The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (80 page)

My wife, seemingly overwhelmed by her motherly instincts, gave William a warm hug, planted him on her knee, and softly instructed him in how to say ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ in Hebrew. Thus it was that when the time came to bid farewell, the boy born to be king stretched out his hand to Prime Minister Shimon Peres and, at his mother’s urging, said to him, “Shalom.”

As I was relating all this to Mr. Begin, I caught a hint of the old impish look in his eyes. Being a formidable history buff, he responded by regaling me with a saga of his own, about the origins of the name of the British royal family. They were originally of German stock, he recalled, and he cited a number of close relatives of the royal family who had served the Nazis as
gauleiters
, and had fought with crack Wehrmacht units, including the SS. Then he went on to catalogue the royal pedigree in immense detail, explaining that the House of Windsor sprang from the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, who was the son of the German Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

“Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, not Windsor, is therefore the true surname of the royal family,” he said, with the faintest hint of a sassy smile. “However, in nineteen seventeen, when World War One was raging and anti-German sentiment was at its height, King George the Fifth ordered the royal family to scrap Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favor of the English-sounding Windsor. Likewise, Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, though of Greek
extraction
, was also of German stock, from the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. This, arguably, should be the surname of his heirs, not Mountbatten-Windsor, which he adopted.”

At that point, Mr. Begin screwed up his gaunt features into a scowl, and said, “But the one who should be put in the dock was King Edward the Eighth. His admiration of Hitler was a national scandal. He had an affair with an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson and abdicated the throne in nineteen thirty-six to marry her. In nineteen thirty-seven they visited Germany and paid their respects to Hitler. When they parted, Edward described him as a decent sort of a chap, and Hitler was heard to say of Wallis Simpson that she would have made a good queen. But instead of the throne, Edward was reduced to the rank of a mere duke, and was shipped off to Bermuda as its governor, there to live out World War Two, and he quickly faded into obscurity.”

As he was rattling this off I got the distinct impression he was doing so not to engage me in discourse, but to exercise his own mind and put his memory to the test. Once he was finished with his recitation, he held out a lean hand in a limp farewell, and asked me to remember him to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

That was the last I ever saw of Menachem Begin. There was one final bit of correspondence on the occasion of his seventy-eighth birthday, in 1991, when I sent him greetings, to which he replied:

My Dear Friend,

I thank you from the heart for your greetings on the occasion of my birthday. We both share good memories of the days when I called you ‘my Shakespeare’ and until the day when you welcomed immigrants from Ethiopia to Eilat [a reference to my peripheral involvement in the secret mission of smuggling Jews out of Ethiopia during that country’s most turbulent days]. Our working together was always a deep source of satisfaction to me. My best wishes to your wife and family.

Most sincerely, and warmest greetings,

Menachem Begin

Begin’s last letter to author, 1 August 1991 (Translation, page 689)

Menachem Begin’s ‘will’ deposited with Yechiel Kadishai (Translation, page 693)

The curtain descended and the lights went out on 9 March 1992.

Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, died of a heart attack, and Yechiel Kadishai opened the envelope which Begin had entrusted to him. The handwritten note it contained read:

My Dear Yechiel,

When the day comes, I request that you read to my dear ones, to my friends and comrades, this request: I ask to be buried on the Mount of Olives next to Meir Feinstein and Moshe Barazani. I thank you and all those who will carry out my request.

With love,

Menachem Begin.

World leaders readied to fly to Jerusalem to attend the funeral, but Israeli embassies were swiftly instructed to inform governments that, at the request of the deceased, the funeral was to be a traditionally Jewish one: no lying in state, no military guard of honor, no official delegations, not even eulogies.

Despite the previous nine years of silence which Menachem Begin had mysteriously imposed on himself, a dense throng of hundreds of thousands spontaneously spilled into the streets in a mass display of grief and honor for the man whose voice had spoken for them, to a sometimes
hostile
or indifferent world, about Jewish faith, Jewish honor, Jewish patriotism and Jewish pride.

