Thirteen Days in September

  Begin then said that there really had to be two agreements at Camp David. The one between Israel and Egypt was important, of course. But there was a far more urgent contract that must be reached between Israel and the U.S. It would show the world that there were no important differences between the policies of the two countries. His argument was similar to the one Sadat had also been trying to make. Both sides wanted to enlist the U.S. against the other party. The implicit danger that Carter would lean in one direction or the other gave him the only real leverage he had. He wasn’t about to surrender that.

  “We are going to produce a comprehensive proposal for peace,” Carter warned Begin. “I can see no other possibility for progress,” he remarked. He intended to present it the next day.

  “Mr. President, please do not put this in a proposal to us,” Begin pleaded.

  “I cannot let you tell me not to discuss the Israeli presence on Egyptian territory,” Carter tersely responded.

  The two men talked until nearly four o’clock, when Rosalynn sent in a note reminding Carter of his meeting with Sadat. As Begin was leaving, he invited the president and his wife to join him for Shabbat dinner that evening.

  Carter rushed over to Sadat’s cabin. As they drank sweet mint tea, Carter implored the Egyptian leader to remain at Camp David. “You promised me,” Carter reminded him. Slyly using the single advantage he had, he suggested that the Egyptians and the Americans could come to an agreement, even if the Israelis weren’t a part of it. Sadat eagerly agreed. “You write it,” he said. “You know the issues that are important to me. I will support any reasonable document you put forth.”

  For the moment, the summit was saved. But Carter’s role had changed. He had originally cast himself as a facilitator, the person who could place Begin and Sadat in the same room and let them work out the details of an enduring peace. That idea had failed. If the summit was going to succeed, it would require a catalyst, someone with new ideas, yes, but also someone who was willing to go beyond pleading and persuading to the point of issuing threats. Carter had to be that person. Each side had to believe that it had something vital to lose, which was its standing with the United States.

  MENACHEM BEGIN AND HIS WIFE, Aliza, hosted the Shabbat dinner in the Camp David movie theater, which had been converted to a banquet hall for the occasion. Gefilte fish and challah were brought in from Washington for the occasion, along with extra skullcaps.

  At the head of the table Rosalynn sat between Begin and Dayan—two of the most compelling men in Israel’s history. The evening started with Begin offering the blessing of the wine, saying, “Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who sanctifies us with His commandments, and has been pleased with us. You have lovingly and willingly given us your holy Shabbat as an inheritance in memory of creation. The Shabbat is the first among our holy days, and a remembrance of our exodus from Egypt. Indeed, You have chosen us and made us holy among all peoples.”

  The tension of the last few days lifted and there was a convivial, even joyful atmosphere among the guests. Begin reminded Rosalynn that the Bible says you cannot serve God with sadness, and so he commanded everyone to sing. One of the songs was the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” which means “The Hope.” It had special meaning for Begin. He said that his father had sung it as he was being led to the River Bug to be drowned by the Nazis.

  Our hope is not yet lost,

  The hope of two thousand years,

  To be a free people in our land,

  The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

  While Begin was translating the lyrics of one of the songs for her, Rosalynn enviously asked how many languages he knew. He said he fluently spoke the Slavic languages, including Polish and Russian; also, German, English, Hebrew, and French. He could read Italian and used to teach Latin. He and Aliza, also a Latin scholar, liked to read Virgil aloud to each other, much as Rosalynn and Jimmy read the Bible to each other every night in Spanish.

  The Begins’ courtship and marriage resembled that of the Carters to a marked degree. Begin had decided to marry Aliza the moment they met, and their union was famous for its exclusiveness and fidelity. Unlike her tempestuous husband, who was often subject to fits of depression or euphoria as well as explosions of fury, Aliza was always controlled and calculating, her huge unblinking eyes behind thick tinted lenses rarely betraying any doubt of the rightness of her husband’s calling, even through his years in the underground, in prison, and on the political fringe. Despite her chronic asthma she smoked incessantly, and frequently resorted to the inhaler in her purse. If Carter had been hoping that Aliza would moderate her husband’s views, he miscalculated. She was known by the Israeli delegation to be a staunch ideologue.

