The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (12 page)

He took a breather, had a sip of water, and, eyes still watery, began to speak of the arms ship, the
Altalena
.

“History teaches us,” he intoned, “that on the heels of most wars of liberation, bloody civil strife almost inevitably breaks out. The fall of a regime resembles an earthquake, and an earthquake, even after it has spent itself, is often succeeded by a chain of subterranean aftershocks.

“Our Irgun revolt did, indeed, create aftershocks, at least in the minds of our detractors. So much so the British predicted that on their departure there would, indeed, be a Jewish civil war. It did not happen for the reasons I have already given. And because of those reasons we never indoctrinated our Irgun fighters to hate our political opponents. On the contrary, we impressed upon them that a day would come when they would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle for the Jewish State’s defense, soldiers of a single Jewish army.”

Again he paused, patted his forehead with a handkerchief, drank, and went on: “Remember, the singular goal of the Irgun was to achieve Jewish statehood, not political power. We broke away from the Hagana to revolt against the British because our national subjugation left us no alternative. We dissented in order to fight for our people, not to rule them. But Ben-Gurion never believed us. For years he and his colleagues maligned us. He and his colleagues insisted our struggle was nothing but a struggle for power. He spread libel throughout the Jewish world when he stated that we were planning a putsch. That’s why he ordered the shelling of the
Altalena
. He spread the word I was launching a coup when, in fact, we were bringing in desperately needed arms and volunteers to assist in the general war effort.”

He illustrated this by enumerating the particulars of the
Altalena
’s cargo: 5,500 rifles, 300 Bren guns, 50 Spandau machine guns, 4 million bullets, 10,000 aerial bombs, 50 anti-tank guns, 1,004 armored track vehicles, all this in addition to 900 volunteers.

Back and forth he swayed as he rolled off this manifest.

In his speech that night he made no mention of what befell him personally on board the burning
Altalena
. Eyewitnesses told me about that much later on. They told me how a loudspeaker was rigged on the ship to enable Begin to address the many people lining the Tel Aviv beach, some watching the crippled ship, others firing at it.

“People o
f T
el Aviv,” Begin roared, “we of the Irgun have brought you arms to fight the enemy, but the Government is denying them to you.” And then, to the soldiers firing at him from the beach: “For God’s sake, help us unload these arms which are for our common defense. If there are differences among us, let us reason together.”

One of the people who heard him say this was Yitzhak Rabin, then deputy commander of the Palmach
–
the Hagana’s crack striking force. Thanks to the
UN
truce, he had taken a few days leave, and he happened to be at his Tel Aviv headquarters on some minor errand when, suddenly, he found himself in full view of the grounded
Altalena
, wedged on the rocks, helpless and immobile, some seven hundred yards from dry land.

“I honestly believed what Ben-Gurion was saying, that Begin was mounting a coup,” he would tell me years later. “So when ordered to take command of a Palmach unit and open fire, I did. There was a gun battery nearby, a very old cannon, unequipped with sights and with a very slim chance of a direct hit. But clearly, this was no mere shelling to frighten off the people on board; it was meant to strike home. And strike home it did. The gun progressively zoned in on its target and the third shell hit it, setting the ship ablaze. And what a hit that was!”

Eye witnesses described Menachem Begin standing on the burning deck like some figure in a parable, black from the acrid smoke, flinging up his arms and yelling frantically to his men, “Don’t shoot back! Don’t open fire. No civil war!”

Fearful that the munitions packed below would explode in the spreading flames, the white flag was raised and the captain gave orders to flood the holds and abandon ship. Begin insisted on being the last man off, but his colleagues hurled him overboard. He was picked up in the water and carried ashore, a pitiful sight to behold, by all accounts.

That night, eyes dark-circled with anxiety and fatigue, he broadcast over the Irgun’s secret transmitter, and spoke in tears about the
Altalena
, its arms, and its dead. He described the vessel’s destruction as “a crime, an act of folly and of sheer blindness.” He charged that a deliberate attempt had been made to kill him, snipers having aimed directly at him. “But you do not kill an idea by killing one of its loyal adherents,” he cried, and he ended his address with an appeal for ahavat Yisrael – for mutual Jewish love. “Long live the people of Israel,” he declared in a rasping voice. “Long live the Jewish homeland. Long live the soldiers of Israel, the heroes of Israel – for ever and ever.”

