The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  Frigidly, the prime minister answered. “No, sir – under no circumstances.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, sir, Jerusalem was a Jewish capital long before London was a British capital. When King David moved the capital of his kingdom from Hebron, where he had reigned for seven years, to Jerusalem, where he reigned for thirty-three years, the civilized world had never heard of London. In fact, they had never heard of Great Britain,” and he turned on his heels toward the door, where Mrs. Thatcher was waiting to greet him.

  Over pre-lunch drinks, the talk was largely about the British leader’s support for the worldwide Jewish campaign on behalf of Jews in the Soviet Union who wished to emigrate to Israel.

  “Those who manage to get out, are they readily absorbed in your country?” asked Thatcher. “Do they set down roots easily?”

  Begin, who loved telling a story to illustrate a point, and who could be a flatterer if not a flirt in dealing with women, answered in a velvety tone, “Oh, they set down roots all right – excellent roots. Their contribution to our society is enormous. And I can well imagine your predecessor, Mr. Churchill, asking the very same question in this very same room.”

  “How so?” asked the lady, intrigued.

  “Because,” said Begin jovially, “when Churchill first visited us in nineteen twenty-one, Tel Aviv was little more than a few houses on sandy streets. So the then mayor, Meir Dizengoff, anxious to make a good impression, had several large trees transplanted to the entrance of his little town hall to give it color. However, the pressure of the crowd was so great that one of the trees toppled over, almost hitting Mr. Churchill. And he, dusting himself down, was heard to say, “My dear mayor, if you want to make an impression you must set down deeper roots. Without roots, it won’t work.”

  The general laughter was followed by the British prime minister regaling her guest with stories expressive of her fervent admiration of Jews. “It has to do with my Methodist upbringing,” she exclaimed. “Methodism, you see, means method. It means” – her fingers bunched into a fist – “sticking to your guns, dedication, determination, triumph over adversity, reverence for education – the very qualities you Jews have always cherished.”

  Begin responded with a small, modest smile. “I cannot deny,” he said, “that millennia ago, when monarchs did not even know how to sign their own names, our forefathers had already developed a system of compulsory education.”

  Thatcher’s eyes were ablaze with enthusiasm: “Your marvelous chief rabbi here, Sir Immanuel [later Lord] Jakobovits, recently made exactly the same point. He said to me that the term, ‘an illiterate Jew,’ is an oxymoron. How right he is! He has…” – she paused as if to replenish her stock of awe and respect – “such a high moral stature, such an inspiring commitment to the old-fashioned virtues, like community self-help, individual responsibility, and personal accountability – all the things I deeply believe in.” And then, in a voice that was surprisingly acrid, “Oh, how I wish our own church leaders would take a leaf out of your chief rabbi’s book.”

  Begin nodded, but said nothing. Perhaps this was because he thought it would be indiscreet to concur, or perhaps it was because he and the British chief rabbi did not always see eye-to-eye on the Jewish State’s vision of itself.

  The two prime ministers were standing chatting in the Blue Room. A butler appeared at the door and, emitting a discreet may-I-have-your-attention-please cough, announced, “Prime Ministers, Gentlemen, lunch is served.”

  “Do you know,” continued Mrs. Thatcher doughtily, as she led the way into the oak-paneled dining room, “in all the many years I have represented Finchley, my parliamentary constituency, which as you know has a high proportion of Jewish residents, I have never once had a Jew come to me in poverty and desperation. They are always so well looked after by their own. And that is absolutely splendid!”

  Pundits would postulate that it was this cast of mind that accounted for the remarkably high number of Jews in the various Thatcher governments – six at one time or another, not to speak of close advisers. And in a class-conscious society like Britain where the aristocracy was almost solidly Anglican, her Methodist roots made her an ambitious outsider. So it was perhaps natural for her, the daughter of a grocer, to see Jews as kindred spirits.