  For three decades before Begin became prime minister the couple lived in a rent-controlled, three-room ground-floor flat in north Tel Aviv, on an income of about five hundred dollars a month. While they were raising their three children, the couple slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. Unlike the wives of previous prime ministers, who sometimes sought power for themselves, Aliza strained to keep out of the public eye. She made her own clothes and loved to cook. Even when her husband was prime minister, she insisted on riding the public bus whenever she traveled between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Such austerity was in blatant contrast to many high-ranking political figures, who lived luxuriously, often benefiting from bribes and favors. Indeed, the election that brought Begin to power was triggered by the downfall of Yitzhak Rabin, the previous prime minister, whose wife was charged with maintaining an illegal bank account in the U.S. Begin’s scrupulousness, by comparison, was legendary. In 1977, when he first traveled to Washington to meet Carter, he had only two suits to his name, both of them a decade old, and way too large for him after the weight he lost following his heart attack. His aide Yechiel Kadishai insisted that he get new suits for the trip, but when another of his aides told him what a suit would cost, Begin balked. “I can’t afford that!” he exclaimed. “Ask if I can pay it on time.”

  Aliza and Menachem Begin on their wedding day, May 30, 1939, in Truskawiec

  Kadishai told him the store was intending to give him the suits.

  “Absolutely not!” Begin cried. He finally went to Washington with two new suits that he paid for on credit.

  Moshe Dayan’s single eye was on Rosalynn’s side, so she spent most of the evening talking to him. His hearing was poor, and unless he leaned toward his companion he was likely to drift into himself. Despite Dayan’s reputation for bluntness and pessimism, Rosalynn found him charming, in part because he flattered her husband. He said that he had been preparing for this summit for thirty years, having been involved in every negotiation since the founding of the State of Israel, but in all that time there had not been a single instance when Middle East countries were actually negotiating for peace. This meeting would never have happened, he said, without Jimmy Carter. He recalled that he had recently seen Rosalynn on television saying, “Jimmy is a fighter and you won’t see him giving up.” Dayan offered, “If you want me to, or need me to, I can testify to that!” Such a statement would be an incalculable asset for the Carter reelection campaign, especially among American Jews, who had always been leery of the Baptist from the Deep South. Rosalynn replied that Jimmy was always ready to tackle tough issues and never worried about the consequences of his actions, such as whether he could be reelected.

  “Oh, he’ll be reelected,” Dayan assured her.

  DAYAN WAS NOT just a hero, he was a riddle, his complexity holding him apart from serious emotional relationships, even with his children. “He was a man made for labyrinths,” his often estranged daughter Yael summed up. It was as if behind his black eye patch there was not a ruined empty socket but some ghastly secret he could never share. His rise through the Israeli military ranks was aided by his relationship with David Ben-Gurion, who noted his “almost insane daring balanced by profound tactical and strategic judgment.” Dayan was a lodestar; his arrogant self-
assurance gave Israelis a sense of relief. They had come to believe that he was unbeatable; nothing bad would happen so long as Dayan was at hand.

  Throughout his life, women offered themselves to him, drawn by his fame and mystery. One woman who fell in love with him was the wife of a military officer who was a childhood friend of Dayan’s. The officer discovered the affair and wrote to Ben-Gurion, demanding that he publicly distance himself from his protégé. Ben-Gurion responded with the story of Bathsheba, the beautiful wife of one of King David’s officers, Uriah the Hittite. King David impregnated her, and then to cover his sin, he sent her husband to the front lines, where he was killed. The message seemed to be that there were some people so important to the Israeli nation that such matters must be overlooked. There was also a hint of a threat that the cuckolded husband might suffer for making such a complaint.