Months later, to us, sitting there in the dilapidated Tiberias cinema, he lamented, “We had not yet buried our dead when
Ben-Gurion
claimed that the cannon he had commanded to fire at the
Altalena
was a holy weapon, worthy of a place in our future Temple. Oh, the shame of it! No wonder people of high moral stature and impeccable repute chastised him for mouthing such sacrilege, reminding him that no holy Temple can ever arise so long as there are Jews with the blood of other Jews on their hands.”

And then: “To this day there are enemies who mock me because of the tears I shed in public that night in my radio address. Let them jeer! I feel no shame. There are tears of which no man need be ashamed. On the contrary, there are tears of which a man can be proud. Tears do not come only from the eyes; sometimes they well up, like blood, from the heart.

“Whoever has followed my story knows that fate has not pampered me. From my earliest youth I have known hunger and have been acquainted with sorrow. Death, too, has often brooded over me. But for such things I never ever wept. I did weep that night, however, for the
Altalena
. Why? I wept because there are fateful times when a choice has to be made between blood and tears. During our revolt against the British, blood had to take the place of tears. But at the time of the
Altalena
–
Jew against Jew
–
tears had to take the place of blood. Far better for one Jew to shed tears from his heart than to cause many Jews to weep over graves.”

And then, head high, chest out, pitching toward his finale, he ended:

“I say to you tonight, God forbid that a decision of a democratically elected government of Israel shall ever be defied by force. Whatever our differences, however strongly held are our differing convictions, however raucous the debate
–
these shall be expressed only through the legal avenues of legitimate dissent, as befits our parliamentary democracy. It is thanks to this democracy, set in a sea of despotism, that we shall weather every storm, overcome every hurdle, and withstand every test, as we shall grow, with God’s help, from strength to strength.”

The applause those words evoked went on and on and on.
7

The election of 1949 was to be the first of many that Menachem Begin would lose. David Ben-Gurion demonstratively excluded him from every coalition government he headed, and he headed many. He stuck to the belief that Begin’s party, Herut, and the communist party, Maki, were both a threat to democracy: the first wanting a right-wing, the second a left-wing dictatorship.

“He never understood,” Begin was to say, “that the very essence of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s teachings was the establishment of a liberal parliamentary democracy.”

Only in 1967 did Ben-Gurion’s successor, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, end the boycott, when he invited Menachem Begin to join his national unity government on the eve of the Six-Day War.

But that was sixteen years into the future. In that dismal winter of 1949, we weary pioneers of Kibbutz Lavi continued to endure our rock-clearing amid the piercing winds, the bone-numbing chills, the ubiquitous mud, and the relentless downpours. But finally the spring came, and it was a solace of Nature. The sun warmed the hillsides which were golden-green with pristine grasses, and the valleys, which were carpeted with wildflowers. Clusters of sunflowers bloomed here and there, hanging their heads as if in awe of the new village growing in their midst. The few acres freshly cleared of rocks and stones changed color from gray to green as shoots sprang up. And when the days lengthened, folk strolled around the patches, inspecting the ripening grain in anticipation of the first humble harvest.

One early evening, Wolfe tapped me on the shoulder in the dining hut and suggested we go for a walk, to see how the crop was doing. As it turned out, what he really wanted was a heart-to-heart. He told me that the kibbutz had received a letter from the executive of Bnei Akiva in Britain urging that I return to become the movement’s general secretary. It would be my task to oversee the workings of the youth groups, coordinate educational programs such as summer camps and winter seminars, and edit the organization’s magazine.

Wolfe contended I was morally obliged to take up the role because I had originally arrived in Israel on a Bnei Akiva scholarship to study at the
Machon
youth leadership training program, and was thus committed to three or four years service to the movement. Besides, he said, Lavi needed fresh recruits and it would be my job to help enlist them.

I gave Wolfe a shrug of submission, and said I would do whatever the kibbutz thought best. In truth, I was seized with a mixture of huge regret and tremendous relief
–
regret because I was under the powerful lure of Lavi, and relief because I was silently falling apart under the strain of the grueling rock clearing. So it was with mixed feelings that I bid farewell to Lavi in the summer of 1949 and plunged into the affairs of Bnei Akiva in Britain.

Returning to England, I was not the same person who had left. I felt like I had a new identity
–
a full-bodied Israeli identity. I continued to live the fantasy of Lavi by joining a small Bnei Akiva commune in a north London suburb, wore Kibbutz Lavi clothes
–
open-neck shirt, khaki cotton pants, windbreaker
–
wherever I went, spoke a stumbling Hebrew to whoever would listen, and reunited once more with my adoring family, made plain my intent to return to Lavi after a few years’ work for Bnei Akiva.