  “Now, let’s talk about your country,” said Thatcher. They had reached the dining room table, accompanied by half a dozen cabinet colleagues and aides. Through the window one could catch a glimpse of the prime minister’s lanky husband, Dennis, practicing putting on the back lawn, while from their gilded frames, Viscount Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington stared down haughtily at the oblong table that seated four on each side. As Begin took his place alongside Thatcher, he gestured toward me with his chin, and muttered, “Yehuda, mach hamotzi.”[1]

  He was indicating a low corner table bedecked with a white silk Sabbath cloth draped over a plaited loaf of Sabbath bread – a challah – on a silver platter, together with an ornamental Sabbath bread knife, a jug of water, a glass bowl, and a hand towel embroidered with a Sabbath blessing, in Hebrew. A card placed discreetly by the bread, read, “Under the Supervision of the Sephardic Kashrut Commission.”

  In her eagerness to please, this ever-vigilant, tough woman known as the “Iron Lady” had gone overboard in ensuring our kosher fare by turning a regular Tuesday lunch into a traditional Sabbath-style feast, with all its attendant ritual regalia. This left me wondering what best to do. The room went as mute as a tomb and I could feel Mrs. Thatcher’s sharp-edged gaze playing on my back, waiting for the ritual to begin. So, with nowhere to hide, I canonically performed the hand-washing libations, recited the blessing, cut the challah, which was so fresh it crumbled to pieces in my hands, chewed on a piece and, stomach tight, danced around the table, bowed, and proffered our hostess the crumbled bread on the silver platter, intoning, “Madame Prime Minister, wilt thou break bread with me?”

  Thatcher was charmed. “Oh, what a delightful custom,” she cooed. “I must tell protocol about this. We should do it more often.”

  Lord Peter Carrington, the foreign secretary, who was full of the self-confident repartee common to graduates of Eton and Sandhurst, ho-hummed in the authoritative, patronizing warble of the British upper class: “I bet you a wager, Mr. Begin, that I know what passed through your mind when I was introduced to you before.”

  “Do you, Lord Carrington? I’m not a betting man, but please tell me: what did pass through my mind?” An impudent smile hovered over Begin’s features. All at the table were grinning at the banter.

  The foreign secretary chuckled devilishly. “You were thinking to yourself: By George, those Camel Corps chaps at the British Foreign Office are a bunch of Arabists besotted with an irredeemable proclivity toward Arab interests. Am I not right? Come on – own up.” He gave an audacious smile and wagged a finger to add to the tease.

  Begin raised his arms in a don’t-shoot pose, his eyes bright with mirth. “How did you guess, Lord Carrington? You are totally correct! And you put it so succinctly.”

  Everybody let out peals of laughter, and Thatcher, laying on all her charm, said sportingly, “Oh, come, come, Prime Minister, you know Peter’s just joking. Israel has good friends here in Whitehall, even if we don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything.” And then, solicitously, “How do you find the salmon? It’s specially catered – kosher.”

  “Delicious. Your thoughtfulness is appreciated.” And then, back to the foreign secretary, who was sitting opposite him: “What, pray, do we not see eye-to-eye about these days?” He was desirous of moving on to the crux of things.

  Lord Carrington’s gung-ho manner vanished. Flatly, he answered, “Your bag and baggage approach toward settlements, mostly.”

  A fiery light appeared in the Israeli prime minister’s eyes. “Bag and baggage?”

  “That’s what I said,” replied Carrington, and he stepped into the ring and began punching hard, one-two, one-two, one-two: “Your settlement p
olicy is expansionist. It is intemperate. It is a barrier to peace. The settlements are built on occupied Arab soil. They rob Palestinians of their land. They unnecessarily arouse the animosity of the moderate Arabs. They are contrary to international law – the Geneva Convention. They are inconsistent with British interests.”

  In a voice like steel wrapped in velvet, Margaret Thatcher affirmed, “The foreign secretary is speaking on behalf of Her Majesty’s government in this matter.”

  Begin chose to fight Carrington, not Thatcher. He leaned forward to focus his fullest attention on him, and the looks traded were malevolent. Then he let fly.

  “The settlements, sir, are not an obstacle to peace. The Arabs refused to make peace before there was a single settlement anywhere. No Palestinian Arab sovereignty has ever existed in the biblical provinces of Judea and Samaria, where most of the new settlements are located, hence the Geneva Convention does not apply. Besides, we are building the settlements on state-owned, not Arab-owned land. Their construction is an assertion of our basic historic rights, not to speak of their critical importance to our national security.”