  From his birth, Moshe Dayan seemed destined to become the living embodiment of the Israeli experience. His parents had immigrated to Palestine when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Moshe’s father, Shmuel, a horse-cart peddler from Ukraine, arrived in 1908, and his mother, Dvora, the daughter of a lumber merchant from Kiev, five years later. They married and helped start the very first kibbutz in their new country. It was imagined as a communal workers’ paradise, where everything was owned collectively, all the work was shared, and even the children were raised communally, in separate housing from their parents. In 1915, Moshe became the very first child actually born in the kibbutz, which added to the symbolic weight that would accrue around his life.

  Aliza Begin, Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Rosalynn Carter at a Shabbat dinner hosted by the Israelis

  When Shmuel Dayan became discontented with the kibbutz system, he moved his family to another experimental farming cooperative, called a moshav—it means settlement—once again the first in the country, the prototype of the hundreds that would follow. The settlement was called Nahalal; it was in the Jezreel Valley, near Nazareth.

  Although Shmuel taught his children to think of Arabs as shiftless marauders who were violent by nature, Moshe mingled with other boys in Arab villages and Bedouin camps, absorbing their language and customs. “From my boyhood days, I have found it easy to get along with Arabs,” he would later boast. At the age of fourteen, Moshe was initiated into the outlawed Jewish defense organization, Haganah, created to protect settlers in isolated communities. He patrolled the fields, driving away goats belonging to the Arabs that had trespassed on settlement areas. As he grew older, relations between the Jewish pioneers and the native Palestinians grew increasingly tense and violent. In 1932, Arab terrorists threw a bomb into the hut of Dayan’s neighbor, killing an eight-year-old boy, a harbinger of what was to come.

  Two years later, the settlers in Nahalal cultivated a parcel of land that had been purchased from Arabs by the Jewish National Fund. A Bedouin tribe had been using the area for grazing, and when Jews arrived to turn the field, the Arabs gathered on a hilltop and sullenly watched. Then stones began to fly. A plowman was struck. The settlers fought back. Neighbors on both sides joined in the fray; meantime, Dayan defiantly continued sowing seeds as rocks flew overhead. Suddenly, when he got to the top of a rise, he was clubbed into unconsciousness. He was taken by horseback to a hospital in Jerusalem to convalesce. He returned to Nahalal with a scar on his head but no bitterness toward the dispossessed Arabs. “I could understand their feelings, but I could not assuage them,” he writes. “They had been pasturing their flocks on other people’s land, and watering them at other people’s springs, for generations. But the land then had been untilled, untended, and misused for grazing because it had fallen into disuse. It was ours now.”

  Open revolt by Palestinian Arabs against mass Jewish immigration started in 1934. Several hundred Jews were killed. The British authorities responded by killing, wounding, or imprisoning more than 10 percent of the adult Arab males in Palestine. Moshe joined the Jewish Settlement Police Force, working with the British Army to protect an oil pipeline that was a frequent target of Arab saboteurs. This experience taught him the futility of regular troops trying to deal with guerrillas who knew the terrain and easily disappeared into the local population. “It became clear to me that the only way to fight them was to seize the initiative, attack them in their bases, and surprise them when they were on the move,” he writes. These were tactics that he would use to devastating effect.

  At the outbreak of the Second World War, Dayan was recruited into a unit of the British Army that was preparing for an invasion of Syria, then occupied by the Vichy French. His task was to seize the bridges on the coastal highway to Beirut before the French could blow them up. His patrol came under machine-gun fire while attempting to capture a police station, which turned out to be a regional headquarters for Vichy forces. Dayan stormed the building by himself and tossed a hand grenade through the window, silencing the machine gun. He and his men then took control of the station. When French reinforcements were drawn to the battle, Dayan went up on the roof with the captured machine gun. As he was scanning the landscape to see where the shooting was coming from, a bullet struck his field glasses, shattering the lens and the casing and driving bits of glass and metal into his left eye and socket bones. It was another twelve hours before the Allied troops reached the police station and Dayan was driven back to a hospital in Haifa. Dayan endured the agony with his customary stoicism. An Arab scout named Rashid held his hand throughout the ordeal.