I enjoyed arranging the educational programs most of all, and one afternoon in October 1952, I found myself in Oxford checking out premises for a Bnei Akiva winter seminar. With time to kill, I sauntered into one of Oxford’s celebrated, well-stocked secondhand bookshops to browse around, and while inhaling the musty air I caught sight of a handbill announcing a debate that was to take place that evening at the Oxford Union. The announcement read:

MOTION
: This House Condemns Zionism as Imperialism.

FOR
THE MOTION
: Dr. Ali el-Husseini, adviser to the secretary general of the Arab League, Abdul-Khalek Hassouna.

AGAINST THE MOTION
: Dr. Gershon Levy, adviser to Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion.

Gershon Levy I knew. He had lectured at the
Machon
. So it was with high anticipation that I went to hear the debate.

The Oxford Union is celebrated as being the most prestigious debating society in the world, with a reputation for airing the most controversial issues. It is the battleground of British crossfire. One of its most outrageous motions was famously debated in 1933, just as Hitler rose to power. It read, This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country. The motion was passed by a large majority, sparking off a national outcry. Winston Churchill denounced it as “this ever shameless motion,” and editorialists suggested it contributed to Hitler’s delusion that Britain would not fight, thus encouraging him to invade Poland without fear of a British declaration of war, which followed, in fact, six years later, igniting World War II.

Arriving well in time for the main debate, I sat crammed into the spectator’s gallery, looking down on a chamber packed with students many of whom were attired in a dress code peculiar to the Oxford Union
–
eccentric hats, fancy waistcoats, brilliant neckties, and every kind of mustache.

A sanctuary for future statesmen, the Oxford Union had the appearance more of a cathedral than a students’ debating society. Its oak benches were old and heavily pew-like, and its Tudor-style windows reached up to an oak-carved, arcaded ceiling from which hung wrought-iron chandeliers. Portraits of illustrious ex-Union presidents hung around the walls, interspersed with marble busts of former prime ministers who had once held Union office.

When I took my seat a satiric debate was in progress, a warm-up to the main contest. The motion was:
This House Considers
Non-Perforated
Postage Stamps a Menace to Societ
y
. It was a scintillating exhibition of brilliant wit, clever quip, cutting irony, and hilarious anecdotes that reached an uproarious finale when the last speaker perorated: “And so, my Right Honorable Friends, after the Great War of 1914–18
–
the war to end all wars
–
the victors carved up Europe into small pieces and called that making the world safe for democracy. All it really did was to create a glut of new, worthless, non-perforated postage stamps that made life damned complicated for collectors like me.”

This set off a shower of guffaws. And when the union president on his mounted throne, dressed in traditional white tie and tails, called on the tellers to count the show of hands, he was greeted with lighthearted cheers. As the cheers died down, Gershon Levy and Ali el-Husseini took their places adjacent to the Dispatch Box from which they were to make their addresses, reminiscent of the House of Commons.

The el-Husseini name was well known to anybody who had lived in Palestine before 1948. They were one of the richest and most powerful of all the rival clans in the country. The most famous
–
or infamous
–
of them was Haj Amin el-Husseini, who had been the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Palestinian national movement, a perpetrator of early terrorism, and a collaborator of Hitler.

His younger kinsman, Ali, had a resonant voice, an appealing appearance, and the confident eloquence of one raised in a household whose daily fare was the politics of Palestine. Galvanizing his audience with grandiloquent verbal thrusts which he punctuated with disarming digressions, he triggered loud applause at the end of his presentation.

Next it was Gershon Levy’s turn. He spoke as he looked: reserved, pensive, erudite, and thought-provoking. He spoke with an intellectual power that was without guile, laying out his facts with precision. And when he laced these with satiric irony, they cut like a scalpel, so that when he sat down people clapped hard for him too.

A short floor debate followed, students making brief points for and against, after which the two adversaries were invited to wind up their respective cases. Tempers were higher now, reaching a crescendo of an all-out war of words as both sought to clinch their arguments with every verbal trick they could muster in an effort to vanquish the other. The final cataclysmic salvo concerned a place called Deir Yassin.

