“Mr. Prime Minister, there is a lot of concern in Israel about the stability of the regime in Egypt. You’ve just come back from there. Can you say anything about it?”
“There is no reason to believe in the instability of the regime. We found a bereaved government who had lost a great and respected leader. But we also found a strong government. In a couple of days’ time, the new president, Hosni Mubarak, will be sworn in.”
“Can you tell us something about your relationship with President-designate Mubarak?”
“Yes, I can. I can tell you of a very simple human and dramatic moment when we met. As we were walking toward each other we extended our hands to one another, and we both said simultaneously, and with absolute spontaneity, ‘Peace forever.’ Of course, one cannot guarantee anything forever. But what we meant was that we shall both endeavor to establish a peace that our children and grandchildren can inherit.”86
On a November evening just weeks after the Sadat assassination, while moving between the basin and the towel rail in his bathroom, Menachem Begin slipped and fell. Excruciating pain shot through his body when he attempted to pick himself up. Wincing, he called to his wife for help, but she didn’t hear him because his bathroom radio was blaring so loud it drowned out his cries.
Fortuitously, soon afterward, Mrs. Begin had cause to go to the bathroom herself. Upon opening the door, she discovered her husband prostrate on the floor.
“Menachem, what happened?” she asked in alarm.
“I fell.”
“So get up.”
“I can’t.”
Their daughter, Leah, heard them talking and ran to the scene. “Daddy, what’s wrong?”
“I fell. I can’t get up. Just leave me to lie here a while and then I’ll try and raise myself again.”
After a brief consultation, wife and daughter decided they would gently ease him up as best they could, and carry him to his bed.
“Don’t,” grimaced the prime minister. “You don’t have the strength, and you’ll only make the pain worse. I might have broken something. Call the security guards. I’ll tell them how to carry me.”
Within minutes, two strapping young men hovered over the prime minister, awaiting his instructions.
“Place your hands under my back and lift me up in one go, and carry me to my bed,” he told them. “But try not to jerk any limbs, please.”
An ambulance took the prime minister to the Hadassah Hospital, where he was examined by three senior doctors, among them his personal physician, Dr. Mervyn Gotsman. X-rays confirmed he had a fractured left femur, and he was swiftly operated upon. Later, when it was over, firmly convinced that the public had a right to know every detail of their leader’s state of health, Begin penned an article describing in vivid detail the circumstances of his accident and what had gone through his mind while on the operating table, when the local anesthetic had already taken effect and a screen had been placed to hide his gaze from what was being done to his thigh:
The operation began. I did not feel it begin. I felt nothing. I spoke with Professor Gotsman who was by my side, and he talked to me. Suddenly, I heard the pounding of a hammer on a nail. The pounding increased. I felt nothing. I did not count, but I think I distinguished nine or ten intermittent hammer-blows. After a while they told me the operation would soon be over and that everything had gone well. A little while later they said it was done.87
When the Prime Minister was discharged from hospital eighteen days later, a long convalescence began. Overnight, he seemed to have aged a decade. Sometimes the pain was so excruciating he could hardly function, and the medications he had to take tired him out. The only way he could get about was in a wheelchair. His desk was too uncomfortable for him to work at, so he ran the government from the couch in the corner of his office. Far worse than his own discomfort, though, was his anxiety about the country, and his family: The economy was in the dumps with no signs of an early improvement, some of his cabinet colleagues were getting him down because of petty squabbles over petty grievances, and most disquieting of all, his beloved wife Aliza, who had a long history of asthma attacks, had become very sick indeed.
So there he sat, alone in his apartment on a mid-December evening, steeped in a deep melancholy, brooding. But for the purr of the radio broadcasting the evening news, to which he was hardly listening, the room was as quiet as a crypt. Suddenly, however, his ears pricked up, when the announcer began quoting a report in a Kuwaiti newspaper on a statement by Syrian President Hafez al-Assad:
He will not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians deign to do so. There can be no question of making peace between Israel and the Arabs so long as the strategic balance plays into Israel’s hands. He called upon the Arab states to persist in their rejectionist stand until they attain the power necessary to impose peace conditions on Israel in the spirit of Arab demands.
