A state at any cost, p.73
A State at Any Cost, page 73
Dayan thus began his political career as a problem. Ben-Gurion held him in esteem but did not like him very much. “Moshe lacks love of people,” he wrote in his diary; he had previously remarked to Navon, “The chief of staff loves the IDF but not its soldiers. But he is the best chief of staff we have had.”55 When Dayan was caught up in a particularly embarrassing scandal, he defended him.
Lieutenant Colonel Dov Yermia, a childhood friend of Dayan’s, was married to a woman named Hadassah. She was his second wife, having served as his secretary during her army service. Dayan stationed Yermia on the Syrian border and his wife went to Jerusalem, where she enrolled at the Hebrew University. She lived in IDF officers’ housing and soon grew intimate with Dayan; Yermia fomented a scandal. He sent abusive letters to Dayan, complained to Dayan’s wife, Ruth, and also wrote to Ben-Gurion, demanding that he, the minister of defense, censure the former chief of staff.
Ben-Gurion, vacationing on Mount Canaan, near Safed, replied with a long and revealing letter, written by hand. He opened by assuring Yermia that he understood his pain, but even at this point intimated that Dayan was not solely to blame. “I know how deep and sensitive the personal side is in things of this type, and I am not claiming that you need to rage not only against the man but also against the woman (if in cases of this sort there is a logical basis for rage), and that you must understand that a woman is not private property but rather a free individual. That is none of my business.” But Yermia was demanding that he withdraw his support from a man he termed an “arrogant hypocrite,” Ben-Gurion went on, requiring him to make a distinction between the intimate and subjective side of the affair and its public ramifications.
“A man can be an ascetic and a saint his entire life but not be a successful public leader,” he maintained, and the opposite was also true. He offered two examples—King David and the British admiral Horatio Nelson. “The authors and editors of the Bible were devotees of the Davidic dynasty,” he began this section of his letter, “and their moral greatness is exemplified in the fact that they did not hide David’s horrible and terrifying crime from the people.” Not only against Bathsheba, the woman he lusted for, he wrote, but also against her husband, Uriah the Hittite, whom he sent to his death in battle so as to be able to steal his wife. What David did to Uriah, his servant and loyal soldier, was a thousand times worse than what he did to Bathsheba, he argued. Then Nathan the prophet bravely castigated him—but did not disqualify him from the kingship. To this day there is no king more venerated in Jewish lore, even though every Jew knows what David did to Bathsheba’s husband. There was no reason to doubt that the story was true, unlike a number of other things in the Bible, he went on. And when David said that a person who does such a deed deserves death, the prophet responded, “You are the man.” But he went on to say: “Even for your sin you will not die.” As a result, David’s line lasted until the destruction of the First Temple.
The second case involved the most admired man in British history, Ben-Gurion continued—Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar. “The entire English people knew what he did with the wife of the British ambassador (to the Kingdom of Naples, I believe), but this did not detract from the British people’s gratitude to and admiration for their hero, despite, as you no doubt know, the puritanical views, or at least the expectations of public comportment, that prevailed in England during the age of Queen Victoria.”
He knew that nothing he said would assuage Yermia’s pain or anger, but the lesson of both these cases was clear. “It is unfeasible and, I think, wrong to examine the confidential intimate life of any person, man or woman, so as to determine their public standing and reputation,” Ben-Gurion wrote. For that reason, he could not agree that the man who was the object of Yermia’s fury, “and not without reason and justice,” was a hypocrite. After all, Dayan did not play the role of a moral tribune and preacher on intimate matters, those between man and woman. “And the things he did, at the behest of the nation, he accomplished not only with great ability but also by putting his life on the line, and what he demanded of others he first demanded of himself, and in battle he went first, before his subordinates.”
Here he repeated, almost word for word, his admonition about the need to keep the intimate and public aspects of a person’s life separate. “It seems to me that you are mixing up two things that cannot be mixed,” he wrote, reiterating, “with friendly sincerity,” that he could not be a party to Yermia’s “public vendetta” as much as he respected his feelings and understood what he felt. “I have replied to you after much inner hesitation,” he concluded, “and if I have in some way hurt you, or if my words have pained you, I ask your forgiveness.” He wished Yermia well and wrote, underneath his signature, “If you would like to see me in person, I will do so willingly.”