Deir Yassin
–
now Har Nof
–
was a small Arab village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, located across the valley from the suburb of Beit Hakerem, where I had lodged during the 1948 seige of Jerusalem. In the early spring of that year, Deir Yassin gunmen began taking pot shots at Beit Hakerem. Then, on 9 April, at five in the morning, an explosion from the direction of Deir Yassin roared across the valley with such force it practically knocked me out of bed. Two hours later another blast shook the building. I was told that Irgun fighters, with members of Lechi
–
the much smaller, radical breakaway underground group
–
were attacking the village.

“What happened at Deir Yassin,” whipped Ali el-Husseini at the Oxford Union, in a voice that lashed like steel, “was emblematic of the notorious and horrific totality of Zionist massacres and imperialist crimes committed against my people. Menachem Begin stands indicted for the deliberate brutal massacre of two hundred and fifty-four
innocent
men, women and children at Deir Yassin. He ordered his thugs to descend upon this quiet village, savage its women, throw scores of mutilated bodies down the village wells, and burn the rest. Those who survived the massacre were, at Begin’s command, loaded onto trucks and paraded throughout Jewish Jerusalem, to be stoned and spat upon, before being taken to a nearby quarry to be shot.”

Then, climactically, bitterly, in a tear-smothered voice: “The Deir Yassin massacre and the resultant terror that seized the Palestinian people in its wake marked the beginning of the depopulation of Arab Palestine. For millions upon millions of Arabs this tiny village has become a symbol of Zionist imperialistic perfidy, brutality, aggression, and expansionism.”

With that, he sat down and Gershon Levy jumped up. In an incensed voice that lifted to a shout, stopping all applause dead, he fumed, “What this House has just heard is an elaborate exercise in Arab myth-making and propaganda. On trial here is not what happened at Deir Yassin but what has been invented
about
Deir Yassin.”

Then, tersely, vigorously, powerfully, as an attorney might address a jury, he made his points
–
that Deir Yassin, high on a ridge, was a village of strategic importance; that its inhabitants had been forewarned of the impending assault and given the opportunity to flee, thereby surrendering the element of surprise; that there was no deliberate massacre; that the fighting was house-to-house and, therefore, murderous, causing heavy civilian casualties; and that the number of dead was less than half of what Arab propaganda portrayed.

Turning to face Ali el-Husseini he said in a voice as cold as his eyes:

“I would advise you, sir, not to don the cloak of hypocrisy here, before an audience as perceptive as this Oxford Union. You cannot pull wool over their eyes. For they know it to be true that we Jews, unlike you Arabs, are not a martial people. And unlike the Arab nation”
–
he was talking to the pews again
–
“the legendary heroes of the Jewish nation were never warriors and conquerors but prophets and scribes. Warfare is not a part of our culture. It is not in our blood. There never was, never could be, a Begin policy of deliberately attacking civilians, as there has been a consistent Arab policy of doing just that. I speak of the policy of massacre and mutilation of Jews in the riots of nineteen twenty, in the riots of nineteen twenty-one, in the riots of nineteen twenty-nine, in the riots of nineteen thirty-six to nineteen thirty-nine, and in the recent war in which the Arabs set out to massacre and mutilate the Jewish State at birth; a war, during the course of which
–
to mention but a few instances
–
a convoy of seventy-seven doctors and nurses, in clearly marked ambulances en route to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem met with massacre and mutilation, when all thirty-five members of a convoy en route to the Etzion Bloc met with ambush, massacre and mutilation, when all but four survivors of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion met with massacre and mutilation, or when
–
”

Cries of revulsion and nausea suddenly cut him short as a foul stench pervaded the hall. Outrageously, an unseen blackguard had hurled a handfull of stink bombs in the direction of the president’s chair. They fell at his feet, and the reek was so pungent it reached up to the spectator’s gallery. We all held our noses, our faces screwed up. People flailed their arms in an effort to waft the stink away. The president, handkerchief over his nose, began yelling, “Order! Order!” but his audience was fleeing in such droves he declared the debate null and void.

In the entrance hallway a dozen furious students were bawling epithets at each other, and thrusting fists into each others faces. There I caught sight of Gershon Levy in the company of a union officer, and he insisted I join him at the post-debate reception.

The reception was in an adjacent room, where some thirty-odd people stood about in high moods, drinking and laughing, and referring to the most famous Englishmen by their first names. The union president, glass in hand, called out that he would like to propose a toast.

“A toast, not a speech,” teased a tower of a man with the posture of a Grenadier Guard and a Kaiser-style mustache, causing people to chuckle. He sounded tipsy.

