Between You and Me (14 page)

And that, I mistakenly thought, was that.

As we soon discovered, Rabbi Hertzberg had just begun to fight.

A few days after our contentious meeting, the American Jewish Congress called a news conference, where its officials reiterated the objections and accusations we had heard in Hewitt’s office. On most occasions, when we aired a piece that provoked a hostile reaction, the criticism would peter out in a few days, a week or so at the most.

But the American Jewish Congress was determined to keep the Syrian story on the front burner, and its well-organized attacks on “Israel’s Toughest Enemy” persisted for several months after our broadcast.

Of all the shots the AJC aimed at us, the most offensive came in an editorial that ran in its publication Near East Report. Drawing an analogy that I found obscene, the editorial compared our broadcast to

“films in which Goebbels portrayed the clean and tidy barracks in the idyllic concentration camps.” Even at its absolute worst, life for Jews in Syria didn’t come close to the psychotic depravity of the Third Reich, and I felt that to suggest such a parallel was to dishonor the memory of the millions who suffered and perished in the holocaust.

A postscript: There are far fewer Jews living in Syria now, and

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that’s because the harsh restrictions ontravel were lifted inthe early 1990s. Although they were not allowed simply to cross the border into Israel, Jewish residents were free to leave Syria, and many of them have moved to other countries. The most popular destination for Syr-ianJews has beenthe United States—inparticular, Brooklyn, New York—but a fair number (there are no precise figures available) chose to relocate inIsrael, which they reached through transit countries.

M e n a c h e m B e g i n

A n w a r S a d at

W H E N I I N T E R V I E W E D M E N A C H E M B E G I N in the fall of 1977, he had recently taken over as prime minister of Israel. He had come to power a few months after President Jimmy Carter was sworn into office, and there were reports that the two new leaders regarded each other with a wariness that bordered on mistrust. As a longtime member of the opposition party in the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—Begin had acquired a reputation for being an inflexible hard-liner, and that was bound to put him at odds with Carter, who had vowed to adopt a more evenhanded approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. There was a growing concern among American Jews that Carter and his foreign-policy team were tilting toward the Arabs, and I was curious to know if Begin shared that apprehension.

W A L L A C E : He is the first American president—the first American president—to talk of a Palestinian homeland. He is the first American president to talk of legitimate Palestinian rights.

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B E G I N : Sometimes President Carter makes statements which we cannot agree with, and then we say so openly and sincerely. Then we have our debates with him. . . .

W A L L A C E : You do not believe that Israel and the United States are on a collision course?

B E G I N : No, no. No, no. I don’t think that we are on a collision course.

But it wasn’t just the United States that had become disillusioned with Israel’s expansionist policies, and I reminded him of how dramatically the attitude toward his country had changed in the last decade.

W A L L A C E : Ten years ago, after the Six-Day War, Israel was the most heroic nation in—in the world, virtually. Everybody admired Israel, right? Today Israel seems to be, around the world, pretty close to alone. Question: why?

B E G I N : Seems to be? May I tell you that these people go around the world telling the story of the poor Palestinians, whom we rejected, as they say, et cetera. This is the big lie of the successful propaganda. . . . They tried to destroy our people time and again, either directly or with the help of invading armies, and they didn’t succeed because we fought them off.

And then they cry out, “But we were wronged!” They were wronged by their own aggression.

On two occasions within the previous decade, Israel had to repel armies from Egypt, Syria, and other Arab neighbors. But in 1977 its main security concern was not another conventional war so much as the sporadic and deadly acts of terrorism that were being carried out

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by Palestinian guerrillas. The irony was that the Israelis had their own history of guerrilla warfare, and no one had been more deeply involved in it than Menachem Begin. With his thick glasses, which gave him an owlish appearance, and his formal sartorial taste (in contrast to the laid-back open-collar style preferred by most Israeli leaders, Begin almost always wore a conservative suit and tie in public), he may have looked like a staid economics professor, but his early claim to fame was as a warrior.

Back in the 1940s, during the years leading up to Israel’s War of Independence, Begin had been commander of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a radical guerrilla force committed to the violent overthrow of British rule in Palestine. Under his leadership, the Irgun launched attacks on Arab villages, British troop trains, and other targets throughout the region that would later become Israel. To their critics (a group that included such prominent Jews as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt), the Irgun commandos were terrorists. But in the eyes of their admirers, they were freedom fighters, and Begin in particular was later praised for having helped dynamite the state of Israel into existence.

Three decades later, as prime minister, Begin had to cope with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dynamic leader, Yasir Arafat, who was spearheading a determined effort to dynamite Palestine back into existence. That led me to ask Begin the following question: “Do you—forgive me—see no similarity of purpose between the Menachem Begin of thirty years ago and the Yasir Arafat of today?”

“And who?” he stiffly replied.

“Yasir Arafat.”

He glared at me in silence for a moment or two, and when he finally did speak, his first words were “I will not get angry.” But he was unable to suppress his anger, and he began to berate me for having

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dared to draw a comparison between his Irgun guerrillas who had fought “for the survival of our people” and “the man called Arafat who wants to destroy the Jewish state and sends his henchmen to kill men, women, and children.”

The interview soon came to an end, though the scolding continued even after we turned off the camera and microphones. Begin was still furious, and I was starting to get a little sore myself. It was obvious from his tone and manner that he could not understand how I, a fellow Jew, could have asked such a question. The quarrel with the AmericanJewish Congress over the Syrianstory was still a fresh memory, and I found myself thinking: Good Lord, here we go again. I did try to explainmy position. I told Beginthat as the sonof Jewish immigrants, I had been brought up to believe in Zionism, and I remained firmly committed to the existence of Israel. I said I had trees planted in Israel to honor the memory of my parents, and that ina number of other private ways, I had givenmy support to Israeli causes. However, I couldn’t allow my personal feelings to in-hibit my work as a reporter, and since I had heard other Israelis make the connectionbetweenthe Irguncommandos of the 1940s and the PLO guerrillas of the 1970s, I considered my question fair and legitimate.

