The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership

by Avner, Yehuda

  Ablaze with defiance, he shook a finger in righteous ire at the battery of television cameramen who were recording his every word and gesture, and he thundered: “CHUTZPAH! INSOLENCE! By what right does the United Nations dare tell us where the capital of Israel should be? Who arrogated to them the right to tell us where the office of the prime minister of Israel should be? Did the founders of the proud American nation ever ask anybody’s permission before they designated Washington as their capital? Did they?”

  The speaker stared down at his approving visitors with glowing eyes and they responded with smiles and loud applause. When this died down, Begin’s face creased into a roguish smile, and he snickered, “By the by, may I ask you a question? If Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel, where is our capital? Petach Tikva, perhaps?”

  Laughs ricocheted around the hall.

  “Just as the builders of Washington endowed their capital city with the letters DC, so did the builders of Jerusalem endow our capital with the letters DC – David’s City.”

  More guffaws and claps.

  “And what exactly is our crime, ladies and gentlemen? What wrong have we done that so irritates the United Nations?”

  He stepped out in front of the podium, and in a stage whisper, said, “I’ll tell you, confidentially, what our crime is. Our sovereign Knesset has the temerity to unilaterally declare Jerusalem our capital city. Oy vey! UNILATERALLY! Without the UN’s permission! What a felony!”

  Then, springing back to the podium, he threw up his arms, fists balled, and in a voice that was vibrant and trembling, he cried, “We Jews did not choose Jerusalem unilaterally as our capital city. HISTORY chose Jerusalem unilaterally as our capital city. KING DAVID chose Jerusalem unilaterally as our capital city. That is why reunited and indivisible Jerusalem shall remain the eternal capital of the Jewish people forever.”

  As the applause exploded, Begin’s voice soared higher, above it, and he repeated “YES, FOREVER AND EVER!” And then he shared how, at the very end of his Camp David talks with Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat, in 1978, literally minutes before the signing ceremony was due to begin, the American president approached him with “Just one final formal item.” Sadat, Carter said, was asking Begin to put his signature to a simple letter that committed him to placing Jerusalem on the negotiating table of the final peace accord.

  “I refused to accept the letter, let alone sign it,” rumbled Begin. “I said to the president of the United States of America, ‘If I forgot thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning, and may my tongue cleave to my mouth.’”

  This ancient admonition was borne aloft as the premier concluded amid more cheers: “My fellow Jews: Jerusalem is an epic. It is the wellspring of a civilization. Without Jerusalem’s civilization, the spiritual history of the world would be stagnant. Has anyone ever heard of a daughter or a son of a Saladin fasting each year in memory of ancient Jerusalem’s anguish? Not a one! Has anybody ever heard of a son of a Crusader who breaks a glass at his wedding ceremony in memory of ancient Jerusalem’s torment? Not a one! Throughout all its three-thousand-year-long history Jerusalem has been capital to no one but the Jews. So it was. So it is. And so it shall forever be.”

  The entire audience leapt to their feet in a standing ovation, led by the chairman of the evening, Sam Rothberg, a sharp-chinned, plain-talking philanthropist, hewed from much the same flinty rock as the prime minister himself. A native of Peoria, Illinois, Sam Rothberg was an initiator of, and voluntarily led, the State of Israel Bonds campaign for years, often against the wishes of other prominent Jewish community leaders, who preferred tried and tested Israeli charities like the United Jewish Appeal. Menachem Begin respected Sam Rothberg enormously, at times treating him as a sort of ex-officio cabinet minister, charging him with helping top up the country’s development budget while also raising funds for the expanding needs of the country’s prestigious Hebrew University, whose governing board he chaired.

  When the prime minister sat down, Rothberg shook his hand enthusiastically and bellowed above the hullabaloo, “Menachem, that was magnificent! Where on earth do you find the energy to cope with the two most grueling jobs in government – the premiership and the defense ministry, and yet still be as fresh as a daisy at this hour of the night?”