  Lord Carrington’s face went blotchy. He would have none of it. Tempers were at flash point.

  Abruptly, Begin turned to face Margaret Thatcher. “Madame Prime Minister,” he said, in a voice pitched to hit hard, “your foreign secretary dismisses my country’s historic rights and pooh-poohs our vital security needs. So, I shall tell you why the settlements are vital: because I speak of the Land of Israel, a land redeemed, not occupied; because without those settlements Israel could be at the mercy of a Palestinian state astride the commanding heights of Judea and Samaria. We would be living on borrowed time. And,” – his face went granite, like his eyes – “whenever we Jews are threatened or attacked we are always alone. Remember in nineteen forty-four, how we came begging for our lives – begging at this very door?”

  The British premier’s brow creased in concentration, and she muttered pensively, “Nineteen forty-four? Is that when you wanted us to bomb Auschwitz?”

  “No, Madame, not Auschwitz. We asked you to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz. In the summer of nineteen forty-four, Eichmann was transporting to their deaths a hundred thousand Hungarian Jews a week along those lines to Auschwitz.”

  Thatcher cupped her chin in profound contemplation, “You know, Prime Minister,” she said bluntly, after a momentary pause, “I have at times wondered what I would have done had I been here at Number Ten in those days. And I have to tell you in all candor, the policy of the Allies in those years was to destroy the Hitlerite war machine as speedily as possible. I would have agreed to nothing that would have detracted one iota from that goal.”

  Menachem Begin went white. Clearly, the woman had not been briefed who this man was – a survivor of the Holocaust, orphaned of virtually his whole family.

  “But Madame, this was nineteen forty-four,” he said, in a low voice reserved for dreaded things. “The Allies had all but won the war. You were sending a thousand bombers a night over Germany. What would it have taken to divert fifty, sixty, seventy aircraft to bomb those lines?”

  “And what does this have to do with the settlements?” Thus, Carrington, barging in with malign consistency.

  Begin, livid, turned on him and snapped: “Lord Carrington, please have the goodness not to interrupt me when I am in the middle of a conversation with your prime minister. Do I have your permission to proceed?”

  Carrington went puce.

  The shocked silence was interrupted only when Mrs. Thatcher, in a gesture of uncommon informality, placed a calming hand on Begin’s arm, and said, “Please do not allow yourself to get upset. You are truly among friends here. In my constituency, I go to synagogue more often than I go to church. And whenever there is crisis in your country half of my constituents disappear, and I know exactly where they are. They have gone to you. They have gone to Israel, to help.”

  “Precisely, Madame Prime Minister,” said Begin. “As I said, whenever we are threatened or attacked, we have only our own fellow Jews to rely on.”

  “Peter,” said Mrs. Thatcher softly, “I think an admission of regret is called for.”

  The foreign secretary took off his spectacles, breathed on them, and polished each lens in turn with a handkerchief from the top pocket of his Saville Row suit. He seemed to be about to speak, but hesitated, and then he made up his mind. “Quite right, Prime Minister,” he said apologetically. “Somehow, your little country, Mr. Begin, evokes all sorts of high emotional fevers. Stirs up the blood, so to speak.”

  Begin, his composure regained, smiled at him, the smile not reaching his eyes. “The story of our people is very much a tale of having to defend ourselves against bouts of irrationality and hysteria,” he said. “It happens in every generation.”

  “Quite, quite,” said Prime Minister Thatcher, seemingly mystified at this reflection. And then, desirous of steering into calmer waters, she said in a conciliatory tone, “Let’s talk about our bilateral trade relations. I believe they are excellent.” And for the next ten minutes all concurred that indeed they were, after which the talk began to peter out, and then it was time to go.74

  This conversation remained etched in my mind when, a few years later, still during the Thatcher years, I served as Israel’s ambassador in London, and often encountered passionate expressions of disapproval of Israel’s policies – from journalists mainly – couched in a language that seemed to me to be more offensive than necessary. When that happened, Lord Carrington’s words would invariably come to mind: “Somehow, your little country evokes all sorts of high emotional fevers. Stirs up the blood, so to speak.”

