“Every child in every one of these twenty-two Arab states,” Katz began, “is taught from an early age that it is a patriotic duty and a moral imperative that this tiny state” – his fingertip was resting on Israel, blotting it out entirely – “be eliminated from the face of the earth, as a divisive and immoral element intruding into the Arab world.”
The president listened, his face impassive.
“Indeed, in the Palestinian Covenant, which is the National Charter of the PLO, the expulsion of the so-called ‘Zionist imperialists’ from the Arab world takes precedence over the ‘purging of the Zionist presence in Palestine.’”
Carter pressed his lips together. Clearly, he had no tolerance for national dogmas of this sort. His mind was empirical, that of an engineer, focused only on results. You could sense it in the way he fixed his steely, impatient, pale-blue eyes on Katz, as if to say, “What’s your bottom line?” Recognizing this gaze, Carter’s advisers began shifting about restlessly, shooting wary glances at each other. In contrast, Begin sat expressionless while Dr. Katz elaborated further:
“Logically, the PLO was recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people by all the Arab states, for the PLO is an instrument of all the Arab states, armed by them, financed by them, and trained by them. To bolster the scenario of a people driven from their homeland by a predatory Israel they have built up a mythological history which bears no relation to the facts. In 1974, Arafat addressed the United Nations, claiming that the Palestinians were engaged continuously for thousands of years in farming and cultural activity in Palestine. It is hard to imagine a description in harsher contrast to the facts.”
“How is that?” asked Vance mildly.
“Because the land was virtually empty. As Americans, you will be interested in the firsthand testimony of one of your own – testimony that refutes the absurd Arab claim. I urge you to read, or reread, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad.”
Katz hunched over his file and extracted from it a page photocopied from the book. He adjusted his spectacles, coughed a little cough, and said, “This is Mark Twain in eighteen sixty-seven, writing about the scene he saw in Upper Galilee: ‘There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent, not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts, and not see ten human beings…. Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided in and out among the rocks and lay still and sunned themselves. Where prosperity has reigned and fallen; where glory has flamed and gone out; where gladness was and sorrow is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high places, there this reptile makes its home, and mocks at human vanity.’”61
“Oh, how Mark Twain could write!” gushed Menachem Begin, his smile pure sunlight. “Whoever would have thought that a day would come when his words would become testimony filled with such pertinent political significance?” He sat back and beamed contentedly at the old brass chandelier hanging above the table. “A beautiful piece,” he observed.
Katz continued, “And Twain’s is only one of a series of testimonies between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries that describe the utter desolation of the Land of Israel. Indeed, Palestine was never, never ever” – he tapped Twain for added weight – “a homeland of any other people; never, never ever, a national center to anybody else except to the Jewish people. Their links were forever continuous. It is part of western culture that Palestine was always a Jewish country.”
The president wore a mask of politeness, but it was easy to see by his clenched teeth that anger lurked beneath. Apparently, not only did he resent the lengthy Katz litany; he found no joy in hearing America’s foremost literary prodigy being quoted back at him in such a fashion.
“Yes, indeed, a Jewish country,” echoed Begin, striking a defiant pose. “When the British Mandate was adopted at the San Remo Conference in 1920, the language used was, ‘Recognition having been given to the historical connection between the Jewish people and Palestine.’ Note, Mr. President, the Jewish people and Palestine. The name, Palestine,” he crisply clarified, “was given to the area by the Roman emperor Hadrian when he crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 133 c.e. He sought to erase every last trace of Jewish existence by calling the country Syria et Palestina, after the long-extinct Philistines. Yet throughout history, the historical connection was recognized by all civilized nations as between the Jewish people and Palestine, and not any other people.”
Shmuel Katz picked up the theme. “The present-day Arabs in the country are, for the most part, fairly recent arrivals, beginning with the nineteenth century, and especially since the Zionist revival in the twentieth. That is probably why so many got up and ran in forty-eight. That is not how a rooted peasantry behaves. The really indigenous Arabs are the ones who stayed.”
“Is that so? Tell us more!” Thus Brzezinski, his voice brimming with cynicism.
Carter looked at Katz with a cold, hard, pinched expression, his patience long gone. More than half the allotted time for the meeting had passed, yet not a word had been said by Begin about Geneva. Others around the table fidgeted, eyeing comrades with sideways squints. But Katz would not be stopped. He spoke of how the old Zionist organizations in America, and elsewhere, axiomatically used the name Palestine in their titles, since Palestine was axiomatically the Jewish land; he spoke of how the 1919 agreement between the Emir Faisal and Chaim Weizmann stated explicitly that here was a pact between ‘the Arab state,’ meaning the Arabs, and ‘Palestine,’ meaning the Jews; he spoke of how the Arabs themselves had once insisted that there was no such country as Palestine, and that it was really southern Syria; he spoke of how, by international law, Israel was entitled to the ownership of Judea and Samaria because their occupation by the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan in 1948 was an act of aggression and an illegal invasion, and Israel enjoyed a ‘preferred right of ownership’; and he spoke of how the British, for imperial reasons, had given the Arabs three-quarters of the original Palestine – now the Kingdom of Jordan – and how the PLO insisted that the Palestinian homeland still stretched across both sides of the Jordan River. Therefore, they already had a homeland, on the other side of the Jordan. As he finished this sentence, the prime minister placed a gentle restraining hand on his arm and, in a voice low yet intense, interjected, “With your permission, Mr. President, I have something important to say.”
