On one of the last days of March 1955, Minister of Defense Ben-Gurion received an urgent telephone call from one of the volunteer counselors at Patish, a farming village in the northern Negev, about twelve miles from the Gaza Strip. If he did not get there immediately, the counselor warned, the inhabitants would abandon their homes and head for Jerusalem to stage a protest in front of the Knesset. Ben-Gurion canceled all his appointments and set out for the tiny settlement. It was the first station along the road to a second round of war with the Arabs. Another Negev settlement was the second station; the third was Paris.
Most of the inhabitants of Patish had come to Israel from Kurdistan. One evening they were celebrating a wedding in one of the homes. Some sixty guests were still there just before midnight. Suddenly hand grenades flew through the window, along with automatic rifle fire. A volunteer counselor, Varda Friedman, was killed; some twenty guests were wounded. The assailants had come from the Gaza Strip. Friedman was from Kfar Vitkin, an established agricultural community in central Israel founded in the 1930s; she and her boyfriend had responded to Ben-Gurion’s call to serve as unpaid counselors in communities of new immigrants. Ben-Gurion attended her funeral.
The atmosphere at Patish had been grim even before this attack, as one of the volunteers, Meir Rabinowitz, told Ben-Gurion. Most of the inhabitants had been sent there immediately after arriving in Israel. The homes that awaited them there were substandard; there was not a single flush toilet in the whole village, and only one shower. Neither was there electricity. The inhabitants worked as farmhands, but there was only enough work to employ them for two weeks out of every month; the rest of the time they were idle. Many came from cities and towns and did not want to be farm laborers. Terrorists had attacked the village several times. Many of the residents felt abandoned by the state and showed signs of despair; one once took his baby son to the center of the village and threatened to burn him. Many abandoned the place and tried to manage on the margins of Tel Aviv. Varda Friedman and her friends taught them to cultivate onions and potatoes.
The day following the attack on the wedding party, they all decided to leave. Rabinowitz was able to convince some of them that that was exactly what Nasser wanted. Ben-Gurion’s visit reassured them a bit. Playing on the village’s name, which means “hammer,” Ben-Gurion declared: “There are many Patishes in the country, but there is also a heavy hammer that will shatter the boulders of our enemies.” He promised to settle another thousand families along the Gaza Strip. As always, he took a personal interest in several of them and asked what they needed. Some of the inhabitants spoke only Aramaic, the language of Kurdish Jews. When he returned to Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet that he had been wrong when he claimed that there were two nations in Israel. “There are many nations, distinct and different from one another, and there is almost no contact between them.” He did not delude himself that his visit would persuade the inhabitants of Patish to remain. “They will flee and it will be a catastrophe,” he told the General Staff, with the same alarm he had displayed when the Jews of the Islamic world began arriving in Israel.1
About a year after the attack on Patish, a large wedding was being readied at the kibbutz Nahal Oz, founded in 1951 just a few hundred yards from the Gaza Strip border. Most of the initial members were of a background quite different from that of the residents of Patish—they were native-born Israelis, members of a youth movement affiliated with Mapai. Four couples were to be married on April 29, 1956. Moshe Dayan had been invited as guest of honor. When he arrived, he learned that the regional commander, Ro’i Rotberg, had just been shot dead. Rotberg had set out on horseback to chase away several Palestinian farmers from the Gaza Strip who had crossed the border to harvest wheat from Nahal Oz’s fields. When he reached the invaders, he was shot and killed. His murderers took the body, mutilated it, and then handed it over to UN observers. Rotberg had been twenty-one years old, and left a wife and a young son. The eulogy Dayan gave at his grave turned the fallen man into an Israeli symbol. Dayan knew how to write—he wrote poetry as well. He described the war with the Palestinians as Israel’s unavoidable doom: “We are a generation of settlers, and without helmets of metal and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house,” he intoned. It was not a new idea. Nor was he saying anything new when he declared that the millions of Jews exterminated in Europe “are looking at us from the ashes of Jewish history and commanding us to inhabit and raise up a land for our nation.” Echoing Ben-Gurion many years earlier, he offered a pessimistic insight regarding the hatred of the Palestinians: “For eight years they have been living in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we are turning the land and villages where they and their forefathers dwelt into our possession.” Quite naturally, hostility and a thirst for revenge were surging among them.
Rotberg himself had not realized this, Dayan intimated, implying that Rotberg was culpable for his own death. “The light in his heart blinded his eyes, and he did not see the glint of the blade,” Dayan said. “The longing for peace deafened his ears and he did not hear the voice of the murderer lying in wait.” Dayan depicted Rotberg as “a slender blond boy,” apparently not physically sturdy enough, he said, evoking Samson’s devastation of the Philistine city of Gaza (Judges 16:1–3): “The gates of Gaza were too heavy for his shoulders and overwhelmed him.” Dayan did not say how it was that a “boy” so naïve, skinny, and weak had been made responsible for the region’s defense, and did not explain who was guilty of not enabling his blinded eyes to properly make out the deadly hostility of the Arabs. Before speaking of Rotberg’s blindness, deafness, and weakness, Dayan spoke of these same defects in the first-person plural. He meant Ben-Gurion.
UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld happened to be in Israel that week. He demanded that Israel agree to a set of arrangements that were meant to reduce tensions along its borders. Dayan opposed the provisions and feared that Ben-Gurion might accept them. Relations between the two men were strained as a result. “Ben-Gurion is deluding himself and we will pay a heavy price for such concessions,” Dayan wrote in his diary before setting off for Nahal Oz. Ben-Gurion understood the eulogy for Rotberg perfectly, and before its publication demanded the omission of the words “The ambassadors of hypocrisy are plotting and calling on us to set aside our weapons.” Hammarskjöld was not to be insulted, Ben-Gurion told the chief of staff. He no doubt meant also that his own authority was not to be undermined. Politically, Dayan was on the ascendant.2
Half a year later, Ben-Gurion and Dayan were sitting in a plane together, on a secret night flight to France. The chief of staff had brought with him two books about a tiny island, Tiran, located at the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Along with another island, Sanafir, it was located in the middle of the narrow strait that connected the Gulf with the Red Sea. Whoever controlled the island could prevent ships from reaching Eilat. Ben-Gurion dismissed the books because they were based on a translation. He was acquainted with the original, written by Procopius of Caesarea, a sixth-century Byzantine historian, and had copied a passage into his diary in ancient Greek. It said that Tiran had once been an autonomous Hebrew province called Yotvat.*3
Soon thereafter, when the IDF took the island, Ben-Gurion wrote: “Eilat will again be the principal Hebrew port in the south, and Yotavat, called Tiran, will return to be part of the third Israeli kingdom.” That was the fantasy that put Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Shimon Peres on that night flight to France.
The day after the attack on Patish, Ben-Gurion summoned Dayan and put three questions to him: Could Israel quickly take control of the Gaza Strip? Was the IDF prepared for war with Egypt? Was the IDF prepared for war against all the Arab armies?4 A few days later, he told the Cabinet that Dayan had answered all three questions in the affirmative and proposed “expelling the Egyptians” from the Gaza Strip. He presumed that such military action would also empty the area of the refugees who lived there. Most of the ministers were dismayed.
Some Cabinet members from his party supported his proposal. Golda Meir said: “I have been living a long time in fear, not of war but of peace,” by which she meant the conditions of peace that the United States was liable to impose on Israel. But most of the ministers feared a full-scale war with Egypt, which could deteriorate into hostilities with Jordan and Syria as well. The principal problem was, as they saw it, the fate of the refugees. Some of the ministers feared that the refugees would not flee to Hebron, as Ben-Gurion predicted they would, but into Israel, inundating Be’er-Sheva and the entire Negev. That would double the number of Arabs in Israel. “We won’t know what to do with them,” one minister said.
