The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (17 page)

“We’re getting lots of letters and telegrams from some very important people,” he grunted, hardly looking up. “Go through them and, where necessary, draft individual replies for my signature. Consult Yaakov if you’re not sure what to say.”

Dr. Yaakov Herzog was one of Israel’s commanding intellects, possessed of a subtle and powerful mind, who was as equally at home with Bach as he was with the Bible. An impeccably dressed man, he had about him a quiet yet compelling charm, and his shrewd face showed the sensitivity of a scholar and the charisma of a cosmopolitan. A devout Jew, he was the son of a former Chief Rabbi of Israel and the younger brother of a future president. Described by Ben-Gurion as a genius in foreign affairs, and acknowledged by his peers as a prodigy in Talmud, philosophy, and theology, Levi Eshkol had recruited him early on as his most trusted foreign policy adviser. It is hard to overstate Yaakov Herzog’s influence on my own worldview. To me he was a tutor, a guide, a counselor, and a mentor. Often he took me into his confidence in explaining his opinions and what shaped them, and his subtle and powerful mind left an indelible imprint on my thinking as a religious Zionist and public servant.

As I was about to leave the prime minister’s room, Herzog strode in, followed by Colonel Yisrael Lior, Eshkol’s military secretary. Herzog had obtained his early schooling in Dublin, where his father had once been Chief Rabbi, so his Hebrew was brushed with an Irish brogue, and this was greatly amplified when he told Eshkol that President Johnson had just sent a message through our Washington Embassy warning Israel not to fire the first shot. If Israel did spark a war, the Jewish State would have to go it alone. The United States needed more time to assemble an international flotilla to break the Egyptian blockade of Eilat and remove, thereby, the causes for war, said the message.

Eshkol listened glumly but did not say a word.

“There’s more,” continued Herzog, holding up another cable. “It’s from the Soviets. The operative paragraph reads: ‘If the Israeli Government insists on taking upon itself the responsibility for the outbreak of armed confrontation it will pay the full price of such action.’”

The prime minister still did not say a word. He just faced Herzog without looking directly at him.

“And there is still one thing more,” his chief adviser went on, a chilling tone creeping into his voice. “Field Intelligence reports that poison gas equipment has been spotted in Sinai. There is a possibility the Egyptians intend to use it. Nasser has used poison gas before, in his recent war with Yemen.”

“And we have no stockpiles of gas masks,” added a very pale Colonel Yisrael Lior.

“No gas masks?” asked the prime minister, his eyes locking onto Herzog’s.

“Nothing to speak of,” confirmed Herzog, his usually urbane manner distorted into extreme anxiety.

The prime minister turned his head, bit his lips, and sat there perfectly still for a moment.
“
Blit vet zikh giessen vee vosser,
” [Blood will spill like water] he whispered to himself. And I, full of foreboding, moved to the door and closed it on them as the three leaned their heads together, speaking privately. The only words I caught were those of Eshkol saying to Herzog,
“
Ikh darf reden mit’n der gelernter na’ar
” [I must speak to the learned fool]. He meant Foreign Minister Abba Eban.

That’s how things now were between Eshkol and Eban, the South African-born and Cambridge-educated foreign minister. He was adored by Jewish communities the world over for his Churchillian eloquence, applauded at the United Nations for his brilliant and insightful oratory, highly sought after by high society for his erudition and sophistication, and lauded in virtually all capitals as a world-class statesman. Yet at home he existed on the leanest of power bases and, however unfairly, was seen by his own down-to-earth cabinet compatriots as an incongruous and pretentious outsider. These people gave little credence to Abba Eban’s decision-making acumen. To them he was more a mouthpiece than a mind. No one questioned his exceptional diplomatic gifts and dazzling powers of communication, but few trusted his strategic thinking. Levi Eshkol didn’t, Golda Meir didn’t, Yitzhak Rabin didn’t, and had Menachem Begin been asked he probably would have said he didn’t either. Sardonically, Levi Eshkol once said of him: “Eban never gives the right solution, only the right speech.”

“The prime minister must speak to Eban,” called Yaakov Herzog to the secretary, sticking his head around the door. “He’s due to meet President Johnson soon. Track him down in Washington.”