A short time before his death, at an age of more than one hundred, Yermia said that the backing Ben-Gurion gave Dayan helped create an atmosphere of male chauvinism in the IDF and security forces. Here, again, the spirit of the leader engendered a value system in which certain things were permissible and others taboo. The two men continued to correspond. Yermia, who became a leading peace activist, wrote to Ben-Gurion about the injustices of the military regime imposed on Israel’s Arabs. Ben-Gurion began his reply by saying: “If I was not aware of the emotional background of the resentment in your last letter, I would have thrown it into the wastebasket.”56
*
In the summer of 1958, Paula needed surgery; Ben-Gurion visited her often in the hospital. One of his drivers told Navon: “We visited her today. She walked down the stairs, chattering and talking. As soon as she heard him coming, she lowered her head, as if she were about to faint, sighed, moaned, and groaned. Ben-Gurion approached her tenderly, wanting to help her descend. She shouted at him: ‘Go away, go home, immediately. Leave me alone, David.’” The driver thought she behaved despicably. The nurse also said that Paula felt just fine and that she was putting on a show, but she was afraid to tell Ben-Gurion himself. “Paula feels good objectively,” Navon told Ben-Gurion, “but when she sees you she behaves the way she did today. She wants to be pampered, cared for, given attention. The nurse asked that you not take what happened today personally.” Ben-Gurion was dumbfounded. “He sat there, pale, with a long face, and with great sorrow in his eyes,” Navon recorded in his diary. “All he did was shake his head, without saying a word.”57
Ben-Gurion was now primarily occupied with the construction of the nuclear reactor near Dimona. In 1959 he again got caught up in the enthusiasm of an election campaign. At the age of seventy-three, he led his party under the slogan “Say yes to the Old Man!” Mapai won 47 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, more than ever before. Having reached the height of his power, he commenced a campaign of self-destruction.
* Israel Kastner had been murdered in Tel Aviv just a few months previously.
† Ben-Gurion once gave Katznelson a copy of Plato’s Symposium. After reading it, she told him to be careful. An old man’s love for boys is stronger than his love for women, she warned him, because he served as a model for emulation for boys. That was a kind of eros that could drive one mad, she claimed. Ben-Gurion dismissed her concern. (Rivka Katznelson, interview with Shabtai Teveth, Oct. 2, 1977, BGA, Shabtai Teveth collection: subjects: Ben-Gurion and women.)
‡ Argov’s close friends claimed that he killed himself because of a “difficult romantic disappointment.” Haim Israeli, who ran the defense minister’s office, wrote to Elie Wiesel that “Nehemiah had an affair with a woman who was an IDF officer. The affair went on the rocks and years later the young woman worked in Jacqueline Kennedy’s press office. According to Navon, Argov told him a few months before his suicide that he wanted to die. “I have nothing more to aspire to,” he explained. “I have reached the acme of my life. What more can there be?” (Navon 2015, p. 194; Lam 1990; Bar-Zohar 2006, p. 274; Yisraeli 2005, p. 48.)
§ It seems that at least some of the soldiers who took part in the Kafr Qasim massacre were aware of a plan code-named Operation Hafarperet (Mole). According to this plan, apparently, in the case of war between Israel and Jordan, Arabs living in villages along the border between the two countries were to be driven out of their homes. (Reuven Rubik Rosenthal 2000, p. 14ff.; Ben-Gurion, Diary, July 14, 28, Aug. 16, 1958, BGA; Yitzhak Navon, Diary, July 13, 24, 1958, YNA.)
** The nuclear agreement recalled Ehud Avriel’s use of the Ethiopian emperor’s name to obtain planes from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the War of Independence. “The radio announced this morning that the Bourgès-Maunoury ministry fell last night over the vote on Algeria,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary. “I am afraid that Shimon Peres’s trip to Paris the day before yesterday was useless.” But Peres got the ousted French prime minister to sign the document and backdate it to the previous day, when he was still in office. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, Oct. 1, 1957, BGA; Bar-Zohar 2006, p. 297ff.)
†† He sometimes cited Hiroshima to argue that it is not always possible to obey the biblical injunction that “a person may be put to death only for his own crime.” In war, innocent civilians, women and children among them, inevitably become casualties. So it was during the Blitz on London, and so it also was in many of the IDF’s reprisal actions. “Had Japan, with the consent of a large part of its populace, not attacked America,” he later wrote, “the first atom bombs would not have fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Oct. 25, 1953, ISA; Ben-Gurion to Enrico Pratt, Sept. 13, 1961, BGA.)