Ben-Gurion intimated that they would not be allowed to do so. Nevertheless, another minister expressed his concern that, if Israel were flooded with Gaza refugees, “there will be a great extermination of those refugees and afterward we will be worse off.” Moshe Shapira suggested that the refugees would not flee. “The only way to make them leave would be by murder,” he said. He would vote to take Gaza only if it were decided that all the refugees who would not flee of their own volition, by his estimate two-thirds of them, would be allowed to remain under Israeli rule. The result was that a majority opposed the idea. The vote was nine against five. “We were thus saved from a disaster the end result of which no one could predict,” Sharett wrote.5
Ben-Gurion devoted the major part of his strength and time in the summer of 1955 to the election campaign. In that capacity, he termed himself “Golda’s deputy,” as Meir headed the effort. “He has a hand in everything,” Ma’ariv wrote. “Everyone attends to his advice concerning organization, propaganda, and public relations.” The party sought to produce the maximum from his return to the leadership, making him its superstar. He traveled from city to city, speaking to rallies attended, so the press reported, by myriad Israelis. He flew to Haifa, appeared at five events, and then spoke for more than an hour before a crowd that he estimated at fifty-five thousand. “I have never seen such a huge crowd at a rally listen in that way,” he wrote. One exhausting day he campaigned in the Upper Galilee. He had not worked so hard for a long time, he wrote. When, in the evening, he emerged from Kfar Giladi’s dining hall, he saw a flying saucer in the sky. “I found him quite impressed by the experience,” Sharett wrote. “It looked like a cigar, all lit up,” Ben-Gurion said. He was not alone—a local teacher who was with him also saw the “flying object,” as Ben-Gurion referred to it in his diary. The upper and lower ends looked like fish tails. It flew rapidly from north to south, along a straight line, and disappeared behind the trees that blocked the horizon.6 About half a million people took part in the Histadrut elections and more than 57 percent voted for Mapai.7
Ben-Gurion and the party leadership made a great effort to win just as great a victory in the elections to the Knesset and municipalities. They saw the party and the state as a single entity. At the end of May, Israel was visited for the first time by a foreign prime minister, U Nu of Burma. His visit was produced as a mass celebration of national pride. Children were taken out of school and stationed along sidewalks to welcome the eminent visitor, waving little flags of his country. The Ministry of Finance announced that Israel would receive $70 million from Germany, a down payment on the reparations. Sharett and Ben-Gurion declared that, if Egypt did not desist from harassing ships sailing to and from Eilat, Israel would use force to keep the Gulf of Aqaba open. A week later, Ma’ariv offered a prominent headline quoting what Ben-Gurion had told an American journalist: “If they want to try at strength, they must know we will give them a good beating.” Another large headline that day proclaimed that the Israeli navy would receive two destroyers from Britain by the end of the year. Moshe Dayan raised the Israeli flag at a ceremony marking their imminent arrival and lauded Britain’s assistance in establishing the IDF. The next day, Ben-Gurion told an election rally in Jerusalem that Israel was close to producing atomic energy. “The United States has decided to deliver us a nuclear reactor, but even without it we could build such a reactor, because we have heavy water and uranium.” He related that there was uranium “in every rock in the Negev,” although in small quantities, making its production expensive. He was overseeing this project as part of his position as defense minister, he stressed, adding, “Without revealing secrets, I am convinced that the time is not distant when we will produce and exploit atomic energy.” Two days later, he said on the radio that he would agree to return to the post of prime minister.8
There were thus good reasons for Israeli citizens to support Mapai. But two days before the elections, the newspapers reported that terrorists from Gaza had again attacked Patish, again tossing hand grenades into houses. Three Israelis were wounded, two of them critically. A Ma’ariv correspondent who visited the village the next day discovered by chance a bomb that had not gone off. Prior to this, Ma’ariv had reminded its readers that the platforms of the opposition Herut and Ahdut Ha’avodah parties demanded the annexation of the Gaza Strip.9
Mapai emerged from the election with forty Knesset seats, five fewer than before. Menachem Begin’s Herut almost doubled its strength, receiving fifteen seats to become the second-largest faction in the new Knesset. Ben-Gurion, who intended to form the next government, did not take responsibility and displayed complacence. “I do not see in these elections a significant failure of the party,” he declared. He attributed the weakening of his party to a confluence of “fortuitous factors,” first and foremost the Kastner trial.10 Three more months passed before he returned to the prime minister’s chair. The coalition negotiations frayed his nerves, as well as those of Sharett, who continued in the meantime to serve as prime and foreign minister.
On the morning of October 13, 1955, Ben-Gurion was scheduled to set out for Tel Aviv. At eight, his military secretary, Nehemiah Argov, arrived at the room at the Jerusalem President Hotel where Ben-Gurion was lodging, only to find that the prime minister’s shoes, which he had left out to be polished, were still outside the door, along with the morning newspapers. Ben-Gurion, it seemed, had not even woken up yet. Argov went in, and Ben-Gurion emerged from the bathroom. He tottered for a few minutes and then collapsed. By the time a doctor arrived he had lost consciousness. The doctor managed to bring him to so that he could, with great effort, answer a few questions, but he then again plunged into insensibility. The medical team was alarmed in the extreme, Argov reported to Sharett. After treating and reviving Ben-Gurion, they ordered absolute bed rest for several days; he was not hospitalized. Sharett asked if it had been a heart attack; Argov replied that his heart was fine, “but it’s something connected to the blood.” Sharett summoned Ben-Gurion’s personal physician, Dr. Moshe Rachmilevitz, who told him that Ben-Gurion had apparently suffered a stroke. He related that Ben-Gurion had complained of a sense of heaviness in his head, “as if I have no brain,” in his own words. Ben-Gurion himself attributed the feeling to the sleeping pill he had taken the night before. Dr. Rachmilevitz was skeptical but did not entirely dismiss the possibility. In the meantime, it was quite possible that it could happen again. As such, Ben-Gurion had to be forbidden to engage in “all work with responsibility”—in other words, he was not to engage in any physical, mental, or emotional effort.11 He had several difficult months behind him.
*
Since his return to the Defense Ministry, the conflict over Palestine had looked much like it had during the second half of the War of Independence—a confrontation between Israel and the Arab states, led by Egypt. But in large measure it was a continuation of the fifty-year struggle for the land. Most of the infiltrators and attackers who penetrated Israel from the Gaza Strip were refugees, as were the fedayun (“those who sacrifice themselves”) guerrillas, some of whom operated under the direction of the Egyptian army.12
The attacks increased, and, in tandem, so did the army’s demand to be allowed to respond. Sharett did not oppose every reprisal operation on principle, but his inclination was to hold the army back. That was a source of tension between him and Ben-Gurion. A short time after the elections, Ben-Gurion declared at a meeting of his party’s Central Committee that the Foreign Ministry existed to serve the Defense Ministry, not the opposite, and that the Defense Ministry was responsible for the well-being of Israel’s population, not for what foreign diplomats might say or what The New York Times might write. He remarked that the foreign affairs portfolio, which Sharett had retained when he became prime minister, should be placed in the hands of “a worthy person,” adding that he still did not know who that would be. “In this speech, the Old Man spoke out in the sharpest way against the Foreign Ministry, and hurt Father very much,” Tzipora Sharett wrote to her children. “The entire scene was so appalling that even the newspaper reporters were ashamed to make it public.” She offered her children a scoop that the journalists themselves might not have been aware of. “Ben-Gurion’s speech was preceded by a personal message to Father, a note he sent him during that very same meeting, informing of his decision to return to Sde Boker. Father took Ben-Gurion’s speech as that of a man pouring out his anger prior to his retirement.” The next day, it turned out that Ben-Gurion was staying.13 It would have been the right moment, and was likely the last possible one, for Sharett to break with Ben-Gurion and resign to preserve his honor and self-respect. But he stayed on.