  “I try to do what Napoleon did,” responded Begin, smiling, rising again to bow and wave at the still-applauding crowd. “Napoleon said of himself that he compartmentalized an array of subjects in his head, and when he wished to focus on one he simply locked the doors on all the others. Tonight, I locked everything away but Jerusalem, and on that subject, the good Lord gives me great strength. Remember the ancient words of the Almighty, ‘Hanoten l’ayef koach’” [He who gives strength to the weary].

  Photograph credit: Chanania Herman & Israel Government Press Office

  Prime Minister Begin votes for the Jerusalem Bill, 29 July 1980

  “So how much sleep do you manage on?” asked Rothberg, amid the din.

  “Though I only managed a couple of hours last night, Hanoten l’ayef koach saw me through the day. So now I shall go home, have a quiet nocturnal chat with my wife, study the latest dispatches, get a few hours rest, and, im yirtze Hashem [God willing], be ready to start tomorrow afresh.”

  The next day, the prime minister was rushed to Hadassah Hospital with a heart attack. It turned out to be a relatively mild one, and the doctors indulged his doggedness by allowing him to work minimally behind a curtained-off corner in the coronary ward, which he shared in semi-privacy with eight other patients. Summoned to his bedside, I found him propped up reading cables. His pajama-clad shoulders were bowed and his cheeks sallow, but his eyes were as sharp as ever.

  “Hosht du gehert aza meisa? ” [Did you ever hear of such a thing?] he asked me impishly, in colloquial Yiddish. “Lord Carrington has the chutzpah to tell me what I should be doing here in my own capital. I read it in a press report from London this morning.”

  The British foreign secretary and the Israeli prime minister had, by this time, arrived at a no-exit stalemate of chronic dislike for one another.

  “I shall write him a letter!” said Begin, and on the spot he began dictating to me a furious reprimand, essentially telling Lord Carrington to mind his own business, and repeating much the same thing as he had said to one of the journalists outside Number 10, when he had called on Mrs. Thatcher.

  “Open your bible, Lord Carrington,” he dictated, “and read the First Book of Kings, chapter two, verse eleven, where you will find that King David moved his capital from Hebron, where he had reigned for seven years, to Jerusalem, where he ruled for another thirty-three years, and this at a time when the civilized world had never heard of London.”

  Released from hospital ten days later to recuperate at home, Begin seemed unfazed that eleven of the thirteen foreign embassies in Jerusalem – including the Dutch, which had been the first to open an embassy in Jerusalem – had withdrawn to Tel Aviv, in protest against the Knesset bill. Begin also received a fourteen-page letter from President Sadat which included a sharp protest against the Jerusalem bill. Annoyed though the Egyptian leader was, he nevertheless graciously opened with a solicitous inquiry about Mr. Begin’s health after his heart attack. These were not empty words; as unlikely as the pairing of these two men was, they had, by now, taken a genuine liking to each other.

  In his reply, which Begin drafted that night, he began on an equally personal note, marveling with intense lyricism at the fragility of the human heart. He wrote:

  May I tell you something of my thoughts during the illness which suddenly befell me? My good doctors put me under a big machine, made in Israel, unique in its sophistication. They made a photo of my heart and decided to show it to me. So, what is the human heart? It is, simply, a pump! God Almighty, I thought to myself, as long as this pump is working, a human being feels, thinks, speaks, writes, loves his family, smiles, weeps, enjoys life, gets angry, gives friendship, gets friendship, prays, dreams, remembers,
forgets, forgives, influences others, is being influenced by other people – lives! But when this pump stops, one is no more. What a wonder is the cosmos and the frailty of the human body, without which the mind, too, becomes still, helpless and hapless. Therefore, it is the duty of every man who is called, to serve his people, his country, humanity, a just cause, to do his best – as long as the pump pumps.

