Axiomatically, Washington, on the White House lawn, in the presence of Jimmy Carter, was where the ceremony would take place.
Last page of Prime Minister Begin’s draft of speech at Egypt-Israel peace-signing ceremony, written on the morning of the ceremony, 26 March 1979
[1]On a subsequent research visit to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, in November, 1999, I was handed a ‘sanitized’ transcript of this same meeting to which a note had been attached. It was addressed to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and signed by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and it said, “The subject memoranda of conversation are very sensitive and should be held close. They are forwarded for your records only.”
Chapter 41
Abie Finegold Saves the Peace Treaty
Tapping his temple and radiating an inscrutable smile, the prime minister quipped, “Yehuda, it’s in here. You’ll have it as soon as it’s finished in here.”
It was 25 March 1979, the ceremonial signing of the peace treaty was but a day away, and Menachem Begin’s speech, scheduled for worldwide broadcast, was still incubating in his mind. His original intention had been to draft it during the long and tedious flight from Tel Aviv to Washington, but the journey turned out to be too distracting. We were traveling in an antiquated Israel Air Force Boeing 707, refurbished with discarded El Al seats, many of which were occupied by cabinet ministers, and, as a demonstration of national unity, a sizable contingent of opposition members, led by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. His fellow travelers kept the prime minister engaged for much of the time, and the turbulence over the Atlantic was so severe it made me feel like a piece of salad in a colander tossed by a particularly energetic chef. So, by the time we’d unpacked at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, where we were lodging, I was longing for bed.
“Go to bed,” said the prime minister, when I walked into his suite to check on the status of his speech. “You look done in. I’ll ring you first thing in the morning, when it’s ready.”
And so he did – at five a.m.
Still bedraggled and bleary-eyed, I dragged myself to his suite and found him in a dressing gown, full of beans. “Kindly shakespearize this,” he said, passing me eight pages of his tight, vertical scrawl.
I immediately set to work, handing page after polished page to my secretary, Norma, who checked and rechecked it with particular attention to the English translation of Psalm 126, which the prime minister wrote down in its original Hebrew, and which I copied into English from a Gideon Bible I found in a bedside drawer. After going over the typed version one last time, I placed it in a luxurious black leather folder which I had brought with me from Jerusalem for the occasion, and carried it to the prime minister’s suite, where I found him breakfasting with Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman.
“Please place it on the desk by the window,” he said. “If there are changes, I’ll let you know.”
Hearing nothing from him all morning, I pocketed his handwritten draft, and having shaved, showered and generally spruced myself up, boarded the minibus marked ‘ISRAELI DELEGATION – Prime Minister’s Staff, ’ to be driven to Blair House, where Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was hosting a noon luncheon for the Egyptian, American, and Israeli delegations. The Begins and the Sadats were to lunch an hour later with the Carters at the White House, after which they were to step out onto the North Lawn for the signing ceremony before a crowd of dignitaries, at two o’clock sharp.
Traveling to Blair House down Connecticut Avenue, our American driver drew up at a traffic light, but General Poran suddenly began pounding the dashboard and ordered him not to stop. “Jump the light!” he commanded. But the man stared back at him bewildered, as did we all, not having seen what Freuka had seen in the rearview mirror – a band of thirty or so Arab demonstrators exiting a side street and rushing toward us, yelling slogans.
The driver inched forward, hooting, through the snarled traffic, but it was too late. The demonstrators swarmed around us, some carrying anti-peace placards, and all of them ranting wild curses and threats against Sadat and Begin and their peace treaty. Cowering, I peered out of the window at faces full of hate and venom, while my traveling companions seemed to be maintaining a remarkable sangfroid. But then a man with a kaffiyeh started to pound the roof with a stick; others whacked with their fists, booing, hissing, and spitting, and then they all began heaving the minibus from side to side. The driver, numb with dread, was incapable of running the tormentors down, even if he had wanted to. And as the vehicle pitched and tossed, we all stared fixedly ahead gripping our seats as best we might, until we were rescued by mounted police who, truncheons flying, cleared a path to let us through. The driver revved up the engine, gunned the vehicle forward, and pulled away with a tire-wrenching jerk, his knuckles white. When he brought us safely to our destination he acknowledged our thanks with a scowl, and hissed, “That’s the last frigging time I’ll ever drive Israelis again.”
