The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (18 page)

When Eshkol, pallid and grim, again approached Begin about joining an expanded emergency cabinet, he responded, “Only with Dayan as defense minister.” This greatly aroused the ire of Golda Meir, then secretary-general of the Labor party, who ferociously opposed Dayan’s appointment, never having forgiven him for quitting Labor when Ben-Gurion established his rival rump faction, Rafi
.
However, as the noose of war tightened ever more chokingly around the nation’s neck, she acquiesced.

Thus it was, that on Thursday, 1 June, listeners to the evening news cheered with relief
–
and many with tears
–
upon learning that a national unity government, the first in the country’s history, had at last been formed. That same night, Defense Minister designate Moshe Dayan and Minister without Portfolio designate Menachem Begin took their seats at the cabinet table and cast their votes in favor of a preemptive strike.

Also, that same evening, Chaim Herzog, Yaakov’s elder brother, a former chief of military intelligence, a general in the reserves, and future president of Israel, told listeners in his highly rated daily morale-boosting broadcasts, “I must say in all sincerity that if I had to choose between flying an Egyptian bomber bound for Tel Aviv, or being in Tel Aviv, I would, out of a purely selfish desire for self-preservation, opt to be in Tel Aviv.” For people digging slit trenches in their backyards in preparation for an Egyptian air bombardment, these were soothing words indeed.

On Sunday, 4 June 1967, the war cabinet passed the following resolution:

After hearing reports on the military and diplomatic situation…the Government has determined that the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan are deployed for a multi-front attack that threatens Israel’s existence. It is therefore decided to launch a military strike aimed at liberating Israel from encirclement and preventing the impending assault by the United Arab Command.
12

With that, what had come to be known as the
hamtana
–
the waiting period
–
was over. The Jewish State’s 264,000 soldiers were now poised to pit their prowess and grit against the Arab States’ 350,000, its 800 tanks against the Arab’s 2,000, and its 300 combat aircraft against the Arab’s 700.

Such were the odds.

At 7:45 the following morning, 5 June, soldiers in the southern trenches looked upwards in response to a distant drone in the sky that expanded into roaring waves of combat aircraft flying in tight formations at such low altitudes they could easily discern the Stars of David on the fuselages. A few hours later Menachem Begin, accompanied by his closest aide, Yechiel Kadishai, climbed the stairs of the prime minister’s Tel Aviv bureau where they found an exuberant Levi Eshkol in animated conversation with half-a-dozen equally elated ministers.

“
Mir dafen machen shecheyanu
–
we have to recite a thanksgiving blessing,” called Eshkol to Begin, and he made him privy to the single most spectacular piece of news he had ever heard in his life. In a surprise attack that morning, the Israeli Air Force had virtually wiped out the Egyptian Air Force. The blackened skeletons of more than three hundred Egyptian planes lay smoldering on the bombed runways of their bases. The Syrians, the Jordanians, and the Iraqis had all opened fire and, consequently, their air forces were also being demolished.

“
Baruch Hashem! ”
[Thank God] exclaimed Begin, his eyes alive with excitement. And then, “Tell me, the Jordanian attack
–
how serious is it?”

Eshkol’s face fell into its familiar worry lines: “So far just artillery exchanges, mainly in Jerusalem, with a few skirmishes around Mount Scopus. I have sent word to King Hussein through the
UN
and the Americans that if Jordan stays out of the war we won’t touch them. The fighting in Sinai is much fiercer. Our tanks are just now penetrating the Egyptian fortifications, but we have total command of the skies. Up north, the Syrians are shelling townships and settlements from the Golan Heights. We are returning fire.”

Hardly had Eshkol said these words when his military secretary, Colonel Yisrael Lior, walked in from the anteroom and handed him a note. The prime minister adjusted his spectacles and studied it.

“Aha! The Jordanians are intensifying their shelling. I presume this is King Hussein’s reply to my message. He wants war!” There was a sharp and defiant bite to his words.

A deeply pensive look entered Begin’s eyes, as if he was considering some staggering implications. He was! He was thinking that if the Jordanians persisted in their attack, the holy and historic national treasures the Jewish people had lost in the 1948 War of Independence might soon be liberated
–
the Old City, the Western Wall of the ancient Temple, Jerusalem reunited as the capital of Israel!

He shared this reverie with one man
–
the Minister of Labor, Yigal Allon. An old soldier, a veteran kibbutznik, a Labor leader, and an agnostic, Allon was, nevertheless, an ardent advocate of Jewish national rights in Eretz Yisrael. Begin suggested they go into the anteroom to talk things over. There they discussed their hopes, and Eshkol, sighting them through the open door of his office, pulled up his glasses and called out to them,
“
Nu
, tell me what you two are hatching?”

“Jerusalem,” said Allon. “Begin and I want the Old City of Jerusalem.”

The prime minister rubbed his chin in the manner of a rabbi stroking his beard, and with twinkling eyes, replied,
“
Dos iss a’gadank
–
that is an interesting idea.”