  Having delivered himself of these musings, he delved into the substance of the Egyptian president’s letter, gently rebuking him for insinuating that he had misled him on the matter of Jerusalem:

  You will, I hope, forgive me for this quasi-philosophic introduction, but it is relevant. Both our nations yearn for peace. It is in this spirit, and for the sake of clarity, that I must make several corrections in your detailed letter…You will agree with me that none of our meetings consisted of a monologue, either by you or by me. We conducted a mutual dialogue. You spoke, and I responded. I spoke, you responded. Let us therefore refresh our memory of the things we spoke about.

  In your letter to me, you write, “You will recall that I agreed [in El Arish] to provide you with water that could reach Jerusalem, passing through the Negev. You, however, misunderstood the idea by saying that the national aspirations of your people are not for sale.”

  Mr. President: I believe that were you to recreate in your mind our short dialogue at El Arish you will agree that: (a) you suggested to me bringing water from the Nile to the Negev Desert. You never once mentioned bringing water to Jerusalem; (b) I never said that the national aspirations of my people are not for sale. I would never use such language in our exchanges. You took the initiative by making a double proposal. You said: “We must act with vision. I am prepared to let you have water from the Nile to irrigate the Negev,” and you also said, “let us resolve the problem of Jerusalem, because if we solve this problem we solve everything.” To which I responded: “Mr. President, water from the Nile to the Negev Desert – a great idea, indeed a great vision. But we must always distinguish between moral and historical values, which is the matter of Jerusalem, and material advances, which is the matter of watering the Negev. So let us separate the two – Jerusalem on the one hand, and water from the Nile to the Negev on the other.”

  He then went on to catalogue in immense detail the number of times he had emphasized his principled and consistent refusal to put Jerusalem on the negotiation table, and objected to the intimation that under Jewish sovereignty the religious rights of Muslims and Christians could not be guaranteed. Warming to that topic, he sermonized:

  We know that from the point of view of religious faith, Jerusalem is holy to Christians and Muslims, but to the Jewish people Jerusalem is their history for three millennia, their heart, their dream, the visible symbol of their national redemption.

  Anwar Sadat was not at all receptive to this lecture. Two weeks later he wrote a thirty-five page retort, much of it a recapitulation of his previous epistle, but introduced now by a lengthy discourse on the religious imperative which had inspired all his negotiations. His inspiration, he wrote, was stirred while on a visit to Mount Sinai. Begin was so intrigued by this that he invited Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, and Interior Minister Yosef Burg to his home, to hear their impressions of the opening paragraph of the Sadat letter, which he read out to them:

  Page from Prime Minister Begin’s letter to President Sadat in which he lyrically reflects on the heart attack he had recently suffered, 3 August 1980

  The thoughts which I am sharing with you now occurred to me as I was on the peak of Mount Moses, reciting the Koran and worshipping God in this sacred part of the land of Egypt which witnessed the birth of the great mission. As I was reciting the Koran on this unparalleled spot, I became more certain of a fact that I have stated before, that my peace initiative was a sacred mission. The story of the Israelites began in the Land of Egypt. It is apparent that it is the will of God that the story would find its completion in Egypt also.

  Yosef Burg, himself a religious man of sharp wit and tranquil optimism, was genuinely mystified. “He really believes he talks directly with the Almighty,” he said, drolly. “He is summoning us from the heights of Sinai.”

  Yitzhak Shamir, a hardheaded, hard-line realist, couldn’t believe his ears. He asked the prime minister to show him the pertinent paragraph again, and as he read it, he translated it slowly into Hebrew, word for word, while the urbane Yadin evaluated the more ambiguous phrases to make sure of the right rendering. Knowing Begin’s penchant for legalities, and his sometimes florid style, the three ministers suggested judicious points of reply. Thus it was that in the silence of his study that night, the prime minister reviewed the letter with patience, and answered it with ardor. “On Jerusalem,” he wrote, “I have told you everything I can, both orally and in writing. Jerusalem is our capital, one city, indivisible, with guaranteed free access to all the Holy Places for all religions.”