Checking ourselves in the large mirror of the Blair House entrance hall, we decided none of us looked the worse for wear, so we joined the crowd at the buffet table. Hardly had I picked up a salad plate when Ovad, a member of the prime minister’s security detail, accosted me, telling me that Begin was searching for me urgently. He dialed a classified number and put me through.
“Mr. Begin, you’re looking for me?” I panted.
“Yes, where’s my speech?”
“On the desk by the window in your suite, where you told me to put it.”
“No, not that one – my original.”
“It’s in my pocket. You need it?”
“Yes – immediately!”
“When are you leaving for the White House?”
“At twelve forty.”
I looked at my watch. The dial said twelve twenty. A shiver ran down my spine. “I’ll bring it over right away,” I said, not having the slightest idea how. But then I spied Secretary of State Cyrus Vance casually chatting with an Egyptian, and in desperation, brandished the speech in his face and said with deadly seriousness, “Mr. Secretary, unless I get this document to Mr. Begin at the Hilton Hotel within ten minutes there will be no signing ceremony today.”
He stared at me in disbelief.
“Come with me,” he snapped, and he strode to the front door, where he collared a senior police officer who ran down the steps to a waiting police car, and ordered the cop inside, “Get this man to the Hilton in ten minutes or I’ll have your head. Step on it.”
Siren blaring, we hit eighty kilometers an hour within a block, whereupon the policeman extended a massive paw, and said, “Sholom aleichem! My name’s Abie Finegold. I’m one of four Jewish cops on the Washington police force. Pleased to meet you.”
“Aleichem shalom,” I said, flabbergasted. “Are we going to make it?”
“Sure, you bet. When Abie Finegold presses on the gas, people know to keep out of my way. Hey, lady!” He was yelling at an aging driver in an aging car, at a signal light. “That light’s green, and it isn’t going to get any greener. Go! Go! Go!” He peeled off around her, and she made an obscene gesture as we passed by. Another car made the near fatal mistake of slowing at an intersection that had no stop sign or traffic light. Abie flashed his headlights, blasted his horn, raised the siren to an even higher hysterical pitch, did a sharp swerve, swore, and clucked, “Jeez, I almost hit the bastard.” He swore again as he bore down on a forty-kilometer-an-hour sluggard, then tailgated a guy who, in despair, mounted the sidewalk to let him pass.
I was beginning to like this: High Noon on Connecticut Avenue, and I was Gary Cooper.
“Mazal tov! We made it!” chirped Abie, screeching to a halt in front of the Hilton.
The clock on the dashboard read 2:39.
I ran into the lobby just as Mr. and Mrs. Begin were exiting an elevator surrounded by a bevy of bodyguards.
“Baruch Hashem! ” cried Begin when I handed him the pages. “Thank God you caught me!”
“The speech that I left on your desk – it’s not what you wanted?” I asked, somewhat peeved. “You weren’t happy with my changes?”
“Oh, no, they’re fine,” he assured me. “It’s just that as I was going over the typed text I suddenly had the feeling that today of all days I want to read my own speech exactly as I wrote in my own hand.” And to make the implicit explicit, he added, “I wrote it from the heart and I want to read it from the heart.”
