The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  Chapter 28

  Swansong

  On the very day Yitzhak Rabin was locked in his vinegary dispute with Jimmy Carter at the White House, Leah Rabin was spotted making a withdrawal at the Dupont Circle branch of the National Bank by a security officer at the Israeli Embassy. Her transaction was trivial enough, and would have gone unnoticed but for the fact that at that time it was an offense for an Israeli citizen to hold a bank account abroad. The account was a leftover from the Rabins’ ambassadorial days, and should have been closed once their time in America was over. It contained some twenty thousand dollars.

  Tipped off, Dan Margolit, the Washington correspondent of the influential Israeli daily Haaretz, dashed off to the branch in question, and thinking quickly, told the teller he owed the Rabins money, and would like to deposit a fifty-dollar check into their account. The unsuspecting teller examined the customer file, confirmed the existence of the account, and jotted down the account number on the back of Margolit’s check prior to depositing it. Margolit, quick as a Roadrunner, memorized the digits, scribbled them down, and scurried off to ask the prime minister’s press secretary, Dan Patir, if Mr. Rabin had any comment to make. Rabin said he had none, but asked that the story be held up for one day, to enable him to fly home before it broke. It was this that was preying on the prime minister’s mind as he winged his way back to Ben-Gurion airport, not just his row with Jimmy Carter.

  Israel’s attorney general at the time, Aharon Barak – later to become president of the Supreme Court – initially regarded the matter as a mere technical infringement, to be handled on an administrative level. But being something of a doctrinarian, ultimately he underwent a change of heart and insisted that the law be allowed to take its inexorable course, which meant that Leah Rabin would have to stand trial.

  “Me, too,” insisted an outraged Rabin when given the news. “I will not let Leah face this alone. Morally and formally we share responsibility. True, Leah was the one who actually used the account, because she always handled our finances. But the account was registered in both our names and I share full responsibility. If she is to blame, so am I. I will not allow a distinction to be drawn between me and my wife.”

  Three people were witness to this outburst – Freuka Poran, in the prime minister’s office to report on some military matter, Dan Patir, Rabin’s press secretary, who was there to report on the day’s media, and myself. I was there to report on a document that required his attention. Embarrassed and dismayed, the three of us sat speechless as we watched this most private and decent of men, as honest a one as ever had crossed the threshold of Israel’s political life, being thus besmirched and humiliated.

  Came the day of the trial, and Yitzhak Rabin publicly escorted his wife to the courthouse, where she was found guilty and heavily fined. Even before the trial, Rabin had decided to resign from the prime ministership as a matter of principle. This was an act so exceptional in Israeli political life it came to be seen as a legendary deed of noble proportions. However, Israeli constitutional law forbids a prime minister to resign once a new election date has been set, and an election was already scheduled for three months hence. So Rabin announced his withdrawal from the electoral race as leader of the Labor Party, and his natural successor was, predictably, his longtime nemesis and arch-rival, Minister of Defense Shimon Peres. Unable by law to resign, Rabin did the next best thing: he took what was tantamount to a leave of absence. But, here, too, the law did not totally relieve him of his overall responsibilities, most notably on matters to do with public security, so he continued to come daily to the office, as did we, his personal staff. I, personally, had little to do other than to write an occasional speech, letter, or position paper for Shimon Peres, who conducted whatever affairs of government he was engaged in either from the Cabinet Room on the floor above, or from his ministry of defense office in Tel Aviv.

  As election day approached, his secretary called to say he wanted to see me to talk about a job following the elections. I was totally taken aback; the very thought of working for Shimon Peres, after having worked so long for Rabin, was abhorrent to me and I went in search of Rabin to tell him so.

  There can be few things worse for a politician than to be an out-of-work prime minister: the Rabin I met that day looked forlorn and abandoned. His eyes were red and swollen. He stood grimly at his desk scanning newspapers, a bent shadow of his old self.

  “Stop torturing yourself with that stuff,” I said as I walked into his room. “The media is wallowing in your crucifixion.”

  “Swine!” he hissed. “They twist everything around.” But, then, with a spark of spirit he pointed to a paragraph in Davar – the Labor Party daily, now defunct – and said, “Here I’m being called obstinate and inflexible, but honest to a fault. Is that a compliment or not?”

  “A backhanded one, I suppose,” I replied.

  He obviously did not want to be alone, for he invited me to take a seat, and in a wry and unusually candid fashion, said, “You’ve known me long enough to know I can be pretty inflexible, and I do know that I am honest to a fault. This has sometimes got me into a lot of hot water, not least in the army.”

  “And in Washington, too,” I reminded him. “How many times were you rapped over the knuckles by Abba Eban because you said exactly what you thought of him?”