  Why was this so? I wondered. Where did genuine criticism end and bigotry begin?

  It did not take long for me to realize that an anti-Semitic bigotry of sorts still lingered in segments of the British landed class, which constituted the true aristocracy of Britain. I encountered it firsthand more than once, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly, including one memorable incident in 1985, during a banquet celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday, at Hampton Court Palace.

  The tabloids were reaping an abundant harvest that year from the goings-on in the royal family, and Henry VIII’s Great Hall at the palace, with its sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries and soaring ceiling, was abuzz with salacious gossip about Britain’s future king, Charles Prince of Wales, husband of the widely adored Princess Diana, who, it appeared, had taken for himself a mistress. Her name was Camilla Parker Bowles, and she was a married woman. To my right sat a baroness whose name I do not recall, but whose appearance was unforgettable. She had the face of a haughty Pekingese, a long neck noosed in yards of pearls, a prominent Adam’s apple, and she was dressed in a fussy fire-engine red.

  “Charles has taken a feather out of Henry the Eighth’s cap, I wager,” she remarked in a tone ringing with reproach. “Did you know that after Henry married Anne Boleyn in fifteen thirty-three he still played hanky-panky with her sister, Mary – and their mother, too, right here in Hampton Court. Did you know that?”

  I confessed that I hadn’t.

  “And at the very same time, he was also conducting an affair with a wench called Elizabeth Blount, also right here in Hampton Court. Did you know that?”

  Again, I admitted that I hadn’t.

  “And did you know that not only was she his mistress, she gave birth to his only son?”

  Once more, I acknowledged my ignorance.

  The woman stared sharply at me through her pince-nez as if to say ‘You are a nincompoop,’ and then cast a jaundiced eye at the white-gloved butler, who was obsequiously placing a gold plate of kosher cuisine before me.

  “Where are you from?” she snapped.

  “Israel,” I said.

  “Oh, there. Bah!” and she tucked into her own dish, brimming with contempt.

  Whether this was meant as a slur against my beliefs, a slight at my ignorance, or a sweep at my country I did not have tim
e to fathom, for now the woman on my left – a Lady Carpenter, wife of the Dean of Westminster Abbey – marked my meal and began pontificating about the virtues of religious traditions. She was a trim, middle-aged dowager of pious appearance – no make-up, no jewelry, her silvery hair simply done, her dress unadorned. The fellow next to her, a husky, soldierly type in his early seventies, with an aristocratic nose, glossy bald head, and piercing blue eyes, joined in, declaring jovially, “By sheer chance, I partook of a kosher meal myself in New York last week.”

  “How interesting,” gasped Lady Carpenter. She sounded quite spellbound.

  “I was out with a Moslem chap, a Pakistani,” he elaborated. “And since we couldn’t find a hallal restaurant we ended up in a kosher one. Good chicken soup, I can tell you. Ha, ha!”

  He spoke in a refined accent, and a crimson sash crossed his chest, decorated with royal insignia and military honors. Proffering his hand, he said, “My name is Howard, but people call me Norfolk.”

  I blushed at my gaucherie, for I had failed to recognize the Duke of Norfolk, Premier Earl of the English peerage and chief layman of the English Catholic church.

  “Dr. Inamullah Kahn, that was the Pakistani’s name – secretary-general of the World Moslem Congress,” he explained. “And we’d just awarded him the Templeton Prize.”

  The Templeton Prize is one of the most munificent prizes in the world – a tidy $1,500,000 – and is awarded for innovative contributions to the harmonious coexistence of religion and science. I deduced that the Duke was a member of its panel of judges.

  “And do you know,” he piped on, “an influential New York lobby had the effrontery to try and pressure us at the last minute to withdraw the prize.”

  “Really, Your Grace?” sighed Lady Carpenter. “How dreadful! But why would they want to do such a thing?” Her voice trailed off into whispery woe.

  “Because, Madame,” answered the Duke with alacrity, “Dr. Inamullah Kahn is a friend and supporter of Yasser Arafat and his cause, that’s why.”