Begin, dabbing at the sudden film of sweat on his forehead, meditated over this statement. The situation with Syria had already deteriorated greatly. The Syrians had all but taken over Lebanon, and had deployed their advanced ground-to-air missiles on its territory, hampering Israel’s freedom of the skies. Worse still, Yasser Arafat’s PLO had taken control of Lebanon’s south, from which it was mounting ever more deadly salvoes on northern Israel. This in turn was harming the Israel-U.S. relationship, because President Reagan had made plain his opposition to an Israeli incursion into Lebanon to clear the PLO out.
The prime minister picked up the phone to Yechiel Kadishai. “Yechiel, please find out the current population of the Golan Heights and call me straight back.”
A half hour later, Yechiel called back. “There are some ten to twelve thousand Druze living on the Golan, and a few thousand Israeli settlers, no more,” he reported.
Begin closed his eyes and forced himself to think through his pain. The Golan Heights rose a thousand feet over the farm-rich Hula Valley. Were it governed by a friendly neighbor, the Heights would be unimportant, but in enemy hands it was a strategic nightmare. Its capture in the Six-Day War had put an end to years of Syrian bombardment of the villages and towns below. When the Syrians almost recaptured the Heights during the Yom Kippur War, their forces had advanced within reach of the road to Haifa. Now, Hafez al-Assad, the most intractable and intransigent of all the Arab leaders, was saying for the umpteenth time that Syria would never recognize the Jewish State. So why wait? Why leave this sparsely populated, critically strategic plateau in a state of legal limbo under military administration when, by a simple act of legislation it could be incorporated under Israel’s sovereign law? And what better time to do it than now, when international attention was distracted by a crisis in Poland, where the communists were suppressing the anticommunist Solidarity movement, and by turmoil in Argentina, presaging the Falklands war with Britain.
Crisply, Begin set things in motion. “Yechiel,” he said, “arrange a special cabinet session first thing tomorrow morning here at the residence, and alert the Knesset Speaker to a possible legislative session later in the afternoon. Also, tell the attorney general to call me.”
Yechiel Kadishai, forever the perfect factotum, did not ask why.
“Gentlemen, I am pleased to propose to you the Law of the Golan Heights,” the prime minister told his astonished ministers the following morning. He was sitting propped up in his wheelchair, his ministers fanned out in a semicircle around him.
“The law of what?” asked one, thinking to himself the medication was beginning to affect Begin’s mind, so the minister was to later to tell me. Others were so perplexed by the grandness of this sudden ambition that they just sat there wondering what had gotten into their leader.
“After consultation with the attorney general, I wish to go over the language of what I term the Golan Law,” answered the prime minister. After citing the law’s proposed clauses, he proceeded to make his case:
“Following the renewal of our independence, the Syrians dominated the Golan Heights and demonstrated what they
were capable of doing to our civilian population in the towns and villages below. The Syrians turned the lives of tens of thousands of our people into hell. Driven by their deep and abiding hatred, they would open fire from the Heights, instituting a reign of blood and terror throughout the area. Their targets were men, women, and children, and the attacks took their toll in killed and wounded. It was said in those days that the children born in that valley were ‘children of the shelters.’ Why? Because at every alert – and there were so many – they ran for their lives to the shelters. No wonder that in this matter of the Golan Heights the nation is virtually in consensus that Israel cannot come down from the Golan Heights and hand them back to the Syrians, ever.”
“So what are you proposing?” asked one.
“I am proposing that we apply the law of Israel to the Golan Heights.”
“Isn’t that tantamount to annexation?” asked another.