As the secretary fussed with a phone directory, I lifted the first of the two cartons of letters to carry them to my room. When I returned for the second one I could distinctly hear Levi Eshkol’s voice through the half-open door, yelling into the telephone: “You hear me, Eban? That’s right
–
poison gas. Write down what I’m saying. I’m telling you to remind the president what he promised me. He promised me that the United States would stand by us if we were threatened. Yes, yes, in all circumstances – that’s what he said. And remind him what he said to me when I asked him what would happen if one day Egypt attacked us and the United States had other problems on its head – what would be then? Write down that he said the same thing. And tell him this is what is about to happen, and with poison gas, too. Tell him the question is no longer freedom of shipping to Eilat. The question is Israel’s existence.” Then, totally beside himself with anger and frustration, he shrieked in Yiddish, “Zug dem goy as mir haben tzu ton mot chayes. Ir hert – chayes!” [Tell the goy we’re dealing with animals. You hear – animals!]

I all but dropped the carton in fright as the prime minister slammed the phone down in anger.

Photograph credit: Israel Government Press Office

Prime Minister Eshkol with Chief of Staff Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, accompanied by General Tal, during the crisis that culminated in the Six-Day War, 25 May 1967

The official prime minister’s residence, a two-story box of a house, stood in an inconspicuous street in the fashionable Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. The policeman at the garden gate, illuminated by the spill of light from a lamppost, stood stiffly to attention as Menachem Begin wished him a pleasant evening and made his way to the front door.

Levi Eshkol, his nose stuffed with a sudden cold and his eyes grave with anxiety, received Begin in his study. It was a room as unpretentious as himself
–
nondescript furniture, plain rugs, and dull paintings. There he briefed the leader of the Opposition on the latest menacing developments, and felt him out on the idea of establishing an emergency coalition of all the mainstream parties to unite the nation in this time of crisis. As Menachem Begin listened, Levi Eshkol thought he could detect sympathy in his eyes, for, like himself, Begin was a Jew from the old
shtetl
background, and despite their conflicting politics they got along well and understood each other.

But there was something else in Begin’s eyes that Eshkol did not divine that night: relentless resolution. Unbeknownst to him, Menachem Begin had come not only to be briefed, but more importantly, to persuade the prime minister to resign. He wanted him to step aside in favor of David Ben-Gurion, and demote himself to become
Ben-Gurion’s
deputy, in charge of domestic affairs. He was not alone in this view.

“We are going to war,” contended Begin, his voice soft yet firm. “When an enemy of our people says he intends to destroy us, the first thing we have to do is to believe him. People did not believe Hitler. The Arabs say they want to destroy us, and so we must believe them. We must seize the initiative and destroy their armies first.”

“But how can you, of all people, ask me to step aside in favor of the man who has abused you at every turn, tried to bring you down at every turn?” asked an astonished Eshkol. And then, obdurately, “Besides, all our moves must be coordinated with the United States. It would be the wildest folly to act precipitately without exhausting the prospect of an American initiative to break the blockade. We, a country of two and a half million, cannot afford to thumb our noses at the United States and the rest of the world. We have no choice but to take world opinion into account.”

“I do not believe the Americans are serious about marshalling an international flotilla to break the blockade,” Begin replied. “And as for world public opinion, I agree it is important, but we must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by what the goyim think. Besides, we’ve called up all our reserves, and think what this mobilization is costing our economy!”

“So what are you proposing?”

Begin looked evenly at Eshkol: “I’m proposing we go on the offensive immediately. Time is of the essence. And I’m proposing you hand over the reins of government to Ben-Gurion and become his deputy in a national unity government. I have the highest regard for you personally, but I think the situation is so grave and your responsibilities so heavy, you cannot carry the burden on your shoulders. I am firmly of the belief that Ben-Gurion has to lead the nation in this hour of peril. He is a war leader.”

Eshkol shot him a sharp look, and there followed a brittle silence which was broken when he snapped, “Impossible! Ben-Gurion is eighty-one.”

“True, but I say again, he’s a tried and tested war leader.”

The prime minister, hurt to the core, stared upwards, studying the ceiling, trying to take it all in. Finally, he shot back, “You are asking me to do this after all Ben-Gurion has done and said about you over all these years? He’s even compared you to Hitler.”

“The enmity is his, not mine. I live by the maxim that a Jew should never hate another Jew.”

Levi Eshkol let off a mighty sneeze, blew his nose, took a deep breath, rose, walked to the window, and gazed sullenly into the night, where he saw picketers encamped across the street holding up signs calling upon him to step aside. After what seemed a long time, he turned, gazed morosely upon Begin, and shook his head from side to side.

“If that’s your feeling, “said Begin, “I shall go.”