Amid the jeeps, half tracks, personnel carriers, fuel trucks, tank carriers, maintenance vehicles, ammunition trucks, and other assorted means of military transportation that congested the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway that afternoon was the car in which Menachem Begin was traveling. It was crawling along at a snail’s pace. With him were Yechiel Kadishai and a couple of other intimate loyalists who had stood by him unflinchingly throughout the perilous underground days and during the long backwater years of the Opposition. And now, here they were, escorting him to Jerusalem to witness his formal swearing-in as a minister of the cabinet, a Knesset ceremony which, for them
–
indeed for all veteran Irgun comrades-in-arms
–
was a momentous moment of vindication. For here, at last, was a signal, albeit a slight one, that after almost two decades of virtual ostracism by the Labor-dominated establishment, the tectonic plates of Israeli politics were finally beginning to shift.

Begin’s volunteer driver was so fed up with the congested highway that he threw caution to the wind and stepped on the gas, spurting along the road’s narrow shoulder, overtaking a tank transporter groaning under a Centurion tank, and an open ammunition truck loaded with shells, avoiding collision by a hair’s breadth.

“
Meshugenner!
” scolded Kadishai, with a wince. “Are you crazy? Get off the road at the next junction and take the roundabout route. At least there’s a chance we’ll get to Jerusalem in one piece!”

Yechiel Kadishai was a gregarious, quick-witted, irreverent, and self-assured man, in his mid-forties. He had just been released from the army, where he had spent the last few days and nights as a lackluster auxiliary guardsman, in order to attend upon the new ministerial needs of his boss, Begin. The side road, a rather dubious one in parts, led them along valley edges and through terraced hills, climbing and snaking along contours which steadily rose toward Jerusalem.

“Stop!” commanded Begin as they turned a hairpin bend. “We’ve just overtaken Golda. I must speak to her.”

Yechiel Kadishai jumped out, with Begin hard on his heels, and flagged down Golda Meir’s car.

“What’s going on? What’s so urgent?” she asked, head out of the window, a cigarette stuck on one side of her mouth, its smoke drifting across her face.

“Wonderful news! Wonderful news!” called Begin, his lips and eyes all smiles and his excitement inflated with the novelty of being a cabinet insider about to impart extraordinary information to a cabinet outsider. Breathlessly, he told her of the destruction of the enemy air forces. For the briefest moment Golda Meir hid her face in her hands, then glanced upward at the cloudless sky and gasped, “I don’t believe it! After all these weeks of the terrible fear of air raids
–
thank God that threat is over.”

Cars slowed at the sight of these two old political foes leaning toward each other through the open window, exchanging smiles and handshakes, wondering, no doubt, what it was they had to smile and congratulate each other about. For the nation had not yet been told of this remarkable early triumph.

Entering Jerusalem, Begin and his party sped through streets which had been emptied by almost nine hours of shelling. The thud of cannon could still be heard, and most of the city’s residents were battened down in shelters. After a brief ceremonial visit to the graveside of their mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky they drove to the Knesset, a flat-topped colonnaded parliament building of a style much favored by modern legislative assemblies. It was presently jammed with journalists anxious for news of the war, and some tried to waylay Begin, but he waved them off, and made his way to the second floor to shmooze – and no doubt to gloat – with David Ben-Gurion.

Volleys of cannon fire were still clearly audible and at one point everybody was shepherded into the basement shelter. Down there people applauded at the sight of Begin and Ben-Gurion elbowing their way to each other through the crush, like old friends. And there all sat on benches
–
ministers, Knesset members, officials, clerks, cleaning workers, religious, secular, left, right
–
all engaged in convivial conversation, and some gustily chorusing a robust sing-a-long. Never had Israel known such a sense of unity and common purpose as at that hour.

At one point a shell flew overhead and then whoo
–
oo
–
ooo
–
oooOOO
–
boom
–
bang, crashed into the nearby Israel Museum. When the shelling tapered off, Begin went back upstairs to the Knesset restaurant. The thought of capturing the Old City would not leave him. It appeared to be an ever more tantalizing prospect with each passing hour, so he instructed Kadishai to wait at the Knesset’s driveway for the arrival of the prime minister from Tel Aviv.

“When you see him coming, let me know. I must talk to him,” he said. “I’m going to ask him to convene an emergency session of the cabinet, even before the Knesset swearing-in ceremony. I’m going to try to persuade him to make a decision here and now about Jerusalem.”

An hour later
–
it was 7:30 in the evening
–
Yechiel Kadishai came rushing back into the restaurant. “He’s coming,” he cried. “His car is drawing up.”

Begin hastily made his way to the entrance where he accosted Eshkol as he was about to walk in. No man in Israel was better primed to perform the task in hand than was Menachem Begin at that moment. His ardor, his candor, his logic, all were brought to bear in convincing the prime minister to summon his ministers forthwith to the Knesset Cabinet Room.

