The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  N: What do we plan then?

  K: Well, we plan to try to get it wound up this week.

  N: [garbled]

  K: Yes.

  N: …Well at least I feel better. The airlift thing, if I contributed anything to the discussion it is the business that, don’t fool around with three planes. By golly, no matter how big they are, just go gung ho.

  K: One of the lessons I have learned from you, Mr. President, is that if you do something, you might as well do it completely.29

  And do it completely he did. Over the course of the ensuing days and weeks U.S. resupply aircraft conducted 815 sorties delivering more than 27,900 tonnes of materiel, replenishing Israel’s arsenals and enabling the idf to decisively move over to the offensive.

  When a bleary-eyed and weary prime minister addressed the Knesset a couple of days after this conversation she expressed Israel’s fervent gratitude to the president and people of the United States for the airlift, and caused an optimistic stir when she revealed that even as she was speaking, a task force of the Israel Defense Forces had succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal and was engaging the enemy on its western bank.

  But the principal reason Golda Meir chose to address the Knesset that day, when the war was still at its height and Israel still in peril, was because she wanted the world to know what the Jewish State’s fate would have been had it ever bowed to the constant international pressure to withdraw to the pre–Six-Day War lines of 1967. She wanted the world to know why she and her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, had rebuffed that pressure so stubbornly. To the approving nods of Menachem Begin, who was listening to her with appreciation, she told the House in a voice that rang with sudden command:

  One need not have a fertile imagination to realize what the situation of the State of Israel would have been if we had been deployed on the June fourth sixty-seven lines. Anyone who finds it difficult to visualize this nightmarish picture should direct his mind and attention to what happened on the northern front – on the Golan Heights – during the first days of the war. Syria’s aspirations are not limited to a piece of land, but to deploying their artillery batteries once again on the Golan Heights against the Galilee settlements, to setting up missile batteries against our aircraft, so as to provide cover for the breakthrough of their armies into the heart of Israel.

  Nor is a fertile imagination required to imagine the fate of the State of Israel had the Egyptian armies managed to overcome the Israel Defense Forces in the expanses of Sinai and to move in full force towards Israel’s borders…. This is a war against our very existence as a state and a nation. The Arab rulers pretend that their objective is limited to reaching the lines of June fourth sixty-seven, but we know their true objective: the total subjugation of the State of Israel. It is our duty to realize this truth; it is our duty to make it clear to all men of goodwill who tend to ignore this truth. We need to realize this truth in all its gravity, so that we may continue to mobilize from among ourselves and from the Jewish people all the resources necessary to overcome our enemies, to fight back until we have defeated the aggressors.

  Toward the end of October, the Arabs sued for a ceasefire. What had begun three weeks earlier as an ignoble retreat of the Israelis ended in an almost total rout of the Egyptians and the Syrians, and the humiliation of their patron, the Soviet Union. Reenergized and reequipped, the IDF advanced to forty kilometers [not twenty as Kissinger had told Nixon] from the gates of Damascus, battled its way along the highway to Cairo, smashed two Egyptian armies, surrounded a third, and was poised to strike a knockout blow against that Third Army when Nixon and Kissinger put the squeeze on Israel, saying in effect, “Okay Golda! Good job! Enough! Stop, it’s over!”

  Exactly as the president and the secretary had envisaged in their jumbled and rambling telephone exchanges two weeks before, the squeeze rescued Egypt’s remaining forces from total annihilation and Israel was robbed of a decisive military victory. Fretfully and fatalistically, Prime Minister Meir put it this way to her cabinet:

  Let’s call things by their proper name. Black is black and white is white. There is only one country to which we can turn, and sometimes we have to give in to it – even when we know we shouldn’t. But it is the only real friend we have, and a very powerful one at that. We don’t have to say yes to everything, but let’s call things by their proper name. There is nothing to be ashamed of when a small country like Israel, in this situation, has to give in sometimes to the United States. And when we do say yes, let’s, for God’s sake, not pretend that it is otherwise and that black is white.30

  The fact that the last remnant of Egyptian military power – the Third Army – had not been routed and had not surrendered, enabled President Sadat to declare to his people that he had wiped clean the shame of 1967, and enabled Secretary of State Kissinger to fly into the Middle East to begin reaping the political harvest of Washington’s diplomacy. Using the currency of Israeli concessions, he set out to convince President Sadat that Washington, not Moscow, was henceforth the arbiter of affairs in the Middle East, and that it paid to be a friend of the United States of America.

  The first full Knesset debate on the Yom Kippur War took place on 13 November 1973, and Leader of the Opposition Menachem Begin, dressed in a dark gray double-breasted suit, walked into the parliament building spoiling for a fight. He had not uttered a word of criticism against the prime minister and her government so long as the war raged, but now that it was over, the political gloves were off. Golda Meir had to be made to account to the nation why she had allowed a war to break out in the first place – a war that had sent two thousand, six hundred and eighty-eight Israeli soldiers to their graves.