Either the prime minister did not catch the question, or he chose not to hear it. “The question I have to ask myself is whether we should wait indefinitely, in the hope that one day a Syrian ruler will display willingness to conduct peace negotiations. I, personally, have no illusions. Time and again I have called upon the Syrian president from the rostrum of the Knesset to come to Jerusalem or, alternatively, to invite me to Damascus, to negotiate peace. For almost fifteen years he has consistently refused the approaches of every Israeli government. But most significant is his most recent refusal which I heard last night. Unlike the previous ones, this time he actually specifies why.”
“In what sense?” asked the same minister, skeptically.
“The cabinet should know that we have all the information from an impeccably reliable source as to exactly what happened at the recent Fez conference.[1] There, the Syrian foreign minister declared,” – Begin picked up a paper stamped “Top Secret,” and adjusted his spectacles – “he declared, and I quote, ‘We Arabs must not put forth any peace proposal. We must be willing to wait a hundred years and more until Israel’s military prowess wanes, and then we shall act.’” He replaced the document on the small table beside his wheelchair, and picked up another. “Just yesterday, President Assad himself said much the same thing, publicly. I heard it with my own ears over the radio, and it appears here in today’s review of the Arab press.” His voice was firm as he quoted the Kuwaiti newspaper.
“So I ask you, after such words, should Israel wait in vain for the Syrians to talk peace, knowing that when they deign to do so, it will only be at a time when they feel they can dictate their terms either because they have grown so strong or we, God forbid, have grown so weak? Meanwhile, Syria is extending its domination over Lebanon, and the murderous PLO have taken over the south of the country. What do we have to wait for?”
One worrier, “How do you suppose the United Nations will react to your proposed Golan Law?”
“A fair question. Clearly, what I’m suggesting is a bold move, and I do not dismiss for one minute that the international repercussions will be harsh. For one, I anticipate a Security Council resolution roundly condemning us.”
“And the United States?” asked another. “How do you suppose Reagan will react?”
“In all likelihood, the U.S. will support such a UN resolution and will lodge its own direct protest. Our American friends will argue that the Golan Law is a unilateral step which they will not recognize. I would expect a letter in such a vein from Secretary of State Haig, or from President Reagan himself. We will answer them with what we genuinely believe – that justice is on our side, and that we deem our action fully valid under the circumstances we face.”
A number of faces in the chairs around him continued to display uneasiness, prompting Begin to say with some vehemence, “With all due respect to our great friend the United States of America, with whom we recently signed an agreement on strategic cooperation, Israel is a sovereign state and ours is an elected government. We are not talking here about some whim, some caprice; we are talking about our lives and our future as a nation. No one on earth has a moral right to dictate to us what to do after we have waited this long, fully fifteen years since the end of the Six-Day War, to negotiate peace with Syria, only to be rebuffed time and again by their rejectionism.” And then, with even greater conviction. “I am convinced that our people will back the government to the hilt on this matter. Therefore, I propose to submit the Golan Law to the Knesset for legislative approval this afternoon, subject to cabinet approval.”88
The subsequent ministerial debate was not as straightforward as the prime minister would have wished, but by the end all were in agreement. That afternoon, they took their seats at the cabinet table in the well of the Knesset chamber, as the prime minister, immobile in his wheelchair, opened by beseeching the Speaker to allow him to remain seated where he was, and not mount the podium.
“Permit me, Mr. Speaker, for reasons beyond my control, to address the House today from my place at the government table,” he said, in grand parliamentary style. “And permit me, not withstanding custom, to deliver my remarks while seated.” He then launched into much the same rhetoric as he had used at the cabinet session, and before the day was done, the Golan Law was passed by a majority of sixty-three to twenty-one, creating an instant firestorm in Washington.
“You know, Al,” said President Reagan to his secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who for once was in agreement with Caspar Weinberger, “I’m madder about this Golan Law thing than I was about the Iraqi reactor business. I would think Israel’s unilateral action has complicated Middle East peacemaking tremendously.”