The Knesset Cabinet Room is an elegant, wood-paneled and spherical chamber, with a ring-shaped mahogany conference table so large it takes up virtually the entire wall-to-wall red carpet. A floodlit floor-to-ceiling painting of a Galilean landscape, the work of a favored Israeli artist, Reuven Rubin, dominates the room and, with this as his backdrop, Prime Minister Eshkol banged his gavel and gave Menachem Begin the floor.

“Mr. Prime Minister,” he solemnly began, “The question before us is of unprecedented historic consequence
–
”

“Out, out. Shells are falling again. Out, out,” cried the sergeant-at arms with terrible suddenness as he flung open the door. To the sound of a mortar bomb falling on the Knesset lawn and shattering the restaurant windows, two ushers pushed the ministers down to a lower level floor where the only private shelter space available was a long, narrow storeroom cluttered with brooms, buckets and mops, and stacked with old furniture, including about a dozen dusty chairs on which the prime minister and his colleagues planted themselves.

The sounds of the bombardment were filling this makeshift cabinet room as Prime Minister Eshkol again gave Begin the floor. Stuffy and tense though the room was, Eshkol showed no sign of stress. He was clearly in command. One could see it in his calm bulk, and in his candid, tranquil gaze as, cupping an ear, he listened to Begin solemnly saying, “Mr. Prime Minister, the question before us is of unprecedented historic consequence. This is the hour of our political test. We must occupy the Old City, in response both to the unheeded warnings we sent to King Hussein, and to the persistent Jordanian shelling since. The United Nations Security Council is currently in session debating a ceasefire. If we do not act promptly we are liable to again find ourselves outside the walls of Jerusalem, exactly as happened in nineteen forty-eight when we lost the Jewish Quarter and all our holy sites, and the city was left divided
–
all because of a
UN
ceasefire. I therefore propose we take immediate military action to liberate the Old City.”

In an almost phlegmatic tone Eshkol explained that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who was not present at the meeting, had serious reservations. “His view,” he said, “is that entering into the Old City will entail house-to-house fighting, and that will be costly. Moreover, there is a chance it will cause damage to the holy places of the other faiths, and that will bring the whole world crashing down on our heads. Presently, we still command a great deal of worldwide sympathy.”

“There is much sense in that,” said one of the ministers present.

“Moreover,” continued Eshkol, “Dayan is of the view that it would be sufficient simply to surround the Old City. It would then fall to us like a ripe fruit.”

Yigal Allon sharply disagreed. He insisted with martial authority that the Jordanian lines were fast crumbling and that given the order, the
idf
could quickly surround the Old City in a pincer movement. “However,” he went on, “unless and until Jewish feet are deep inside the Old City and on the Temple Mount, Jerusalem will remain forever divided. We have to occupy it physically.”

Another minister mused that the Vatican would never countenance Jewish sovereignty over the Christian holy places, whereupon Eshkol revealed that the Vatican had already proposed declaring Jerusalem an open city, meaning it should be immune from attack by all sides. Washington was sympathetic to the idea, he said.

“Gentlemen,” Begin said vehemently, “the Jordanian army is all but smashed, and our own army is at the city’s gates. Our soldiers are almost in sight of the Western Wall. How can we tell them not to reach it? We have in our hands a gift of history. Future generations will never forgive us if we do not seize it.”

Even as these emotions flared, the enemy’s heavy guns opened up with renewed ferocity from the direction of the Old City, the thuds clearly heard by everyone in that cluttered, narrow shelter. Eshkol would not be distracted, however. Prudently, he continued to listen to the fiery debate, hearkening with sympathy to the pleas of Begin and Allon that it was now or never, and then pondering again the military and diplomatic merits of the Dayan argument, that a frontal attack was unnecessary. Those of this view exchanged pessimistic predictions, reinforcing each others’ belief that the Christian and Muslim worlds would not tolerate damage to, let alone occupation of, their holy places, and that if it did occupy the Old City, Israel would surely be forced to withdraw. Behind all that, there was always the looming threat of Soviet intervention to think about.

In the end the prime minister called for order and proposed that in view of the situation created in Jerusalem by the Jordanian bombardment, and after the Israeli warnings to King Hussein had gone unheeded, “an opportunity has perhaps been created to capture the Old City.”

“If it comes to it, I’ll overrule Dayan,” mumbled Eshkol to Begin as the meeting broke up.

That night, the Speaker of the Knesset banged his gavel, and the newly appointed ministers of the national unity government formally took their oaths of office. Also that night, as the Israel Defense Forces were smashing the Egyptians in Sinai, routing the Jordanians on the West Bank, and occupying the key strategic positions surrounding the Old City, Menachem Begin’s brain was so crammed with thoughts that he could not sleep. Tossing and turning, he was gripped by Jewish memories as old as time. His all-encompassing grasp of Jewish history stirred his deepest convictions, causing him to ponder how much longer Israel could wait before restoring to the bosom of its people Jewry’s most sanctified treasures locked behind the Old City’s walls. Who among his cabinet colleagues, besides Allon, would be brave enough to fight for a motion calling for the immediate storming of the Old City’s walls?