At the end of that same month, the Cabinet approved a reprisal operation. An IDF contingent set out. After they had already crossed the Gazan border, an order arrived from Sharett to abort the operation. It turned out that as the operation was in its final stages of preparation, Sharett received a call from an American named Elmore Jackson, United Nations observer for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace and charitable organization. Seeking to promote a Middle East peace compact, Jackson had met with both Nasser and Ben-Gurion.14 According to Sharett, Jackson had assured him that he was doing all he could to restore calm. As a result, Sharett, with Ben-Gurion’s apparently reluctant concurrence, ordered that the operation scheduled for that night was not to be carried out. Dayan submitted his resignation the next day. Ben-Gurion summoned the Mapai members of the Cabinet, placed Dayan’s letter on the table, and said that there had to be a clear line, either his or Sharett’s. Then he walked out of the room. Sharett then obtained the Cabinet’s approval for an operation to blow up the police station in Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip. It would be the IDF’s largest operation since the War of Independence, and it ended with seventy Egyptians and one Israeli dead. Ben-Gurion observed the operation from close to the border, along with Dayan and Ariel Sharon.†15
The next Cabinet meeting was on a war footing; the IDF had called up reserves. “I did not sleep for two straight nights,” Ben-Gurion related. He conjectured that the British were behind the rising tensions and listed three Israeli settlements that the Egyptians intended to attack—one of them was Sde Boker. One Cabinet minister asked about the country’s food stocks, the water supply in Jerusalem, and the condition of Tel Aviv’s bomb shelters. “We have what remains from the War of Independence,” Ben-Gurion responded.16
In September 1955, Egypt announced that it had signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, which would include a supply of tanks and MiG aircraft. The country had already ratcheted up its restrictions on shipping to Eilat and signed a defense pact with Syria. Like the supply of arms to Israel during the War of Independence, the deal required the Soviet Union’s sanction. The Russian penetration of the Middle East created a new and dangerous situation. Sharett called a special Cabinet meeting. The record shows that the ministers were in shock, especially because of the difficulty of obtaining armaments from the United States. In that regard, Ben-Gurion commented: “I am not so sure that we will not ever have to ask for arms from the Russians, if an opportunity rises.” He did not say much more than this. At a certain point he blurted out: “If they really receive MiGs, I will favor bombing them. We can do it.” Then he excoriated Nasser: “I have heard that he is a hypocritical liar,” he said.17 He collapsed in his hotel some ten days later.
*
He was very sick. The political system began to prepare for the day after. “I was going mad with speculation,” Sharett wrote. “Are we on the verge of a new catastrophe? And even if this is not a catastrophe, what if it turns out that Ben-Gurion is not capable of heading the government? Good God, what chaos.”
The country was awash in rumors. An American news agency reported that he had had a stroke. The government had no choice but to issue a statement. The Government Press Office suggested saying that he had had a dizzy spell caused, according to his doctors, by an inner ear disturbance—in other words, an attack of vertigo, or perhaps Ménière’s disease. Sharett consulted with Golda Meir, who said that the statement offered too much detail. “Everyone will say, dizziness, loss of balance—it means that the Old Man is not what he once was and that he needs to leave the ranks.” Sharett called in the physicians. Dr. Rachmilevitz had not yet ruled out the possibility of a stroke, but agreed to sign the statement drafted by the Government Press Office. Paula also objected to all the detail. In the meantime, Ben-Gurion’s condition improved. Sharett went to see him at the hotel. Suddenly there was an electrical outage, as occasionally happened in Jerusalem. “I saw his face by candlelight, wonderfully relaxed but sad,” Sharett wrote. He was lucid and asked about the protracted and aggravating coalition negotiations. Tzipora Sharett said that even if Ben-Gurion recovered, he would never regain his previous stature. “The legend has lost its allure,” she maintained. It had been “the greatest mistake of his life” not to remain at Sde Boker but to try to return to the helm.18
The growing friction on the Gaza Strip border faced Ben-Gurion with two sets of heavy pressures. Dayan and several political leaders were demanding war against Egypt, as soon as possible. They based their position in part on the “Czech deal,” which meant, so Dayan said, that Egypt was preparing to destroy Israel. Most members of the Cabinet, led by Sharett and other Mapai leaders, opposed war. Ben-Gurion had difficulty deciding between them. Rather than leading, he was drawn in one direction and then in the other. His physical and mental frailty made it all the more difficult. He was unsure what to do, to go to war or not. His memory was also bad. He proposed capturing Gaza and fought for his proposal, but did not resign when it was rejected, just as he was actually not sure that it was the right thing to do.
He would soon order Dayan to plan a large operation to seize control of the Tiran Straits, but he did not allow it to be carried out.19 It was not easy to hold Dayan back; the army was behind him.
When he returned from Sde Boker, Ben-Gurion found that Dayan was carrying out the eighteen-point program that he had left behind him when he retired. He could reassure himself that, in contrast with Sharett and Lavon, Dayan lived up to expectations. The chief of staff was acting in accordance with a strategic conception that Ben-Gurion himself had dictated to the Haganah during the period of terrorist attacks that preceded the War of Independence, what he had variously termed a policy of “first strike,” or “offensive defense,” or “initiated war.”20 In fact, Dayan pushed Ben-Gurion toward war.‡
The Lavi Plan that the IDF developed under Dayan’s leadership, in accordance with this conception, integrated a study from July 1954 produced by the General Staff’s Planning Department under the title “Nevo.” Its principal conclusion was a rather bleak one—time was working against Israel. To survive, it had to enlarge its borders. The forty-three-page document reflected an innovative approach to the concept of national security. The evaluation of strength and definition of goals was expanded beyond military capability to take into account political, demographic, and economic data and processes, from the health of the population to national morale, including education, culture, and values. The authors of the document also listed a number of advantages held by Israel’s 1.5 million Jews, as civilians and soldiers, but they argued that Israel would have difficulty achieving its aims, most important of all “the Jewish settlement effort,” within the armistice borders.
The document’s economic chapter stated that if 2.5 million Jews lived within the state as defined by the armistice borders, per capita national product would decline “decisively” to the level of the Arab world. Furthermore, if Israel were blocked from using the waters of the Banias and Hatzbani Rivers, which had their sources in Syria and Lebanon, half a million Israelis would not have enough food. Among the major dangers facing the country, other than the hatred of the Arabs, the report cited the composition of its Jewish population. During the coming several decades, about a third of Israelis would belong to “backward ethnic groups whose natural increase will be greater than the rest of the inhabitants.” As a result, Israel was in danger of “Levantization,” which could weaken social solidarity and strength. To achieve what the study called “qualitative enhancement,” Israel would need the immigration of high-quality Jews from overseas, meaning mostly the United States and the Soviet Union. The economic forecast did not promise that they would want or be able to come. In any case, it asserted, “It is absolutely clear that, within the existing borders, there is no economic capacity for absorbing the desired population.”
The question, according to the Nevo report, was thus not whether to enlarge the country’s Green Line borders but when and where to do so. Strategic logic suggested that the country’s borders should coincide with natural barriers, such as deserts, mountain ridges, and sources of water. Also, the borders should be as distant as possible from the areas where the Jewish population was concentrated and restrict the number of Arabs in Israel to no more than 20 to 30 percent of the population.
On this basis, the authors presented several alternatives. The best of them was that the border with Egypt should be set at the far end of the Sinai Desert, preferably on the bank of the Suez Canal. In the south, the border should lie beyond the desert reaches of Saudi Arabia, with the possibility of an “extension” that would enable Israel to control the Arabian oil fields. The recommended boundary with Syria would run somewhere beyond the Bashan highlands, while the border between Israel and Jordan should be set deep in the desert, far east of the Jordan River. The study offered less attractive alternatives as well, including one that would leave Israel with control only of the eastern shore of the Sinai Peninsula and the Straits of Tiran, including the island itself, along with the Hebron highlands and East Jerusalem.
