The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (16 page)

Mustering my last shreds of dignity, I followed him to the door of the official residence, where he snapped to attention and gave me a whirling salute as I walked inside.

I was ushered into a red-carpeted parlor upstairs, where the two prime ministers were sitting by a grand marble fireplace under a portrait of a man attired in the uniform of an eighteenth-century admiral. Surrounded by their aides, they were exchanging small talk while a maid in a black dress and a lace collar poured tea with fastidious care from a silver teapot. To the raised eyebrows of Adi Yaffe, I planted myself as inconspicuously as I could on a chair by the door, and flipped open my pad to take notes.

“In my view, the main essentials of a successful prime minister are lots of sleep and a sense of history,” Harold Wilson was saying genially to Levi Eshkol, in his rich northern accent. “Take this old house, for example. It’s not the quietest of places to sleep in. It originally goes back to the sixteen-eighties. In 1732, I believe it was, King George the Second offered it to our first prime minister, Robert Walpole, but Walpole didn’t like it. It was an uncomfortable place, poorly constructed on boggy soil, just like my Labor Party is today
–
shaky, unstable, and noisy.”

“Not as noisy as mine,” laughed Eshkol. “Put three Israelis in a room and you’ll have four political parties.”

The two men were jousting like the old socialist comrades they were, Harold Wilson looking very dapper in a powder blue shirt, pinstriped suit and bright red tie
–
nothing like your typical British prime minister. I had learned from a briefing paper that he was not yet fifty, came from a humble background, and had risen through scholarships to become one of the youngest Oxford dons of the century.

“Now, for our getting down to business,” he went on with an impish smile, “I have to warn you, I’m a thoroughbred Yorkshireman, and we Yorkshiremen are a blunt lot. We’re straight-talking, open, honest, and careful with our money. So, you and I will talk to each other as good friends must, candidly and honestly, and say exactly what’s on our minds. And I know what’s on
your
mind, Mr. Eshkol
–
this Syrian mischief over the Jordan River. Tell me about it.”

Wilson’s expression stilled and became somber as, for the next hour, while one sipped English and the other Russian tea, the two men earnestly mulled over the dangerous implications of the Syrian Jordan River diversion scheme.

“We’ve just completed what we call our National Water Carrier,” Eshkol summed up grimly. “And now that it’s up and running, the Syrians are doing their level best to dry us out. No country in the world would tolerate such premeditated aggression. If they go too far, things could easily escalate into full-scale war.”

“A hot potato if ever there was one,” remarked Wilson, puffing on his pipe. And then, “Tell me again, where exactly are the Syrians digging?”

Adi Yaffe jumped up and unfurled a map on the coffee table between the two men. Bending low over it, Eshkol pointed out two Jordan River tributaries tucked just inside the Syrian border, on the Golan Heights
–
the Banias and the Hazbani.

“If they succeed in diverting these,” said Eshkol, “they will deprive the Jordan of about half of its annual flow. And that, as far as we are concerned, would be an act of war.”

“My, my!” said the British prime minister, familiar enough with Middle East complexities to display genuine concern. “Is there nothing you can do to stop this, short of war?”

A parade of emotions raced across Levi Eshkol’s face. “We are trying our best
–
our very best. We are using our guns to zone in on their earth-moving equipment
–
tractors and dredgers
–
without inflicting casualties. We want to hit their equipment to bring them to their senses. But who knows? They are retaliating, shelling our villages in the Hula Valley from their Golan Heights above. The engagements are sometimes fierce. They could easily escalate.”

What he was really saying was that in the Middle East, butterfly wings can become typhoons, but Mr. Wilson was clearly not inclined to see it that way. He eyed a memo lying in front of him
–
composed, presumably, by his Foreign Office
–
on which he had made margin notes. With great solemnity, he sermonized, “I’ve no doubt you will display a responsible attitude and show maximum restraint to prevent this situation from getting out of hand. The last thing we need now is another fireball in the Middle East.” And then, with a gust of goodwill, “I shall inform Parliament about this. I shall send a warning shot across the Syrian bow, to make plain our dissatisfaction with Damascus’s behavior.”

