The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (66 page)

“By all means,” said Reagan. “Go ahead.”

Sharon, frequently called “the Bulldozer” because of his girth, his autocratic style and his military daring, stood up, and referring to a set of maps, proceeded to give an elaborate presentation of the ways in which Israel and America might cooperate strategically. Weinberger, always extremely sensitive about America’s relationships with major Arab countries
–
most notably Saudi Arabia, with which he had done much business before joining the administration
–
reddened at Sharon’s swashbuckling style. Others on the American side exchanged uneasy glances, but Sharon plowed on imperviously, proposing what was essentially a wide-ranging mutual defense treaty. For his part, Begin, sensing the growing uneasiness around the table, suggested that the president authorize the two defense ministers to confer about finding a mutually acceptable formula.

“Good idea,” said Haig.

“So why don’t you two fellas get together and see if you can work something out in this area?” Reagan said to Weinberger and Sharon.

Weinberger seemed dumbfounded. It was clear that he was seething, stuck with a presidential request to deliberate with a man he could not abide, about an agreement he totally opposed.
82

The next day, the prime minister was interviewed by Israel Radio:

Question:
You’ve described your meeting with the president as highly successful, telling us you’ve reached an agreement in principle for a far-reaching memorandum of understanding on strategic cooperation. How far-reaching does it go?

Answer:
I hear some people back home are saying that the whole strategic security cooperation memorandum will boil down to a bit of stockpiling and the construction of a few hospitals. That’s not so. We are talking about genuine cooperation. We haven’t signed anything yet, but we have come to an agreement in principle on the matter. The details are many and very serious. We are talking about true cooperation on land, at sea, and in the air.

At the very same hour that the prime minister was saying this on Israeli Radio, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was telling his senior aides, “I want no publicity on this matter. I want as little said as possible. The Israelis, of course, are going to do just the opposite. They’ll want a binding document with lots of detail and publicity. We’re not going to subscribe to anything like that at all. Whatever we’ll sign will be so general and so empty of content that we’ll be able to defend it in the Arab world. And I want the negotiations to be held right here in Washington. Is that clear? I intend to control the whole process personally myself.”83

And control it he did.

Shortly after the preliminary talks, and within a matter of weeks, the Israeli defense ministry presented the Pentagon negotiators with a twenty-nine page booklet containing a sweeping list of military cooperation proposals. This spawned further back-and-forth negotiations which, in the words of one American participant, “was like being in a washing machine where sometimes things went very smoothly and the water was warm. Then suddenly cold water would come out of nowhere and you’d be turned the other way and get hit across the head with some unexpected action or development. It was a funny time: On the one hand, things were done at the president’s direction that were unprecedented, but then they would be undone by his secretary of defense.”
84

Soon enough, Sharon became so disenchanted he wanted to wash his hands of the whole concept, but Begin insisted he persist. He sought a symbol of the alliance, if nothing more. What he got in the end was a brief, seven-hundred-word memorandum of understanding, that contained little that was new or substantive. It was signed in November, 1981, by Sharon and Weinberger without fanfare, at an informal dinner at the National Geographic Society in Washington. In what was a calculated resolve to play down the whole exercise, no press was invited, and the Pentagon did not even give its customary briefing to the media afterward. Nowhere are there photographs of Weinberger signing the agreement with Sharon.

Whatever misgivings Begin might have had regarding the watered-down version of the strategic cooperation agreement were swept aside by the devastating news which reached him at his home on the afternoon of 6 October 1981. His peace partner, President Anwar Sadat, was dead, mowed down at a Cairo military parade by Muslim fanatics.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” asked a shocked Begin, with a quick intake of breath. “Is it absolutely confirmed?” He was talking to General Poran, who had conveyed the news to him on the phone. I was sitting there rigid, my pen frozen mid-air, primed to continue the dictation for which the prime minister had summoned me to his residence.

Freuka’s answer was evidently not unequivocal, for Begin said, “I need full and final confirmation.” Then, to me, “Switch on the radio. See what the foreign stations are reporting.”

I began fiddling with the receiver on his desk, seeking a shortwave band. The Voice of America was saying that Sadat had been wounded, but was not in danger. Radio Monte Carlo was saying that two of Sadat’s bodyguards had been killed, but that he had been led away untouched. The
BBC
World Service, however, announced unambiguously that the president of Egypt had been assassinated.

Begin’s expression was as pained as though he himself had taken a bullet. “If the
BBC
announces it so categorically, it has to be true,” he said. And then, “Please connect me back to Freuka.”

“Freuka,” he said, in a commanding tone, “contact the chief of staff at once. We must be on full alert for any contingency. Who knows what’s going on in Cairo. It may be a coup.”

His military secretary evidently assured him that all precautions were well in hand, because Begin began to nod his head up and down, saying, “Good. Good. Good.”

And then, back to me, “I need to speak to Yechiel.”

Yechiel informed him that our ambassador to Cairo, Moshe Sasson, had finally been able to get through on the clogged Egyptian telephone lines, to report that he had witnessed the shooting, and that yes, Sadat was indeed dead.