Begin wasn’t buying any of that, and as our argument grew more heated, we must have started shouting at each other. The next thing I knew, the door to his office flew open and in walked Israel’s defense minister, Ezer Weizman. He greeted us with a roguish grin and said,

“I understand that the prime minister is having a fistfight with an American reporter.” That broke the tension, and Weizman, sensing that I had no desire to continue the squabble, suggested that he and I repair to my hotel for a drink. I eagerly accepted his offer.

At the bar in the Jerusalem Hilton, we struck up a conversation

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with a couple of Israeli reporters, and I couldn’t resist regaling them with a lively account of my encounter with Begin. I probably was not as discreet as I should have been, but I was still somewhat agitated.

Anyway, a few days later, an Israeli weekly magazine published a cover story on the incident, which was boldly illustrated with a full-page photograph of Begin and me facing each other in a classic pose of confrontation. I was later told that when Begin saw the article, which featured some pungent quotes from me, he blew his stack all over again.

Although neither Begin nor I had any way of knowing it at the time, our little scrap occurred just as he was on the verge of getting caught up in a historical drama of major proportions. On November 9, 1977—three days after my interview with Begin was broadcast on 60 Minutes—the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, dropped a diplomatic bombshell. In a speech before the Egyptian parliament, he said that his desire for a permanent peace in the Middle East was so strong that he “would go even to the home of the Israelis, to the Knesset, to discuss peace with them.” That dramatic move was a stunning break with precedent; never before had an Arab head of state come up with such a bold proposal. The ball was now in Menachem Begin’s court, and to his great credit, the reputed hard-liner responded in kind. Two days later, he announced his plan to invite Sadat to Israel to talk about an enduring peace, and on November 19, 1977, the president of Egypt stepped off a plane in Jerusalem, thus becoming the first Arab head of state to visit Israel.

That breakthrough was a step toward the most encouraging development to take place in the Middle East since Israel had joined the family of nations in 1948. One month later, Begin visited Sadat in Cairo, and in September of the following year, they both accepted President Carter’s invitation to engage in face-to-face talks at Camp

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David, where, after twelve days of arduous and finely tuned negotiations, they agreed on a series of accords that provided the framework for an official peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

On two earlier trips to the Middle East in 1977, I had done stories on Egypt and the many problems that beset its president. During the second of those visits to Cairo, our focus was on the country’s economic woes (we called the piece “Sadat’s Troubled Egypt”), and I made a point of talking to some of Sadat’s critics. When I interviewed the man himself, I said to him, “You know what they say about you?

They say you’re a politician, but you’re no economist. You’re a first-rate foreign minister, but a bad chancellor of the exchequer.”

Instead of disputing that assessment, Sadat candidly conceded that “we are really suffering from a very acute economic problem.

This is a fact.” It was clear from his somber tone that no one was more acutely aware than he of how difficult conditions were in Sadat’s troubled Egypt, and I closed our report with this observation: “It is to forestall an explosion from inside his country or from outside that Sadat labors so mightily these days for peace. . . . The peace he needs to give his country’s economy a chance to flourish. The peace he may just need, in fact, to keep his job.”

We aired that story in August 1977, and three months later, when Sadat returned to Cairo from his historic visit to Jerusalem, cheering crowds gave him a hero’s welcome. Although many of his Arab allies had denounced Sadat’s overture to Israel as an act of treachery, his daring peace initiative had clearly captured the hearts of his countrymen. It was the Egyptians, after all, who had borne the brunt of all the wars with Israel, and so it should have come as no surprise that a vast majority of them shared their president’s fervent hope for a formal peace treaty.

In March 1978, I flew to Cairo to do another 60 Minutes story

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on Sadat. His diplomatic triumph had greatly enhanced his stature and news value, and I wanted to give our viewers a more detailed portrait of the man. We talked about his early life and career and how, as a young army officer, he had been one of the leaders of the revolution in 1952 that overthrew the decadent regime of King Farouk and later drove the British occupiers out of Egypt. Sadat went on to serve as chief deputy to Gamal Abdel Nasser during his long reign as Egypt’s ruler, and I had been told that Sadat was then disdained by some Egyptians as an obsequious bureaucrat who always treated Nasser with fawning deference. In an effort to get under Sadat’s skin a bit, I asked him if he was aware that he was often referred to in those days as “Nasser’s poodle, Nasser’s Mr. Yes-Yes.”

Puffing furiously on his pipe, Sadat managed a wan smile and said, “Yes, yes, I know. I know it.”

I then brought up the general reaction in Cairo in 1970, when Nasser died and Sadat succeeded him. “No one expected you to survive. . . . Everybody said, ‘Nasser’s poodle will last six weeks.’ ”

“Four to six weeks,” he corrected me with a merry laugh.

This was my third interview with Anwar Sadat in under a year, and I must confess that by this time I had joined the growing ranks of his admirers. I not only respected him as a statesman and a leader of his people; he had won me over with his personal charm and warm sense of humor. At the time of our 1978 interview, he seemed in particularly good spirits, and since he had rolled with the punches so graciously when I alluded to “Nasser’s poodle,” I decided to bring up something I had read in his autobiography, In Search of Identity. In a chapter that dealt with the Yom Kippur War, Sadat recalled a snag in the discussions to return the bodies of Israeli soldiers to their homeland. “Applying the Jewish principle of putting a price on everything,”