‡‡ Shimon Peres and Reuven Shiloah, one of the founders of Israel’s secret security services, visited other American Jewish scientists as well, including Edward Teller. “My picture is the only one in Teller’s room,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, noting that Teller was “an enthusiast for the Negev.” (Ben-Gurion, Diary, Nov. 26, 1957, BGA.)
§§ Peres was an easier case. He simply told Ben-Gurion that it was time for him to be elected to the Knesset, and that after the elections he wanted to be appointed deputy defense minister. (Yitzhak Navon, Diary, May 3, 1958, YNA.)
■ 23 ■
THE LAVON AFFAIR
“I DON’T TRUST MYSELF”
In the afternoon hours of June 16, 1959, the prime minister and defense minister cleared his schedule to have a long meeting with a well-known Romanian-born fortune-teller from Tel Aviv, Sally Linker. About sixty years old at the time, she was a “diviner of secrets,” he wrote, in quotation marks, using a phrase that is used in the book of Jeremiah (11:20) to describe an attribute of God. They seem to have spoken in a mixture of French and Yiddish; Linker did not know Hebrew. “She did not look at me when she spoke, but rather at her fingers resting on her lap,” he noted. She began by describing his character—he had will and energy, and was sometimes stubborn. He was often irate, as a result of weakness. He liked to be with people, but sometimes didn’t want to see anyone. He had once had a strong emotion, a profound experience, and was unusually sensitive. He needed to develop good habits; badly fitting shoes were liable to tire him. Success was on the horizon. Four days hence he would have a good feeling.
Ben-Gurion carefully recorded everything she said, even unfinished sentences and single words. The impression is that she spoke in a trance of some sort. He asked her to read his thoughts about a number of people whose identity he did not reveal to her. She did not even get close to what Ben-Gurion felt about Lavon. “I have been disappointed with her,” he wrote. But when a baby girl was born to Amos, he noted: “Ruth was born precisely four days after my conversation with the Romanian woman, who told me that something important and joyful would happen to me in four days.” He continued to consult with her.
She was unmarried and childless, and had lived most of her life in a rented room full of rags, cats, and houseplants; she also painted. One of her neighbors was a Mapai member of the Knesset, Hannah Lamdan, who became Linker’s patron and brought her along when she met her acquaintances.
Ben-Gurion was again reminded of her a few days after the election in which Mapai rose to forty-seven seats in the Knesset. “When she came to me a few months ago, she prophesied that things would be good, very good, after the election,” he wrote. “But I did not pay attention, and even now I have my doubts as to whether there is really a human faculty for predicting the future.”
He met with her twice more in 1960, recording political and diplomatic forecasts she offered. When she told him that he needed to deal severely with two or three people, he asked if they were foreign agents. She said they were not. He asked if they held political positions in Israel. She said they did, and again warned him that they were ambitious. She saw “a family problem,” but also told him that “it will work out.”
In three weeks there would be a change for the better, she promised him.
Less than a month later, Navon recorded in his diary an outburst from Paula, in the usual mixture of Hebrew, English, and Yiddish. “I can’t take any more. I am fed up … You don’t understand anything I say. He is so selfish, doesn’t care about anything. It’s only him … he doesn’t care about the children. He doesn’t love anyone, only himself. We’ve been married for forty years. That’s enough. I can’t stand it. But I’m the prime minister’s wife. If I wasn’t, I’d leave him.”1
A few days later, he was received in the White House for a conversation with President Dwight Eisenhower. He also met with the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. When Ben-Gurion reported to the Cabinet on these meetings, he said, “I am now deathly weary, I don’t trust myself … I am not sure of myself.”2 When he next met with Linker the Romanian, as she was known in Tel Aviv, she offered him several pieces of advice on how to surmount his fatigue.3
His final years as prime minister were one scandal after another; he became a prisoner of his whims and humiliated himself. This same period saw dramatic struggles over relations with Germany, control of Mapai, and the construction of the Dimona reactor, as well as a crisis in relations with the United States, now led by John F. Kennedy. All these were pieces of a puzzle that had the Lavon Affair at its center. His power eroded, his influence diminished, he turned spiteful and cantankerous, resentful and insufferable. In June 1963, he resigned from the prime ministership for the last time. In the ten years of life that remained to him, he became an Israeli King Lear.