Like the Cabinet ministers, the IDF’s Planning Department also addressed the fate of the population that would, in all these cases, come under Israeli rule. Control of all of Sinai, to the Suez Canal, was so desirable that it would be worth it for Israel to assume also the burden of ruling the Gaza Strip, with its entire population, “although a transfer would, of course, be desirable.” A less comfortable option would be to evacuate the two hundred thousand refugees in the Strip “westward,” which seems to have meant into the desert, or to create for them a “neutral political enclave.” The added value of placing the eastern border beyond the Jordan River had to be balanced against the need “to control and eradicate a hostile population of more than 1.3 million.” That did not seem like a practical option, or would not be until after Israel took in at least 2.5 million more Jews and transferred at least 50 percent of the Arab population to Iraq, in the framework of a “political settlement,” a phrase the document placed within quotation marks. Moving the eastern border of Israel to that of Jordan would require Israel to “swallow” eight hundred thousand people, including the Palestinian population in the West Bank. Even after “maximum thinning,” at least four hundred thousand would remain, leaving a total population in which there were only twice as many Jews as Arabs. The Hebron highland option would bring only two hundred thousand Arabs under Israeli rule, “if it is not possible to evacuate them.” The ideal northern border would involve bringing only a relatively small number of Arabs under Jewish rule.
“A policy of thinning out [the Arab population] by means of evacuation or transfer,” as the Nevo report put it, was meant to go hand in hand with a “large settlement effort,” but the authors also proposed consideration of the political aspects of another possibility: the “creation of a neutralized Arab enclave in Transjordan and the Triangle, in the framework of a ‘Palestinian state,’ linked to Israel, that will also include the Gaza Strip refugees.”21
The head of the Planning Department, who gave the name “Nevo” to the document, may have been thinking of Moses, who ascended Mount Nevo, east of the Jordan River, to gaze out over the Promised Land that he would not enter. There is no clear evidence of the extent to which the authors were influenced by the spirit of Dayan’s order; perhaps they were seeking to please him. What is certain is that the IDF’s top command advocated a larger Israel and sought to instill that view in the troops.22 Ben-Gurion may or may not have been directly influenced by the Nevo report. Whatever the case, he viewed the Green Line as a temporary border, which is indeed how it had been designated in the armistice agreements. From time to time he pondered ways of correcting it.
*
Chief of Staff Dayan, then about forty years old, a member of the second generation of the Zionist aristocracy, was already an object of adulation. Ben-Gurion considered him the ideal combination of farmer and warrior, the two essential sides of the New Jew. He was also impressed by Dayan’s fascination with archaeology and the Bible, and recommended to him that he read Sophocles. Dayan had been born at the very first kibbutz, Degania, and grew up at Nahalal, another legendary pioneering settlement. His father was a leading figure in Mapai and represented the party in the Knesset. Dayan’s trademark black eyepatch became a national symbol. An admired and charismatic commander, he was daring and adventurous, and seems to have been fascinated by danger and death. He often placed himself at the front line of battle, where he could smell the gunfire and absorb the smoke. One of his command assignments during the War of Independence was the conquest of Lod; on several occasions he was involved in the expulsion of Arabs.
He thought a lot about how Jews and Arabs might live together, but he remained largely ensconced in the Orientalist fantasy of the kindly landowner who treats his tenant farmers well or punishes them, as he sees fit. His biographer, Mordechai Bar-On, wrote that he had an “extreme aversion” to being under the sway of any form of ideology and aimed to constantly reexamine changing circumstances. But he was born into the Zionist creed and held fast to it to the end of his life. And, like Ben-Gurion, he was willing to pay any price that it demanded.
An arrogant romantic, who sought power, women, money, and glory, he was a slave to his desires and passions. Over his lifetime he betrayed his wives and children, the law, the truth, and himself as well. Averse to accepting supreme responsibility, he always needed to be under the authority of a prime minister. As Ben-Gurion aged, he became ever more dependent on this younger man, treating him with a great measure of indulgence. This included allowing his general to do what he had categorically forbidden officers affiliated with Mapam to do—engage in political activity.
Dayan’s efforts to force Ben-Gurion into a full-scale war with Egypt produced a dialogue that sometimes looked like a cat-and-mouse game. Both men were cunning, but Dayan more so, and with impunity. “Once and for all, I have to try to give you some military education,” he told Ben-Gurion imperiously on one occasion. Ben-Gurion responded that he was always prepared to learn, and for his part tried to give Dayan a lesson in national leadership. Dayan betrayed him, too, in the end.
Ben-Gurion started from the insight that, while Egypt could destroy Israel, Israel could not destroy the Arab state, even if it had the upper hand in a second round of war. “If war comes tomorrow and we win, we will face the prospect of a third, fourth, and fifth round, without end,” he said, adhering to the fundamental approach that had guided him for many years. He reminded Dayan that every war causes a huge amount of destruction. It made no difference if Israel initiated the war or waited for the Arabs to attack, whether Israel lost or won—the damage the country would suffer would set it back by five to seven years. A preventative war was liable to prompt the intervention of a third party—he especially feared that Britain would come to the aid of Egypt and would in exchange receive control of the Negev. A war Israel initiated was thus liable to end in defeat; at the very least it would leave Israel in a worse position than it had been in before. The entire world would condemn it, even if, “in the best case,” sanctions were not imposed on it. The immediate task was thus to obtain arms, not start a war.
If that were the case, Dayan asked, then what level of alert did the army need to be on? Ben-Gurion said that the question was a hard one, but he offered an answer. The army had to take into account the possibility of a sudden war, and needed to be able to mobilize the necessary reserve forces “in the shortest possible time.” The army, including the reserves, needed to be well trained, its “armaments in good order,” and have the needed fuel available. Furthermore, it needed to ensure that Israel’s “moral climate” would enable the nation to face such a test.23 Dayan was not convinced, but inferred from his talks with Ben-Gurion that there was nothing preventing him from pursuing what he called the “deterioration method.” Israel did not need to stage any provocations, he explained to his men. It was sufficient to respond forcefully to every act of Egyptian aggression. “In the end, such a policy will, on its own, bring the tensions to the detonation point,” he said.24 But neither did he set aside the option of preventative war.
Ben-Gurion returned to work three weeks after his collapse. “It is the first time since he fell ill that I have seen him standing on his feet, and I did not get the impression that he is standing firmly,” Sharett wrote. The new government that Ben-Gurion had finally formed was supported by a coalition comprising two-thirds of the members of the Knesset, including Mapam and Ahdut Ha’avodah.25 Sharett had lost the prime minister’s post, but remained foreign minister. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion retained the Ministry of Defense. When he presented his government to the Knesset, he dressed in khaki; his face was pale and his voice muffled. A few minutes after he began to speak, he stopped, apologized, and then after a brief silence went on. The entire house held its breath, Sharett wrote. Everyone was preoccupied with the question that no one asked out loud: had he really returned? Meir related that, a few days previously, Ben-Gurion had shared with her his fear that he would not last long as the country’s leader. He gave the rest of his speech sitting down, an unprecedented sight in the Knesset. But he seemed to recover toward the end of his address. “We have never and we will never start a war against anyone,” he declared. He then walked firmly from the speaker’s podium back to his seat at the Cabinet table. That night the IDF carried out an operation in the area of Nitzana, which was disputed between Israel and Egypt. Operation Har Ga’ash (Volcano) left some eighty Egyptians and six Israelis dead.26 A few days later, Dayan again proposed to Ben-Gurion that Israel bring about a “large-scale confrontation” with Egypt, “at the earliest possible time.” The goals of the war he was proposing had not changed—the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the Straits of Tiran.
