The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (47 page)

He stared at the prime minister with an indecipherable expression in his eyes, and Begin could do no more than to thank him for taking the matter into consideration. Then he said, “Before I get to your specific questions concerning Geneva, I would like to turn to the matter of southern Lebanon. I have a map of the area which I would like you to see.”

General Poran quickly unfurled a map on an easel. It displayed tiny clusters of Christian villages, colored in green, surrounded by an abundant sprinkling of Moslem villages, in red. As Begin began describing the threats which the isolated Christian villagers were facing, Freuka indicated with a pointer how the scattered green dots were dominated by the excessive profusion of the red. The Christians were not merely isolated, said Begin, but abandoned amidst five thousand well-armed
PLO
terrorists who had taken over southern Lebanon and who were shelling them regularly every night. It was due to this situation that the Israeli government had reviewed its policy vis-à-vis Lebanon, and had reached conclusions somewhat different from those of its Labor predecessor.

“The points of our policy are these,” declared Begin unequivocally:

Photograph credit: Ya’acov Sa’ar & Israel Government Press Office

After the meetings in Washington with President Carter, Prime Minister Begin visited the UN to discuss, again, the Lebanese border tensions, using the same map. Here, with UN Sec. Gen. Waldheim and author, 22 July 1977

“One
–
we don’t want any part of Lebanon, not a single inch.

“Two
–
we don’t want a war to result from the situation in Lebanon.

“Three
–
we will not let the Christian minority in Lebanon down.

“And four
–
whatever happens we shall never take you, Mr.
President
, by surprise. If contingencies arise that might require action, we shall always consult you.”

And then, with a cautionary lift of the hand, “But I think, above all, we have to say to you that we cannot turn our backs on the Christians. We have a human duty as Jews
–
nay a sacred duty
–
never to allow the Christian minority to be destroyed.”

Carter’s voice rose in surprise. “Do you not feel the Lebanese central government is the best source of protection for the Christians? We are thinking of extending them assistance.”

“The Lebanese President, Elias Sarkis is, of course, a Christian, but he is virtually helpless, as I’m sure your specialists will confirm,” said Begin.

Brzezinski cupped his hand and hastily whispered something into Carter’s ear. The president nodded and reiterated to the prime minister, “Nevertheless, it is our inclination to give him military assistance.”

“Good!” said Begin, but then he continued, in an ominous tone, “But I have to tell you, Arafat is destroying Lebanon. Presently, he is engaged against the Christians. And the Christians must be given the means to protect themselves. But a day will come when he will surely turn against us, too.”

Carter made no response. The issue was becoming too knotty. He did not want to be drawn in. So, jaw tight, gazing upon the prime minister with narrowed eyes, he said, “Might I suggest we move on to your next point.”

“Certainly,” said Begin, and he breezily turned to the man sitting on his left, whom he introduced as Dr. Shmuel Katz, his chief information adviser. “I’d like my friend and old comrade, Dr. Katz, to describe for you the way we look upon Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District in their broader historical context,” he told the president.

A soft-spoken intellectual originally from South Africa, Shmuel Katz was a former member of the Irgun High Command, and its chief ideologue. Indeed, within the Begin camp, Katz was the keeper of the Jabotinsky conscience, the guardian against corrupters of the Eretz Yisrael creed. Clearly, he was here as an ideological voice. At this first encounter with the American president, Menachem Begin wanted his interlocutors to know exactly what he stood for.

Shmuel Katz’s usual melancholy demeanor deepened as he held up a map of the Middle East on which were displayed twenty-two Arab states surrounding one tiny Jewish State, prominent in its abject isolation.

“Every child in every one of these twenty-two Arab states,” Katz began, “is taught from an early age that it is a patriotic duty and a moral imperative that this tiny state”
–
his fingertip was resting on Israel, blotting it out entirely
–
“be eliminated from the face of the earth, as a divisive and immoral element intruding into the Arab world.”

The president listened, his face impassive.

