Ben-Gurion, and demote himself to become Ben-Gurion’s deputy, in charge of domestic affairs. He was not alone in this view.

  “We are going to war,” contended Begin, his voice soft yet firm. “When an enemy of our people says he intends to destroy us, the first thing we have to do is to believe him. People did not believe Hitler. The Arabs say they want to destroy us, and so we must believe them. We must seize the initiative and destroy their armies first.”

  “But how can you, of all people, ask me to step aside in favor of the man who has abused you at every turn, tried to bring you down at every turn?” asked an astonished Eshkol. And then, obdurately, “Besides, all our moves must be coordinated with the United States. It would be the wildest folly to act precipitately without exhausting the prospect of an American initiative to break the blockade. We, a country of two and a half million, cannot afford to thumb our noses at the United States and the rest of the world. We have no choice but to take world opinion into account.”

  “I do not believe the Americans are serious about marshalling an international flotilla to break the blockade,” Begin replied. “And as for world public opinion, I agree it is important, but we must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by what the goyim think. Besides, we’ve called up all our reserves, and think what this mobilization is costing our economy!”

  “So what are you proposing?”

  Begin looked evenly at Eshkol: “I’m proposing we go on the offensive immediately. Time is of the essence. And I’m proposing you hand over the reins of government to Ben-Gurion and become his deputy in a national unity government. I have the highest regard for you personally, but I think the situation is so grave and your responsibilities so heavy, you cannot carry the burden on your shoulders. I am firmly of the belief that Ben-Gurion has to lead the nation in this hour of peril. He is a war leader.”

  Eshkol shot him a sharp look, and there followed a brittle silence which was broken when he snapped, “Impossible! Ben-Gurion is eighty-one.”

  “True, but I say again, he’s a tried and tested war leader.”

  The prime minister, hurt to the core, stared upwards, studying the ceiling, trying to take it all in. Finally, he shot back, “You are asking me to do this after all Ben-Gurion has done and said about you over all these years? He’s even compared you to Hitler.”

  “The enmity is his, not mine. I live by the maxim that a Jew should never hate another Jew.”

  Levi Eshkol let off a mighty sneeze, blew his nose, took a deep breath, rose, walked to the window, and gazed sullenly into the night, where he saw picketers encamped across the street holding up signs calling upon him to step aside. After what seemed a long time, he turned, gazed morosely upon Begin, and shook his head from side to side.

  “If that’s your feeling, “said Begin, “I shall go.”

  “No, no, stay,” hastened Eshkol, resuming his seat. “Let’s talk this through. The country is in such danger that every option must be thoroughly explored.”

  For the next hour almost, in an intimacy they had never shared before, they sat together mulling over the matter, weighing its pros and cons from every possible angle. Finally, a tired Eshkol rose, stretched his arms, yawned, looked at his visitor wearily, shook his head, and said, “Dee tzvei fert kennen nisht shlepen de vagon tsuzamen” [These two horses cannot pull the same wagon together].

  “I understand,” said the leader of the opposition. He got to his feet, made for the door, and was about to open it when the prime minister gripped him by the arm, and with a sad smile, said, “Thank you for coming, anyway. I know you think this is the best course for the nation. The immediate thing is to broaden the coalition, with you in it.”

  “But only if Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan are in it, too.”

  Levi Eshkol raised his palms, indicating that Begin had no need to belabor the point, and said, “Let’s see what the next few days shall bring, and then we’ll decide what course to take.”11

  Over the course of the next few days a good many people in Israel were anxiously sticking strips of adhesive tape onto their windows to reinforce them against the blasts of shells and bombs. It was a laborious chore, on the eve of a war of survival which everybody expected to begin at any moment. The prime minister and his most senior aides were ensconced in the war room, to which I had no access, so my wife and I were busily engaged in sticking tape to our windows when an announcement came over the radio that Eshkol was about to address the nation. Along with hundreds of thousands of others across the land, we were hoping for an encouraging word, so we stopped what we were doing and glued our ears to the set.