President Carter was the first to speak, then President Sadat, and then Prime Minister Begin. All three promised the sixteen hundred invited guests on the White House lawn, along with a worldwide television audience in the millions, that warfare between Egypt and Israel was banished forever. All three quoted, coincidentally, Isaiah’s famous phrase about swords being beaten into plowshares. Yet even as they pronounced these stirring words, the shouts of thousands of Arab protestors from nearby Lafayette Park drifted across Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, a reminder that the whole of the Arab world was implacably opposed to the document to which the leaders had just put their signatures – the first treaty of peace between an Arab nation and the Jewish State.
Begin’s address was by far the most highly charged with personal emotion. “Peace is the beauty of life,” he sentimentalized. “It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth.”
To Sadat, he said, “It is a great day in your life, Mr. President of the Arab Republic of Egypt. In the face of adversity and hostility you have demonstrated the human value that can change history – civil courage. A great field commander once said, civil courage is sometimes more difficult to show than military courage. You showed both, Mr. President. But now it is time for all of us to show civil courage, in order to proclaim to our peoples and to others: no more war, no more bloodshed, no more bereavement – peace unto you; shalom, salaam, forever.” And then, husky with emotion, “This is the proper place, and the appropriate time, to bring back to memory the song and the prayer of thanksgiving I learned as a child in the home of my father and mother, that doesn’t exist anymore because they were among the six million people – men, women and children – who sanctified the Lord’s name with their sacred blood which reddened the rivers of Europe from the Rhine to the Danube, from the Bug to the Volga, because – only because – they were born Jews; and because they didn’t have a country of their own, nor a valiant Jewish army to defend them; and because nobody – nobody – came to their rescue, although they cried out ‘Save us! Save us!’ de profundis, from the depths of the pit and agony: that is the Song of Degrees written two millennia and five hundred years ago when our forefathers returned from their first exile to Jerusalem, to Zion.”
Here Begin felt into his pocket and took out a black silk yarmulke, which he placed on his head, and in a gesture pregnant with symbolism, recited in the original Hebrew the whole of the Psalm of David – “Shir hama’alot b’shuv Hashem et shivat Ziyon hayinu k’cholmim” – without rendering it into English.
“I will not translate it,” he said. “Every person, whether Jew, Christian or Moslem, can read it in his or her own language in the Book of Books. It is simply psalm one hundred and twenty-six.”
A general applause greeted his remarks, and one could tell from the areas of louder applause where the Jewish groups were sitting. Everybody rose to their feet and clapped ecstatically when the three men wholeheartedly grasped each other in a three-way hand clasp, a picture of reconciliation so memorable that the cheers lingered on long after the three had departed the platform to reenter the White House.
That night, under a great orange and yellow marquee on the South Lawn – the marquee longer than the presidential mansion itself – more than thirteen hundred invitees gathered for a state banquet to celebrate the peace. The fifteen-page guest list offered the novel sight of Arab and Jewish names succeeding each other alphabetically. Practiced observers of Washington politics and politesse commented that it was the first time so many of the Washington social establishment had entered the Carter White House, making it the largest presidential dinner in memory.
Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and the guests mingled and table-hopped with all the informality of a high school reunion. I was chatting with Yitzhak Rabin when Henry Kissinger came threading his way through the crush, his arms open wide as though to embrace his old antagonist and friend.
“Yitzhak! What a day,” he exclaimed, with a broad grin. “You and I can take pride in having helped to make this happen.”
The former prime minister gave his half smile. “How many people here know that, Henry?” he said mildly. “How many people know that my nineteen seventy-five Sinai interim agreement with Sadat was the first step toward this peace?”
“And how many people know that I had to drive you crazy to make it happen?” quipped Kissinger, tease and truth in delicate balance.
“Forgive me, Henry,” said Rabin in all seriousness. “We differed on details, but not substance. We both sought the same thing – disengagement and diffusion on the Egyptian front.”
“And it sure worked,” said Kissinger with a sparkle.