The president responded with a polite smile, and said, “First, I’m sure everybody will agree that both our debaters tonight presented their cases and causes admirably.”

“Hear hear,” people grunted approvingly.

“Second, I wish to extend my deepest apologies for the inexcusable and insufferable incident that brought the debate to an abrupt close. It is my resolve to uncover the perpetrator, be it a prankster or a troublemaker. It seems this sort of behavior reflects the spirit of the times we live in.”

Somebody piped up, “Was it not Goethe who said that what people call the spirit of the times is mostly their own spirit, in which the times mirror themselves? Ha, ha!”

The witty man looked hardly more than forty, yet he had a pronounced scholarly stoop and a prematurely balding scalp. He was, I learned, Isaiah Berlin, a brilliant philosopher and an ardent Zionist who, in later life, would be revered as Britain’s most celebrated intellectual, philosopher, historian of ideas, and recipient of the highest award a British monarch can bestow
–
the Order of Merit.

Across the room someone began playing a popular chorus on a grand piano and people gathered round to sing. Berlin sauntered over to congratulate Gershon Levy on his presentation, and surmised that the stink bomber was a student up to mischief, not politics.

Introduced to the philosopher, he asked me about my pedigree, and in an extraordinarily rapid manner of speech, proceeded to volunteer his own. He told me he was an agnostic Jew born in Riga to a devout family. His maternal grandfather had been a Chasidic rabbi of the Lubavitch tradition, and a direct descendant of the renowned eighteenth-century Lubavitch luminary, the Tzemach Tzedek, who had been himself, the grandson of the first Lubavitcher Rebbe. And in those circles there could be no higher pedigree than that.

“I say, old chaps, mind if we butt in?”

It was the Grenadier Guard type with the Kaiser mustache, accompanied by a skinny, long-necked lady with cobweb-like hair.

“Please do,” said Gershon Levy.

“Well the thing is this
–
nothing personal, you understand, I mean to say, well…” His voice was warped with whisky, and he dropped it to a conspiratorial whisper when he continued, “My wife and I were just talking: what we’d like to know is…well, you in the debate were talking about Israel being a Jewish State. What we’d like to know is, what exactly is a Jew? I mean, are you a religion, or a nation, or what? I mean to say, you seem to be so many things all at once, if you know what I mean.”

“Both,” answered Levy, amusement lurking in his eyes. “We are both a religion and a people
–
a nation-faith, so to speak.”

To this, Berlin added enigmatically, “Remember memory! Don’t forget memory. Jews are steeped in memory. We have longer memories than anybody else. Hence, we are aware of our continuity and heritage more than any other surviving community in the world.”

“Oh dear,” sighed the woman vacantly. “Now I understand why you Jews are such a clannish lot.”

Her husband laughed with gusto and remarked in the breathy good-old-boy voice of the high-class alcoholic, “Well said, Ethel.” Then, to us, “You chaps have to admit
–
calling yourselves Jews, well, I mean, it
is
a bit thick. Can you imagine me going around calling myself Gentile? It would sound funny, don’t you think? What are you?
–
I’m a Gentile. Bloody alien it sounds to me.”

Isaiah Berlin demonstratively turned his back on the awful pair, and said grumpily to us, “I can tell you as a researcher of the history of ideas that anti-Semitism is the most resilient prejudice in all of history. It is one of the strongest forces in world affairs. Amazing how many people are anti-Semites and don’t even know it.”

To that, Gershon Levy said, “That reminds me of a story. When the Germans conquered Paris they confiscated the grand houses of the French nobility. One such grand house was that of Philippe de Rothschild, and its new occupier was an SS general, a General Halle. Rothschild spent much of the war years in England with the Free French Forces, and when he returned to Paris at the war’s end his mansion was restored to him. ‘Felix,’ said Rothschild to his old butler, who had remained in domestic service in the mansion throughout the war – ‘Felix,’ he said, ‘the house must have been very quiet during my absence. What did you do?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ answered Felix, ‘it wasn’t quiet at all.’ ‘Not quiet?’ asked Philippe de Rothschild. ‘No sir,’ said Felix respectfully. ‘The SS general hosted receptions every night.’ ‘Every night?’ asked Rothschild, baffled. ‘But who came?’ ‘The same people who used to come to your receptions before you fled, sir,’ answered Felix. ‘The very same people.’ ’’