  What we heard was a shuffling of papers, followed by a cough, a clearing of the throat, and then the distinctive gravelly voice. Eshkol talked bluntly of the anxiety the Arab troop concentrations were causing the nation, not least because of the Eilat blockade, and then he rattled on about how the Government had laid down principles for the continuation of its policy designed to promote an American-led international initiative calculated to avert war.

  There then came the sound of more paper being rustled, accompanied this time by repeated grunts of “Err, err,” as if Eshkol had lost his place, or was struggling to decipher scribbled alterations about “responsible decision-making” and “unity of purpose” – exactly as had happened at the Joint Israel Appeal dinner in London a few years before. Like then, he stumbled along, speaking in fits and starts, stuttering “Err, err” over and over again. But this was no fund-raising dinner. His audience was a frightened nation, and the more he stumbled over his reading, the more indecisive and panic-stricken he sounded, even when he rounded off with an assurance that Israel would know how to defend itself if attacked.

  The broadcast shook everybody’s nerves. Suddenly, the country seemed powerless and leaderless. Subsequent news reports told how Israel’s enemies rejoiced while Israeli soldiers in the trenches smashed their transistors and broke down in tears.

  Menachem Begin listened to the broadcast at his Tel Aviv home and recoiled in shock. He fiddled with the knobs of his radio to catch the BBC World Service to hear its commentary on the speech. What he got instead was the genteel voice of the BBC’s Cairo correspondent describing the relentless Egyptian military buildup in Sinai, illustrated with a quote from the order of the day to the Egyptian forces:

  The eyes of the world are upon you in your most glorious war against Israeli imperialist aggression on the soil of our fatherland. Your holy war is for the recapture of the rights of the Arab nation and to reconquer the robbed land of Palestine by the power of your weapons and the will of your faith…

  Begin switched off the radio in disgust and said to his wife Aliza, “I know Eshkol is suffering from a cold, but he sounded as if he’s having a heart attack.” And then, adamantly, “There’s no doubt he must resign in favor of Ben-Gurion, and hand over the Defense Ministry to Moshe Dayan.”

  Next morning Israel’s leading daily, Haaretz, said much the same thing:

  If we could truly believe that Eshkol was really capable of navigating the ship of state in these crucial days, we would willingly follow him. But we have no such belief after his radio address last night. The proposal that Ben-Gurion be entrusted with the premiership and Moshe Dayan with the Ministry of Defense, while Eshkol takes charge of domestic affairs, seems to us a wise one.

  When I walked into the prime minister’s office that same day, I entered an atmosphere of gloom. Adi Yaffe took me aside to tell me what exactly had fouled up the radio broadcast. It had been a calamitous day from the start, he said – nerve-racking cabinet consultations, endless phone calls, party politicking, and the idf General Staff straining at the leash like dogs penned up in kennels, wanting to strike the enemy before their bu
ildup became impenetrable. In the eyes of the idf, the delay was not due to military insufficiency but to political indecisiveness. Certain generals were even slinging accusations of cowardice at Eshkol. But he was shutting his ears to such epithets from men he saw as impetuous commanders who would lead him into war before he had exhausted every possibility of avoiding one. He insisted that if the American commitment to break the blockade came to naught then Washington’s only moral choice would be to support Israel in a war thrust upon it.

  Adi explained that, originally, Eshkol was to have prerecorded his address in the haven of his own room. However, because of his grueling schedule he did not get around to it until very late in the day. Going over the text drafted by Herzog and others, he quickly scribbled changes and, since his secretary had already gone home, Adi had sat down to retype the speech with one finger. He had hardly begun when the studio called to say it was too late to make a recording, and that if the prime minister wanted prime time he had to come to Broadcasting House immediately.