Dayan pressed very hard, and employed the rest of the IDF leadership to help him. At one General Staff meeting, Ben-Gurion informally polled the generals. Every one of them favored a preventative war.27 Yehoshafat Harkabi, who had replaced Binyamin Gibli as army intelligence chief, sent Ben-Gurion a memorandum in this spirit, as did the chief of the Shin Bet secret security service and Mossad, Isser Harel. Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to Washington and the United Nations, agreed.28
During this period, the chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in the region tried to put together an agreement that would reduce to a bare minimum the tensions in the Gaza Strip area. To that end, he met with both Ben-Gurion and Nasser. Among his proposals were joint Israeli and Egyptian patrols and the construction of a border fence. But Israel did not want joint patrols, which would constrain its freedom of action, and the Egyptians did not want a fence, which would grant the armistice line the nature of a recognized border between states.29 UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld also traveled to the Middle East, as did a series of self-appointed mediators. One of the latter was Richard Crossman, who still felt he had a mission to save Zionism from Ben-Gurion and get it back on Chaim Weizmann’s track. He also visited Nasser, but had no success and went home. Britain and the United States concocted a peace plan, which they gave the code name “Alpha.” An American envoy named Robert Anderson, a former secretary of the navy, arrived in total secrecy, at the behest of President Eisenhower. He tried to arrange a meeting between Ben-Gurion and Nasser, perhaps even in Cairo. But all these efforts failed, because Israel wanted Egypt to recognize Israel’s right to live in peace, while Nasser agreed to consider only proposals that Israel had refused to accept, among them Israel ceding the southern Negev and accepting the right of the refugees to return to their homes or accept compensation, as each one saw fit.§30
Ben-Gurion did not believe in these initiatives. “Nasser’s face is not turned toward peace,” he wrote in his diary. That was the fundamental assumption that guided him. Nasser knew how to make a good impression on his guests. They returned to Jerusalem with the feeling that he was not refusing to make peace. But, Ben-Gurion wrote, “his behavior over the years shows that he seeks war with Israel, and is only waiting for the day when he can be sure of his military superiority.”31 As time went by, he increasingly came to see Nasser as the principal factor in Israel’s conflict with Egypt, and to a large extent with the entire Arab world. He read Nasser’s book, Philosophy of the Revolution, just as he had read Mein Kampf in an earlier decade. “Nasser is now the greatest danger for us,” he said.32
Against this background, the tension on Israel’s borders continued. In December 1955, the situation on the Syrian border deteriorated, leading to a large Israeli reprisal at Lake Kinneret, where the two countries were at odds over fishing rights in the lake, among other issues. Some fifty Syrians and six Israelis were killed. Ben-Gurion seems not to have properly appreciated the dimensions of the operation or to have considered the possible implications with all due caution. Neither did he take account of an urgent appeal that reached him a day earlier from Sharett. The foreign minister was in the United States, closing an arms deal with the Americans. He asked Ben-Gurion to refrain from all military action until the deal was finalized. But Ben-Gurion listened to Dayan instead; he apparently wanted to humor Dayan after vetoing several other operations the chief of staff had proposed. The operations were aimed, in part, at furthering Dayan’s “deterioration policy.”
The Kinneret operation was condemned throughout the world. It roused protests in the Cabinet as well, among other reasons because Ben-Gurion had not brought the operation before the ministers for their approval. Ha’aretz ran an editorial with the headline “Dictatorship of the Prime Minister?” Ben-Gurion explained that, when the operation was approved, he was not only prime minister and defense minister, but in Sharett’s absence was also acting foreign minister. He had thus consulted with himself. But his face was bleak, sad, and distressed during the debate; he seems to have regretted the operation. Ambassador Eban also sent him a sharply worded protest, but then defended the operation before the Security Council. Ben-Gurion’s retort became an Israeli classic: “I fully understand your concern about the Kinneret operation. I must confess that I, too, began to have my doubts about the wisdom of it. But when I read the full text of your brilliant defense of our action in the Security Council, all my doubts were set at rest. You have convinced me that we were right, after all.”
Here, too, hawkeyed and razor-tongued Tzipora Sharett offered a merciless but clearheaded account of the background to the operation. “It is difficult to understand what happened here logically,” she wrote to her children. “I can say that what was at work here was the Old Man’s age, the fallout from his recent illness, his weakening memory and capacity for considering the act from all sides, political and military, his old complex regarding your father, and above all else, the fact that he has been dominated by Moshe Dayan, who explicitly wants war.” Ben-Gurion liked to play with soldiers and lived in an imaginary world, she wrote: “Not everyone is mad, but it is not hard to be dragged along by history.” Sharett himself told the members of Mapai’s Political Committee that even “the Devil himself” could not have recommended a more damaging operation than the one at the Kinneret. In response to a note from Navon, Ben-Gurion’s aide, Sharett agreed to take back that metaphor.33
Operation Alei Zait (Olive Leaves), as the Kinneret operation was officially called, did not draw Nasser into war, but Syrian attacks on Israeli settlements increased. Like the conflict over fishing in the lake, disputes over grazing and harvesting rights in the Gaza Strip area led to a large operation that ended up killing dozens, most of them civilians, in that territory. In the months that preceded the operation, fedayun carried out a series of attacks on civilian settlements in Israel. They also planted mines and carried out ambushes. From behind the border, Egyptian soldiers sniped at Israeli patrols; an Israeli soldier was killed on March 1, 1956, and three days later three more were killed. The soldiers were driving away a flock of sheep that had crossed into Israeli territory, apparently as bait. The Egyptians then shelled a number of kibbutzim, including Nahal Oz. There were no casualties. In response, the IDF fired artillery at Gaza City. According to a report Sharett made to the Cabinet, thirty men were killed in the shelling, twenty-six of them civilians, as well as fifteen women and twelve children. More than a hundred people were injured. Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet that when the chief of staff informed him about the shelling, he ordered Dayan to desist. His reason, he explained, was that the target, an Egyptian army outpost, was located within a civilian area. Any light deviation in the direction of fire would mean that civilians would be hurt, Ben-Gurion said, and for that reason he ordered an end to the shelling.
Several members of the Cabinet agreed that the action had been necessary. “I want to say that I am not sorry about the Gaza matter,” Golda Meir said. “I know that it might sound cruel. Children were killed. But the children of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha are also children. I freely admit that I don’t have any bad feelings about it … I am not saying that because in Gaza Arab children were killed and here we are talking about Jewish children, but because we did not start it. They need to know that they need to pay, and pay a high price.” By this point, Ben-Gurion had reached the conclusion that there was no way of preventing fedayun incursions from the Gaza Strip; the only way to stop them was to undermine Nasser’s regime.34
Nasser did not allow himself to be drawn into war this time, either, but he sent several fedayun squads into Israel. One of them managed to reach Shafrir (later renamed Kfar Chabad), just nine miles from Tel Aviv. The terrorists made their way into the synagogue of the village’s vocational school while evening prayers were in progress, opened fire, and killed four students and a counselor.35
About two hours previously, the first six Mystère IVA fighter-bombers purchased from France arrived in Israel under a veil of the highest secrecy. Ben-Gurion drove to the Hatzor airbase, in the Negev, to watch them land. He was beside himself with excitement. When, standing in the air control tower, he heard the voices of Israeli pilots, a huge smile spread across his face. “It’s a beautiful object,” he told the Cabinet. “It was a pleasure to see them descend, one after the other.” For a moment he sounded like a kid with a new toy. “You press a button and it throws rockets at an enemy plane,” he marveled. Several selected guests watched the landing with him, including Israel’s ambassador to France and France’s to Israel. Foreign Minister Sharett was not invited.36
Following the attack on Shafrir, Ben-Gurion demanded a large-scale operation on a fedayun base in the Strip. He explained that Israel could not act against Egypt with the same kind of small detachments the Palestinian commandos used. Several ministers asked if he meant war and the conquest of the Gaza Strip. Ben-Gurion responded with an ambiguous statement of the type he had used in the past. “I do not favor us starting a war, although I am not opposed to carrying out an operation that might cause a war.” In any case, he said, “the war is approaching us rapidly.”
