The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli
Leadership
By Yehuda Avner
(The Toby Press, 730 pages, $29.95)
Yehuda Avner is a retired Israeli civil servant who served as an
adviser and speechwriter to four prime ministers — Levi Eshkol,
Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin — before becoming
Israel’s ambassador to Great Britain. Now in his eighties, Avner
has produced a splendidly written memoir that succeeds in bringing
these Israeli leaders to life. Although not the most scholarly or
comprehensive book ever written about Israel, The Prime
Ministers is by far the most engaging political history I have
ever come across.
Consider Avner’s account of an exchange between Menachem Begin
and President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, over the wording of a draft U.S.-Israeli statement to
be issued after the conclusion of talks in Washington:
“Totally acceptable except for two sentences,” [Begin
declared.]
“And what are they?”
“Please delete ‘The United States affirms Israel’s inherent
right to exist.’”
“Why so?”
“Because the United States’ affirmation of Israel’s right to
exist is not a favor, nor is it a negotiable concession. I shall
not negotiate my existence with anybody, and I need nobody’s
affirmation of it.”
Brzezinski’s expression was one of surprise. “But to the best of
my knowledge every Israeli prime minister has asked for such a
pledge.”
“I sincerely appreciate the president’s sentiment,” said Begin,
“but our Hebrew Bible made that pledge and established our right
over our land millennia ago. Never, throughout the centuries, did
we ever abandon or forfeit that right. Therefore, it would be
incompatible with my responsibilities as prime minister of Israel
were I not to ask you to erase this sentence.” And then, without
pause, “Please delete, too, the language regarding the commitment
to Israel’s survival.”
“And in what sense do you find that objectionable?”
“In the sense that we, the Jewish people alone, are responsible
for our country’s survival, no one else.”
Wordlessly, and seemingly perplexed, the national security
adviser deleted the offending sentences, upon which the prime
minister expressed himself totally satisfied.
This whole exchange is vintage Begin. A survivor of the Soviet
gulag and a former leader in Israel’s pre-state underground, Begin
was obsessed with Jewish honor, both personal (“A Jew bows to no
one but God,” was one of his favorite maxims) and national. His
unyielding insistence upon Israel’s historic rights to biblical
Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. the “West Bank”), drove his American
interlocutors crazy, but they recognized that once Begin gave his
word, he would never go back on it. To do so would be
dishonorable.
Golda Meir, though equally devoted to Israel’s security, was a
different personality altogether. Her passion was not for Jewish
honor, but for social justice — and just as Zionism would bring
justice to the Jews, so in her view would socialism bring justice
to the world. But Golda’s belief in socialism was shaken to the
core during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when her fellow social
democrats in Western Europe turned their backs on Israel as it
struggled to hold back a massive Soviet-Arab onslaught, and only
Richard Nixon — an American president known neither for his
philosemitism nor for his commitment to social justice — came to
Israel’s rescue. With American weaponry, Israel (at a terribly high
cost) eventually won the Yom Kippur War, but an embittered Golda
Meir subsequently gave vent to her anger at a meeting of the
Socialist International.
“Believe me,” she told the assembled socialist leaders, “I am
the last person to belittle the fact that we are only one tiny
Jewish state and that there are over 20 Arab states with vast
territories, endless oil, and billions of dollars. Of course you
have your interests. But what I want to know from you today is
whether these things are decisive factors in socialist thinking
too?”
When the Israeli prime minister sat down, the chairman asked
whether anyone would like the floor. None of Golda’s abashed
“comrades” cared to speak up, but from behind her, someone said,
“Of course they won’t talk. They can’t talk. Their throats are
choked with oil.”
TODAY, OF COURSE, it is the nuclear weapon, rather than the oil
weapon, that poses the gravest threat to Israel’s existence, and
people all over the world are wondering whether Israel would go to
war to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. For any reader
of Avner’s book, the answer is obvious. As Begin put it in 1981,
after Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, “Let the
world know that under no circumstances will Israel ever allow an
enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against our people. If
ever such a threat reoccurs we shall take whatever preemptive
measures are necessary to defend the citizens of Israel with all
the means at our disposal.” One might call this the “Begin
Doctrine,” and it is the lodestone of Israel’s policy today, just
as it was 30 years ago.
When Begin ordered the bombing of Osirak, however, even Israel’s
good friend, President Ronald Reagan, was taken aback. Reagan felt
that Begin was seriously remiss in not alerting the United States
in advance about Israel’s concerns, and he ordered his ambassador
to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, to join the other members
of the Security Council in condemning the Israeli raid. (As it
happens, I was a member of Kirkpatrick’s staff at the time, and saw
firsthand how, after desperately trying to water down the
anti-Israeli resolution, Kirkpatrick reluctantly but dutifully
voted for it. I even happened to be present when a surprised
Kirkpatrick received a phone call from the UN’s then
secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, congratulating her on her vote.
Back then, of course, none of us knew of Waldheim’s Nazi past.) It
turned out, however, that Begin actually had expressed Israel’s
concerns to Washington but — incredibly — the outgoing Carter
administration had failed to pass them on to the incoming Reagan
administration. As the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Samuel
Lewis, later told Avner:
“I contacted Washington informally to make sure that a full
paper on this subject was prepared by the transition team. The
paper was prepared, I was later told, but with such a high
classification and such extreme restrictions on its distribution
that neither Secretary of State-designate Alexander Haig nor any of
the key White House officials ever saw it. That real bureaucratic
‘glitch’ during the change of administration meant that President
Reagan apparently had never been properly briefed on the history,
and was both astounded and ‘blind-sided’ by the Israeli
action.”
Eventually, however, the crisis between Washington and Jerusalem
was overcome, and on the 10th anniversary of the Osirak bombing,
the then U.S. defense secretary, Richard Cheney, presented a
satellite photograph of the destroyed Iraqi reactor to Major
General David Ivri, who had commanded the Israeli Air Force during
the raid. Cheney’s inscription read: “With thanks and appreciation
for the outstanding job on the Iraqi nuclear program, which made
our job much easier in Desert Storm.”
These are only a few of the many revealing stories contained in
The Prime Ministers. The overall impression one gets from
Yehuda Avner’s book is that while American-Israeli relations have
had their ups and downs, the alliance between the two nations
remains unshakable. That is a bit of history worth bearing in mind,
as the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government head
toward yet another clash — over the president’s poorly conceived
peace initiative, the future of the Israeli settlements, and the
looming confrontation with Iran.