  Exhausted from stress and croaky with his incipient cold, Eshkol entered the broadcasting booth and began reading a text he had not fully checked and which was crisscrossed with corrections he could not fully decipher. “At one point,” said Adi dejectedly, “he signaled us, Herzog and me, that he wanted to cut the broadcast short, but we signaled back that he had no choice but to finish. And that’s what happened.”

  On the following evening, David Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula, a short, stout, robust woman, padded to the front door in a dressing gown to answer a gentle knock. “Ah, it’s you,” she said amiably, ushering in Menachem Begin and a couple of his party colleagues. “David is waiting for you.”

  Though the evening was hot and humid the leader of the Opposition wore, as was his custom, a formal suit and tie. He greeted Mrs. Ben-Gurion with genuine warmth. Paula liked Begin, and he liked her. In fact her husband was later to acknowledge this in an extraordinary letter he wrote to him in February 1969:

  For whatever reason, my Paula was always an admirer of yours. I opposed your path both before and after the establishment of the State, sometimes aggressively…. I remained an adamant opponent of certain of your positions and actions even after the State’s inception and I have no regrets about that because I believe I was in the right (anyone can make a mistake without knowing it). But on the personal level I never felt ill-will toward you, and the more I got to know you in these past years the more have I come to respect you, and my Paula is happy about that.

  This reconciliatory note suggested that the Old Man’s ferocious animosity toward his longtime political adversary was finally cooling off, but this was hardly discernible that night when Begin and his colleagues walked into his Tel Aviv apartment.

  Squat and stocky, and dressed in his signature open-necked khaki shirt and baggy cotton pants, David Ben-Gurion received them in his armchair, his silvery mane as untamed as ever and his face as pugnacious as ever. A man of issues, not of niceties, he snapped, “Nu – so what is it you’ve come to see me about?”

  Begin, in a tone that suggested he and his colleagues had given considerable thought to the matter in hand, explained their proposal that he assume the leadership of an emergency national unity government, replacing Levi Eshkol. The Old Man’s brows knitted into a frown and his bottom lip protruded in hard-pinched contemplation. Finally, he barked, “Me, Prime Minister again? Never!”

  He then proceeded to make short shrift of their strategic concepts, chastising them for imperiling the nation by advocating a preemptive strike, insisting that the IDF could not win a war without the backing of a great power such as the United States, advising that any military action be restricted to reopening the passage to Eilat, no more, and generally accusing them of endangering the very existence of the Jewish State in a war it could not possibly win alone.

  When Begin and his colleagues repaired to a nearby coffee shop to chew over Ben-Gurion’s tirade they concluded that the man was completely uninformed, abysmally out of date, had no concept of the idf’s genuine strength, and had talked himself into believing that Israel did not have the grit to save itself by itself. In short, he had grown old and was politically extinct, and that disappointed Menachem Begin very much.

  Steeling themselves for the battle of their lives, the people clamored for Dayan. Mass rallies chorused the same cry in city after city: “WE WANT DAYAN!” Wives of reserve officers – dubbed by one wit “the Merry Wives of Windsor” – marched in Tel Aviv chanting “DAYAN! DAYAN!” – Dayan, the legendary one-eyed warrior with the trademark black eye patch; Dayan, the internationally known Israeli hero; Dayan, the symbol of the Jewish State’s fortitude; Dayan, the one-time Hagana commander and dashing Chief of Staff who had shaped the Israel Defense Forces and led the Jewish State from victory to victory. Only he could rally the nation in defending itself against yet another looming Holocaust. As for the unableto-make-up-his-mind Levi Eshkol, most commentators were quick to assume he would carry on as prime minister in name only.

  When Eshkol, pallid and grim, again approached Begin about joining an expanded emergency cabinet, he responded, “Only with Dayan as defense minister.” This greatly aroused the ire of Golda Meir, then secretary-general of the Labor party, who ferociously opposed Dayan’s appointment, never having forgiven him for quitting Labor when Ben-Gurion established his rival rump faction, Rafi. However, as the noose of war tightened ever more chokingly around the nation’s neck, she acquiesced.