  And then, totally fed up of platitudes and clichés, he cut through the claptrap.

  Prince Fahd of oil-rich Saudi Arabia calls on his Arab brothers to march on Israel in a holy war – jihad. We are not impressed. You know me by now, Mr. President. I hate war with every fiber of my soul. I love peace. My colleagues and I made great sacrifices for the sake of peace. If there are, anywhere, ungrateful men who prefer to forget what we did, and the sacrifices we made for the sacred cause of peace – let them buy oil, let them sell arms, let them be friends of tyrants, like the ruler of Iraq, to mention just one. Let them sell principles and dignity. They will not change the irrefutable facts.

  And then, soaring high on the winds of history:

  Yes, we hate war and yearn for peace. But let me say this: should anybody at any time raise against us a modern sword in the attempt to rob us of Jerusalem, of our capital, the object of our love and prayers, we Jews will fight for Jerusalem as we have never done since the days of the Maccabees. And how Judah the Maccabee and his brothers fought and won the day, every student of history and strategy knows. The threats of Prince Fahd are of no concern to us. He does not know – how can he? – what this generation of Jews, who suffered the indescribable fall and the unprecedented triumph, is capable of sacrificing and doing in order to defend the people, the country, Jerusalem. He may have the billions of petro-dollars; we have the will and the unconditional readiness for self-sacrifice.

  This was evidently enough for the Egyptian president. A week later he wrote a brief letter of acknowledgement, suggesting they meet sometime somewhere at a summit. No such summit ever took place and Menachem Begin held by his vow to never discuss the matter again in any forum. The United Nations remained equally obdurate, refusing to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, even its pre-1967 Western half. As a matter of policy, all embassies remain located in Tel Aviv, including that of the United States, electoral promises to the contrary notwithstanding.

  Chapter 46

  Germany – the Eternal and Infernal Reverie

  On an afternoon in early May, 1981, a group of about thirty young Americans greeted the prime minister with spirited applause, as he entered his conference room. They were budding Jewish community activists affiliated with the United Jewish Appeal. With old-world charm, Begin made his way around the table, kissing the hands of the young ladies, shaking the hands of the young men, and asking everybody their first names and where they came from. His opening remarks were punctuated by coughs, and as he cleared his throat of rumbling phlegm he apologized, and explained that he had caught a slight chest cold at the opening ceremonies of the recently held Holocaust Memorial Day – the annual commemoration of the six million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

  Irving Bernstein, the indomitable executive vice president of the UJA, who was in charge of the group, asked in his typical straight-to-the-point manner, “Tell us, Mr. Begin, in which way does the memory of the Holocaust impact on your attitude toward Germany today?”

  Everybody straightened up, attentive, as th
e prime minister buried his face in his hands. Looking through his fingers, he told them that the subject was deeply emotional for him. Softly, in sorrowful spirit, he added, “You see, I know how my mother, my father, my brother, and my two cousins – one four years old, one five years old – went to their deaths. My father was the secretary of the Brisk Jewish community. He walked to his death at the head of five hundred fellow Jews, leading them in the singing of “Hatikva,” and “Ani ma’amin,” the declaration of faith in the coming of the Redemption. The Germans drove them into the River Bug, which flows through Brisk. They opened fire with machine guns, and the river turned to blood. Their bodies were left to float down the river. That is how they died. And my mother – she was elderly and sick in hospital – they drove her and all the other patients out of the building, and slaughtered them on the spot. So yes, I live with this trauma. It colors everything I do. I shall live with it until my dying day.”

  Begin stared unseeingly at the faces of his young guests. After a few moments, he snapped out of his reverie, his composure restored, smiled a faint smile, and said, “Now, baruch Hashem, we Jews have the means to defend ourselves. We have our courageous Israel Defense Forces.”