  “Who will hire a one-eyed man?” he asked despairingly, when his wife announced she was pregnant with their second child. “I can’t support my family.” But his reputation as a soldier overcame his disability. He was instantly, universally recognizable, with his round, balding head, and the piratical eye patch. He became an emblem of Israel itself—arrogant, blunt, visibly wounded but undaunted.

  DURING THE 1948 WAR, two hundred thousand Palestinian refugees had taken refuge in the Gaza Strip, a narrow ribbon of land twenty-five miles long and only seven miles wide at its widest point, which lies along the Mediterranean Sea at the southern end of Israel. Gaza was an administrative capital of the ancient Egyptian empire and a stop on the caravan route to Syria. The Philistines—thought by most scholars to be the ancestors of today’s Palestinians1—conquered the territory in the twelfth century BCE. God seemed to have taken a special dislike to the people and to the land that they occupied. “Gaza shall be forsaken,” Yahweh warns in the Old Testament. “I will leave you to perish without an inhabitant!” But whenever he was angry with the Jews, God handed them over to the Philistines. Despite the Lord’s partiality to the Israelites, the Philistines had a technological advantage. They had discovered iron, and the Israelites were still in the Bronze Age.

  But then, among the Jews there arose a champion who terrorized the Philistines with his bare hands. His name was Samson. He was a kind of monster. In rabbinical literature, he was said to be so mighty he could rub mountains together in the palms of his hands. He married a Philistine woman, but then murdered his wedding guests, burned their fields, and slaughtered an army of a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.

  Samson used to visit the whores of Gaza. One night, the Philistines locked the gates of the city, thinking to trap him after his carousal, but at midnight he ripped up the massive gates and carried them away on his immense shoulders. Another Philistine woman named Delilah, from the Valley of Sorek, coaxed him into disclosing the secret of his physical powers. He confided that he was a Nazirite, a kind of Jewish monk, who is commanded never to cut his hair. “If I am shaved, my strength will leave me, and I shall grow weaker and be like anyone else,” he confessed. Delilah, who had contracted for eleven hundred pieces of silver from the Philistine rulers to betray her lover’s secret, cut off seven locks of his hair while he was sleeping. When he awakened, the spirit of the Lord had left him, and he became an ordinary man. The Philistines gouged out his eyes and put him to work as a draft animal in a gristmill in Gaza.

  The Philistines
cheered their own god, Dagon, for this wonderful turn in their fortunes. To celebrate, they dragged the blinded Samson into a large stadium before an audience of three thousand people. Samson prayed to God to restore his strength one last time, and with a final exertion he pulled down the pillars of the building, killing the entire host. “Those he killed by his dying were more than those he had killed during his lifetime,” the Bible notes approvingly.

  In the minds of the Palestinians who suffered Moshe Dayan’s wrath, he was a kind of modern-day Samson, a role he readily embraced. He, too, was a famous womanizer and even partially eyeless. Physically, Dayan was not imposing; he was of modest height with a wiry frame; but he noted in one of his memoirs, Living with the Bible, an account of his obsession with biblical archeology, “The greatness of Samson lay not only in his physical strength, but in the spirit of freedom that flamed in his breast and inspired him to rise up against the enslavers of his nation.” Like Samson, Dayan evinced a quality of remorselessness that was woven into the myth of his invulnerability.

  After the 1948 war, Dayan was put in charge of the Southern Command of the Israeli army. “I would leave early in the morning for my headquarters in the south,” he writes, “and as I drove down from the cold mountains, crossed Delilah’s Valley of Sorek, and reached the coastal belt, I always had the feeling that I had come to another land. It was a land of springtime every day of the year.… No wonder Samson loved to walk in the land of the Philistines.”