The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  “And who is this lobby?” I asked, antlers rising.

  “Oh, come, come, Ambassador, you know as well as I do who the lobby is.” His expression was prim, his lips a tight smile.

  “No. Who?”

  “The Jew press of New York, of course.”

  “The what?”

  “The Jew press of New York,” he gamely repeated.

  I could not believe my ears. “You’re an anti-Semite, sir,” I stuttered.

  “Am I? It never occurred to me.” He seemed genuinely taken aback.

  Apparently alarmed at my breathlessness, Lady Carpenter began rubbing my back, cooing, “Ambassador, please do not let the wounds of two thousand years be reopened. Let me mollify them with the balm of Jerusalem.”

  And as she rubbed, the Duke of Norfolk said over and over again, “Nothing personal, old boy – nothing personal.”

  These theatrics were halted by former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who stepped over and said to me, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited,” I said.

  “But didn’t the president ask you to accompany him to Moscow?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh my God, don’t tell me. I’m getting old. I’ve done it again. You’re not Henry Kissinger. You’re the Jordanian ambassador. Forgive me,” and off he strode, genuinely aghast at himself.

  Meanwhile, the red-liveried toastmaster began barking for silence, and commanded everybody to rise for the Loyal Toast. Everybody did, and then we all settled down for the speeches.

  Orations done, the guests moved into an adjacent grand parlor, where brandy, liqueurs, coffee, and cigars were proffered, and a string quintet was playing Bach. Amid the hubbub I came face to face with the baroness, who was enjoying a tipple. She was standing under a Gainsborough, not far from the secretary of state for Scotland, Malcolm Rifkind, who was engaged in a vehement conversation with the head of the Liberal Party, David Steel. By now a trifle inebriated, the baroness, sneered “Look at them – politicians! Talk! Talk! Talk!”

  “Scotsmen do seem to have much to talk about,” I bantered, for want of anything better to say.

  A derisive expression spread across the baroness’s face, and with a jerk of her chin in Rifkind’s direction, scoffed, “He’s not a Scotsman, he’s one of yours.”

  That was enough! Earlier, this insufferable woman had addressed me with a mixture of paternalism and hauteur. Now, it was pure hauteur – anti-Semitic hauteur. Irate, I retorted: “How can you say that a man born in Edinburgh, raised in Edinburgh, educated in Edinburgh, represents a constituency in Edinburgh, and is the secretary of state for Scotland, is not a Scotsman?”

  The baroness’s lips twisted into a disdainful smile as she pointed in the direction of yet another Jew who was a member of Prime Minister Thatcher’s cabinet – the secretary of state for trade and industry, Lord David Young. Scornfully, she hissed, “Young’s an Englishman as much as Rifkind’s a Scotsman.”

  Aghast, I began scanning the big room in search of other Jewish members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. “Look,” I said challengingly, “There’s Keith Joseph, secretary of state for education. And over there is Leon Britain, the home secretary. And by the window is Nigel Lawson, the chancellor of the exchequer. And there’s Michael Howard, minister of state for local government – in addition to Malcolm Rifkind and David Young. So what do you make of that? How come Mrs. Thatcher has so many Jews in her cabinet?”

  Her eyes held a vicious glint, as smoothly, snottily, the baroness answered, “Because Margaret Thatcher is most comfortable among the lower middle class,” and off she went.

  Still, while I would come across many a haughty and hidebound aristocrat of the baroness’s breed, there were also numerous high-ranking types who thought Jews admirable and the Jewish State remarkable. I had known one such for years, and had arranged to meet him during my trip to London with Prime Minister Begin shortly after the rather crabby luncheon at 10 Downing Street. The appointment was at yet another refined address, this one at the corner of Pall Mall and Waterloo Place – The Athenaeum. The Athenaeum is one of London’s celebrated gentlemen’s clubs, built at a time when Britain ruled the waves and when its masters concentrated their phenomenal power in the drawing rooms of gentlemen’s clubs all along London’s Pall Mall, once the epicenter of the world’s largest empire.