  At four o’clock that afternoon a press secretary poked his head through the door of the Knesset restaurant and shouted, “Begin’s speaking,” causing a stampede of parliamentary correspondents to pile out of the eatery, up the stairway and into the press gallery, where they peered down on the Opposition leader standing at the podium beginning to address a House crammed to the rafters. Usually, Mr. Begin delighted in dropping a cool nugget of irony into the most heated of debates, and then watching with satisfaction the resultant effervescence bubble and pop, but not today. Today was not a time for rhetorical antics. It was a time to be grim, lucid, terse, accusatory and, above all, to state the opposition case so unanswerably as to vanquish the government and compel it to resign.

  Up in the press gallery foreign correspondents crowded around me, some kneeling, some sitting on the floor, scribbling furiously while straining to hear my stage-whispered, amateurish simultaneous translation above the amplified voice of the speaker. Menachem Begin was pointing an accusatory finger at the prime minister, who was sitting at the government table in the well of the chamber, shoulders hunched, face pale, her hair somewhat disheveled, surrounded by her brooding ministers, and all knowing what was about to come. What came was a growling Begin with a contemptuous eye, scornfully reproving:

  “Did we, Madame Prime Minister, at noontime on Yom Kippur, have armor and infantry mobilized along the two fronts, north and south, ready to inflict a preemptive blow on the enemy? No, Madame, we did not! What did we have along those fronts?” He surveyed the House as if expecting an answer. “We had the finest and bravest troops any nation could wish for, but they were so thinly stretched, any preemptive action on their part would have been suicidal. Perhaps our Air Force might have been brought into play, but given the advanced weaponry at the enemy’s command, their deadly ground-to-air missiles – the SAMs – plus their four thousand tanks and their multiple divisions poised to strike, it is unreasonable to assume our pilots could have prevented such a coordinated assault that had been so meticulously planned.”

  As he spoke, the packed assembly kept on shifting its gaze from his face to that of the prime minister’s, like a crowd watching a tennis match.

  “The question every household in Israel is asking,” battered Begin in full stride, “is, why was it that between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kip
pur you did not mobilize the reserves and move our armor forward? What prevented you, Madame Prime Minister, from taking this most elementary of precautionary measures? You knew well in advance of the massive Egyptian and Syrian preparations for an imminent attack, and yet you did not even admit this to your own government, and you overruled your own chief of staff when he wanted to stage a preemptive strike.”

  He abruptly dropped his voice from a high octave to a low one when he continued reasonably:

  “Oh yes, I agree that to decide to launch such an all-out preemptive strike in such circumstances would, indeed, have been a momentous decision. One would have had to ponder it a thousand times. But with an enemy concentrating his forces before your very eyes” – again, he was up on the high ground, strident and harsh – “and still to do virtually nothing? And all the while, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur you were receiving confirmatory reports about those troop and weapon concentrations, yet you still did not take the most elementary precautions. How is this possible?”

  He tossed up his arms in bafflement and stared hard at the premier and her cabinet ministers, searching their faces. Golda Meir sat there immersed in papers, as though engaged in other affairs. There was the blank, impassive face of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the intellectual, paunchy face of Foreign Minister Abba Eban, the closed expression of Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon; there were the veiled eyes of Minister without Portfolio Yisrael Galilee, whom some called Golda’s Svengali; the sharp and intelligent eyes of Interior Affairs Minister Dr. Yosef Burg, and the shrewd and clever gaze of Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir – among others.

  “Just imagine,” said Begin to the people at that table, “and I say this with restrained yet indescribable frustration, that we had called out the reserves, say, four days before Yom Kippur, and at the same time moved our heavy weaponry forward. I’m speaking here of five hundred tanks to the Golan Heights and seven hundred to the Suez Canal, which would have still left us with an ample strategic reserve; just imagine those twelve hundred tanks readied in the north and in the south, the difference it would have made. One of two things would then have happened: either there would have been no war at all. Soviet spy satellites would have spotted our presence and Cairo and Damascus would have been forewarned by Moscow: ‘Don’t attack – the Jews are ready and waiting;’ or, yes, the enemy would have attacked, but the Egyptians would never have gotten across the Canal, certainly not with seventy thousand infantry, nine hundred tanks and hundreds of artillery pieces. The Israel Defense Forces would have fulfilled its vow: ‘They shall not pass!’ and we would not have had to pull back in the north, abandoning almost half of the Golan Heights, creating an intolerable threat to the villages in the valley below. We would have smashed the Syrian assault just as we would have routed the Egyptian aggressors, because we would have had the means to do so.”

  Then, really letting go, he unleashed a mighty barrage with unreserved passion:

  “But where, Madame Prime Minister, were those forces at noontime on Yom Kippur when our sworn enemies set out to destroy us? Where were those twelve hundred tanks? Where were their crews? Where were their gunners? I shall tell you where they were, Madame Prime Minister: the weapons were in the depots and the crews were at home.”

  At this, several scores of voices exploded in a tumult of resentment: “All right, all right. We know about that. Sit down. Enough!” And there were some voices that were raised almost to a squeal: “Stop the demagoguery! You don’t know what you’re talking about! You don’t have all the facts! You’re imagining things!”