But when the Israeli prime minister raised the possibility of
acquiring
British Chieftain tanks so as to deter the enemy before it became too late, pointing out that Britain was already supplying such heavy armor to Arab countries on a considerable scale, the British prime minister suddenly looked visibly uncomfortable. Raising his hands in a dramatic gesture of reassurance, he began to speak elliptically about “silver linings” and “military balances,” and “Israeli pluck,” and “never letting an old socialist comrade down.” And then, having exhausted his reassurances, he escorted his guest to the front door, where he bid him a fond farewell, waving a boisterous goodbye for the cameras to catch. Responding, Mr. Eshkol returned the wave with a forced smile and, entering his car, muttered to us in Yiddish under his breath, in a voice full of foreboding, “Mir ret, mir ret und keiner hert nisht zu ! ” [One talks and one talks, and nobody listens].10

The Syrian water diversion stratagem continued to menace Israel like a floating mine, and by the late spring of 1967, the situation had deteriorated so drastically that war correspondents began descending on Israel in droves. With mounting audacity, provocation followed provocation as Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser made common cause with Syria, moving his vast army and air force into the Sinai, ousting the United Nations peacekeeping forces, blockading Israel’s Red Sea port Eilat by closing the narrow Straits of Tiran, and signing a war pact with King Hussein that put the Jordanian Army under Egyptian command. Other Arab states quickly adhered to the alliance, which Nasser told cheering Egyptians was designed to “totally annihilate the State of Israel once and for all.”

Even before this dire peril, Israel’s mood had been low. The nation was suffering from an unprecedented economic slump that put tens of thousands out of work. Record numbers had left the country, and the macabre joke of the day told of a sign at Lod
–
now Ben-Gurion
–
Airport, reading, “Will the last one to leave please switch off the lights.”

As enemy forces mobilized in the north, the south, and the east, and mobs in Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus howled “Death to the Jews!” and “Throw the Jews into the sea!” people spoke with chilling seriousness of the possibility of total physical annihilation.

The Government Press Office, straining under the weight of processing accreditations to the seemingly endless flow of arriving war
correspondents
, asked me to pitch in, translating official communiqués and giving pro forma briefings in my spare time. This was what brought me to the King David Hotel’s coffee shop on the afternoon of 27 May, to keep an appointment with two correspondents, one from the
Houston Chronicle
, and the other from the London
Guardian
. They were interested in an overall review and a quick tour of the shattered frontier zone that had sundered Jerusalem’s heart in the battles of the 1948 War of Independence, and which, ever since, had been a looming front line, with East Jerusalem occupied by Jordan.

The coffee shop was packed with journalists sitting around like vultures, munching on peanuts, pretzels and potato chips, waiting for the war to begin. They ranged in age from their twenties to their sixties, and traded gossip at the tops of their voices in German, French, Spanish and English. By the looks of them, a good many might well have been plucked straight from an Ivy League yearbook. Most were casually dressed in sport shirts and jeans, or safari suits, and their easy chitchat made it plain they had met before, in other war zones. The hum of the place gave it the air of a theater bar crammed with critics waiting for the curtain to rise.

And rise it did.

The
idf
reserves were fully mobilized, bringing normal life to a standstill and transforming usually bustling thoroughfares into eerie war zones. As we exited the King David Hotel, into St. Julian’s Way
–
now King David Street
–
an air raid siren went off. It was only a test, but it prompted the few pedestrians in sight to scurry into the nearest sandbagged doorways. Posters on the shutters of the closed shops advertised advice about civil defense, bomb shelters and first aid. As we reached the street corner, a military policeman on a motorcycle gruffly stopped us to allow a number of armored vehicles to turn the bend leading to the border area where Israeli west Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem met.

There, rough concrete walls and high wooden barriers had been raised to protect pedestrians and traffic from the eyes of Arab sniper nests, observation posts, and gun positions perched on the Old City’s ramparts and on its adjacent rooftops, some of which were only yards away. One such anti-sniper wall blocked Mamilla Road which, until the 1948 war, had been a graceless yet boisterous thoroughfare leading to the Old City’s Jaffa Gate. It had once been lined with a hodgepodge of small shops, and teemed with pushcarts, loaded donkeys, and Arab and Jewish vendors and shoppers. Now it was a derelict border street, strewn with rubble, trash, and the strange dark weeds that always seem to sprout in the cracks of destroyed places.
idf
soldiers in webbed helmets and battle harness, some scanning the scene with binoculars, stood in the shadow of the towering concrete wall, and as we approached they waved us back, one of them yelling, “Snipers! You might be spotted.”

So we retraced our steps along St. Julian’s Way to Yemin Moshe, also a stone’s throw from the King David Hotel.