“Tell him,” instructed Begin, “that he should tell the Egyptians that I wish to attend the funeral at the head of an official Israeli delegation.”

This thought seemed to have touched a nerve, as if the consequences of the catastrophe had only just now truly sunk in, for his features went suddenly taut and his face grayer as he heaved a tormented sigh, leaned heavily back in his chair, and murmured, “God knows what this will do to the peace treaty. In a few months we’re supposed to complete our final withdrawal in Sinai, and dismantle our settlements there.”

“Do you want to issue a statement of condolence?” I asked warily, for fear of upsetting him further.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he answered, and he dictated:

President Sadat was murdered by the enemies of peace. His decision to come to Jerusalem and the reception accorded him by the people, the Knesset and the government of Israel will be remembered as one of the great events of our time…. Unforgettable is the hour in which he, the President of Egypt and I, the Prime Minister of Israel, signed a treaty of peace between our two countries. During our many meetings a personal friendship was established between us. I have therefore lost not only a partner to peace, but also a friend…. We hope the peace process will continue, as we know Sadat would have wished.
85

But the question on everybody’s lips was, would the peace process indeed hold?

Menachem Begin found out when, the following Friday, he flew to Cairo with three of his senior ministers to attend the state funeral, much to the discomfort of the Egyptian authorities, who were saddled with a
twofold
predicament: the unprecedented security the visit necessitated, and the unprecedented protocol headache it posed because of the attendance of numerous Arab enemies of the Jewish State. Since the funeral took place on Saturday
–
Shabbat
–
the security headache was further compounded when the Israelis refused to ride in the armored vehicle meant to carry them from their accommodation to the funeral procession, insisting instead on walking. This was staggeringly courageous, and a significant physical effort on their part, and an unmitigated nightmare for the Egyptians.

Nevertheless, all passed off without mishap. Upon returning home on the Saturday night, a fatigued prime minister spoke to the waiting press. He told them that he and his colleagues had felt it vital to attend the funeral as a gesture of respect and tribute to his peace partner, and to personally express condolences to Mrs. Jehan Sadat and her family. “Those who came to console her,” he said, “were themselves consoled by her. To me and my colleagues she said, ‘I was always afraid that I would lose him. But God is stronger than those who killed him, and he gave his life for peace, and the peace shall continue.’”

“Mr. Prime Minister,” asked a journalist, “will the peace process indeed continue?”

Unhesitatingly, the prime minister answered, “I am convinced it will. I had a long private talk with President-designate Mubarak, and that is what we mainly talked about. There is no doubt in the minds of both of us that this is going to be a fact.”

“Mr. Prime Minister, there is a lot of concern in Israel about the stability of the regime in Egypt. You’ve just come back from there. Can you say anything about it?”

“There is no reason to believe in the instability of the regime. We found a bereaved government who had lost a great and respected leader. But we also found a strong government. In a couple of days’ time, the new president, Hosni Mubarak, will be sworn in.”

“Can you tell us something about your relationship with President-designate Mubarak?”

“Yes, I can. I can tell you of a very simple human and dramatic moment when we met. As we were walking toward each other we extended our hands to one another, and we both said simultaneously, and with absolute spontaneity, ‘Peace forever.’ Of course, one cannot guarantee anything forever. But what we meant was that we shall both endeavor to establish a peace that our children and grandchildren can inherit.”
86

On a November evening just weeks after the Sadat assassination, while moving between the basin and the towel rail in his bathroom, Menachem Begin slipped and fell. Excruciating pain shot through his body when he attempted to pick himself up. Wincing, he called to his wife for help, but she didn’t hear him because his bathroom radio was blaring so loud it drowned out his cries.

Fortuitously, soon afterward, Mrs. Begin had cause to go to the bathroom herself. Upon opening the door, she discovered her husband prostrate on the floor.

“Menachem, what happened?” she asked in alarm.

“I fell.”

“So get up.”

“I can’t.”

Their daughter, Leah, heard them talking and ran to the scene. “Daddy, what’s wrong?”

“I fell. I can’t get up. Just leave me to lie here a while and then I’ll try and raise myself again.”

After a brief consultation, wife and daughter decided they would gently ease him up as best they could, and carry him to his bed.

“Don’t,” grimaced the prime minister. “You don’t have the strength, and you’ll only make the pain worse. I might have broken something. Call the security guards. I’ll tell them how to carry me.”

Within minutes, two strapping young men hovered over the prime minister, awaiting his instructions.

“Place your hands under my back and lift me up in one go, and carry me to my bed,” he told them. “But try not to jerk any limbs, please.”