The Cabinet authorized him to make a decision about a reprisal operation as he saw fit, “in consultation with the foreign minister.” Two ministers voted against the resolution; Sharett was one of them.37 Two months later, he was dismissed. He heard about it from a columnist for Ha’aretz, Shlomo Gross, who called him to ask whether it was true that he was being appointed to the position of secretary of Mapai and that Golda Meir was replacing him as foreign minister. Tzipora Sharett had already heard about it from her friends.38
There was no easy way of getting rid of Sharett. As he had at other junctures, Ben-Gurion offered his colleagues a choice: him or me. Unlike in the past, his colleagues offered no opposition. Sharett felt that he had been done a terrible injustice. “Every day is a nightmare,” he wrote. Before he was compelled to leave the Cabinet, he put in writing things he had never dared say so ferociously before. “I have thought about a long chain of fabrications and lies that we are to blame for and which cost us lives, and on excesses by our people that have caused the most horrible catastrophes, some of which have had repercussions on the entire course of events and contributed to the security crisis we find ourselves in,” he wrote. “I warned against the criminal narrowness of our approach to state security, which leads us to impetuous and wild actions that destroy our political standing on the security front and which severely undermine our position.”39 With regard to the shelling of Gaza, he first wrote that it had been “wild and foolish”; a while later he wrote: “In my opinion, it was a criminal act.” He argued that the “deterioration policy” had caused Israel to miss an opportunity to restrain Nasser, perhaps even to topple him. Nor could he resist putting down an embarrassing incident that revealed Ben-Gurion’s poor memory. During a Cabinet debate, Sharett claimed, Ben-Gurion had demanded the establishment of an Israeli settlement in the demilitarized zone along the Egyptian border. When he was told that the Cabinet had long ago approved the proposal, he was surprised and said that, if that were the case, there was no reason not to found the settlement. But the settlement was already there. “I do not know if all members of the Cabinet have given proper consideration to these vicissitudes of memory, misleading reports, and wiles of concealment and disguise that were here demonstrated in such a measure of deterioration in the space of just a few minutes,” Sharett wrote. He left the Cabinet feeling that his ouster was a catastrophe of history. “I am sad, sad, sad,” he wrote.40
All this principally indicated that Sharett knew very well that he could not serve as foreign minister in Ben-Gurion’s government. Just weeks later, Nasser provoked another dramatic crisis, of a sort that Golda Meir was much better suited to manage together with Ben-Gurion. It happened on July 26, 1956, in Alexandria. Nasser told an audience of three hundred thousand of the city’s inhabitants that he was nationalizing the Suez Canal. Ma’ariv called it a bombshell; Israel, which up to that point had faced war with Egypt alone, suddenly found itself with two potential allies, Britain and France.41
About ten days after marveling at the sight of the first French warplanes to arrive in Israel, Ben-Gurion visited the Kishon port, just north of Haifa, to see the unloading of several dozen AMX-13 tanks that had arrived by boat from France. This was the first installment of a larger shipment that would arrive on several boats over the next several days. He was extremely excited, Dayan wrote, and boarded the ship to shake the hand of the French admiral and his officers. Dayan was excited as well, but tried to hide it.
It was meant to be a secret, but many people already knew about it, in part because Ben-Gurion invited selected guests to witness the arrival of the ships carrying the tanks. Natan Alterman was invited to memorialize the event in a poem. Ben-Gurion did not allow him to publish the work, but read it at a Cabinet meeting (“iron, much iron, new iron … and while it is all imagination—it is all already real …”). It was Alterman’s best poem ever, he thought; at a later date, he also recited it before the Knesset. He proposed to the ministers that they cast lots to determine in what order they would come to watch the tanks unloaded, but they preferred that he decide.42 Ben-Gurion made a point of welcoming each one of the ships; when one was late in arriving, he was upset and personally called the commander of Israel’s navy to ask what had happened.**
The arms purchase agreements between France and Israel were signed before Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The negotiations between the two countries apparently received a push after the Czechoslovakian arms deal with Egypt. Dayan had informed the Cabinet as early as August 1954 that France was interested in selling arms to Israel. In April 1956, he explained France’s motives: certain circles in the French army wanted Israel armed so that it would start a war with Egypt. That would ensure that Egypt would not intervene in the Algerian revolution against French rule. It was a French gamble that reminded Dayan of something he claimed to have once heard from Ben-Gurion: “Whoever bases his policy on Israel rather than the Arabs is either an idiot or a genius. The difference between a genius and an idiot is that a genius sees things before they happen.”43
France had lent aid to the Zionist struggle before the establishment of the state, and during the War of Independence as well.44 But in the 1950s, the road to obtaining French arms was a bumpy one. It required putting out cautious feelers to competing individuals in France, who had differing interests and approaches, among them politicians, officials, generals, and the heads of secret security agencies, many of whom were caught up in a web of conflicts, plots, and intrigues. Very few foreigners were able to divine how it all worked. One who did was Shimon Peres; he felt completely at home in the jungle of the Fourth Republic. He had a talent for precisely identifying who was a friend and who a foe, who a potential ally and who a likely turncoat, how much power each had, and what the weaknesses of each individual were. “In France there are three defense ministers,” Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet in astonishment—of land forces, the navy, and the air force.45 Peres’s secret activity was an extension of the escapades of the Bricha and arms procurement operations that had preceded the state, among them covert operations and deceptions of all sorts, many of great imagination, ingenuity, and daring. Peres often spoke in the name of the survivors of the Holocaust, or on occasion in terms of socialist values—he always knew how to target the interests of his interlocutor. “The central figures in the aviation industry are Jews,” he reported. Ben-Gurion asked: “Is that good or bad?” Peres said it was good.46
Ben-Gurion had discovered him at a young age. Peres had been only thirty years old when Ben-Gurion appointed him director-general of the Ministry of Defense. Ben-Gurion’s relationship with Peres, unlike that with Dayan, did not grow out of the younger man’s biography. Rather, it principally derived from Peres’s ability to get things done and his intellectual talents. Peres read widely and was willing to consider all options, as fantastical as they might seem. Peres was almost everything Dayan was not. He had been born in a town in Poland; he had arrived in Palestine at the age of thirteen and had lived on a kibbutz for a while, but did not fight in the War of Independence and never made it into the native-born elite. He remained something of an outsider his entire life, a Jew among Israelis; the accent he had in every one of the several languages he knew, Hebrew included, gave away that Yiddish was his mother tongue. Many treated him with contempt and hostility; almost to the end of his life he was identified more as a political intriguer than as a person who had made a huge contribution to Israel’s security. He thus spent his life seeking love, or at least recognition and belonging. One of his most senior counterparts in France, Abel Thomas, attributed his success there to his inclination and ability to blend into whatever surroundings he found himself in.47 His outsider position in Israel was an obstacle, but his foreign Israeli mien charmed France. There was probably no one in Israel who admired him as a politician and a friend the way Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury did; Bourgès-Maunoury was France’s defense minister and later prime minister. Ben-Gurion’s patronage was the source of his power, but Peres also felt a profound personal loyalty to his patron. Dayan’s relations with Ben-Gurion were much more utilitarian. Together, Peres and Dayan led him into a war that he did not at first want.