  When one enters the Athenaeum, a sign beneath a nude statue catches the eye: TIES MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES. A porter in the doorway, with a gaunt face made grand by white muttonchop whiskers, asked me my business. I told him I was looking for Sir Herbert Hardwick.

  “Sir Erbert Ardwick is ’ere, upstairs, ’aving a drink,” he advised me.

  I found the gentleman at the entrance to an expansive chandeliered parlor. It was a mausoleum of a place, hung with portraits of the Victorian upper crust haughtily gazing upon an array of dozing, reclining and or conversing men: cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, church dignitaries, and other assorted celebrities, all of them over sixty. Sir Herbert had not changed a bit over the years I had known him. He wore a pinstripe suit, held a bowler hat in one hand and a tightly rolled umbrella in the other, and his face was staid and melancholy.

  “I’ll just pop these in the cloak room,” he said, indicating his hat and umbrella, and off he strode, with the ramrod posture of a British grenadier.

  We had initially met in early 1967, when I was at a gathering in London to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, at which Sir Herbert spoke. It was hosted by a group of parliamentarians – friends of Israel – in a Westminster reception hall. When the proceedings were done, Sir Herbert asked me if I would care to join him for tea on the parliamentary terrace, and there, munching scones with Devonshire cream, he revealed that his father, whom he referred to as Pater, a former Colonial Office man, had been of the same old Scottish lineage as the famed Lord Arthur James Balfour, and a devout Presbyterian, as was he. It was due to this pedigree that he had been prevailed upon to speak at this annual commemoration of Lord Balfour’s historic 1917 declaration proclaiming in the name of His Majesty’s Government that Britain “views with favor” the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people,” thereby giving the Zionist enterprise its first vote of approval from a significant power. I was to learn, further, that his father had been closely acquainted with Blanche (Baffy) Dugdale, Lord Balfour’s niece, and one of Chaim Weizmann’s closest confidantes.

  “Baffy used to conduct a Zionist salon luncheon in the private room of a Soho restaurant, to which my Pater was often bid,” he revealed. “They would dine in the company of such Christian Zionists as Orde Wingate, Wyndham Deeds, and C.P. Scott.” And then, with some fervor, “Indeed, under Pater’s influence, I have been strongly infused in the Hebraism of the Old Testament and the People of the Book. And I can tell you that the Christian religion and civilization owe to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill-repaid. Hence, Israel’s future welfare seems to me of immense moral importance.”

  He went on to recount with a self-deprecating chuckle how, back in the 1950s, he had pulled family strings to get himself appointed as a junior diplomat to the British Embassy in Tel Aviv. “But I didn’t last very long,” he said wistfully. “I was so pro-Zionist my ambassador cabled London to say I’d been stricken by what one nowadays calls the Jerusalem syndrome, and was promptly sent packing. All my subsequent postings were to Eastern Europe, where I became something of an expert on the Soviet bloc.”

  Upon retirement, given his expertise in Soviet affairs, Sir Herbert became a firm and useful advocate of the “Let My People Go” movement, which lobbied aggressively worldwide for the right of Jews to leave the Soviet Union. This, together with his passion for Israel, brought him periodically to Jerusalem, invariably accompanied by a colleague or two from the Institute of Strategic Affairs, of which he was a senior fellow. It was in the lobby of the King David Hotel that I had next bumped into him, in June 1967, during the excruciatingly t
ense days leading up to the Six-Day War. Not recognizing one another at first, we both hesitantly searched our memories for the right identification, and his penny dropped first.

  “By George,” he warbled, “you’re the chap I had tea with at the Balfour affair a few months ago,” and he pumped my hand, spilling over with goodwill. I responded in kind, and invited him to join the clusters of war correspondents sipping drinks on the hotel’s terrace, in full view of the spectacular Old City walls. Incongruously, Sir Herbert was still wearing his pinstripe suit and bowler hat. His face was more staid and melancholy than ever as he confided the chilling thought that Israel’s days were surely numbered.

  “How can it be otherwise?” he had said gloomily, in his top-drawer accent. “How can you save yourselves now? How can your small army withstand the combined might of all the Arab armies that are ganging up against you even as we speak?”

