Nothing Begin could have told his ministers, no revelation he might have made, could have horrified them more than his words. For fifteen years their nation’s survival had reposed on two strategic pillars, the support of the United States and the knowledge that in the ultimate crisis Israel alone in the Middle East possessed atomic weapons. Now the image of a mushroom cloud rising above the Libyan desert had destroyed the strategic basis of their state.
“We have no choice!”
The words thundered through the stricken silence left by Begin’s speech, their impact underscored by the sound of a heavy fist smashing onto the ministerial table. They came from a barrel-chested man in an old sweater and open shirt, his suntanned face setting off a full head of pure white hair.
“We can’t live with a madman pointing a thermonuclear gun at our heads.”
Benny Ranan was one of the five authentic military heroes in the room, a former paratroop general who’d jumped at the head of his troops in the 1973
war in the spectacular transcanal operation which had paved the way for Arik Sharon’s triumphant encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army. As Minister of Construction, or “Minister of Bulldozers” as he was referred to, he was one of the most ardent supporters of the program to throw up new Israeli settlements on the land Begin called Judea and Samaria. He rose and strode around the table with the swaying gait his paratroopers loved to mimic.
His destination was the mural covering one wall of the room, a photograph of the Middle East taken by Walter Schirra from his Apollo 7 spaceship.
Nothing could have illustrated more graphically the terrible vulnerability of their nation than that kaleidoscope of blues, whites and blacks, its vista sweeping from the Red to the Black Sea, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Israel was just a sliver in its immensity, a strip of land clinging precariously to one edge of the photo.
Ranan gazed at it dramatically. “What this does is change totally the conditions of our existence. All Qaddafi has to do to destroy us is drop a bomb here-” Ranan’s thick forefinger thumped the map in the vicinity of Tel Aviv-“and here-and here. Three bombs and this nation will cease to exist.”
He turned back to his fellow ministers. The booming parade-ground voice dropped in register to a hoarse whisper. “What would our life be worth here knowing that at any second, any minute, any hour, a fanatic who’s been screaming for our blood for years can incinerate us instantly? I couldn’t live like that. Could any of you? Could anybody?”
He paused, aware of the impact his words were having on the men in the room. “Forty centuries of history has one lesson for us. We Jews must resist any threat to our existence with all our strength. We have to destroy him, gentlemen. Right now. Before the sun is high.”
Ranan placed his forearms on the table so that his heavy trunk leaned forward and the lingering smell of the garlic and cheese of his breakfast hung on the air. “And we will tell the Americans what we intend to do once we’ve done it.”
Again, quiet muffled the room. The Deputy Prime Minister struck a match and thoughtfully lit his pipe. Yigal Yadin’s bushy moustache and his bald head were as much a part of Israel’s political scene as Ranan’s bulky figure. He was an archaeologist, a humanistic warrior who was the architect of Israel’s victory in the first war she had had to fight with her Arab neighbors, in 1948.
“For the moment, Benny,” be noted, “the people who are menaced by Qaddafi’s bomb are not here. They’re in New York.”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is destroying Qaddafi before he can react. The Americans will thank us for doing it.”
“And suppose Qaddafi still manages to detonate that bomb and destroy New York? How much gratitude do you suppose that will inspire in the Americans?”
Ranan sighed. “That would be a tragedy. An appalling, ghastly tragedy. But it’s a risk we’re forced to take.
What would be a greater tragedy-the destruction of New York or the destruction of our nation?”
“For whom, Benny?” Yadin asked. “Us or the Americans?”
“There are three million Jews in New York,” noted Rabbi Yehuda Orent, leader of the religious party that was a part of Begins ruling coalition, “more than there are here.”
“This is where they belong.” Ranan shook his head. “What’s at stake here is more important than any number of Jews. We’re the expression of the eternal vocation of the Jewish people. If we disappear, the Jewish people will cease to exist as a people. We’ll condemn our seed to another two thousand years in the wilderness, in the ghettos, in dispersion and hate.”
“Benny,” the Prime Minister noted, “I must remind you the Americans have asked us to avoid taking any unilateral action against Qaddafi.”
“The Americans?” Ranan gave a growling, scornful laugh. “Let me tell you something, the Americans are going to sell us out. That’s what they’re going to do.” His hand waved toward a bank of black telephones in one corner of the room. “They’re on the phone trying to talk to Qaddafi right now. Dealing away our land, our people, behind our backs.”
“And suppose we do negotiate over those settlements.”
Those words from the mouth of General Yusi Avidar, head of Shimbet, Israel’s military intelligence agency, stunned the room. At the head of his tank battalion in 1967 he had defeated the Arab Legion in the crucial battle for the West Bank. “Giving them up won’t mean the end of Israel. Most of the people in this country didn’t want them there in the first place.”
“What’s at stake is not those settlements.” Ranan’s answering voice was deep and controlled. “Or New York. It’s whether this nation can exist beside a Muammar Qaddafi armed with thermonuclear weapons. I say it cannot.”
“And for that you’re ready to run the risk of seeing five million innocent Americans slaughtered, of making enemies of the one people whose support and help we need?”
“I am.”
“You’re mad.” Avidar sighed. “It’s insane. It’s this damnable, sick Massada complex driving us to destruction and suicide again.”
Ranan was totally composed. “Every minute we waste talking brings us closer to our own destruction. We have to act right now, before the world can organize to stop us. If we wait, we’ll have no West Bank, no Jerusalem, Yassir Arafat and his thugs on our doorstep, our hands tied behind our backs by the Americans, and Qaddafi posed to slaughter us. We will have no more will or reason to exist.”
Menachem Begin had followed the argument without intervening, anxious to let every opinion enter into the debate. Now, softly, he spoke to his Defense Minister. “Does this nation have any military option to stop Qaddafi other than an all-out preemptive nuclear attack on Libya?”
The burly former fighter pilot who was the architect of Israel’s Air Force slowly, despairingly almost, moved his head from side to side. “I can see none. We have no resources to mount and sustain an attack across hundreds of miles of open water.”
Begin glanced at his hands, folded on the table before him. “I have lived through one holocaust. I cannot live under the threat of another. I believe we have no choice. I pray God the bomb in New York doesn’t explode.”
“Good God!” General Avidar gasped. “We won’t have a friend left in the world.”
Begin’s face was set in a tragic, melancholy mask. “We have no friends now.
We never have. From Pharaoh to Hitler we have been a people condemned by God and history to dwell alone.”
He called for a vote. Scanning the raised hands, he remembered the May afternoon in 1948 when the leaders of the Jewish people had decided to proclaim their state — by just one vote. That was the margin before himone vote. He turned to General Dorit. “Destroy Libya,” he ordered.