Behind Begin, on one of the bookshelves stacked with encyclopedias, was a photograph taken of himself in the disguise which had allowed him time and time again to slip through the streets of Tel Aviv under the noses of Britain’s soldiers: the fiat black hat, black frock coat and straggly beard of a rabbi.
He turned and walked slowly back to the desk at which he had taken the President’s phone call. He was dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt and a dark smallpatterned tie, a reflection of a taste in clothes which, like so many other things, stamped him as a man apart in a nation in which ties were an anathema and baggy corduroys were preferred to well-pressed trousers.
Once again he reviewed the notes he had scribbled on a yellow legal pad during the President’s phone call, punctuating his study with sips of the lukewarm tea flavored with Sucrasit, a sugar substitute, which had constituted his breakfast since his second heart attack. He uttered a silent prayer to the God of Israel. There was no question in Begin’s mind about the significance of the information the President had passed him: it represented the most fundamental shift in power relationships in the Middle East in his lifetime. The American President would perceive it, as he would have to, in terms of the horrible threat being posed to the people of New York. Begin’s duty was to perceive it in terms of the threat it posed to his people and their nation. It was mortal.
A crisis was at hand and Begin well knew that, in that crisis, he could not count on the friendship of the President. He had long ago sensed the rising tide of the animosity the American bore him. For his part, Begin did not dislike the President; rather, he mistrusted him, just as he mistrusted most non-Jews-and, indeed, a great many of his fellow Jews. He had, his political foes charged, a ghetto mentality, a narrow, ingrown attitude ill fitting a world leader, an inability to perceive a problem in anything other than its Jewish dimension.
That was the natural heritage of his formative years, his boyhood in the ghettos of Poland, his youth fighting as a Jewish partisan, his young manhood spent as an underground chieftain with a price on his head, struggling to drive the British from Palestine.
One vision had driven him during those years, the vision of his tutor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose writings lined his study. It was of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel; not the truncated little Israel that his foe, David BenGurion, had accepted like a crumb from the world’s table in 1947, but the real land of Israel, the Biblical land God had promised his forebears.
Consolidating Israel’s claims to the land captured in 1967, which he referred to as Judea and Samaria, and bringing his people peace: those had been the two fundamentally irreconcilable aims of Begin’s years as Israel’s leader. Both seemed far away this December morning. The complex, painfully arrived at Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement had proven to be a chimera. Its failure to come to grips with the Palestinian problem had left a raw and festering wound at the heart of the Middle East.
Instead of enjoying the benefits of the peace they so desperately wanted, his countrymen were living the most painful hours of their existence.
Inflation and the heaviest tax burden any people on the globe were forced to carry stifled their economic life. Immigration had dwindled to a trickle of the infirm and the elderly. Many more Jews left Israel each year than arrived. There seemed little promise left in the Promised Land.
Most important, Israel’s enemies, determined to destroy a peace settlement they believed to be a fraud, were gathering once again. Iraq and Syria were united, the Palestinians resurgent. Behind them, fanatical and militant, was the new Leftist Islamic Republic in Iran with its vast arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry seized in the overthrow of the Shah.
Turkey, where once Israel had counted many a valuable friend, was openly hostile. The oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf, menaced by the Leftist tides to the north, no longer dared to counsel caution to their Arab brothers.
The focal point on which all their ambitions converged was Jerusalem and the Land of Judea and Samaria. Qaddafi’s mad gesture seemed to Begin the inevitable culmination of the conflict that had opposed Arab and Jew for half a century.
Outside, he heard the rasp of approaching motorcycles. A few seconds later there was a knock on his door. His wife entered the study and placed on his desk a white envelope with a red slash across one corner. It was sealed and bore the words “Sodi Beyoter-Ultra Confidential.” Prepared a few blocks away in an austere, barracklike building identified only by a number, 28, and the sign “Center for Research and Policy Planning,” it contained the daily intelligence digest of the most important of Israel’s three intelligence services, the Mossad.
The Prime Minister opened the envelope and smoothed the report out on his desk. At 7:01, it noted, Israel’s seismograph laboratories had detected a shock of 5.7 on the Richter scale. Its source had been established as the area of the Awbari Sand Sea in southwestern Libya, an area not noted for earthquakes.
Reading the next paragraph, he started. At 7:31, the report continued, Mossad’s Washington representative had spoken personally to the head of the CIA. The CIA director had given him his personal assurance that the shock was an earthquake.
Even in the most difficult hours of Israel’s relations with the United States, the bonds between the CIA and her intelligence apparatus had been warm and intimate. There was almost nothing the Israelis learned that was not immediately passed to Washington. And now, in a matter critical to Israel’s national existence, the Americans had deliberately, if perhaps only momentarily, lied to her. The implications of that were not lost on the Israeli Prime Minister.
He looked at his wife. She knew nothing of the crisis. But she saw he had suddenly gone pale, an almost grayish pallor seeping over his features.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“This time, we are alone,” he gasped, as much to his own stunned self as to her. “Completely alone.”
The chimes of St. John’s Monastery of the Cross were tolling nine, Jerusalem time, when Menachem Begin’s black Dodge slipped below the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and up to the unattractive, functional building that housed the center of the nation’s government.‘A quartet of burly young men leaped out, each clutching in his left hand a black leather attache case. Dressed in something other than their blue jeans and leather jackets, they might have been stockbrokers or a group of aggressive young salesmen rushing into company headquarters with their latest orders. Instead those cases contained the tools of their calling as the Prime Minister’s bodyguards, an Uzi submachine gun, three extra magazines of 9mm. ammunition, a Colt .45 and a walkie-talkie.
A few minutes later, Begin took his place at the center of the oval table at which his Cabinet was gathered in emergency session. None of the men at the table had even the faintest intimation of the nature of the emergency that had brought them there. Begin had confided in no one. For a moment his regard swept the room, his dark eyes rendered outsized by the glasses he wore to correct his astigmatic vision. Carefully choosing his words, he began.
“Gentlemen, we are facing the gravest crisis in our history.” With the phenomenal memory for which be was noted, he recollected every detail of his conversation with the President.