Yemin Moshe was a hillside quarter of red-roofed, chunky stone dwellings incongruously topped by a windmill, facing the Israeli-held Mount Zion and the Arab-held south-west corner of the Old City. This neighborhood had been virtually abandoned since the 1948 war, and it gave off the distinctive odor of dilapidation and decay. Its lower reaches were strung with thick entanglements of barbed wire festooned with the irretrievable refuse of no-man’s land
–
spiked newspapers, rags and other filthy debris. Beyond the barbed wire was a no-man’s land prowled by jackals and cats.

Adjoining the lane overlooking Yemin Moshe was an olive grove [now the Inbal Hotel and Liberty Bell Park] where an open jeep was parked. Two dusty soldiers in the wrinkled uniforms of reservists were sitting in the vehicle, and two more were leaning on it, rifles slung over their shoulders, talking to a civilian. He was a man in his fifties and was immaculately dressed.

“Who’s that?” asked the
Houston Chronicle
fellow who, in contrast to his drably attired English colleague, was fitted out in full western regalia
–
cowboy boots, blue jeans, western shirt, a string tie, and a Camel cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Menachem Begin,” I said, “Leader of the Opposition.”

“Well kiss my rusty dusty, so it is. Hi there, Mr. Begin, mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Presently, presently,” Begin called back. He continued his conversation with the soldiers for a few more minutes and then, shaking the hand of each in turn, stood stiffly as if to attention, while the driver revved the engine, released the brake, and roared off.

“Inspecting the troops, Mr. Begin?” asked the
Guardian
’s journalist, with an air of professional impudence.

Begin squeezed his face into something resembling a smile, and said, “Let me say, simply, I’m familiarizing myself with the lay of the land.”

“And how is your land today?” asked the Englishman darkly.

“Beautiful as always,” sparred Begin.

“Beautiful, but critically imperiled, wouldn’t you say?” said the Texan, aiming straight for the solar plexus. “Your tiny land is outmanned, outgunned, out-planed, out-tanked, and outflanked. How on earth are you going to survive the combined Arab onslaught Nasser is preparing?” He was staring intently at Begin as if awaiting some exciting spectacle.

“People all over the world are demonstrating their passionate support for you,” added the English journalist. “Nobel laureates are lining up to sign petitions in sympathy for your plight. There is a fear this could be a second Holocaust. Could it be, Mr. Begin?”

Begin was already shaking his head, but the Texan plowed on: “Washington is asking Eshkol to hold back, to sweat it out until President Johnson rallies international support to break the blockade of Eilat and remove the
causus belli
for war. What say you to that?”

Defiance and melancholy harmonized strangely in Menachem Begin’s voice when he said, “Gentlemen, what you call international support is, I fear, illusory. It has the ring more of compassion than support
–
compassion for a nation assumed to be on its deathbed. Well, let me assure you”
–
this with quiet emphasis
–
“Israel is not on its deathbed. We do not want war. We hate war. Premier Eshkol is doing his best to avoid war. But if war is thrust upon us, the Arabs will be hurt more than we will.”

The journalists were scribbling, flipping page after page as the Opposition leader drove on. “The other day I told the Knesset that Israel must speak with one voice and with total clarity, warning our enemies of the dire consequences for them of their intended aggression. That, in itself, might bring them to their senses.”

The Englishman looked up and asked, “Isn’t it a bit late for words?”

“It is never too late. You may recall the famous story about your fellow countryman, Sir Edward Grey. He was the British foreign secretary on the eve of World War One. It was from his room that, as he put it, he observed ‘the lamps going out all over Europe.’ Well, at the war’s end, analysts queried whether Edward Grey had been sufficiently outspoken in forewarning Germany of the consequences of its aggressive designs. Had he spoken up with greater clarity, more explicitly on England’s behalf, that terrible war might never have happened. I told this to our Knesset. I told my colleagues that in order to prevent the situation from deteriorating into all-out war we, Israel, must speak up loud and clear so that our enemies will be under no illusion as to our resolve and capacity to protect our women and children, come what may.” Then, peering at his watch, “Oh dear, forgive me gentlemen, I must go. I have to return the car.”

He pointed with his chin to a dilapidated Peugeot half-hidden in the shade of an olive tree and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “I’ve no car of my own, you see, and this one belongs to our Knesset faction. One of my colleagues is waiting to use it
–
so forgive me.”