  Thus it was, that on Thursday, 1 June, listeners to the evening news cheered with relief – and many with tears – upon learning that a national unity government, the first in the country’s history, had at last been formed. That same night, Defense Minister designate Moshe Dayan and Minister without Portfolio designate Menachem Begin took their seats at the cabinet table and cast their votes in favor of a preemptive strike.

  Also, that same evening, Chaim Herzog, Yaakov’s elder brother, a former chief of military intelligence, a general in the reserves, and future president of Israel, told listeners in his highly rated daily morale-boosting broadcasts, “I must say in all sincerity that if I had to choose between flying an Egyptian bomber bound for Tel Aviv, or being in Tel Aviv, I would, out of a purely selfish desire for self-preservation, opt to be in Tel Aviv.” For people digging slit trenches in their backyards in preparation for an Egyptian air bombardment, these were soothing words indeed.

  On Sunday, 4 June 1967, the war cabinet passed the following resolution:

  After hearing reports on the military and diplomatic situation…the Government has determined that the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan are deployed for a multi-front attack that threatens Israel’s existence. It is therefore decided to launch a military strike aimed at liberating Israel from encirclement and preventing the impending assault by the United Arab Command.12

  With that, what had come to be known as the hamtana – the waiting period – was over. The Jewish State’s 264,000 soldiers were now poised to pit their prowess and grit against the Arab States’ 350,000, its 800 tanks against the Arab’s 2,000, and its 300 combat aircraft against the Arab’s 700.

  Such were the odds.

  Chapter 13

  A Prayer at the Wall

  At 7:45 the following morning, 5 June, soldiers in the southern trenches looked upwards in response to a distant drone in the sky that expanded into roaring waves of combat aircraft flying in tight formations at such low altitudes they could easily discern the Stars of David on the fuselages. A few hours later Menachem Begin, accompanied by his closest aide, Yechiel Kadishai, climbed the stairs of the prime minister’s Tel Aviv bureau where they found an exuberant Levi Eshkol in animated conversation with half-a-dozen equally elated ministers.

  “Mir dafen machen shecheyanu – we have to recite a thanksgiving blessing,” called Eshkol to Begin, and he made him privy to the single most spectacular piece of news he had ever heard in his life. In a surprise attack that morning, the Israeli Air Force had virtually wiped
out the Egyptian Air Force. The blackened skeletons of more than three hundred Egyptian planes lay smoldering on the bombed runways of their bases. The Syrians, the Jordanians, and the Iraqis had all opened fire and, consequently, their air forces were also being demolished.

  “Baruch Hashem! ” [Thank God] exclaimed Begin, his eyes alive with excitement. And then, “Tell me, the Jordanian attack – how serious is it?”

  Eshkol’s face fell into its familiar worry lines: “So far just artillery exchanges, mainly in Jerusalem, with a few skirmishes around Mount Scopus. I have sent word to King Hussein through the UN and the Americans that if Jordan stays out of the war we won’t touch them. The fighting in Sinai is much fiercer. Our tanks are just now penetrating the Egyptian fortifications, but we have total command of the skies. Up north, the Syrians are shelling townships and settlements from the Golan Heights. We are returning fire.”

  Hardly had Eshkol said these words when his military secretary, Colonel Yisrael Lior, walked in from the anteroom and handed him a note. The prime minister adjusted his spectacles and studied it.

  “Aha! The Jordanians are intensifying their shelling. I presume this is King Hussein’s reply to my message. He wants war!” There was a sharp and defiant bite to his words.

  A deeply pensive look entered Begin’s eyes, as if he was considering some staggering implications. He was! He was thinking that if the Jordanians persisted in their attack, the holy and historic national treasures the Jewish people had lost in the 1948 War of Independence might soon be liberated – the Old City, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple, Jerusalem reunited as the capital of Israel!