The arteries of Jerusalem were clogged in total gridlock as friends and foes, those who had loved him and those who had opposed him, the exalted and the humble, stood vigil while the body was prepared for burial at the Sanhedria funeral home. Under a pewter sky, the 1978 Nobel Prize laureate was carried by his pallbearers – all former Irgun commanders – to the cinnamon slopes of the Mount of Olives, the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world, there to be laid to rest alongside his beloved Aliza and his two comrades-in-arms. Countless lips trembled and countless eyes brimmed, and many openly sobbed as the procession of mourners, which extended over four kilometers, accompanied the bier that bore Menachem Begin’s body, wrapped in a simple shroud and a prayer shawl. Never before had Jerusalem seen such a funeral, that did such unique homage to the man and to the country’s unity.

I was one of literally thousands stumbling among the Mount of Olives tombstones and wandering the terraces of the ancient cemetery in search of a vantage point. It was only when one of Menachem Begin’s old bodyguards recognized me that I was able to squeeze through the barrier that enclosed the burial site where the family stood. There, Benny Begin recited
Kaddish
and Yechiel Kadishai read
“
Eil malei rachamim
”
–
the prayer for the tranquility of the soul. And as many took turns to shovel earth into the grave, the aged Irgun veterans stood to attention and sang their old Irgun anthem in a final salute to their commander-in-chief who, for much of his life, had been a figure of controversy but who, on this day, was buried with a nation’s veneration.

Photograph credit: Yitzhak Elharar, Scoop 80

Menachem Begin’s body being lowered into his grave on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, 9 March 1992

Eaton Square is a leafy London enclave, surrounded by pristine period properties where the wealthy and the celebrated, the great and the good, make their homes. Arguably London’s premier quadrangle, the roster of its former residents reads like a
Who’s Who
of English political and cultural lore. It is the sort of place where tour buses stop.

Ninety-three Eaton Square comes with a particular cachet. Two ex–prime ministers once lived there: Sir Stanley Baldwin in the mid–nineteen thirties, and Margaret
–
later Baroness
–
Thatcher, for a brief period in the early nineteen nineties.

The Thatcher occupancy was fortuitous. Henry Ford Jr. offered Baroness Thatcher and her husband, Denis, the use of his London residence at 93 Eaton Square while their own home was being renovated. And it was to this mansion that I repaired on a sunny, crystal clear April morning in 1992, to keep an appointment with the ex-prime minister, who had been ousted by her Conservative Party two years before. My acquaintanceship with Mrs. Thatcher went back, of course, to my London days, when I had served as Israeli ambassador, and she was still very much the prime minister. I was now the inspector general of the foreign service, and was in London on government business. Hearing that Mrs. Thatcher had invited me to tea, friends of mine at the Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan had asked me to use the opportunity to enquire whether she would be willing to accept an honorary doctorate at the next conferment.

Afterword

“Come in, come in,” piped Denis in a rush of companionability, as he opened the door. “Margaret is in the lounge. I’m just dashing out. Be back in a jiffy.” And off he strode, a groomed, gray-haired, bespectacled English gentleman in his late seventies, wearing a brown trilby hat, a well tailored suit, polished black brogues, and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella.

Baroness Thatcher, ten years his junior, received me genially in the hallway, dressed in an apple-green outfit, with a formidable string of pearls around her neck. She led me into an elegant and spacious room, with a grand piano, superb furnishings, Modiglianis on the walls, and french doors giving on to a manicured terrace decorated with a medley of spring flowers. Admiring the setting, I asked her about the honorary doctorate and she agreed on the spot, with gusto. She then patted a comfortable-looking couch and said, “Now, why don’t you and I sit down and have a bit of a natter. Here, have a peppermint!”

She pushed a brass tray of wrapped green sweets in my direction, and tinkled a little bell that was handily placed by her side. “I’m sure you’ll join me in a nice cup of tea, won’t you?”

A maid appeared, bearing a china service, a silver teapot and all the other necessary accoutrements, which she placed on a coffee table whose surface was largely obscured by old copies of the
Illustrated London News
and
Country Life
.

“Now tell me about Mr. Begin,” said Mrs. Thatcher stoutly, pouring the tea. And then, in a leap of sympathy, voice dropping into tenderness, “I read in the newspapers that there was much mourning in Israel at his passing. A massive funeral, I hear.”

Hardly a month had passed since his burial, and it was with deep-felt solemnity that I said, “Mr. Begin’s death did occasion profound national mourning.”