“By all means,” said Carter, his eyes still stirred to anger at the direction the meeting had taken.
Menachem Begin returned the stare with a look that was grave and commanding: “Mr. President, I wish to tell you something personal – not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard may seem academic, theoretical, even moot to you, but not to my generation. To my generation of Jews, these are indisputable facts. They touch upon the very core of our national being. For we are a nation of returnees, back to our homeland, Eretz Yisrael. Ours is the generation of destruction and redemption. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of hell.”
The voice was mesmeric, the room quiet. The speaker’s passion had nudged all at the table out of their restlessness.
“We were a helpless people, Mr. President,” continued Begin. “We were bled, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation – mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children – ours. No one came to our rescue. We suffered and died alone. We could do nothing about it. But now we can. Now we can defend ourselves.”
Suddenly, he was on his feet, his posture militant, his face iron, as he said intrepidly, “Permit me to show you a map. I call it the INSM – the Israel National Security Map. General Poran, the map, please.”
Freuka jumped to unroll the chart on the table between the president and the prime minister, who set about explaining it. “Mr. President, there is
nothing remarkable about this map. It’s quite a standard one of our country, displaying the old forty-nine armistice line as it existed until the sixty-seven Six-Day War, the so-called Green Line.”
He ran his finger along the defunct frontier which meandered down the center of the country.
“As you see, our military cartographers have delineated the tiny area we had for defense in that war. It was a war of survival in the most literal sense. Our backs were to the sea. We had absolutely no defensive depth. The distances were tiny. Permit me to show you how tiny they were. I shall begin with the north.”
He leaned across the table and pointed to the mountainous area which covered the upper section of the map, the section closest to Carter.
“You see these mountains, Mr. President. The Syrians and the Lebanese sat on the top of them and we were at the bottom.”
His finger marked the Golan Heights and the mountains of South Lebanon, and then rested on the green panhandle squeezed in between.
“This is the Hula Valley. It is hardly ten miles wide. They shelled our towns and villages in that valley from up on top of these mountains, day and night.”
Carter nodded, his hands clamped under his chin.
The prime minister’s finger now moved southward, to Haifa.
“Haifa, as you know, Mr. President, is our major port city. The armistice line was only twenty miles away.”
The President nodded again.
The finger shifted still further south, halting at the resort city of Netanya.
“Here, at Netanya, the distance to the old indefensible line was nine miles. Our country was reduced to a narrow waist.”
“I understand,” said the President, pursing his lips in contemplation.
But the prime minister was not sure that he did. His finger trembled and his voice rumbled, “Nine miles, Mr. President! Inconceivable! Indefensible!”
Carter made no comment.
The finger now hovered over Tel Aviv, and it drummed the map.
“Here, in the Tel Aviv area, live a million Jews, twelve miles from that indefensible armistice line. And here, between Haifa in the north and Ashkelon in the south” – his finger was running up and down the coastal plain – “live two million Jews, two-thirds of our total population, together with virtually our entire national infrastructure. This coastal plain is so narrow in parts that a surprise thrust by a column of tanks could cut the country in two in a matter of minutes. For whosoever sits in these mountains” – his fingertip tapped Judea and Samaria, whose heights dominated the narrow coastal plain – “holds the jugular vein of Israel in his hands. The Soviet-supplied artillery possessed by our neighbors has a range of forty-three point eight kilometers. In other words, from any point along this so-called Green Line, their conventional artillery can hit every city and township in our country; every house, every man, woman and child. It would be a mortal danger. It would mean the beginning of the end of our statehood, independence, and liberty.”
Begin’s dark, watchful eyes swept the somber faces of the powerful men in front of him, and he declared tersely, “Gentlemen, I submit to you, no nation in our region can be rendered so vulnerable and hope to survive. There is no going back to those lines. Abba Eban called them the Auschwitz lines. No nation can live on borrowed time.”
Carter bent his head forward, the better to inspect the map, but still said nothing, and his features remained unfathomable.
Begin fixed his eyes upon him more intently, and in a tone that was official, precise, every word weighed, he proclaimed, “To Israel, the term national security is not an excuse for self-aggrandizement. National security is not a cloak to mask an expansionist ambition. National security is precisely that – survival; it is the lives of every man, woman and child in our country.”
As he spoke these words, something stirred deep inside him. There was a sudden detachment in his eyes, a distant gaze, as if he was looking at this dispassionate born-again Southern Baptist from way inside himself, from that most intimate of Jewish recesses – that private space of Jewish remembrance and of Jewish weeping and of Jewish hope. And, standing there in that place he declared in a voice that would not tolerate indifference, “Sir, the distinction between Jewish national security in the past and Jewish national security in the present is that in the present, our men can defend their women and children. In the past, in the Holocaust, they had to deliver them; they had to deliver them to their executioners. We were tertiated, Mr. President.”