“No, no, stay,” hastened Eshkol, resuming his seat. “Let’s talk this through. The country is in such danger that every option must be thoroughly explored.”

For the next hour almost, in an intimacy they had never shared before, they sat together mulling over the matter, weighing its pros and cons from every possible angle. Finally, a tired Eshkol rose, stretched his arms, yawned, looked at his visitor wearily, shook his head, and said,
“
Dee tzvei fert kennen nisht shlepen de vagon tsuzamen
” [These two horses cannot pull the same wagon together].

“I understand,” said the leader of the opposition. He got to his feet, made for the door, and was about to open it when the prime minister gripped him by the arm, and with a sad smile, said, “Thank you for coming, anyway. I know you think this is the best course for the nation. The immediate thing is to broaden the coalition, with you in it.”

“But only if Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan are in it, too.”

Levi Eshkol raised his palms, indicating that Begin had no need to belabor the point, and said, “Let’s see what the next few days shall bring, and then we’ll decide what course to take.”
11

Over the course of the next few days a good many people in Israel were anxiously sticking strips of adhesive tape onto their windows to reinforce them against the blasts of shells and bombs. It was a laborious chore, on the eve of a war of survival which everybody expected to begin at any moment. The prime minister and his most senior aides were ensconced in the war room, to which I had no access, so my wife and I were busily engaged in sticking tape to our windows when an announcement came over the radio that Eshkol was about to address the nation. Along with hundreds of thousands of others across the land, we were hoping for an encouraging word, so we stopped what we were doing and glued our ears to the set.

What we heard was a shuffling of papers, followed by a cough, a clearing of the throat, and then the distinctive gravelly voice. Eshkol talked bluntly of the anxiety the Arab troop concentrations were causing the nation, not least because of the Eilat blockade, and then he rattled on about how the Government had laid down principles for the continuation of its policy designed to promote an American-led international initiative calculated to avert war.

There then came the sound of more paper being rustled, accompanied this time by repeated grunts of “Err, err,” as if Eshkol had lost his place, or was struggling to decipher scribbled alterations about “responsible decision-making” and “unity of purpose”
–
exactly as had happened at the Joint Israel Appeal dinner in London a few years before. Like then, he stumbled along, speaking in fits and starts, stuttering “Err, err” over and over again. But this was no fund-raising dinner. His audience was a frightened nation, and the more he stumbled over his reading, the more indecisive and panic-stricken he sounded, even when he rounded off with an assurance that Israel would know how to defend itself if attacked.

The broadcast shook everybody’s nerves. Suddenly, the country seemed powerless and leaderless. Subsequent news reports told how Israel’s enemies rejoiced while Israeli soldiers in the trenches smashed their transistors and broke down in tears.

Menachem Begin listened to the broadcast at his Tel Aviv home and recoiled in shock. He fiddled with the knobs of his radio to catch the
BBC
World Service to hear its commentary on the speech. What he got instead was the genteel voice of the
BBC
’s Cairo correspondent describing the relentless Egyptian military buildup in Sinai, illustrated with a quote from the order of the day to the Egyptian forces:

The eyes of the world are upon you in your most glorious war against Israeli imperialist aggression on the soil of our fatherland. Your holy war is for the recapture of the rights of the Arab nation and to reconquer the robbed land of Palestine by the power of your weapons and the will of your faith…

Begin switched off the radio in disgust and said to his wife Aliza, “I know Eshkol is suffering from a cold, but he sounded as if he’s having a heart attack.” And then, adamantly, “There’s no doubt he must resign in favor of Ben-Gurion, and hand over the Defense Ministry to Moshe Dayan.”

Next morning Israel’s leading daily,
Haaretz
, said much the same thing:

If we could truly believe that Eshkol was really capable of navigating the ship of state in these crucial days, we would willingly follow him. But we have no such belief after his radio address last night. The proposal that Ben-Gurion be entrusted with the premiership and Moshe Dayan with the Ministry of Defense, while Eshkol takes charge of domestic affairs, seems to us a wise one.

When I walked into the prime minister’s office that same day, I entered an atmosphere of gloom. Adi Yaffe took me aside to tell me what exactly had fouled up the radio broadcast. It had been a calamitous day from the start, he said – nerve-racking cabinet consultations, endless phone calls, party politicking, and the idf General Staff straining at the leash like dogs penned up in kennels, wanting to strike the enemy before their buildup became impenetrable. In the eyes of the idf, the delay was not due to military insufficiency but to political indecisiveness. Certain generals were even slinging accusations of cowardice at Eshkol. But he was shutting his ears to such epithets from men he saw as impetuous commanders who would lead him into war before he had exhausted every possibility of avoiding one. He insisted that if the American commitment to break the blockade came to naught then Washington’s only moral choice would be to support Israel in a war thrust upon it.