“Well, I have to tell you,” she returned, her voice sharpening, “I, for one, made no bones about my opposition to his settlement policies, but I greatly admired his convictions and principles.” Whereupon, between sips of tea, she began reminiscing about her Israeli associations, beginning with the large Jewish presence in her old North-West London parliamentary constituency of Finchley, moving on to highlights of the few occasions she had visited Israel, and concluding with the one major encounter she had had with Menachem Begin.

“I remember it was a lunch at Number Ten, shortly after I’d entered office in seventy-nine,” she said. “And, as I recall, there was some sort of a spat between him and Peter Carrington.”

I reminded her that I had been present, and that Begin had expressed strong feelings about how European Jewry had been abandoned to their fate in World War
ii
.

Thatcher clamped her jaw, stared hard in recollection, and pensively said, “Yes, I remember. He spoke bitterly about how the Allies had not bombed the railway lines to Auschwitz. And I have to tell you”
–
this almost in sorrow
–
“at the time of that luncheon I was hardly aware of what Auschwitz truly was. I knew it was a concentration camp, but it was only later, when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, that I fully realized it was a hideous death camp. It brought tears to my eyes.”

This winded me. “You really didn’t know?”

“Back then there were a number of things of which we were not as fully cognizant as we ought to have been about the Holocaust,” she said broodingly.

“One cannot begin to understand Menachem Begin without understanding the Holocaust,” I ventured. “Virtually his whole family was exterminated. The Jewish helplessness and homelessness of those times dominated his whole being. They were at the core of many of his policies.”

“Here, let me refill your cup,” she said, as if wanting to move off the subject, and she raised the teapot and poured. “So, remind me
–
when exactly was it that Mr. Begin first entered office?” she asked.

Afterword

“In nineteen seventy-seven,” I said.

“Oh yes. I have a vague recollection of our foreign office know-it-alls putting it about that you Israelis had elected a warmonger and a demagogue. But then he surprised us all, being such a world-class statesman, negotiating that historic peace treaty with Egypt. It was a masterstroke. He won the Noble Peace Prize for that, did he not
–
he and Sadat together?”

I confirmed that they had, and added, “In my opinion Mr. Begin was worthy of a second Nobel Prize, too.”

“For what, pray?”

“For securing Israel’s parliamentary democracy.”

Thatcher’s voice acquired a serrated edge. “Surely, you exaggerate. Israel is universally famous for its democracy. It’s one of the most robust in the world.”

“But not at the outset,” I said. “On two occasions, just before and just after our independence, he saved us from civil war.”

“Civil war?” She sounded aghast.

Briefly, I related the tale of the ‘Hunting Season’ in 1944, and of the
Altalena
in 1948, and added, “I once asked Mr. Begin what was the single most important thing he’d ever done in his life, and his unreserved answer was, ‘Twice I prevented civil war.’”

“I had no idea,” said Thatcher, sounding genuinely amazed.

I drove on. “In fact, he can be credited for bringing the whole nation together into the democratic parliamentary system. Most of our people come from countries with no democratic tradition whatsoever, and had no idea how to work the levers of power in a democracy.”

“What countries are you talking about?”

“The Arab countries mainly, in the Middle East and North Africa; also immigrants from Asia. They hardly had a voice. It was Begin who championed their cause, and they were the ones who initially put him in office.”

A maid entered to hand Baroness Thatcher a note. Thatcher shot her a sharp glance and, rising, said, “You’ll have to excuse me a moment. I have to take a call from President Bush [Senior].”

She exited briskly and I took the opportunity to gaze about me, noting the fantasies of power which still clung to her in that room that was a feast of opulence: the large oil painting above the fireplace displayed her statuesque image in the full grandeur of her peerage regalia, the silver sculpture on the table was engraved with the names of her cabinet, the huge plain silver bowl next to it was inscribed as a parting gift of her parliamentary constituency, and a needleworked cushion on an armchair depicted the front door of 10 Downing Street.

“Am I interrupting?” It was Denis Thatcher, peering through the doorway, back from whatever errand he’d been on. “Where’s Margaret?”