Walking to the vehicle, his gaze rested momentarily on the decaying masonry of Yemin Moshe, now tinted gold by the long shadows of the late afternoon sun. Pensively he said, “Gentlemen, what a beautiful city this could be without all that ugly barbed wire dividing it,” and he folded himself into the seat next to the driver and was off.

Early the following morning I traveled by bus to Tel Aviv to keep an appointment with another clutch of journalists lodging at a beachfront hotel. The bus disgorged its passengers
–
many of them reservists
–
at the central bus station, from which I continued by foot. As I drew near the hotel, I caught sight of a hearse pulling up at the gateway of a small park overlooking the beach. Out of it tumbled half a dozen
black-caftaned
, pie-hatted, bearded members of the
chevra kadisha
–
the burial society
–
one of whom, the driver, I recognized. He had been a member of the Jerusalem
chevra kadisha
team for as long as I could remember. He stood out because he was older than the rest, was a head taller, had a physique like an ox, and skin so weathered it looked like leather.

Immediately, two of the undertakers began pacing the park’s grassy area, calling out distances to a third, who wrote down the measurements in a notebook. The other three began striding around the park’s periphery crying out incantations in a whining howl, and while they were thus engaged the brawny driver stood leaning against the bonnet of his hearse, twirling his sidelocks and humming a Chasidic melody, as if this sort of thing was everyday fare.

A sudden shock of black premonition shot through me. Anxiously, I asked him what it was they were doing, and he coolly replied that his Jerusalem
chevra kadisha
had been instructed to help the Tel Aviv
chevra kadisha
consecrate city parks for cemeteries. Rabbis all over the country were consecrating parks for cemeteries. He himself had seen a warehouse stockpiled with tons of nylon rolls for wrapping bodies. Timber yards had been instructed to ready coffin boards.

“We’re preparing for ten, twenty thousand dead,” he remarked in an expressionless voice. “Some say forty thousand
–
who knows?”

I remonstrated with him not to spread such pernicious rumors, but as I continued on my way to the hotel, my every nerve leaped and shuddered.

The journalists smelled a rat immediately. There were half a dozen of them sitting around a lobby table, bored stiff. One of them, a woman with an Irish accent, shot me a look that could freeze water, and said, “You’re nervous. You
really are
nervous. Why?”

“Performance anxiety,” I blustered. “I’m new to the job.”

“So, what do you have that’s new to tell us?” asked a paunchy fellow in a linen suit. “Anything happening we don’t know about?”

I extracted the official briefing paper that had been handed to me that morning, and read it out verbatim: “President Johnson has phoned Prime Minister Eshkol and has promised international action to lift the blockade of Eilat. Foreign Minister Abba Eban is to meet the president in Washington this afternoon when it is expected he will be given details of the plan to send an international flotilla through the Tiran Straits that lead to Eilat, thus breaking the Egyptian blockade.”

“That’s old news,” snapped an upper echelon type, contempt in his eyes. “Our own sources have given us that already.”

“There’s not a chance in hell Johnson will be able to put together an international convoy,” piped up a small thin man with a flashy bow tie. “He’s asked eighteen nations to sign on and only four
–
Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands
–
are on board. It’s a non-starter. Johnson is just one big hulking Texan wishing he could help you out but can’t. He’s too bogged down in Vietnam. The whole thing is pie in the sky.”

Squiggling in my seat I managed one more sentence: “I’m instructed also to say that Israel has received assurances from the president that on no account will he compromise Israel’s national security.”

“Bullshit!” spat one.

“You’ve come all the way from Jerusalem just to tell us that?” said another. “I don’t believe a word you say. I think your people are hiding something. I think you guys are going to jump the gun, fire the first shot, and go to war.”

“I’m not authorized to say anything more,” I stammered, and made a hurried, graceless exit, leaving my briefing paper behind.

Three hours later, back at my desk in Jerusalem, still shaken and dismayed, I was sitting slumped, staring out of the window at the summer flowers, when the intercom rang like an alarm bell. It was the prime minister’s secretary, telling me Eshkol wanted to see me. Assuming a calm exterior, I walked down the corridor into the elegantly carpeted hallway leading to the outer office of the prime minister’s suite.

“He wants you to handle his letters of support,” said the secretary, immersed in her typing. “They’re coming in by the sack-load.”

Two cartons the size of tea chests stood at the side of her desk, filled with envelopes.

When I walked into the premier’s room, his head was bent low over a document, but it was easy to see that he looked more wan and sallow than I had ever seen him before.