The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (2 page)

Anyone who is interested in the first fifty years of the history of the State of Israel will be both enlightened and entranced by this book. From the moment that Yehuda Avner made his way from Manchester to Mandatory Palestine in 1947, to his years as Israel’s Ambassador to Britain in the 1980s, he was a witness to, and increasingly a participant in, the events that shaped and molded the Jewish State.

Yehuda Avner’s Zionism was born in Manchester, the British city where Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, had begun his extraordinary efforts to convince the British Government that a Jewish National Home in Palestine was in the British interest. Avner reached Palestine when the British commitment
–
given with such enthusiasm in the Balfour Declaration in 1917
–
had waned and withered; when the bitterness between the British soldiers and officials in Palestine and the Jewish fighters for independence had reached a fever pitch of misunderstanding, recrimination, and violence.

The young Yehuda’s diary, a precious contemporary document, sets out the strife and fears of the year before statehood was achieved, and the euphoria following that day in November 1947 when the United Nations voted for the establishment of both a Jewish and an Arab State in a partitioned Palestine. The Jews grasped the opportunity. The Arabs rejected it, and in May 1948 turned five armies in fury against the newly proclaimed Israel.

Throughout the formative years of the fledgling nation, Yehuda Avner was there. His diary, his memory, and his many notes made at the time, take us on a remarkable journey, full of insight, drama and humor, as he served four successive Israeli prime ministers, the giants of their day: Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin. It was Begin who, from the outset, most attracted the young Yehuda, and who grew in stature in his mind as the two men worked increasingly closely together. Yet the others three leaders are not diminished in any way by Avner’s preference; indeed, Levi Eshkol grows strongly in stature in these pages as he grasps the awful nettle of Israel’s isolation and danger in 1967. Golda Meir emerges as a human being whose weaknesses were many and whose strength was formidable, and Yitzhak Rabin as a patriot who struggled with his inner demons as Israel began the long, hard, still uncompleted path toward Palestinian-Arab reconciliation.

Yehuda Avner draws the portraits of these four leaders with affection, yet he is never starry eyed. A wealth of sharply noted detail and contemporary documentation given from the standpoint of an independent-minded civil servant and diplomat
–
some of it never before seen in print
–
gives this book its theme, its charm and its importance. The book is, however, much more than a collection of individual portraits, vivid though these are. It is also the story of the life struggle of a new nation, small in territory, poor in natural resources, surrounded by enemies, absorbing vast numbers of immigrants from the Holocaust in Europe and from Arab and Muslim lands, forced to devote enormous resources to the usually penniless newcomers, and at the same time to sustain an army capable of defending
–
in war after war
–
its vulnerable citizens.

Israel’s struggles, challenges and achievements are described in this book with all the enthusiasm of a lifelong Zionist for whom Zionism is not a rigid ideology or a clever theory, but a living expression of Jewish national aspirations, determination, culture, and a worldview that Jewish genius, Jewish hard work and Jewish idealism need a country of their own. As Winston Churchill told a delegation of Palestinian Arab leaders in 1921, when they urged him
–
even then
–
to halt Jewish immigration: “It is manifestly right that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a national center and a National Home, where some of them may be reunited. And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than three thousand years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?”

Yehuda Avner’s book, with its cast of fascinating characters, its insights, its vigor, and its zeal, show how right Churchill was. A State was formed, whose leaders guarded it and moved it forward. Their most recent chronicler, himself so often at the center of the events he describes, has done them proud.

Martin Gilbert

26 May 2009

1943
–
Menachem Begin assumes command of the Irgun.

1944
–
The ‘Hunting Season’: Irgun fighters are handed over by Hagana fighters to the British.

1945
–
End of World War
ii
.

1946
–
The King David Hotel, Jerusalem, is blown up by the Irgun, in collaboration with the United Resistance Command.

1947
–
Begin orders reprisals against British, measure for measure, hanging for hanging. U.N. Resolution on 29
th
November approved Partition Plan.

1948
–
Jerusalem besieged; Israel declares independence; with the arrival of the Irgun arms ship, the
Altalena
, Israel finds itself on the brink of civil war.

