NO one in the world knows, save a few pilots, Israels very top military brass, its prime minister and a few other ministers. No one in Israel knows, no one outside Israel knows. The Jewish people is shuddering in fear. The Psalms flow in anguish and abundance around the world.
Also: imagine this pre-cell phone, pre-email world. This is 1967. June 5, 1967, to be exact, the day of the beginning of the Six Day War. Nobody has the instant scoop.
The beginning was the destruction of the entire Egyptian Air Force in a surprise Israeli attack, the Israeli planes flying so close to the ground that people on the ground could discern the Jewish stars on the bottom of the planes.
This will be a short but intense, costly and difficult war. Successes are not to be disseminated. News blackout is the word.
Somehow, Menachem Begin, leader of the opposition who, for the first time in Israeli history, has agreed to form a national unity government, stumbles into the Tel Aviv bureau of the prime minister the normally gravel-voiced, colorless, bland, methodical, competent, anything-but-effusive Levi Eshkol.
Eshkol is exuberant. He can hardly control himself, for all his joy. Mir darfen machen a shechecheyanu, he says in the favored Yiddish of his childhood.
What is it? Begin wants to know.
Eshkol tells him what happened in the space of a few minutes, that morning, to the Egyptian Air Force.
An unbelievable sense of relief washes over Begin, as it had washed over Eshkol.
This isnt even the anecdote I want to get to.
Begin takes off for Jerusalem. The national unity government is to be sworn in that night. Forget getting to Jerusalem in due time. The highway is clogged with military vehicles. Begin, a major minister is scratching along a few miles an hour. Finally his driver loses patience, hits the shoulder and then veers off onto an alternative route, winding, narrow, certainly not a highway.
Soon Begins car passes another and Begin shouts out to his driver to flag it down. Begin hurtles out of the car, reaches the car housing his longtime political enemy Golda Meir. She looks up at him through the window, startled. What is going on? Begin gushes, right there in the middle of nowhere, the cars stopped on the road, that Israel has destroyed the Egyptian Air Force. Whatever else happens, the Jewish state is no longer in deathly peril.
And Begin has an urgent idea, which later that night he persuades the new national unity government to adopt: reunite Jerusalem.
THIS is the kind of anecdote that The Prime Ministers is filled with. The story above is not a select nugget from the book, subtitled An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership. This nugget is one of thousands of vivid recollections and revelations.
The author is Yehuda Avner, upon whom have fallen two blessings of fate: one, his access to Levi Eshkol, Yitzhak Rabin, Golda Meir and Menachem Begin (and other notables, such as Harry S Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Henry Kissinger); and, two, his life-long habit of keeping detailed diaries. He was these four prime ministers official English speech writer and note taker.
Now in his eighties, Avner, originally a British teenager who came on aliyah in 1947, has collected his notes, diaries, speeches and recollections into a gripping, absorbing, cannot-put-it-down intimate remembrance of these four Israeli leaders.
It is not just the telling anecdote, the eyebrow-raising revelation that Avner provides. It is, as well, penetrating insight into events and their actors, plus belly-laugh humor and heart-slashing sadness.
ON the side of humor, Avner recounts his initial experience with Levi Eshkol, a down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth, Yiddish-speaking socialist, for whom Avner initially provides exactly the wrong kind of speech.
Try this. It is Avners first stab at a major speech for Eshkol, who is addressing the creme-de-la-creme of British Jewish leadership:
Those of you who know our Jewish State know that there is much about Israeli life that is at once grotesque and heroic. We have a penchant for hyperbole and wild passions visionary firebrands, biblical diehards, Tel Aviv high jinks, secular zealots and, of course, party dogmatists. It is hard to find a footing in the soft moss of composure in our land.
Stam narshkeitin utter nonsense growled the prime minster as he struck out the paragraph with his heavy fountain pen. Cant you write in plain English?
The problem is, Avner and Eshkol didnt have enough time to review the entire speech before Eshkol was scheduled to deliver it. So up goes Eshkol to the podium, unprepared, Avners manuscript in hand.
He cant read.
He cant get through it.
Here is the leader of Israel addressing the Jewish leadership of one of Israels most important allies, stumbling, bumbling, leaning across the podium to his speech writer, right in the middle of the speech, calling out in Hebrew, What is this supposed to mean?
Avner: I cringed in mortification as audible rustlings, murmurings, titters, nods, and nudges spread from table to table.
Suddenly, Eshkol yelps: What I just said isnt true.
The audience is baffled.
The very opposite is the case, declares Eshkol, as if in private debate with his speech writer.
But it is not private!
Eshkol then tosses the written text to the winds, goes off on his own (syntax be damned, as Avner put it), telling the audience how each new immigrant is not a burden but an indispensable asset to the future growth of Israels economy.
By the time he is finished, he in his own words, awkward and jumbled yet carrying the tone of his society is greeted with a standing ovation.
Boychik, Eshkol said afterward to his novice speech writer, if you dont stop writing your fancy-schmancy nonsense and start writing what I want to say in the way I want to say it, Ill find somebody else who will.
Chalk one up for patience, for Levi Eshkol.
And its a good thing he did.