  Grumpily, he concurred, and added, “And now, this business of the bank: I brought myself down by insisting on resigning – the law does not require it – because I thought it was the only decent thing to do.”

  “So whose genes are these? Whom did you inherit it from?” I asked this flippantly in the hope of lightening things up a bit.

  Rabin began toying with a statuette on his desk – one of those executive playthings built of multiple metal parts – and smiling his crooked smile, said, “My mother, mainly. My mother, Rosa, was as obstinate as a mule, and strict and straight as a die. She inherited her character from her father – the Cohen from Petrograd. She used to tell stories – to my sister Rachel and me – about what a man of strict principle our grandfather was. He was very religious, and was one of the few Jews allowed to live in Petrograd.”

  “How so? What did he do?”

  “He was a timber merchant. He used to manage forests for some relative of the Tsar, which was why he was allowed to live in Petrograd. They even installed a telephone in his house – one of the first in Petrograd. Now, I ask you – how many people in those days in Russia had telephones? So, when it rang you knew somebody very important was on the other end of the line. But our mother told us that our grandfather had such strong religious principles, and was such a stalwart character, that he would never answer the telephone on Shabbat. The man could have lost everything – all his privileges – but he would never answer the telephone on Shabbat. Now, what do you make of that for a character?”

  I had one sudden lucid thought: “It’s a pity nothing of your grandfather’s Shabbat observance ever rubbed off on you,” I said.

  He shrugged as if the very notion of it was beyond his realm of reasoning, and said simply, “My mother rebelled against religion and left home to come here. But enough of me. What about you?”

  A sudden spikiness had gripped his voice which I knew meant his defenses were back in place and that the Rabin I knew had returned – the Rabin of no nonsense, no frills, no flourishes, just unembroidered frankness and privacy.

  “What about you?” he asked again. “What are you going to be doing now that I’m going?”

  “Peres wants to see me,” I told him. “His secretary tells me he’s going to offer me a job. But I’d prefer to go back to the foreign ministry, under the circumstances.”

  He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean – under what circumstances?”

  “Under the circumstances of having worked with you for nearly a decade; under the circumstances of feeling a deep sense of personal loyalty toward you; and under the circumstances that I can’t simply switch horses overnight, from you to Peres.”<
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  Without a word he walked over to the window, hands thrust in his trouser pockets. However dark his mood had been when I’d entered the room, it was even darker now as he turned, and in a flat, uninflected tone, the tone he used at press conferences, scolded, “Shtuyot! Rubbish! You were never involved in my differences with Shimon Peres, and I’m not going to let you get involved now.”

  “That’s easier said than done,” I muttered.

  “Maybe. But by what moral right will you say to the next prime minister of Israel that you refuse to work with him because of me? If Shimon Peres has the same view of you as I do – and I think he has – that’s all that matters. Must everything be a matter of personal allegiances? What about the country? What about the people? You have no right to refuse him. You’re not a politician, you’re a civil servant. Keep it that way.”

  Bruised by this moralistic tirade, I said in a mood of genuine truculence, “You know it’s not that simple. You can’t stand Peres’ guts and he can’t stand yours. Imagine a situation – he’s sitting in that chair where you are now and he has a go at you, as he inevitably will, because of some speech you’ve made, or some stand you’ve taken. What am I supposed to do, get up and walk out?”

  Blithely, Rabin replied, “Don’t worry, Peres will be careful not to badmouth me in your presence. And besides, I’ll give him no cause to do so.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I’ve decided to stay in the Knesset but lie low for a while – keep a low profile, out of the public eye. After that we’ll see what happens.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “Trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble – war?”

  “Maybe, but not necessarily. The Arabs will certainly have to show Jimmy Carter they have the military muscle to make trouble, otherwise their diplomatic moves will be toothless. And we’ll have to show Carter that we have even more military muscle, otherwise our diplomatic moves will be toothless. We have to be ready to put up a fight. The problem is that ever since my March meeting with Carter an impenetrable cloud has been hanging over Washington.”

  “Impenetrable – what does that mean?”

  Rabin’s voice dropped from a pebbly baritone to a gravelly bass, a sure sign he was about to say something confidential. “Simcha Dinitz can’t get his hand on any hard information, but the indicators are that President Sadat has won Jimmy Carter’s absolute trust, at our expense. They’re cooking up something – something to do with a Geneva conference. Kissinger even phoned Dinitz to warn him he’s heard that a plan is in the offing, but even he doesn’t know exactly what. And because of Carter’s essential ignorance of Middle East affairs, Kissinger is truly worried that we could find ourselves in a grave situation, so grave that he said that as a Jew he could not stand by without alerting us. I even sent over a special emissary to meet quietly with some of our friends over there, but the picture is still murky.”

  I blew a long whistle of surprise. “You think things are that serious?”

