The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (29 page)

K: Right. Right. If it hasn’t been said before, we’ll say it certainly today.

N: The thought is basically: the purpose of supplies is not simply to fuel the war; the purpose is to maintain the balance, which is quite accurate incidentally, and then
–
because only with the balance in that area can there be an equitable settlement that doesn’t do in one side or the other. That’s really what we’re talking about.

K: Right, Mr. President.

N: But now, on the Russians…

K: I expect formally to hear from the Russians. I didn’t get through talking to the Russians till ten last night. And I gave them really a terrific…

N: We can’t have this business of defending them all over the place…What ought to happen is that even though the Israelis will squeal like stuck pigs, we ought to tell the Russians that Brezhnev [the Soviet leader] and Nixon will settle this damn thing. That ought to be done. You know that….

K: That’s exactly right.

N: If he [Brezhnev] gets that through, I think maybe he’d like it. I’ll call you in an hour; you call me in an hour.

K: Right, Mr. President.

N: Bye. Right.

Two hours later Richard Nixon called Henry Kissinger. It has been suggested that given his even more incoherent flow of words he was, by now, truly inebriated.

N: Hi, Henry. I got a fill-in [on the airlift]. I’m glad to know we are going all out on this.

K: Oh, it’s a massive airlift, Mr. President. The planes are going to land every fifteen minutes.

N: That’s right. Get them there. The only addition
–
I want to check the European theater to see if there were some of those smaller planes [Skyhawks] that they need, and fly them down there so that they can replace the aircraft losses. And the other thing is that these big planes [cargo
C
-5 Galaxies] you can put some of those good tanks, those
M
-60 tanks on if necessary, if that would have some good effect, and put a few in there too.

K: Right, Mr. President.

N: So, in other words, don’t
–
if we are going to do it
–
don’t spare the horses. Just let…

K: Actually, the big planes, Mr. President, we have also flexibility. We can fly the Skyhawks in them.

N: Put them on the plane, you mean?

K: Yes. I don’t think there is another way
–
no [European] country will let them overfly [nor grant refueling rights].

N: All right. How many can a big plane take?

K: It can take five or six.

N: All right
–
put some Skyhawks in; do that too. You understand what I mean
–
if we are going to take heat for this, well, let’s go.

K: I think that is right. And I think, Mr. President, we can offer to stop the airlift if the Russians do after a ceasefire is signed.

N: Exactly. I think we should say
–
I think a personal message now should go. I mean you have been sending messages, but one should go from me to Brezhnev.

K: Everything I am sending is in your name.

N: Good. But I think he should know
–
now look here: the peace is not only for this area but the whole future relationship [with the Russians] is at stake here, and we are prepared to stop if you are, and we are prepared
–
you know what I mean. I don’t know
–
have you got anything developed along those lines so that we just don’t have…?

K: I have. I’m developing it now and I think I could call Dobrynin [the Soviet ambassador] and point it out to him.

N: Right. Right. Put it in a very conciliatory but very tough way that I do this [the airlift] with great regret – great reluctance – but that we cannot have a situation that has now developed and that we are prepared to give tit for tat. Nothing on the battle so far?

K: On this morning’s battle, it is the Israelis
–
it has not been announced yet;
they
have knocked out one hundred and fifty tanks.

N: And lost fifteen. Yes, I heard that this morning.

K: Something like ten thirty this morning.

N: The Egyptians…

K: They seem to be heading more south than east and are not really trying to break into the Sinai at this point. So they are just keeping their defensive position down the coast. And they may be going for [garbled]. But, ah…

N: Nothing new on Syria?

K: In Syria the Israelis have told us this morning they have stopped their advance on Damascus. They stopped about twenty kilometers short. There are reports from some foreign correspondents that went up to the front from Damascus on the Syrian side and indicated the Syrian army now was getting to be demoralized and were abandoning equipment. But still, Mr. President, they are the reason why the Egyptians are able to hold on…. The estimate of our group is that it would take the Israelis three more days to knock out the Syrians and that they couldn’t really turn to the Egyptians for another four to five days.

N: What do we plan then?

K: Well, we plan to try to get it wound up this week.

N: [garbled]

K: Yes.

N: …Well at least I feel better. The airlift thing, if I contributed anything to the discussion it is the business that, don’t fool around with three planes. By golly, no matter how big they are, just go gung ho.

K: One of the lessons I have learned from you, Mr. President, is that if you do something, you might as well do it completely.
29

And do it completely he did. Over the course of the ensuing days and weeks U.S. resupply aircraft conducted 815 sorties delivering more than 27,900 tonnes of materiel, replenishing Israel’s arsenals and enabling the idf to decisively move over to the offensive.

When a bleary-eyed and weary prime minister addressed the Knesset a couple of days after this conversation she expressed Israel’s fervent gratitude to the president and people of the United States for the airlift, and caused an optimistic stir when she revealed that even as she was speaking, a task force of the Israel Defense Forces had succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal and was engaging the enemy on its western bank.