The first time the name Begin struck a massively resounding chord in my mind was on a sultry August afternoon in 1947, while walking down a street in the heart of Jewish Manchester. There, daubed in blood-red paint on a synagogue wall, was a splash of raw and angry graffiti: “HANG THE JEW TERRORIST BEGIN.”

Though a mere school lad at the time, albeit close to graduation, I knew enough to know that Menachem Begin was the arch fiend of the British in Palestine. There was a price on his head, and they wanted him, dead or alive. For almost three years he had pitted his ragtag secret army
–
the
Irgun Zvai Leumi
–
the National Army Organization, commonly called the Etzel or the Irgun
–
against British might, in a ferocious rebellion the aim of which was to drive them out of the country. It was a deadly underground combat which Begin called a fight for freedom and which the British called terrorism.

Ever since the early 1920s, Britain had held a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine, with the aim of initiating a Jewish National Home there, as promised in the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917. But to all intents and purposes Palestine had been turned into a possession of the British Empire, and almost from the start, Arab enmity had swelled and grown in proportion to the influx of Jewish immigrants. As the seeds of strife became ever more bitter, London engaged in ever more convoluted exercises to appease the conflicting parties and interests.

It was in a neighborhood called Strangeways
–
the place into which I was born
–
that I came face to face with that alarming anti-Begin graffiti on the synagogue wall. Strangeways at that time was a seemingly irredeemable squalid slum, where for much of the year the air was so thick with smog that even the weeds wilted with grime. Chimneys of every sort billowed geysers of soot-saturated smoke from the textile mills, factories and foundries whose furnaces were fed by the coal pits of Lancashire. In the drab, rain-splashed, cobbled streets where the dwellings stood cheek-by-jowl – row upon Victorian row of bedroom to bedroom, kitchen to kitchen, outside lavatory to outside lavatory – the masonry was eternally black. When I joined the family in 1928, as the youngest of seven, my mother and father – she from Romania, he from Galicia – were eking out a living from behind a counter in a little drapery store whose kitchen in the rear and whose poky rooms upstairs housed us all.

My first childhood memories are of Friday nights. They were magical. When our mother covered her head with a silken white shawl, lit the Sabbath candles, and placed her fingers over her eyes in an attitude of hushed prayer, our humble kitchen was miraculously transformed. Gone were the shabby furnishings, with their suggestions of decay. Instead, in the glow of the candles everything looked palatial. The room was filled with hallowed aromas. And when we came home from shul and our father recited Kiddush standing at the head of the table in his Sabbath best, he looked grand. I sensed bliss on those Friday nights when our family cuddled up into a Shabbat peace that surpassed my comprehension.

Our Strangeways days came to a longed-for end in 1939, when my parents procured a small factory in which they manufactured pinafores and nightwear, enabling us to move into a leafier neighborhood and a finer house, with a garden. Soon thereafter humanity went into the sudden shock of World War
ii
, but as a lad of eleven the war inflicted no particular trauma on me initially. Under barrage balloons as big as galleons that hung high in the sky I went out on shrapnel hunts, played around in bomb shelters, and engaged in all sorts of gas mask pranks. And at night, after the sirens sounded, I and my two brothers, Yitzhak and Moshe, would often sneak out of the cellar which our dad had reinforced as a shelter to watch the searchlight beams bouncing about the clouds trying to pick out enemy aircraft, until the shooting and the bombing began in earnest and we would be hauled back inside, with a smack on the behind or a pull of the ear.

But then the war intensified, and the boy became a teenager and the teenager a young man. The scenes of the heaps of Jewish corpses and the piles of bones of the cremated, and the dead-eyed death camp survivors too frail to survive, inflicted my soul with a piercing sense of helplessness. The horror, the frustration, and the bewilderment of the Holocaust clawed at my innards, and hardly had the flames of the crematoria of Hitler’s “Final Solution” been doused before newsreels were showing the British Navy intercepting leaking boats of Jewish survivors off the shores of Palestine, and turning them back or interning them. Some of the pitiful vessels, searching in vain for a safe harbor, went down with their wretched cargo.

Was it any wonder, then, that a deep-buried fury burned within the Zionist circles of Manchester? And was it any wonder that a man of the stuff of Menachem Begin, driven by an inexpressible anguish, burst forth, and with more audacity than armory, led his small but well-entrenched Irgun underground army in a perilous revolt against the British in Palestine?