  “Am I? I don’t think so,” snapped Begin, his inflection sarcastic. And then, every word plainly enunciated, “What I’m asserting is that our ability to have blocked the enemy at the very outset is not a figment of my imagination. It is an objective fact. And the proof is that, despite our not having mobilized the reserves in time, despite our not having moved our tanks to the front in time, despite the appalling chaos, and despite the resultant logistical breakdowns, despite all of these terrible things, when the actual crunch came – and this I say to the everlasting credit of the IDF – our forces managed on both fronts, with that same approximate number of tanks, to trounce our enemies, grind them underfoot, and send them reeling.”

  Assured even more than before, his finger jabbing the air like a prosecutor scolding a witness, he admonished: “Yet, Madame Prime Minister, you did not mobilize our forces in time. You did not move our weaponry forward in time. So I am compelled to ask you, from whence this irresponsible flippancy? Why don’t you just come out and openly admit to the nation that you made a mistake?”

  Golda Meir looked up sharply, and returned Menachem Begin’s gaze with hard, fearless eyes, as if to say, You know very well the reason why. You know very well my hands were tied by the Americans who told me in no uncertain terms not to fire the first shot, whose Intelligence was as misguided as our own, and who, therefore, warned us against full-scale mobilization for fear it might transform what appeared to be enemy training maneuvers into an enemy offensive assault.

  But whether Menachem Begin knew this or not, he was not to be assuaged. He had reached the very pinnacle of his speech and having climbed there, his eyes still riveted on this old woman whose face was obdurate, he said to her in an almost intimate fashion, without malice or spite:

  “Mrs. Meir, you know full well that a government which fails in a matter so fateful to the life of a nation – and certainly to our nation, surrounded by enemies bent on our destruction – such a government inevitably loses the trust of the people. So I ask you, by what moral authority do you stay in office after being responsible for such a misfortune? How can you possibly think you can continue to conduct the affairs of our nation in light of the fateful decisions that still lie ahead? I am compelled to say to you, not as a politician, not as a party member, but as a father and a grandfather, that I can no longer depend on your Government to ensure the future of my children and grandchildren. So, with all the respect and the regard I hold for you, I have to say to you, please go now – right now. Go to the president and hand him your resignation. You are duty-bound to do so in the name of truth. Please go!”

  Cries of “Yes, yes! Resign! Resign!” rose from the opposition benches, but Prime Minister Golda Meir paid no heed to them. And when Menachem Begin stepped down from the podium and returned to his seat, the whole House in an uproar, she stared at him with disgust in her eyes as he passed her bench.

  She was disgusted too, nay furious, at her fellow socialist comrades, leaders of European governments, who had refused to allow the fighter aircraft to land and refuel in their territories as part of the airlift which America was rushing through to replenish the crippling IDF losses. So she phoned Willie Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany and a highly respected leader of the Socialist International, to ask for a meeting of that body.

  “I have no demands to make of any one of them,” she told him stiffly. “I just want to talk to my friends, my fellow socialists. For my own good I want to know what possible meaning socialism can have when not a single socialist country in all of Europe was prepared to come to the aid of the only democratic nation in the Middle East. Is it possible that democracy and fraternity do not apply in our case? Anyhow, I want to hear for myself, with my own ears, what it was that kept the heads of these socialist governments from helping us.”

  In a word, she wanted to look them straight in the eye.

  The requested conference convened in London shortly thereafter, and was attended by all the heads of socialist parties, those in government as well as those in parliamentary opposition. Having been the one to ask for the meeting, Golda was the first to speak. Rising to do so, she had to impose an iron control on herself: lifelong Labor Zionist that she was, she understood that she was about to face a moment of quintessential truth. Was the Jewish State a rightful member of this socialist fraternity, or was it irredeemably the odd state out in the family of nations?

  She began by remindi
ng her fellow socialists how Israel had been taken by surprise, fooled into misinterpreting Arab intentions, and how it had been touch and go for days until the enemy was driven back and the Jewish State emerged staggering but victorious.

  And then she laid it on thick: “I just want to understand, truly understand, in light of what I have told you, what socialism is really about today. Here you are, all of you. Not one inch of your territory was put at our disposal for refueling the planes that saved us from destruction. Now suppose Richard Nixon had said, ‘I’m sorry, but since we have nowhere to refuel in Europe, we just can’t do anything for you, after all.’ What would all of you have done then? You know us and who we are. We are all old comrades, long-standing friends. What do you think? On what grounds did you make your decisions not to let those planes refuel? Believe me, I am the last person to belittle the fact that we are only one tiny Jewish State and that there are over twenty Arab States with vast territories, endless oil, and billions of dollars. Of course you have your interests. But what I want to know from you today is whether these things are decisive factors in socialist thinking too?”

  “Would anybody like the floor?” asked the chairman when Golda Meir sat down. Nobody did. The silence was palpable. It was broken only by a man’s voice behind her who said audibly, “Of course they won’t talk. They can’t talk. Their throats are choked with oil.”

  “I never found out whose voice that was,” she told a colleague on her return home. “I couldn’t bring myself to turn my head and look at him for fear I might embarrass him. But that man, whose face I never saw, said it all.”31

  To which Menachem Begin, had he been present, might well have said, “Golda, old friend, welcome to the Jewish people.”