  He cast an eye at the Old City’s walls, on whose ramparts Arab Legionnaires stood watch.

  “And, besides, they have the Soviet Union behind them, in addition to the tens of millions of Muslims the world over, with their oil and other fabulous riches, while you have been abandoned even by your so-called friends.” His depressing assessment was getting to me. He continued, lamenting, “And even if you do somehow stave them off now, in ten or twenty years time the Palestinians will catch up with you numerically. Egypt’s population will have burgeoned to seventy-five million, and Saudi Arabia’s to twenty-five. Multiply that by the Arab birthrate overall and what do you get? You get a raging horde of Arabs, most of whom will be younger than thirty-five. There is no way Israel will be able to withstand that kind of hostile demographic pressure.”

  He stared darkly into his empty glass, lips pursed in a frown of despondency, and ordered yet another drink. This last induced him to talk elliptically about “Nasser’s rabble” and “America’s perfidy,” and “Europe’s duplicity” and “plucky Israelis,” and “IDF grit,” and “we shall never surrender” and “silver linings.”

  When we rose to part, he did something very uncharacteristic for his class. He put a hand on my shoulder and let it linger for a while, as he said, in a voice cracked with anxiety, “It’s simply bad luck, old boy. Bad luck has always stomped through the lives of you Jews. The balance is tipped against you. I’m flying home tonight. It will take a paradigm shift for you to survive this thing,” and off he went, his torso rigid, as though he couldn’t find the courage to turn around and bid a final farewell.

  Now, twelve years later, in the stolid Victorian ambience of the Athenaeum Club, he was as tall and straight as ever, possessed of the rigor and energy which often went with Presbyterianism, and manifestly full of beans.

  “Well, well, how things have improved,” he enthused, and he began to tick off our changes of fortune one by one with the tips of his fingers, “One, you’ve beaten off all the Arab armies every time. Two, your Mr. Begin has signed a peace agreement with the biggest, the strongest, and the most influential of all the Arab states – Egypt. Three, the Arab states are helpless without Egypt, so the war option is all but dead. Four, your other neighbors will have to make peace with you sooner or later. Five, your victories have clipped the Soviet Union’s wings good and proper. Six, the struggle for Soviet Jewry is bearing fruit and you’ll soon be bringing in tens of thousands of Russian immigrants, boosting your population by God knows how many. And to think” – this with an abashed, self-deprecating smile – “I was stupid enough to predict your tribe would go under. I was talking rubbish, utter bollocks! Mind you” – his jolliness momentarily lagged – “there’s still Iran and Iraq to reckon with. But, chins up, old chap! The tide is turning, nevertheless. The wind is at your back. Stand fast. Be strong and of good courage. Fear not – time is on your side!” And with this evangelistic flourish, he took a swig of his Black Label.

  “Banjo, you old windbag, who’s this you’re yapping at?” I looked up to see a tall, balding fellow, with a sharp crooked nose and eagle eyes framed in square rimless spectacles. Banjo, I deduced, must be Sir Herbert’s nickname.

  Sir Herbert introduced him as a Sir Charles somebody, and when Sir Charles heard where I was from, he grabbed a chair, sat himself down, stared hard at me, and said, “I used to come across your Mossad chaps. A crafty lot. Sneaky, too.”

  I wasn’t sure whether the man was speaking professionally or prejudicially, but whatever it was, Sir Herbert jumped in to explain that his colleague was a retired MI6 big shot, adding with the familiarity of an old pal, “Charlie’s reputation in the British Intelligence Service was so awesome his underlings would leave his presence by walking backwards. Isn’t that right, Charlie?”

  The retired British spy saw nothing amusing in this. Combing a few strands of gray hair over the top of his balding head, he retorted ominously, “Tell your Mr. Begin to watch what’s going on in his backyard.”

  “Which backyard is that?” I asked.

  The retired MI6 man leaned toward me, and in a conspiratorial manner whispered, “Iraq to begin with. And then there’s those bloody fanatics in Iran – those ayatollahs. They’ve deposed the Shah and they’ll go on a rampage one day throughout the whole of the Middle East if we don’t stop ’em.”