*
The summer found Ben-Gurion, as sometimes in the past, in a meditative, nostalgic mood. A day before Nasser’s announcement about Suez, he was poring over Plato’s position that rulers are permitted to lie in the service of their people. He wrote several lines of Greek in his diary. The news from Cairo did not distract him from critically engaging with a theory of the origins of the Jewish faith. Two days later, he avidly listened to the radio broadcast of the Israel national soccer team’s game against the Soviets—Israel lost 2–1, but at halftime the two teams were tied at 0, and during the second half Israel played without its star, the goalie Ya’akov Hodorov, who had been injured. “It could be that the heat worked against the Russians, but our boys proved that they know how to try hard and succeed,” he wrote in his diary.††48
Nasser’s move to nationalize the Suez Canal did not spur him into immediate action. He presumed that the Soviet Union had sanctioned the move. As he put it, “Hitler has helped the Egyptian Mussolini.” It soon transpired that the United States recognized, in effect, Egypt’s right to nationalize the waterway. Ben-Gurion wrote: “It’s worse than Munich. It’s a knife in the backs of England and France and perhaps NATO as a whole.” But he presumed that France and Britain would not dare take the canal by force, and that there was nothing Israel could do, either.49
Dayan continued to press for an Israeli first strike. Plans had been ready since January of the previous year. A bombing campaign in Egypt might well kill tens of thousands, one of the plans stated; dozens of Israelis would die. Ben-Gurion continued to say no. Dayan’s patience began to run out. “The question is what result you want to achieve,” he said to Ben-Gurion at the end of July 1956. Ben-Gurion wanted “many small strikes that can be kept up and thus make life intolerable for them.” Dayan was opposed. “If we kill five Egyptian peasants they won’t mind,” he said. “They’ll shout ‘the Jews are murderers,’ but not one of them will really get upset.” In fact, the “small strikes” that Ben-Gurion wanted would be interpreted as Israeli failures, Dayan added. The assumption would be that it had wanted to carry out a large operation but had been unable to do so, he maintained.50 The question remained open for the time being.
*
Later that summer, Ben-Gurion found time to inquire about the condition of his friend Shlomo Lavi’s eyes, as well as to copy out selections from Aristotle’s letters in ancient Greek and to listen to a detailed report on a caterpillar that was ravaging the cotton crop. On August 24, 1956, he celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his immigration to Palestine. Memories of his first hours in Jaffa overwhelmed him; his decision not to spend the Sabbath there but to leave the city immediately had, over the years, taken on an ideological cast. “Naveh Shalom Street, where Jews lived mixed in with Arabs, gave me a very harsh feeling of Exile,” he wrote.51 The exile imposed on the refugees of 1948 returned to disturb him, making him again feel a need to insert his own account of what had happened into the Cabinet record. As part of this, he asked Moshe Carmel, who had commanded the forces that took Haifa and was by that time transport minister, for an alibi. “Carmel must know what happened in Haifa,” he said. “When the Haganah began to conquer the Arab parts of Haifa, they said to them, hand over your weapons and you can stay.”
Doris May wrote to him from London. When he returned to the Ministry of Defense, he tried to persuade her to come work for him, and now she finally agreed to come for six months.52
*
The French ambassador to Israel, Pierre Gilbert, an unabashed supporter of Israel, hosted Dayan and Peres for dinner and told them that only a joint French-Israeli operation could guarantee the canal’s international status. The possibility that France would take action against Nasser, perhaps in cooperation with Israel, had already come up before. On September 1, 1956, word arrived from Paris that the scenario was feasible. Ben-Gurion was primarily interested in what Britain would do. He continued to presume that the British would not want to attack Egypt, and certainly not in cooperation with Israel.53 Dayan said that the political risk of refraining from war was greater than the military risk that war would involve. Ben-Gurion rejected that presumption. For a moment it seemed as if he had adopted a strategy that he had first heard from the military historian Israel Beer: “Bleed the attacker from a defense posture and only then sortie and attack.” But “generally,” he added, he agreed with Dayan that the proper thing to do was “to go on the offensive, disrupt, deceive, surprise, and destroy the enemy, and that is possible, even if the enemy has an advantage in personnel and weapons.”54 He found it very difficult to formulate a consistent line of action. During the weeks that followed, it was thus Dayan who led the country to war. Ben-Gurion was not dragged along by the chief of staff against his will, but unlike in earlier times, when he was stronger, he now went along with Dayan more easily.55
In September 1956, he went to spend the Jewish holiday season at Sde Boker, his first visit there in five months. He found a forgotten volume of his diary from 1951 and recalled that he had seen The King and I in New York that year. He spent a long time meditating on the rule of the prophetess Deborah. He was stirred by a passage he found in Plutarch. He hosted George Orwell’s widow and spent many hours in the company of the American journalist Drew Pearson and his television crew. The American presidential campaign interested him. “Ike’s popularity is high and people think that there will not be war during his presidency,” Ben-Gurion wrote. He began to think through the terms and substance of socialist Zionism (“what they said in the past and what they don’t say today”), and he covered many pages of his diary with statistical and economic data, including the annual balance sheet of Solel Boneh. “A bathtub made in Israel is more expensive than one made outside the country,” he wrote.56
In the meantime, deadly terrorist attacks continued, sometimes also originating on Jordanian territory.‡‡
Dayan demanded authorization for reprisal actions. Ben-Gurion consented to only a few of them, and only some of those he brought before the Cabinet received its sanction. Some of these ended with heavy losses for the IDF—in September 1956, sixteen soldiers died in two reprisals. During one of them, Jordanians abducted several soldiers, then returned their bodies that evening. “The bodies were naked and horribly mutilated,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “They cut off the penises.” Dayan came to Sde Boker to explain why the operation had failed. “Ben-Gurion looked despondent,” Dayan wrote, “sitting glumly between piles of books scattered around his workroom in the little hut; the air was heavy.” In a diary entry dated September 22, 1956, Ben-Gurion noted: “According to the Hebrew calendar, I am seventy years old today.”
Three days later, everything changed. Ben-Gurion was flown urgently from Sde Boker to meet with Peres. “What he told me may well be momentous,” the prime minister wrote. His trusted aide had just returned from Paris. Peres said that France had concluded that it had to take action against Nasser, “with the knowledge and consent of the English. They want Israel to be involved, that too with the knowledge of the English.”57 The plan began to move quickly; Ben-Gurion followed all the details. He continued to believe the French and to be suspicious of the British. Dayan tried to reassure him, proposing that Israel, with British cooperation, bring about a new Middle East order. Nasser would be gotten rid of and Jordan partitioned between Israel and Iraq. Ben-Gurion could not conceive of why Britain would agree to such an arrangement. “I think it is an English plot to get us in trouble with Nasser and bring about an Iraqi conquest of Jordan,” he wrote.§§
But the desire for a new Middle East, and perhaps also the last several weeks of not seeing any clear way out of the corner Israel found itself in, finally led Ben-Gurion to adopt Dayan’s plan and make improvements to it. The latter included a solution to the refugee problem. Two days later, he presented the plan to Ambassador Gilbert. Nasser would be ousted. Jordan would be partitioned, with its eastern side going to Iraq, which would make peace with Israel. The United States would fund the resettlement of the Palestinian refugees in the expanded Iraq. He also proposed a partition of Syria, with Israel annexing part of its territory.58 That same day a French plane arrived to take him to the French capital, accompanied by Dayan and Peres. It was during this flight that he read Procopius of Caesarea’s History of the Wars.