Adi explained that, originally, Eshkol was to have prerecorded his address in the haven of his own room. However, because of his grueling schedule he did not get around to it until very late in the day. Going over the text drafted by Herzog and others, he quickly scribbled changes and, since his secretary had already gone home, Adi had sat down to retype the speech with one finger. He had hardly begun when the studio called to say it was too late to make a recording, and that if the prime minister wanted prime time he had to come to Broadcasting House immediately.

Exhausted from stress and croaky with his incipient cold, Eshkol entered the broadcasting booth and began reading a text he had not fully checked and which was crisscrossed with corrections he could not fully decipher. “At one point,” said Adi dejectedly, “he signaled us, Herzog and me, that he wanted to cut the broadcast short, but we signaled back that he had no choice but to finish. And that’s what happened.”

On the following evening, David Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula, a short, stout, robust woman, padded to the front door in a dressing gown to answer a gentle knock. “Ah, it’s you,” she said amiably, ushering in Menachem Begin and a couple of his party colleagues. “David is waiting for you.”

Though the evening was hot and humid the leader of the
Opposition
wore, as was his custom, a formal suit and tie. He greeted Mrs. Ben-Gurion with genuine warmth. Paula liked Begin, and he liked her. In fact her husband was later to acknowledge this in an extraordinary letter he wrote to him in February 1969:

For whatever reason, my Paula was always an admirer of yours. I opposed your path both before and after the establishment of the State, sometimes aggressively…. I remained an adamant opponent of certain of your positions and actions even after the State’s inception and I have no regrets about that because I believe I was in the right (anyone can make a mistake without knowing it). But on the personal level I never felt ill-will toward you, and the more I got to know you in these past years the more have I come to respect you, and my Paula is happy about that.

This reconciliatory note suggested that the Old Man’s ferocious animosity toward his longtime political adversary was finally cooling off, but this was hardly discernible that night when Begin and his colleagues walked into his Tel Aviv apartment.

Squat and stocky, and dressed in his signature open-necked khaki shirt and baggy cotton pants, David Ben-Gurion received them in his armchair, his silvery mane as untamed as ever and his face as pugnacious as ever. A man of issues, not of niceties, he snapped, “
Nu
–
so what is it you’ve come to see me about?”

Begin, in a tone that suggested he and his colleagues had given considerable thought to the matter in hand, explained their proposal that he assume the leadership of an emergency national unity government, replacing Levi Eshkol. The Old Man’s brows knitted into a frown and his bottom lip protruded in hard-pinched contemplation. Finally, he barked, “Me, Prime Minister again? Never!”

He then proceeded to make short shrift of their strategic concepts, chastising them for imperiling the nation by advocating a preemptive strike, insisting that the
IDF
could not win a war without the backing of a great power such as the United States, advising that any military action be restricted to reopening the passage to Eilat, no more, and generally accusing them of endangering the very existence of the Jewish State in a war it could not possibly win alone.

When Begin and his colleagues repaired to a nearby coffee shop to chew over Ben-Gurion’s tirade they concluded that the man was completely uninformed, abysmally out of date, had no concept of the
idf
’s genuine strength, and had talked himself into believing that Israel did not have the grit to save itself by itself. In short, he had grown old and was politically extinct, and that disappointed Menachem Begin very much.

Steeling themselves for the battle of their lives, the people clamored for Dayan. Mass rallies chorused the same cry in city after city: “WE WANT DAYAN!” Wives of reserve officers
–
dubbed by one wit “the Merry Wives of Windsor” – marched in Tel Aviv chanting “DAYAN! DAYAN!” – Dayan, the legendary one-eyed warrior with the trademark black eye patch; Dayan, the internationally known Israeli hero; Dayan, the symbol of the Jewish State’s fortitude; Dayan, the one-time Hagana commander and dashing Chief of Staff who had shaped the Israel Defense Forces and led the Jewish State from victory to victory. Only he could rally the nation in defending itself against yet another looming Holocaust. As for the unableto-make-up-his-mind Levi Eshkol, most commentators were quick to assume he would carry on as prime minister in name only.