*
As prime minister, he attached great importance to relations with Germany, not just because of the economic benefits the ties produced, but also because they included, almost from the start, military cooperation. “I think Germany can be a great help to us, first of all in the military sense,” he had told the Cabinet at the beginning of 1955. “It can provide us with raw materials and perhaps arms as well.” The Mapai faction in the Knesset sent two emissaries to ask him to at least “lower the volume.” Ben-Gurion responded vehemently, one of the members of the delegation later recalled. “Who are you to tell me who the Nazis were,” he muttered, standing up and pacing. “My Sheindele, they killed her, and you’re telling me, you don’t understand a thing.” But even as the uncle of his brother’s beloved murdered daughter, as a Jew and an Israeli, he felt no inhibitions at all about the issue, neither emotional, moral, certainly not political; he had no pangs of conscience at all, he maintained.4
In December 1957, he told the Cabinet that Germany was prepared to sell Israel a submarine and to purchase Uzi submachine guns.5 Two weeks later, Ben-Gurion informed the ministers that Chief of Staff Dayan was making a trip to Germany to further the submarine deal. The story leaked to the press. Ben-Gurion resigned, but formed a new government a few days later, identical to its predecessor. The ministers representing the left-wing parties committed themselves to supporting legislation imposing criminal penalties on Cabinet ministers who leaked information about Cabinet meetings.6
The big blast came in the summer of 1959, when Der Spiegel reported on the Uzi deal.
According to Ben-Gurion, the agreement was to supply Israeli-made hand grenades and Uzis, many of which had already been shipped, worth $40 million. He claimed that the Cabinet had sanctioned the deal, citing the minutes of the relevant meeting. The ministers representing Ahdut Ha’avodah and Mapam claimed that they had no memory of such a Cabinet debate; they would soon intimate that the record of the meeting had been doctored. Once again, the exchange was extremely emotional. “I don’t see that in a real war five years from now we are assured victory over the Arab armies,” Ben-Gurion asserted. “I do not believe that if, God forbid, our army was to fail, many Jews would remain alive, including old people, women, and children.” That was why Israel required means of deterrence, he argued, adding that there was “only one place to obtain those means of deterrence: I do not see that it can be anywhere outside Germany.”
One of the Mapam ministers claimed that Israeli-made Uzis would be used to arm the SS; Ben-Gurion responded that Germany of the Nazi era and Germany of the 1960s were two different countries. This affair, like others before it, fired up the public for only a short time; the opposition demanded that the deal be canceled, but the Knesset voted down the proposal.7 The need to continually defend his German policy weighed on him, but it also helped him defend that very policy. The more he was attacked, the more motivation Germany had to come toward Israel.
“IN A PRIMITIVE COMMUNITY IT CAN HAPPEN”
Germany and its elderly chancellor continued to fascinate him. Israel’s representative in Cologne, Felix Shinnar, frequently updated him on the chancellor and German politics—trends and interests, forces and factions, plots and intrigues, gossip—and offered his personal assessment of events in the country. Direct military contacts were conducted largely in regular meetings between Shimon Peres and the German defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss. They occasionally met at Strauss’s home in a small Bavarian town, far out of sight. Strauss’s German rivals considered him a dangerous militaristic nationalist, and many Israelis agreed. Peres admired him and, especially, his power. Over time, they became friends. Peres managed to bring Germany into the pact he was concluding with France. Strauss was interested, as he wanted nuclear arms to defend Germany against the Soviet Union. Both he and Peres believed in deterrence. Ben-Gurion recorded Peres as saying that Strauss supported Israel for two reasons—fear of Russia, which he hated, and admiration for the IDF. It was all done in coordination with Adenauer. “He saw the secrecy of the ties as particularly important,” Ben-Gurion noted, because the arms deal also had opponents in Germany. A few days earlier, he had written to Adenauer that Israel was interested in conducting its atomic research in cooperation with “Europe.” Several months later, Adenauer asked two Israeli diplomats how soon Israel would be able to produce nuclear arms, adding, “It would be good for your security if you had an atomic bomb.”8