I told him, and he explained that he was searching for an atlas, which was probably in the bookcase by the french window. He stood before the mahogany antique and surveyed its shelves with his hands behind his back, in the manner of an officer inspecting a guard of honor, until he found what he was after. He lowered himself into an armchair, leafing through the atlas, and said, “We’ve been invited to Bahrain, and I’m doing a bit of homework. Aha, here it is
–
another one of those sunny little oases, I see.”

A smile entered his voice and then spread across his features, until, in a burst of conviviality, he shared, “Gosh! I hope they’ve got decent showers there. Your country’s got all the mod cons, I know, but you can never tell in these other places. A few years back we were invited to Abu Dhabi. Got there late at night, and as we were being piled into our cars our chief security chap whispered into my ear, ‘When you get to the palace, sir, you should know there’s no water.’ I said, ‘You’re joking.’ And he said, ‘I’m not, sir, there’s no water.’ When I got there I found I had a bathroom half the size of the Albert Hall
–
marble walls and a line of basins
–
there must have been four or five
–
but no water. I turned the taps full on, but each tap gave only a dribble. And I thought to myself, ah well, I’m going to have to let these run all night. In the morning, I went along to Margaret’s bedroom, which was twice the size of the Queen’s in Buckingham Palace, and I said, ‘You know, there’s no water.’ She said, ‘I know there’s no water. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘come to my bathroom and I’ll give you a shower.’ She said, ‘You’ve got a shower?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a few basinfuls of water and I’ll scoop them over you with my hat. Come along.’ She came along. ‘Strip off,’ I said, and she stripped off. I then threw the water in the air with my hat. But I’m afraid it wasn’t a success. Ah, here comes Margaret.”

He pecked his wife on the cheek and exited, explaining that he had to shove off to his club. She resumed her seat and said, “that was George on the phone
–
I should say President Bush. He stays in touch, which is gracious of him considering I’m no longer in office, and that I still have a bone to pick with him about Desert Storm.”

“And what bone is that?”

Her whole demeanor grew severe as she moralized with cast-iron confidence: “When the Gulf War began, I was still prime minister. I was attending a conference at Aspen, Colorado, and Bush was there. When we heard about the invasion of Kuwait by that monster Saddam Hussein he asked me my view of things. I told him I’d experienced aggression in the Falklands, and I had no doubt there was only one way to deal with aggressors. ‘Look George,’ I said, ‘this is no time to be wobbly. Liberate Kuwait, then go into Iraq and destroy Saddam Hussein and his National Guard. We, Britain, will stand by you. We’ll be at your side all the way.’”

Afterword

Glowering at the teapot, she raised her chin for added conviction and confided, “the trouble with George is that he was badly advised. James Baker [his secretary of state] is no Henry Kissinger. He is a lawyer from Texas, and he operates like a lawyer from Texas. He doesn’t make policy, he makes deals. I suspect he thinks Sinai is the plural of sinuses.”

She rose to stare out of the french windows, arms folded, her features fixed in a pose of melodramatic self-righteousness, saying nothing
–
a nothing that said everything, a nothing that said, ‘If only I was still prime minister everything would be different.’

When she finally spoke her face showed contempt, and she lamented, “I was unseated from the premiership at the critical moment, just when George Bush needed all my backing to keep his nerve. But he faltered. He became obsessed with casualties. He tried to win the war from high altitudes, where everything is clean and sterile. So instead of going into Baghdad and finishing off the job by destroying the National Guard, capturing Saddam Hussein and putting him on trial as a war criminal, George declared a premature victory.”

“At least he and the Allies didn’t have to face a nuclear bomb,” I hazarded.

I say ‘hazarded,’ because one had to tread carefully with this ‘Iron Lady’ who, by reputation, allowed no interruptions, heard no excuses, and permitted no questioning.

“Why do you say that?” she glared.

“Because of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Baghdad, which Mr. Begin ordered our Air Force to destroy in eighty-one, just as it was about to go hot. Hussein was on the point of manufacturing the atomic bomb, remember?”

She cupped her chin and nodded slowly, as the recollection began to seep in. Then she strode back to the couch, sat down, turned to face me with a cold hard stare, but still didn’t say a word.

So I marched on. “You will recall that the Americans protested Begin’s action, as you did. But in the end, the Americans thanked him wholeheartedly for destroying that reactor. The nineteen ninety war against Iraq, they said, could have ended in utter disaster had that Baghdad reactor not been knocked out in time.”