Photograph credit: Ya’acov Sa’ar & Israel Government Press Office
The triple handshake: President Sadat, President Carter & Prime Minister Begin after signing the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, The White House, Washington, 26 March 1979
“Yes, it worked,” concurred Rabin. “Imagine Sadat ever coming to Jerusalem if we’d still been shooting at each other in the Sinai, instead of building up mutual trust. Mind you” – this with undisguised admiration – “for all of Begin’s opposition to my agreement at the time, once he assumed the premiership he handled matters brilliantly.”
A flourish of trumpets and a standing ovation heralded the entry of the Egyptian president and the Israeli prime minister, along with their wives, accompanied by the American president and the first lady. All three men wore dark suits, while their wives displayed long dresses – Mrs. Carter in coral, Mrs. Sadat in beige, and Mrs. Begin in green. A protocol officer guided them to one of the scores of tables decorated with forsythia and yellow tulips, all illuminated by candles encased in miniature hurricane lamps.
“Excuse me, sir, are you Mr. Avner?” interrupted a middle-aged gentleman in a yarmulke, marking my own. “I’m general manager of Schleider’s kosher caterers in Baltimore. I just want to make sure everything is satisfactory.”
He had to pitch his voice high above the hubbub. His eyebrows rose in pleasure when I complimented him on the elegance of his catering.
“We had to prepare everything in such a rush,” he said with professional pride. “It was only on Saturday night [this was Monday evening] that we got the call from the White House to supply one hundred and ten kosher meals for this banquet. They also asked us to prepare meals for Prime Minister and Mrs. Begin for the lunch with President Carter and President Sadat before the signing ceremony. I hope they enjoyed it.”
“I’m sure they did,” I answered, assuming they had.
He arched his neck and stood on his tiptoes, the better to see what was going on around him. “I have to keep an eye on my waiters to make sure they’re serving the right people,” he explained.
A discreetly colored place card marked the settings of the kosher farers, and his waiters wore a slightly different garb amid the small army of other waiters who were serving a menu of Columbia River salmon in aspic with cheese straws, followed by roast beef and spring vegetables, and a hazelnut and chocolate mousse for dessert.
“As you see,” he said, stretching out a hand toward a tray borne by one of his waiters, who was squeezing by us, “our kosher menu is similar to theirs – salmon mousse followed by boneless beef prime rib and the same variety of vegetables. For dessert we’re serving chocolate mousse with non-dairy creamer.”
Again, I expressed my admiration and he, now
buoyant, elaborated, “We wanted to break out our finest gold flatware and our best service pieces for the occasion, but the White House told us to tone it down. Ours, they said, shouldn’t be too different from theirs. And, as you see” – he was pointing to my own place setting – “they’re not.”
We were interrupted by the announcement of the toasts as waiters, squeezing between the densely packed tables, began passing out coffee, brandy, and cigars. Then came the entertainment, by artists representing the three signatory nations – the United States choosing soprano Leontyne Price, Egypt a trio playing guitar, drum, and electric organ, and Israel, the violinists Yitzhak Pearlman and Pinchas Zuckerman.
In the boisterous mingling that followed, I happened upon Ambassador Samuel Lewis, who had apparently just shared a joke with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, a staid man as a rule, who was now bent over in a guffaw of laughter – until he saw me. With sudden earnestness he asked, “That document at Blair House you said you had to get to Mr. Begin without delay, otherwise there’d be no peace-signing – you weren’t serious, were you?”
I described to him the stressful circumstances of that moment, and he took my explanation in the best of spirits. As we were talking someone squeezed up from behind, and Secretary Vance turned to greet a tall, pleasant-looking fellow in his sixties, whose keen, regular features and piercing blue eyes were wreathed in smiles. “Congratulations, Mr. Secretary,” said the man. “I guess it’s been a busy time for you these last few months, knocking this historic peace treaty together.”
“And a few heads, too,” said the Secretary, in jest.
He was speaking to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a cherished advocate of Israeli causes and a relentless champion on behalf of Jews locked behind the communist Iron Curtain.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 53