“Indeed, in the Palestinian Covenant, which is the National Charter of the
PLO
, the expulsion of the so-called ‘Zionist imperialists’ from the Arab world takes precedence over the ‘purging of the Zionist presence in Palestine.’”

Carter pressed his lips together. Clearly, he had no tolerance for national dogmas of this sort. His mind was empirical, that of an engineer, focused only on results. You could sense it in the way he fixed his steely, impatient, pale-blue eyes on Katz, as if to say, “What’s your bottom line?” Recognizing this gaze, Carter’s advisers began shifting about restlessly, shooting wary glances at each other. In contrast, Begin sat expressionless while Dr. Katz elaborated further:

“Logically, the
PLO
was recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people by all the Arab states, for the
PLO
is an instrument of all the Arab states, armed by them, financed by them, and trained by them. To bolster the scenario of a people driven from their homeland by a predatory Israel they have built up a mythological history which bears no relation to the facts. In 1974, Arafat addressed the United Nations, claiming that the Palestinians were engaged continuously for thousands of years in farming and cultural activity in Palestine. It is hard to imagine a description in harsher contrast to the facts.”

“How is that?” asked Vance mildly.

“Because the land was virtually empty. As Americans, you will be interested in the firsthand testimony of one of your own
–
testimony that refutes the absurd Arab claim. I urge you to read, or reread, Mark Twain’s
Innocents Abroad
.”

Katz hunched over his file and extracted from it a page photocopied from the book. He adjusted his spectacles, coughed a little cough, and said, “This is Mark Twain in eighteen sixty-seven, writing about the scene he saw in Upper Galilee: ‘There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent, not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts, and not see ten human beings…. Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided in and out among the rocks and lay still and sunned themselves. Where prosperity has reigned and fallen; where glory has flamed and gone out; where gladness was and sorrow is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high places, there this reptile makes its home, and mocks at human vanity.’”61

“Oh, how Mark Twain could write!” gushed Menachem Begin, his smile pure sunlight. “Whoever would have thought that a day would come when his words would become testimony filled with such pertinent political significance?” He sat back and beamed contentedly at the old brass chandelier hanging above the table. “A beautiful piece,” he observed.

Katz continued, “And Twain’s is only one of a series of testimonies between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries that describe the utter desolation of the Land of Israel. Indeed, Palestine was never, never ever”
–
he tapped Twain for added weight
–
“a homeland of any other people; never, never ever, a national center to anybody else except to the Jewish people.
Their
links were forever continuous. It is part of western culture that Palestine was always a Jewish country.”

The president wore a mask of politeness, but it was easy to see by his clenched teeth that anger lurked beneath. Apparently, not only did he resent the lengthy Katz litany; he found no joy in hearing America’s foremost literary prodigy being quoted back at him in such a fashion.

“Yes, indeed, a Jewish country,” echoed Begin, striking a defiant pose. “When the British Mandate was adopted at the San Remo Conference in 1920, the language used was, ‘Recognition having been given to the historical connection between the Jewish people and Palestine.’ Note, Mr. President, the
Jewish
people and Palestine. The name, Palestine,” he crisply clarified, “was given to the area by the Roman emperor Hadrian when he crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 133
c.e
. He sought to erase every last trace of Jewish existence by calling the country
Syria et Palestina
, after the long-extinct Philistines. Yet throughout history, the historical connection was recognized by all civilized nations as between the Jewish people and Palestine, and not any other people.”

Shmuel Katz picked up the theme. “The present-day Arabs in the country are, for the most part, fairly recent arrivals, beginning with the nineteenth century, and especially since the Zionist revival in the twentieth. That is probably why so many got up and ran in forty-eight. That is not how a rooted peasantry behaves. The really indigenous Arabs are the ones who stayed.”

“Is that so? Tell us more!” Thus Brzezinski, his voice brimming with cynicism.