The first I learned of the Begin ideology was when I escorted my mother, who was a serious sympathizer, to a meeting of his supporters. World War
ii
had just ended and many in the jam-packed hall were Holocaust survivors. The speaker was a man called Ivan Greenberg, longtime editor of Anglo-Jewry’s most influential weekly, the
Jewish Chronicle
. Under his editorship the
Jewish
Chronicle
had become so provocatively critical of British policy and so increasingly sympathetic toward Begin and his Irgun that some parliamentarians demanded the paper be prosecuted for seditious libel; eventually the
Jewish Chronicle
’s directors asked Greenberg to leave.

The recollection I have of him is that of a middle-sized, brisk intellectual with a mesmerizing command of florid Victorian English which he intoned in a manner that would put no actor to shame. This is what a now faded pro-Begin stenciled propaganda sheet quoted him as saying that evening:

Freedom does not descend like manna from Heaven. It has to be won by trampling enemies, and advancing through the wilderness of past bondage into the blessings of future liberty. Menachem Begin is leading his people on that arduous and treacherous trek, away from the wastelands of exile. He is guiding the nation through the tempests of time. Stern and threatening though the storm clouds might be, by dint of infinite resolve, steel courage and boundless sacrifice he is ascending to the sunlit highlands of Jewish honor, of Jewish freedom, and of Jewish justice, in the land where Jewish history began.

This oratory evoked thunderous applause even from those who, like me, barely understood a word of it. And, as reported, Greenberg then went on to talk about the man whom Begin would forever describe as his “master and teacher”
–
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the brilliant linguist, author, essayist, poet and philosopher who had established his own independent movement of Revisionist Zionism.

“Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism,” said Greenberg, “is simple, direct, and candid, yet sophisticated in practice. It calls for the immediate establishment of a Jewish State. Its ideology emerges out of exasperation and disillusionment with the established Socialist-dominated Zionist leadership’s fainthearted policies of abandonment, compromise, and indecisiveness, not to speak of excessive reliance on the British. Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Mr. David Ben-Gurion practiced this in the 1920s and 1930s, and they practice it now in the 1940s.”
1

Here, I understood, as I learned more, and grew more involved in following the struggle in Palestine, lay the key to Menachem Begin’s unreserved defiance of David Ben-Gurion, titular head of the Jewish government-in-waiting in Palestine, and chief strategist of its mainstream underground fighting force, the Hagana. And while in the turbulent landscape of Palestinian Jewish politics Begin and Ben-Gurion
–
two breathtakingly courageous leaders
–
were intense ideological rivals, one left wing, the other right, at this juncture in time there was a lot more dividing them than dueling political philosophies. They wrangled bitterly over the contentious issue of when best to launch the final showdown against the British to drive them out of the country and declare Jewish independence.

Ben-Gurion was intensely pragmatic. He did not waste his energies on what he deemed to be quixotic crusades. As long as the Second World War lasted he clung to the belief that long-term Zionist interest necessitated a full and final Allied victory over the Nazis before battle could be joined with the British. This policy of self-restraint was, to Begin, fatally flawed. In his view, by 1944 the tide of war had irreversibly turned against Germany. Allied victory was in sight, and the closer it came into view the more European Jews in their hundreds of thousands were being driven, cattle-like, into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. So, in brazen opposition to Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin proclaimed his manifesto of revolt, which read:

We are at the last stage of the war. We stand before a historical decision and the fate of generations…There is no longer any armistice between the Jewish people and the British administration in Eretz Yisrael, which hands our brothers over to Hitler. Our people are at war with this [British] regime
–
war to the end…Our fighting youth will not be deterred by sacrifice, torment, blood, and suffering. They will never surrender, nor shall they rest until our days of old are restored, and until our homeland, freedom, sustenance, and justice have been secured…This then is our demand: immediate transfer of power to a provisional Jewish government. We shall fight; every Jew in the homeland shall fight. The God of Israel, the Lord of Hosts, is with us. There shall be no retreat. FREEDOM OR DEATH!2

Decades later I would look at Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, searching for a likeness to the fugitive with a price on his head, but could find none. Nor could I discern any similarity between the hardened and unyielding Irgun underground commander and the statesman I would come to know. And as for his old Irgun comrades-in-arms, I quickly discovered that they were, by and large, an amiable lot, full of good cheer and public spirit, nothing like the terrorist gang their antagonists had portrayed them to be. Always a grand raconteur, in later years I heard Menachem Begin relate to his veterans how much time he spent conjuring up ways to outwit the British. As an example he reminded them of how Irgun youngsters had defied the British ban against blowing the shofar at the Western Wall on Yom Kippur.