  A white-coated butler glided between the armchairs and potted palms toward us, affably holding up two liquor bottles, pausing to top up a glass of whisky here and bestow a drop of brandy there. His whisky refilled, the old spy rambled on.

  “Western civilization has been locked in a historic war with Islam for a thousand years. We thought we’d settled it once and for all, thanks to our technological superiority. But see what’s happening now.

  “The fundamentalists are on the rise, besotted with a holy jihad mission to export their brand of Islamism from Afghanistan to Sudan, and then beyond. Your Mr. Begin must watch out. As far as Banjo and I are concerned, Israel constitutes our front line.”

  “Precisely,” avowed Sir Herbert, brooding over his Scotch. “The Mohammedans’ fanatical frenzy is as dangerous to a man as rabies is to a dog.”

  “Mohammedanism was always a militant and proselytizing faith,” proffered Sir Charles, “and now that the Shiite zealots have taken over a whole country – Iran – they’re capable of setting the whole Middle East ablaze.”

  To which Sir Herbert grunted, “There’s a lot of combustible stuff lying out there. Charlie and I visited a number of Arab countries a few months back, and wherever we went, people were blaming you Israelis for all the blemishes of their own societies. To them, the peace treaty with Egypt is a disaster – ”

  “Begin should have no illusions – it’s not peace between peoples, just between governments,” butted in the MI6 fellow.

  “ – and nowhere did we encounter any form of introspection, self-criticism, or moral inquiry – nothing but a culture of victimhood,” said Sir Herbert, rounding out his thought. “And Arab governments are deliberately promoting this scapegoat nonsense because they need an external enemy so they can retain their power.”

  It was at this point that I mentioned the prickly exchange between Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Prime Minister Begin over lunch at Downing Street, to which Sir Herbert replied, “I can read the minds of those foreign office blokes like an open book. Not a one of them, least of all Peter Carrington, is capable of grasping what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the future of our civilization and all they can think about is trade and oil.”

  “The problem is,” said Sir Charles, “we don’t have enough intelligence on what’s bubbling beneath the surface even in our own country. It’s not like Northern Ireland, where we can do our undercover work like fish in water. Even the most diehard Irish Republican nationalists crack under a little bit of coercion, or the promise of some cash. But your average Muslim fanatic, even if he’s born here – he’d kill himself first, and take you with him. And as for what’s happening where the fanatics gather in Muslim countries, all our state-of-the-art technology isn’t worth a d
amn farthing. Deploy as much high falutin’ satellite surveillance and computer decryption as you like, it won’t track them down in a month of Sundays. The only way to go after him and his sort is by going back to the most elementary methods of intelligence: human intelligence collection; personal counter-espionage.”

  Added Sir Herbert, enigmatically, “Allah will not be mocked. He toys around with our clever gadgets and laughs in our faces. Islamists wage their holy war by simply outflanking our technology.”

  “So what we need,” said the MI6 man, “are first-class operatives – people who look like Arabs, talk like Arabs, and think like Arabs. Your blokes are champions at that sort of thing.”

  “What do you mean, my blokes?” I asked.

  “You Israelis – you’re past masters at duplicity.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Sir Herbert stepped in, placatory, “Your Mossad and Shin Bet chaps have any number of agents who can pass convincingly as Muslims – patriotic Jews from families born in Arab countries, who speak native Arabic and can adopt Islamic disguises at the drop of a hat.”

  “Dead right, Banjo,” interjected the other fellow. Then to me, “Your intelligence is superb. You get your man into Arab lairs almost every time – through infiltration, dissimulation, and deception.”

  I was beginning to feel that this Athenaeum encounter with Sir Charles Thingamajig was no mere coincidence.

  “But you’ve got lots of Arabic-speaking communities right here in Britain,” I averred. “Why not recruit your agents from them?”

  “Don’t trust ’em,” said Sir Charles dismissively.

  Sir Herbert concurred. “Islam has such a powerful hold over its believers that the difficulty of recruiting Muslim undercover agents is acute.”

  “So what does all this have to do with me?” I asked.