Otherwise, Avner would not have had his career and we would not have this precious and illuminating memoir.
Yes, Prime Minister, Avner mumbled after his dressing down, eating, as Avner would put it, a piece of humble pie he would spend a lifetime digesting.
HUMOR and pain, irredeem-?able. ? It is 1948, in Jerusalem. The city is under siege. Not enough water or food is getting through. Vegetables are virtually not to be had. Then there is the siege within the siege the Old City of Jerusalem. It has been reduced to some 300 Jewish residents. The Arabs are closing in. The defenders are too few. The Jewish Quarter is shrinking inexorably. Ammunition is used up. A massacre looms.
One young idealist Esther Cailingold, a teacher from England, all of 22, is in Jerusalem under siege, and wants to find a way to get into the Old City, to help save it. She finds a way in, somehow.
On the day the white flag was raised, Esther Cailingold was killed.
Right before that, she scribbled a letter to her family in London, never knowing if it would reach its destination. Eventually, it did, Avner tells us. And he tells us what she wrote (he knows, because he eventually married Esther Cailingolds sister):
Dear Mummy and Daddy, and Everybody,
If you get this at all, it will be, I suppose, typical of all my hurried, messy letters. I am writing it to beg of you that whatever may have happened to me, you will make the effort to take it in the spirit that I want and to understand that for myself I have no regrets. We have had a bitter fight: I have tasted of Gehenom but it has been worthwhile because I am quite convinced that the end will see a Jewish state and the realization of our longings.
I shall be only one of many who fell in sacrifice, and I was urged to write this because one in particular was killed today who meant a great deal to me. Because of the sorrow I felt, I want you to take it otherwise to remember that we were soldiers and had the great and noblest cause to fight for. G-d is with us, I know, in His Holy City, and I am proud and ready to pay the price it may cost us to reprieve it.
Dont think I have taken unnecessary risks. That does not pay when manpower is short. I hope you may have a chance of meeting any of my co-fighters who survive if I do not, and that you will be pleased and not sad of how they talk of me. Please, please, do not be sadder than you can help. I have lived my life fully if briefly, and I think this is the best way short and sweet. Very sweet it has been here in our own land.
I hope you shall enjoy from Mimi and Asher the satisfaction you missed in me. Let it be without regrets, and then I shall be happy. I am thinking of you all, every single one of you in the family and am full of pleasure at the thought that you will, one day, very soon I hope, come and enjoy the fruits of that for which we are fighting.
Much, much love, be happy and remember me in happiness.
Shalom and Lehitraot,
Your loving Esther.
AND what did Menachem Begin do on his first day in office?
Menachem Begin represented a revolution. For 29 years, the Labor Party had ruled Israel, invincible. It seemed destined to be the government-forever. In 1977, right-wing Menachem Begin stunned Israel (and much of the rest of the world), toppling the Labor Party.
Israel would never be the same.
On Begins first day, there is a major military confrontation in Lebanon. Begin has to deal with it. And there is a letter from the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. It is friendly, but subtly demanding of Begin that he change his stripes, or so it seems to Begin. How can he answer the letter in a way that is full of friendship and gratitude to the US, and firm, all at once?
Amidst all this, a congratulatory call perhaps one of hundreds comes in from Reb Refael. Picture that knock on your front door from a traveling collector for this or the other Jewish charity. The prime minister of the State of Israel, on his very first day in office, no less, is not immune.
Put him through, Begin tells his assistant.
Whereupon follows the warmest conversation between Menachem Begin, inheritor of violence in Lebanon and of pressure from the US, and one Reb Refael. The conversation goes on for some time.
Reb Refael is Rabbi Raphael Benjamin Levine, head of a small yeshiva in Jerusalem, and son of the late Rabbi Aryeh Levine. Though Rabbi Aryeh Levine never uttered a political preference and never joined a political party, he ministered to the British-held prisoners of Begins anti-British group, the Irgun, every single Sabbath, rain or shine, without pay, for years.
Begin and his loyal members of the Irgun had their spirits bolstered by the loyal Rabbi Aryeh Levine.
Begin repaid loyalty with loyalty. He instructed Reb Refael to send the utility bills for the yeshiva to him personally; he would take care of them. He then phoned up Sir Isaac Wolfson in Britain, on the spot, and amidst trading good wishes for the future, asked Wolfson to free up, if he could, a sizable donation for Reb Refaels yeshiva.
Try turning down a prime minister of Israel, on his first day in office, no less.
Your job is to study, Begin told Reb Refael. Leave the rest to us.
That is what Begin did on his first day in office.
This is the quality of the stories you get about Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and many others in The Prime Ministers.
Avner digested his humble pie well indeed, to all of our benefit.
P.S. Dont miss how Levi Eshkol opposed by Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara talked a very reluctant LBJ into selling Israel 50 F-3 Phantoms (the most advanced fighter aircraft then available) after France cut off arms deliveries to Israel, and the USSR built up Arab forces astronomically.
Eshkols discussion with LBJ was a masterpiece of feint, stubbornness, politeness and grace of both restraint and going for the jugular.
For preserving that historical piece alone, Yehuda Avner has placed us all in his debt.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