The story really began on the Yom Kippur of 1928, when a
mechitza
, an improvised, collapsible screen to separate male and female worshippers, was set up in front of the Western Wall for prayers. This, to the Arabs, was an act of provocation, and they went wild.

“Jihad! Jihad!” flashed through the bazaars. “The Jews are trying to rebuild their Temple and destroy our al-Aksa Mosque.”

Eyewitness accounts told of a white-bearded Chasid in a black caftan running for his life, chased by a mob through an alleyway leading to the Western Wall. The pursuers brandished clubs, sabers, and daggers, and howled: “Save our holy places from the Jews!” and, “Death to the Jewish dogs!” and,
“
Allahu Akhbar!
God is great!” The fleeing Chasid, his bony face chalk white, stumbling through the narrow tunnel passages, was losing ground. He fell, sprang up again, and then inexplicably turned and, head-first, drove straight into the phalanx of the chasing mob, hollering hysterically,
“
Shema Yisrael
,” as they cut him down.

Hundreds more were killed in the months that followed, culminating in the 1929 pogrom in Hebron, which snuffed out an entire ancient Jewish community
–
and all because of that flimsy screen at the Wall.

As the riots escalated the British set up an inquiry commission and, stirred by Muslim sensitivities, decreed that the Arabs were the sole owners of the Western Wall and that, henceforth, Jews would be forbidden to even blow the shofar in its precinct. Members of the Jewish community sat up and gasped. What are we, a myth? Do you claim that there never was a holy Temple on the Temple Mount? Our sacred texts are legends? Is it all a fairytale?

Some bravehearts defied the ban. Each year, as Yom Kippur approached its climax with the
Ne’ilah
service, a member of Betar, the youth movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, would surreptitiously sound the shofar; whereupon the British police would move in and hit out in all directions.

Menachem Begin was witness to one such
Ne’ilah
service, on the Yom Kippur of 1943. What he saw was a battalion of British policemen, armed with rifles and batons, trying to pick out who might turn out to be the shofar blower. And when the sun went down and the shadows lengthened, they squeezed in among the pious, elbowing their way towards the Wall, weapons angled and primed.

And then they heard it, and it drove them into a frenzy.

A ruddy-faced sergeant, livid at the insolence, dashed toward a short figure clutching a shofar to his lips and, slapping the lad hard across the face, bellowed, “Stop blowing that thing.” Other policemen set upon worshippers trying to defend him, clobbering them with their batons. The young blower kicked the sergeant away and burrowed through the crush, spurting his way up the stairs, trying to reach the murky warrens adjacent to the Wall.

“Kill him, Stop him! Kill him! Stop him,” cried the Arabs.

“Keep going! Run! Run! Run!” cried the Jews.

The boy dodged and leaped through the alleyways, until an officer felled him and pinned him to the ground.

Seeing the outrage for himself, Menachem Begin decided that the Irgun had to respond, to confound the low tricks of his people’s enemies, who defiled this most sacred of sites. Thus it was that on the following Rosh Hashanah, in 1944
–
ten days before Yom Kippur
–
he instructed his Irgun pamphleteers and poster-stickers to let it be known that any British policeman disturbing the service at the Western Wall “will be regarded as a criminal and be punished accordingly.”

As the Day of Atonement drew nearer his warnings grew increasingly more strident, generating ever more grisly rumors as to what punishment Begin’s Irgun men would mete out to the British policemen.

“Criminal lunacy!” cried the left-wing Hebrew press, fearful of innocent casualties at the Wall. “The blowing of the ram’s horn at the close of the fast is a mere custom, not an obligatory act,” declared a tremulous rabbinate. And British Intelligence speculated as to what casualties their police at the Wall might sustain if fired upon from unseen directions.