“My proposal doesn’t impinge on your nation’s sovereignty, Mr. Begin.” The Prime Minister could sense the American’s exasperation. “Israel has no claims to sovereignty over the West Bank and it never has had. Those lands were given to the Arabs of Palestine by the United Nations in 1947 at the same time your people were given a state.”
“I’m sorry, the United Nations did not give those lands, or any other lands, to the Jewish people.” There was a confidence born of belief, of deep conviction, in the Israeli leader’s voice. “Those lands were given to the Jewish people by the God of our forefathers, once and forever.”
“Surely, Mr. Begin,” the President protested, “you cannot as a responsible leader of the twentieth century, of the thermonuclear age, be pretending to order the world on the basis of a forty-century-old religious legend?”
Begin adjusted his tie and leaned back in his chair. “That legend, as you call it, has sustained us, nourished, preserved us, united as a distinct people, for four thousand years. However difficult it may be for you to comprehend, Mr. President, for a Jew to have the right to settle on this land, on any part of it, is as indispensable an attribute of his nation’s sovereignty as an American’s right to travel from New York to California.”
“To settle on another people’s land? Land that has been theirs for two thousand years? To deprive them of the very right of national existence for which your own people claimed and fought for so many generations? All that in the name of an event, a religious moment, which may, or may not, have ever taken place? Surely you can’t be serious?”
“I have never been more serious. But what is at issue here is not those settlements you so oppose. They are just a handful of people, finally. They do nobody any harm. You are trying to force another nation to an act it refuses for moral reasons, for reasons which go to the core of its right to exist. Are we or are we not a sovereign land? If we are forced to crawl out of the West Bank before a totalitarian dictator-and need I remind you of our experience at the hands of such men? — you will turn us into slaves, destroy our belief in ourselves and our nationhood.”
“My proposal, Mr. Begin, offers your nation the very thing it has wanted so long, a firm guarantee of its survival. It will reinforce your national will, not weaken it.” The American’s slow, precise enunciation revealed to the Israeli how hard he was struggling to control his emotions.
“Guarantees of our survival, Mr. President? What faith do you think my people are going to have in your guarantees after they’ve seen that you, the one nation in the world that was supposed to be our friend, our ally, have coerced us into acting against our will, our interests, our very right to survive? Why-” Begin hesitated to say what be was about to say but the intensity of his feelings was so deep he couldn’t restrain himself-“it’s as if Franklin Roosevelt had said to my people, ‘Go to those camps. I’ll guarantee Hitler’s good behavior to you.”’
The President’s control over his impatience was slipping away again, his frustration and anger at being trapped in this seemingly hopeless dilemma beginning to tell on him. “Mr. Begin, I am not questioning Israel’s right to survive. What I am questioning is Israel’s right to continue a policy which is nothing other than a cold-blooded, calculating effort to annex another people’s land. Those settlements of yours have no valid justification whatsoever-“
This time Begin interrupted him. “In another time, Mr. President, in another way, perhaps the future of those settlements could be discussed. But not like this. Not under this threat.”
“Mr. Begin, the reason those settlements are there is because you put them there. Against our will. Against the Camp David agreement. If we are in this dreadful impasse today it is due to your stubborn persistence in carrying out a policy the whole world-and even a majority of your nation-condemned.”
“Whatever the feelings of the people of this country may be about those settlements, Mr. President, their feelings about their nation are unshakeable. And they will see in your demand, just as I do, an invasion of their national rights and sovereignty.”
This time there was a long pause. When the President resumed, his voice was suddenly resigned and weary. “I told you at the beginning of our conversation, Mr. Begin, that I believe this proposition is the only reasonable way out of this dilemma. Accept it, renounce your claims to the West Bank, and you will give your own nation peace and save the lives of six million New Yorkers.” He paused, waiting for an answer that did not come. “But if you refuse,” the President continued, “I am not going to see six million of my countrymen massacred because you will not rectify the consequences of a policy that has no basis in justice or political fact. It will be the most painful order I will ever have to give, Mr. Begin, but if you will not remove those settlements from the West Bank, then the armed forces of the United States will.”
Begin paled and sank slowly back against his chair. So there it was, the naked threat of force he had expected from the moment this conversation had begun. A strange vision swept through his mind. He was a four-year-old boy in Lodz trembling at his window as a galloping mass of mounted Cossacks rampaged through his ghetto, wielding great staves like swords, lashing the heads and shoulders of any helpless Jews in their way, trampling their twitching bodies under their horses’ thudding hoofs.
His voice was hoarse with sadness when he finally replied. “So we come to that, do we? The final act, the final, if I may say it, betrayal?” Begin sighed. “We live in a terrible world, Mr. President. All the values we counted on to guide us, all the precepts of world order, are disintegrating about us. Someone, some people must somehow find the courage to stop it. I had hoped and believed you and your people would, but I was wrong.” The Israeli could almost sense the distant President’s discomfiture at his words. “We are a democracy. I cannot reply to your demand-or threat-alone. Only my government can. I will call an emergency Cabinet meeting immediately.”
Begin’s first act after he had hung up was to ask his wife to bring him a glass of water. Trembling slightly, he took one of the pills his doctors had urged him to use in moments of stress.
In New York, winter’s quick-falling dusk was dropping its silken shroud over the city. Already the four men crouched in the window, fieldglasses trained on the entrance of the Long Island Bar and Grill across the street, were beginning to have trouble distinguishing the features of the customers entering the bar.
“Shit,” Angelo Rocchia moaned, “if the son of a bitch doesn’t hurry up, we’ll have to stuff Denny here in the back seat of a car and use the old Kotex-box gimmick.” The “Kotex-box gimmick” was a standard police tactic, putting an informer in a car with a box, into which eye slits had been cut, over his head. That way he could identify someone without giving away his own identity.
Benny the Fence, squatting at the window of his “store” between Angelo and Jack Rand, had no intention of getting involved in that. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes before five. “He ought to be along any minute,”
he said. “He’s usually in there by five.”
“Somebody’s ass is going to be in a sling if he doesn’t turn up.” It was the deputy director of the New York office of the FBI standing behind Rocchia, Rand and Benny. Harvey Hudson, the director of the office, had ordered him to take charge of the stake-out as soon as the emergency command post had been informed of Benny the Fence’s story. Half a dozen other police officers and FBI men, one holding a line open to the command post, drifted in and out of the shadows of the Long Island Trading Company’s anteroom. Benny’s secretary sat at her desk, feet twitching to the Top Ten tunes coming from her transistor, totally bored by what was going on around her. Her employer’s cooperation with the police had been total. The Arab who came each night to the bar across the street for a Seven-and-Seven had first established contact with Benny three weeks ago through the bartender. He had rented a snub-nosed .38 that he returned, unfired, the next day. Ten days ago he had told Benny be wanted plastic, a good fresh card, and some ID. The fence had sized the man up as a guy with dough. He’d asked for-and gotten-$250 for the papers, a price well above the going market rate. Then, last Wednesday, the Arab had asked him for a “tailor-made,” a Friday-morning hit on a guy in his midthirties, medium height, not blond. For that he had sprung $500.