“Frankly, I feel quite double-crossed,” agreed an angry Haig. “I didn’t expect this. I favored the memorandum of understanding which you tasked Weinberger to negotiate, because I assumed a formal strategic relationship, however vague, would put paid to their penchant for taking us by surprise, like they did with the bombing of Osirak. I simply took it for granted the Israelis would, from now on, consult with us fully before taking such drastic unilateral action.”
“Does the memorandum oblige them to consult with us?” asked the president.
Haig shrugged, and his sharp eyes narrowed when he answered, “Well, nowhere does it say so specifically. The Israelis never actually promised to consult us, but we had every reason to understand that as strategic allies we could expect not to be taken by surprise again by an act as far-reaching as this, which clearly affects our interest as well as theirs.”
Photograph credit: Chanania Herman & Israel Government Press Office
Prime Minister Begin at the Knesset, 14 December 1981
“So what do you propose?” The president popped a few jelly beans into his mouth.
Haig took his time answering, and when he did, his voice was pensive and measured. “Well, Mr. President, I don’t think we should risk weakening Israel’s defensive capabilities by suspending aircraft deliveries like we did the last time, in the case of the Iraqi affair. But we have to convey a message to Mr. Begin that is sharp enough that he’ll sit up and take note, and not surprise us again.”
“Such as what?”
“I think the first thing we’ve got to do is to straighten out the ground rules between us, so that we’ll know in future how to deal with one another. No more surprises! I therefore recommend that we suspend the strategic cooperation agreement which Begin wanted so much, until we have conducted a joint review of our interpretations of the agreement and the implications of Israel’s action.”
The president mulled this over and said, “You’re right, Al. That’s the way to go. Let’s do it.”
“I’ll instruct our ambassador, Mr. President,” said the secretary of state.89
The next day, Ambassador Sam Lewis phoned Yechiel Kadishai. “Yechiel, I need an appointment with the prime minister. It’s quite pressing.”
“What’s so urgent, Sam? Has somebody in Jerusalem given somebody in Washington a headache?”
The ever-irreverent Yechiel enjoyed ribbing the American am
bassador, and the ambassador, knowing him well enough, took it in the best of spirits.
“Something like that,” he answered. “I have a message from my boss.”
“Well, I think the prime minister has a message for your boss, too,” said Yechiel, as if relishing what Mr. Begin had in mind for Mr. Lewis.
The prime minister received the ambassador the following morning in his residence. He was sitting in a chair, with one foot propped on a stool and, by him, a table covered with papers.
The men had come to like each other a great deal. Begin respected Lewis’s urbane and well-honed diplomatic skills, which made him and his charming wife, Sallie, regulars in the social calendars of Israel’s elite. In fact, during Lewis’s eight years in Israel, which spanned the Carter and Reagan administrations, he became so well connected, and was so well trusted, that frustrated politicians of whatever political hue would occasionally unburden their souls to him.
“Come on in, Sam,” called Begin, when Lewis appeared at the door, accompanied by a note-taker.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Prime Minister?” asked the ambassador solicitously, shaking him by the hand. He noted that the premier’s cheekbones and chin were more pronounced than ever, and there was pain in his eyes.
“Much better, thank you,” answered the prime minister, vainly trying to pump a bit of cheer into his voice. “The trouble is, I can’t bend my leg. But you know me by now, Sam – a Jew bends his knee to no one but to God.”
Whether this was a bit of banter or a declaration of defiance was hard to tell.
Lewis shook the hands of two of the other men in the room, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, each of whom grunted a gruff ‘Shalom,’ and gave him only glares. The prime minister invited him to take a seat, reached for the stack of papers by his side, and with a stony face and a steely voice, began a speech that would last for almost an hour. He never once paused to look at his notes. He gave a thunderous recitation of the perfidies perpetrated by Syria over the decades; its endless attacks on the residents of the Hula Valley from the Golan Heights, the almost-successful Syrian seizure of the Heights during the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli sacrifices in pushing them back, and, finally, “Mr. Ambassador, I therefore have a very personal and urgent message for President Reagan, which I want you to transmit immediately.”
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 63