An ambulance took the prime minister to the Hadassah Hospital, where he was examined by three senior doctors, among them his personal physician, Dr. Mervyn Gotsman. X-rays confirmed he had a fractured left femur, and he was swiftly operated upon. Later, when it was over, firmly convinced that the public had a right to know every detail of their leader’s state of health, Begin penned an article describing in vivid detail the circumstances of his accident and what had gone through his mind while on the operating table, when the local anesthetic had already taken effect and a screen had been placed to hide his gaze from what was being done to his thigh:

The operation began. I did not feel it begin. I felt nothing. I spoke with Professor Gotsman who was by my side, and he talked to me. Suddenly, I heard the pounding of a hammer on a nail. The pounding increased. I felt nothing. I did not count, but I think I distinguished nine or ten intermittent hammer-blows. After a while they told me the operation would soon be over and that everything had gone well. A little while later they said it was done.
87

When the Prime Minister was discharged from hospital eighteen days later, a long convalescence began. Overnight, he seemed to have aged a decade. Sometimes the pain was so excruciating he could hardly function, and the medications he had to take tired him out. The only way he could get about was in a wheelchair. His desk was too uncomfortable for him to work at, so he ran the government from the couch in the corner of his office. Far worse than his own discomfort, though, was his anxiety about the country, and his family: The economy was in the dumps with no signs of an early improvement, some of his cabinet colleagues were getting him down because of petty squabbles over petty grievances, and most disquieting of all, his beloved wife Aliza, who had a long history of asthma attacks, had become very sick indeed.

So there he sat, alone in his apartment on a mid-December evening, steeped in a deep melancholy, brooding. But for the purr of the radio broadcasting the evening news, to which he was hardly listening, the room was as quiet as a crypt. Suddenly, however, his ears pricked up, when the announcer began quoting a report in a Kuwaiti newspaper on a statement by Syrian President Hafez al-Assad:

He will not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians deign to do so. There can be no question of making peace between Israel and the Arabs so long as the strategic balance plays into Israel’s hands. He called upon the Arab states to persist in their rejectionist stand until they attain the power necessary to impose peace conditions on Israel in the spirit of Arab demands.

Begin, dabbing at the sudden film of sweat on his forehead, meditated over this statement. The situation with Syria had already deteriorated greatly. The Syrians had all but taken over Lebanon, and had deployed their advanced ground-to-air missiles on its territory, hampering Israel’s freedom of the skies. Worse still, Yasser Arafat’s
PLO
had taken control of Lebanon’s south, from which it was mounting ever more deadly salvoes on northern Israel. This in turn was harming the Israel-U.S. relationship, because President Reagan had made plain his opposition to an Israeli incursion into Lebanon to clear the
PLO
out.

The prime minister picked up the phone to Yechiel Kadishai. “Yechiel, please find out the current population of the Golan Heights and call me straight back.”

A half hour later, Yechiel called back. “There are some ten to twelve thousand Druze living on the Golan, and a few thousand Israeli settlers, no more,” he reported.

Begin closed his eyes and forced himself to think through his pain. The Golan Heights rose a thousand feet over the farm-rich Hula Valley. Were it governed by a friendly neighbor, the Heights would be unimportant, but in enemy hands it was a strategic nightmare. Its capture in the Six-Day War had put an end to years of Syrian bombardment of the villages and towns below. When the Syrians almost recaptured the Heights during the Yom Kippur War, their forces had advanced within reach of the road to Haifa. Now, Hafez al-Assad, the most intractable and intransigent of all the Arab leaders, was saying for the umpteenth time that Syria would never recognize the Jewish State. So why wait? Why leave this sparsely populated, critically strategic plateau in a state of legal limbo under military administration when, by a simple act of legislation it could be incorporated under Israel’s sovereign law? And what better time to do it than now, when international attention was distracted by a crisis in Poland, where the communists were suppressing the anticommunist
Solidarity
movement, and by turmoil in Argentina, presaging the Falklands war with Britain.

Crisply, Begin set things in motion. “Yechiel,” he said, “arrange a special cabinet session first thing tomorrow morning here at the residence, and alert the Knesset Speaker to a possible legislative session later in the afternoon. Also, tell the attorney general to call me.”

Yechiel Kadishai, forever the perfect factotum, did not ask why.

“Gentlemen, I am pleased to propose to you the Law of the Golan Heights,” the prime minister told his astonished ministers the following morning. He was sitting propped up in his wheelchair, his ministers fanned out in a semicircle around him.

“The law of what?” asked one, thinking to himself the medication was beginning to affect Begin’s mind, so the minister was to later to tell me. Others were so perplexed by the grandness of this sudden ambition that they just sat there wondering what had gotten into their leader.

“After consultation with the attorney general, I wish to go over the language of what I term the Golan Law,” answered the prime minister. After citing the law’s proposed clauses, he proceeded to make his case:

“Following the renewal of our independence, the Syrians dominated the Golan Heights and demonstrated what they were capable of doing to our civilian population in the towns and villages below. The Syrians turned the lives of tens of thousands of our people into hell. Driven by their deep and abiding hatred, they would open fire from the Heights, instituting a reign of blood and terror throughout the area. Their targets were men, women, and children, and the attacks took their toll in killed and wounded. It was said in those days that the children born in that valley were ‘children of the shelters.’ Why? Because at every alert – and there were so many – they ran for their lives to the shelters. No wonder that in this matter of the Golan Heights the nation is virtually in consensus that Israel cannot come down from the Golan Heights and hand them back to the Syrians, ever.”