Carter looked at Katz with a cold, hard, pinched expression, his patience long gone. More than half the allotted time for the meeting had passed, yet not a word had been said by Begin about Geneva. Others around the table fidgeted, eyeing comrades with sideways squints. But Katz would not be stopped. He spoke of how the old Zionist organizations in America, and elsewhere, axiomatically used the name Palestine in their titles, since Palestine was axiomatically the Jewish land; he spoke of how the 1919 agreement between the Emir Faisal and Chaim Weizmann stated explicitly that here was a pact between ‘the Arab state,’ meaning the Arabs, and ‘Palestine,’ meaning the Jews; he spoke of how the Arabs themselves had once insisted that there was no such country as Palestine, and that it was really southern Syria; he spoke of how, by international law, Israel was entitled to the ownership of Judea and Samaria because their occupation by the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan in 1948 was an act of aggression and an illegal invasion, and Israel enjoyed a ‘preferred right of ownership’; and he spoke of how the British, for imperial reasons, had given the Arabs three-quarters of the original Palestine
–
now the Kingdom of Jordan
–
and how the
PLO
insisted that the Palestinian homeland still stretched across both sides of the Jordan River. Therefore, they already had a homeland, on the other side of the Jordan. As he finished this sentence, the prime minister placed a gentle restraining hand on his arm and, in a voice low yet intense, interjected, “With your permission, Mr. President, I have something important to say.”

“By all means,” said Carter, his eyes still stirred to anger at the direction the meeting had taken.

Menachem Begin returned the stare with a look that was grave and commanding: “Mr. President, I wish to tell you something personal
–
not about me, but about my generation. What you have just heard may seem academic, theoretical, even moot to you, but not to my generation. To my generation of Jews, these are indisputable facts. They touch upon the very core of our national being. For we are a nation of returnees, back to our homeland, Eretz Yisrael. Ours is the generation of destruction and
redemption
. Ours is an almost biblical generation of suffering and courage. Ours is the generation that rose up from the bottomless pit of hell.”

The voice was mesmeric, the room quiet. The speaker’s passion had nudged all at the table out of their restlessness.

“We were a helpless people, Mr. President,” continued Begin. “We were bled, not once, not twice, but century after century, over and over again. We lost a third of our people in one generation – mine. One-and-a-half million of them were children – ours. No one came to our rescue. We suffered and died alone. We could do nothing about it. But now we can. Now we can defend ourselves.”

Suddenly, he was on his feet, his posture militant, his face iron, as he said intrepidly, “Permit me to show you a map. I call it the
INSM
–
the Israel National Security Map. General Poran, the map, please.”

Freuka jumped to unroll the chart on the table between the president and the prime minister, who set about explaining it. “Mr. President, there is nothing remarkable about this map. It’s quite a standard one of our country, displaying the old forty-nine armistice line as it existed until the sixty-seven Six-Day War, the so-called Green Line.”

He ran his finger along the defunct frontier which meandered down the center of the country.

“As you see, our military cartographers have delineated the tiny area we had for defense in that war. It was a war of survival in the most literal sense. Our backs were to the sea. We had absolutely no defensive depth. The distances were tiny. Permit me to show you how tiny they were. I shall begin with the north.”

He leaned across the table and pointed to the mountainous area which covered the upper section of the map, the section closest to Carter.

“You see these mountains, Mr. President. The Syrians and the Lebanese sat on the top of them and we were at the bottom.”

His finger marked the Golan Heights and the mountains of South Lebanon, and then rested on the green panhandle squeezed in between.

“This is the Hula Valley. It is hardly ten miles wide. They shelled our towns and villages in that valley from up on top of these mountains, day and night.”

Carter nodded, his hands clamped under his chin.

The prime minister’s finger now moved southward, to Haifa.

“Haifa, as you know, Mr. President, is our major port city. The armistice line was only twenty miles away.”

The President nodded again.

The finger shifted still further south, halting at the resort city of Netanya.

“Here, at Netanya, the distance to the old indefensible line was nine miles. Our country was reduced to a narrow waist.”

“I understand,” said the President, pursing his lips in contemplation.