  He strode toward the window again, stared out of it for a while, and said softly, more to himself than to me, “I think Kissinger is exaggerating. You know how paranoid he can get.”

  I asked him whether the cabinet was fully cognizant of the state of affairs he had just described.

  “Certainly,” he said. “I felt I had to be on record before leaving office that I’ve done all that I could to get hold of all the facts.”

  “And what’s Peres’ view?”

  “Peres is anxious that nothing gets out before the elections, which I can well understand.”

  “And after the elections – will he have a problem putting together a coalition quickly to handle this?”

  His feet now up on the desk, hands pillowed behind his head, he speculated, “My guess is that if Labor makes a decent showing, Peres should be able to form a coalition in a reasonable amount of time. But if Labor does badly he’ll use the Carter crisis to cobble together an emergency coalition – a national unity government together with Menachem Begin. The nation will go along with that under the circumstances.”

  “And are you that convinced Peres is truly our next prime minister?”

  “As things stand now, yes. Begin has suffered a severe heart attack at the worst possible moment for his party. The elections are imminent and he’s virtually out of the picture. They have nobody else of Begin’s stature – so who are they going to vote for? That is why I take it for granted Peres will form the new government, and that you, Yehuda, will be as loyal to him as you have been to me.”

  Then, purposefully, “I’ve got to write a farewell letter to Jimmy Carter, but I’ll be damned if I know what to say. Let’s think.”

  He began to pace the room slowly, immersed in thought, and when he next spoke there was fire in his eyes and grit in his voice: “I’ve got it! I’m going to say that any furthering of the American disengagement from Israel could lead to war, and that any strengthening of America’s special relationship with Israel could lead to peace. Let’s try it out – the thrust of it. Let’s see what it looks like.”

  In its final version it looked like this:

  Dear Mr. President – I depart from my duties as prime minister after three years of unremitting effort to advance the cause of peace in our region. This is a cause which was and remains the highest aspiration of every government of Israel. It is my conviction that if the building blocks for a negotiated peace with security are to be constructively exploited this will depend primarily on the continuation and intensification of the special relationship that has traditionally marked the ties between our two countries. I believe we are entering a crucial period in which the prospects for further movement toward peace will be determined, ultimately, by the credibility of the Israel-U.S. dialogue and the intimacy of understanding it invokes. Over and over again, experience has shown that the atmosphere of this dialogue influences and shapes the atmosphere of the peace climate in the area.

  Extremely satisfied with this paragraph, which said exactly what he wanted it to say, he did something unheard of: this painfully shy man walked around the desk and with an overflowing of camaraderie gave me a hug so huge it left me speechless.

  “B’seder,” he said – “OK.”

  I kept my appointment with Shimon Peres that afternoon, and I confess that his propensity for hyperbole, poetry, and tautology – the very opposite of Yitzhak Rabin – got under my skin. He listened patiently when I told him that I felt too great a personal loyalty to Rabin to switch horses overnight, but being the canny and tested politician that he was, he disarmingly brushed off my protestations, and suavely responded that had I been less loyal to Rabin he would have thought less of me.

  He then went on to regale me with lyrical and optimistic rhetoric about how he was going to beat Menachem Begin roundly, how Begin was virtually out of the race anyway because of his heart attack, and how all the polls were going his way. And then, taking me by the arm and guiding me toward the door, he said with enormous poignancy, “Yehuda, everything I know tells me I shall be the next prime minister of Israel. Psychologically, I’m living with that responsibility night and day, so it’s only natural I should be thinking now about who I want to work with. And one of the people I want to work with is you. I have lots of new ideas, and you have an important role at my side.” Whereupon, he gave my hand a final squeeze and, full of energy, said, “Get ready for hard work. Expect a call after the victory.”54

  Part III The Last Patriarch

  Prime Minister Menachem Begin

  1977–1983

  August 16, 1913 – Born Brisk [Brest-Litovsk], Russia.

  1935 – Warsaw University Law School.

  1939 – Head of Betar, Poland (the influential youth wing of the Zionist Revisionist movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky).

  1939 – Marries Aliza Arnold.

  1940 – Sentenced to eight years in Siberian labor camps by Soviet secret police for Zionist activism.


  1941 – Released to join Free Polish Forces following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

  1942 – Arrives in Eretz Yisrael with the Free Polish Forces.

  1943 – Assumes command of the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi (The National Fighting Organization).

  1944 – Leads uprising against the British rule of Eretz Yisrael.

  Key Events of Political Life

  1948 – Begin disbands the Irgun following Israel’s independence and establishes the Herut (later the Likud) Party.

  1967 – Helps initiate the national unity government on the eve of the Six-Day War.

  1970 – Resigns from the national unity government.

  May 1977 – Elected prime minister.

  November 1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visits Jerusalem.