Jimmy Carter lifted his head. “What was that word, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“Tertiated, not decimated. The origin of the word decimation is one in ten. When a Roman legion was found guilty of insubordination one in ten was put to the sword. In the case of our people it was one in three – TERTIATED!”
And then, in a tone that was stubborn, defiant, obdurate, he rose to his full height, banged his fist on the table, and thundered, “MR. PRESIDENT, I TAKE AN OATH BEFORE YOU IN THE NAME OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE! THIS WILL NEVER, EVER, HAPPEN AGAIN.”
And then he broke. His lips trembled. He clenched his fists and pressed them so tightly against the tabletop his knuckles went white. Unseeing, he stared at the map, struggling to blink back tears. Who could tell what ruined faces of friends and family were staring back at him at that moment as he stood there, dignified, weeping within.
Silence settled on the chamber. The tick of the antique clock on the marble mantelpiece became audible. An eternity seemed to hang between each tick. All the president’s men lowered their eyes until, by degrees, in slow motion, Menachem Begin straightened himself. Gradually the room came back to life.
“Would you like a recess, Mr. Prime Minister?” asked the president, seemingly moved.
“No, no,” answered Begin, pain still flickering in his eyes. “I apologize for speaking at such length. You see, I have so many things to say about my people, about our land, about our history, about our suffering, and about our future. But above all, I have to say this to you – you, the leader of the free world: our fathers and mothers were killed because they were Jews. We don’t want our grandchildren to suffer the same fate. I believe that were we to go back to those old lines, we would lose the very chance of peace.”
Like a cold wind blowing in from the Arctic, Zbigniew Brzezinski asked if this was the prime minister’s rationale for planting Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Was he contending that the proposed settlements were a matter of national security. Begin answered that they assuredly were. This was what he had meant when he’d said that for Israel, national security was not just an excuse for self-aggrandizement or a cloak for expansionist ambition. The settlements were critical to security. Equally, they were an expression of the inherent right of the Jewish people to settle in any part of their historic homeland.
Cyrus Vance seemed unruffled as a rule, but now displayed a great deal of agitation, contending that the new settlements would prove an insurmountable obstacle to peace and would destroy any hope for a successful Geneva conference. Carter thought so, too. The Rabin administration had taken the attitude of discouraging such settlements, he contended.
But Begin pooh-poohed the pessimism. Jews and Arabs already lived side by side in places like Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa, he argued. Besides, no new settlements would be built on Arab-owned land, only on untilled, rocky and uncultivable land, of which there was plenty.
The Americans exchanged guarded glances. This was the Begin they had heard of – the inflexible and obstinate nationalist. Their disquiet was articulated by the president who said, “I shall have more to say on this very thorny question in a minute. Meanwhile, I am waiting to hear what you have to say on a Geneva peace conference.”
But Menachem Begin wasn’t ready for that just yet. He wouldn’t be rushed. He had one more thing to add, and add it he would.
“One last word, Mr. President,” he said.
He took out a piece of paper from his inside pocket, adjusted his spectacles, peered
at the page, absorbed its contents, and then said with sudden good humor, “Mr. President, here in the United States of America there are eleven places named Hebron, five places named Shiloh, four places named Bethel, and six places named Bethlehem.”
Jimmy Carter’s eyes grew faintly amused. “Indeed there are. Within twenty miles of my home there is a Bethel and a Shiloh.”
“May I be permitted to visit them one day?”
“Of course. With pleasure! There are three good Baptist churches there.”
“In that case, I shall bring along our chief rabbi to protect me.”
Everybody laughed, but it was a hollow laugh.
“Allow me to put to you a hypothetical question. Imagine one day that the governors of the states in which these Hebrons and Shilohs and Bethels and Bethlehems were located were to issue a decree, declaring that any citizen of the United States was free to settle in any one of these places except for one category – the Jews. Jews are forbidden to build homes in the Shilohs and the Hebrons and the Bethels and the Bethlehems of America – so it would be decreed!”
Begin threw up his hands and let out an inflated sigh: “Oh dear! Everybody is welcome to settle in any of these places whose names derive from the Book of Books except for the People of the Book. Good women and men everywhere would cry from the rooftops – ‘Scandalous!’ ‘Discrimination!’ ‘Bigotry!’ Am I not right?”
Jimmy Carter heard the penny drop and did not like the sound of it. “Hypothetically,” he said, not amused.
Whereupon Begin clinched his argument. “So how can you expect me, a Jewish prime minister of the Jewish State who heads a cabinet of fifteen Jews, free men all – how can you expect me to forbid my fellow Jews from acquiring a piece of land and building a home in the original Shiloh, in the original Bethel, in the original Bethlehem, and in the original Hebron, from whence our Jewish forefathers originally came? Would that not be scandalous?”
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 46