But the principal reason Golda Meir chose to address the Knesset that day, when the war was still at its height and Israel still in peril, was because she wanted the world to know what the Jewish State’s fate would have been had it ever bowed to the constant international pressure to withdraw to the pre–Six-Day War lines of 1967. She wanted the world to know why she and her predecessor, Levi Eshkol, had rebuffed that pressure so stubbornly. To the approving nods of Menachem Begin, who was listening to her with appreciation, she told the House in a voice that rang with sudden command:

One need not have a fertile imagination to realize what the situation of the State of Israel would have been if we had been deployed on the June fourth sixty-seven lines. Anyone who finds it difficult to visualize this nightmarish picture should direct his mind and attention to what happened on the northern front
–
on the Golan Heights
–
during the first days of the war. Syria’s aspirations are not limited to a piece of land, but to deploying their artillery batteries once again on the Golan Heights against the Galilee settlements, to setting up missile batteries against our aircraft, so as to provide cover for the breakthrough of their armies into the heart of Israel.

Nor is a fertile imagination required to imagine the fate of the State of Israel had the Egyptian armies managed to overcome the Israel Defense Forces in the expanses of Sinai and to move in full force towards Israel’s borders…. This is a war against our very existence as a state and a nation. The Arab rulers pretend that their objective is limited to reaching the lines of June fourth sixty-seven, but we know their true objective: the total subjugation of the State of Israel. It is our duty to realize this truth; it is our duty to make it clear to all men of goodwill who tend to ignore this truth. We need to realize this truth in all its gravity, so that we may continue to mobilize from among ourselves and from the Jewish people all the resources necessary to overcome our enemies, to fight back until we have defeated the aggressors.

Toward the end of October, the Arabs sued for a ceasefire. What had begun three weeks earlier as an ignoble retreat of the Israelis ended in an almost total rout of the Egyptians and the Syrians, and the humiliation of their patron, the Soviet Union. Reenergized and reequipped, the
IDF
advanced to forty kilometers [not twenty as Kissinger had told Nixon] from the gates of Damascus, battled its way along the highway to Cairo, smashed two Egyptian armies, surrounded a third, and was poised to strike a knockout blow against that Third Army when Nixon and Kissinger put the squeeze on Israel, saying in effect, “Okay Golda! Good job! Enough! Stop, it’s over!”

Exactly as the president and the secretary had envisaged in their jumbled and rambling telephone exchanges two weeks before, the squeeze rescued Egypt’s remaining forces from total annihilation and Israel was robbed of a decisive military victory. Fretfully and fatalistically, Prime Minister Meir put it this way to her cabinet:

Let’s call things by their proper name. Black is black and white is white. There is only one country to which we can turn, and sometimes we have to give in to it
–
even when we know we shouldn’t. But it is the only real friend we have, and a very powerful one at that. We don’t have to say yes to everything, but let’s call things by their proper name. There is nothing to be ashamed of when a small country like Israel, in this situation, has to give in sometimes to the United States. And when we do say yes, let’s, for God’s sake, not pretend that it is otherwise and that black is white.
30

The fact that the last remnant of Egyptian military power
–
the Third Army
–
had not been routed and had not surrendered, enabled President Sadat to declare to his people that he had wiped clean the shame of 1967, and enabled Secretary of State Kissinger to fly into the Middle East to begin reaping the political harvest of Washington’s diplomacy. Using the currency of Israeli concessions, he set out to convince President Sadat that Washington, not Moscow, was henceforth the arbiter of affairs in the Middle East, and that it paid to be a friend of the United States of America.

The first full Knesset debate on the Yom Kippur War took place on 13 November 1973, and Leader of the Opposition Menachem Begin, dressed in a dark gray double-breasted suit, walked into the parliament building spoiling for a fight. He had not uttered a word of criticism against the prime minister and her government so long as the war raged, but now that it was over, the political gloves were off. Golda Meir had to be made to account to the nation why she had allowed a war to break out in the first place
–
a war that had sent two thousand, six hundred and eighty-eight Israeli soldiers to their graves.

At four o’clock that afternoon a press secretary poked his head through the door of the Knesset restaurant and shouted, “Begin’s speaking,” causing a stampede of parliamentary correspondents to pile out of the eatery, up the stairway and into the press gallery, where they peered down on the Opposition leader standing at the podium beginning to address a House crammed to the rafters. Usually, Mr. Begin delighted in dropping a cool nugget of irony into the most heated of debates, and then watching with satisfaction the resultant effervescence bubble and pop, but not today. Today was not a time for rhetorical antics. It was a time to be grim, lucid, terse, accusatory and, above all, to state the opposition case so unanswerably as to vanquish the government and compel it to resign.

Up in the press gallery foreign correspondents crowded around me, some kneeling, some sitting on the floor, scribbling furiously while straining to hear my stage-whispered, amateurish simultaneous translation above the amplified voice of the speaker. Menachem Begin was pointing an accusatory finger at the prime minister, who was sitting at the government table in the well of the chamber, shoulders hunched, face pale, her hair somewhat disheveled, surrounded by her brooding ministers, and all knowing what was about to come. What came was a growling Begin with a contemptuous eye, scornfully reproving:

“Did we, Madame Prime Minister, at noontime on Yom Kippur, have armor and infantry mobilized along the two fronts, north and south, ready to inflict a preemptive blow on the enemy? No, Madame, we did not! What did we have along those fronts?” He surveyed the House as if expecting an answer. “We had the finest and bravest troops any nation could wish for, but they were so thinly stretched, any preemptive action on their part would have been suicidal. Perhaps our Air Force might have been brought into play, but given the advanced weaponry at the enemy’s command, their deadly ground-to-air missiles
–
the
SAM
s
–
plus their four thousand tanks and their multiple divisions poised to strike, it is unreasonable to assume our pilots could have prevented such a coordinated assault that had been so meticulously planned.”