It was not easy to cobble together this triple alliance. Ben-Gurion was housed in a private villa in Sèvres, a southwestern suburb famous for both its porcelain and the treaty signed after World War I between the Allies and Turkey. The illusion that the three countries could rid themselves of Nasser by means of an almost childishly simple stratagem lent the talks a “mythical” cast, as Ben-Gurion later told the Cabinet. The idea was that Israel would attack Egypt and that Britain and France would demand that the two sides agree to a cease-fire. Israel would consent on condition that Egypt also agreed, but Egypt would reject the ultimatum, providing a pretext for the two powers to join the Israeli offensive. All three countries wanted to depose Nasser. The French wanted Israel’s help and agreed to provide assistance, but the Israelis wanted a joint action from the outset. Britain was inclined to agree to a joint Israeli-French action, but without its own direct involvement. The Israelis insisted that the British also needed to play a role, the logic being that, if Britain were involved, Jordan would be much less likely to enter the war on Egypt’s side. Ben-Gurion hesitated long and hard before closing the deal. “What if Nasser doesn’t fall?” he kept asking himself.59
Each of the three partners compromised on its opening position. Ben-Gurion agreed to make the first strike against Egypt, for all intents and purposes accepting Dayan’s demand for a preventative war. Dayan promised that no more than 250 IDF soldiers would die. One of his subordinates, Shlomo Gazit, asked Dayan what the basis for this promise was. Dayan responded: “You yourself have seen and heard how apprehensive Ben-Gurion is about losses, and how unsure he is about the IDF’s ability to win this war. I had no choice but to reassure him.” He added that if Israel won, no one would take him to task about the number of soldiers killed, and if Israel lost, it would have much more serious problems to deal with. No one really knew what would happen afterward, but everyone believed that the principal goal would be achieved—Nasser would be done for. Dayan and Peres persuaded Ben-Gurion that it was now or never. That was the major claim he made to the Cabinet a few days later.60
*
Several members of the Cabinet were angry that they had not been informed of the contacts leading up to the pact. “Now you know,” Ben-Gurion told one of them. He had brought most of them up to date before the meeting. He offered a fairly precise but not complete account of the plan. Getting rid of Nasser would guarantee freedom of navigation to and from Eilat; as part of the campaign, Israel would seize control of the islands in the Tiran Straits. He could not say who would receive the Sinai Peninsula after the war. As usual, he stressed that he could not promise anything for certain, and nearly every sentence he uttered was couched in a caveat. He presumed that the United States would be too caught up in the presidential election to intervene, and that the Russians were preoccupied with repressing the uprising in Hungary, but he could not really know how they would react. The “collusion,” as he would later refer to the pact, was thus liable to ensnare Israel in conflict with the two superpowers, but the opportunity to put an end to Nasser’s regime was worth the risk. He said again and again that Israel had been presented with an opportunity that it would never have again, although he refused to commit himself even to that statement. He did not tell his colleagues about the plans for a new Middle East order, but as always got carried away by his own arguments. Israel could destroy Egypt’s army even without French and British assistance, he maintained. Israel didn’t need them. “We’ll do it like nothing,” he asserted. The ministers could still vote down the plan, he said. That was not entirely true—all the preparations for war were in place and the reserves were already being called up.
Most of the ministers supported him. Golda Meir related how she had encountered battle-ready and well-prepared soldiers and her heart had broken; she said those final words in Yiddish. But Minister of Health Israel Barzilai, of Mapam, cited what Ben-Gurion himself had said just a few months earlier—the proposed war would only mark the start of an interim period, between the second round and the third. Ben-Gurion responded: “I’m not saying forever. There will be five to eight years of calm.” He promised that there would not be heavy losses, but did not specify a number. He compared the war he was proposing to the creation of the state.
Someone asked what would happen in the Gaza Strip. Ben-Gurion said that the subject was an “embarrassing” one; he used the English word. “We must take it,” he explained. “If I believed in miracles, I’d wish for it to be swallowed up by the sea.” His constant doubts about conquering Gaza sounded much like his uncertainty about the conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem during the War of Independence. “I am so tense right now,” he said. He promised to keep the leaders of the parties represented in the Knesset posted about developments, and he indeed did so. Even Menachem Begin was invited to his home for a visit, where he offered his best wishes for the IDF’s success. During the days that followed, Begin called Ben-Gurion from time to time to provide him with information he had gleaned from the BBC.61
*
The war began on the afternoon of October 29, 1956; Ben-Gurion was in bed with the flu. He had a high fever and was weak, but kept up with events. Unlike in the War of Independence, he did not interfere with the army’s operations. Dayan was with the forces; Navon was the liaison with the General Staff and for the most part Ben-Gurion had to make do with what he learned through this channel. He waited impatiently for the British and French to intervene, and when they did not begin operations at the assigned hour, he ordered Dayan to bring the Israeli forces home and cancel the war. Dayan persuaded him to continue. “I was very anxious,” Ben-Gurion wrote. He worried that the Egyptians would bomb Tel Aviv and the country’s airfields. It took less than one hundred hours for Israel to capture the entire Sinai Peninsula and the islands of the Tiran Straits. Ben-Gurion sent a message to an IDF victory ceremony at Sharm el-Sheikh, on the peninsula’s southern tip, that it was “the greatest and most glorious operation in our nation’s history, and one of the most amazing operations in the history of all nations.” He quoted several bellicose verses from the book of Exodus and added, “You have extended a hand to King Solomon.” The manifesto ended with the promise that Tiran Island would remain part of the “Third Jewish Kingdom.” He summed up the events of the previous two weeks in his diary with these words: “First the whole thing looked like a hallucination, afterward like an ancient tale, and at the end as the purest marvel.”62
That same morning an official statement was issued regarding “unfortunate events in which several Arab civilians were killed and wounded.” It was referring to the killing of close to fifty inhabitants, among them women and children, of the village of Kafr Qasim in central Israel, close to the border with Jordan. A contingent of the Border Guard, a force then under the command of the IDF, had lined them up and shot them to death because they had returned from work about half an hour after the start of the daily curfew. That day the curfew time had been moved up by half an hour all along the Jordanian border, but villagers working in the field had no way of knowing it. Ben-Gurion claimed that he heard about the incident only three days later. Navon described his reaction: “What? They killed Arabs? Where? Why?” He was shocked. “How can such a thing happen? They just killed Arabs for no reason? Soldiers shot them—why? What happened there? It’s horrible! It’s horrible!” He immediately ordered the appointment of a commission of inquiry.63 But on the day of Operation Kadesh, as the Sinai Campaign was known in Israel, he had more serious things to worry about.
Even as Dayan was reading his victory speech at Sharm el-Sheikh, Ben-Gurion had in hand a threatening letter in Russian from the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Bulganin. He demanded the immediate withdrawal of IDF forces from Egyptian territory “before it is too late.” President Eisenhower also demanded withdrawal. But Bulganin’s letter was of unparalleled ferocity, an almost explicit threat to destroy Israel. Ben-Gurion put off responding to the Soviet threat long enough to make a dazzling victory speech to the Knesset. He declared that the conquest of Sinai brought Israel to the place where the Jewish people had received the Torah. He also quoted, from the source, the account of the Jewish state on Tiran Island; the original Greek appears in the Knesset record. He gave the impression that the occupied territories would remain under Israeli control, at least until the signing of a peace agreement with Egypt. He would never agree for a foreign military force to be stationed there. The armistice agreement with Egypt was a dead letter, he said. “Our losses are few,” he said, “about 150 dead.”***
But the Soviet threat terrified him. “It was a nightmarish day,” he wrote. “Bulganin’s letter to me—a letter that could have been written by Hitler—and the ferocity of the Russian tanks in Hungary, show just what these Communist Nazis are capable of doing.” He was very pale, Dayan wrote after leaving his room, “enraged like a wounded lion.”64 The withdrawal commenced a week later. The last Israeli soldier in Egypt left three months later, just before the Pesach holiday.
* Seven years previously, Ben-Gurion had told the Cabinet that there had been a “Jewish state” on the island until the Byzantine emperor Justinian conquered it. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Dec. 13, 1949, ISA; Ben-Gurion 1979.)
† In a conversation with the men who took part in the operation, Ben-Gurion characteristically took a great interest in the role played by soldiers of Yemenite and North African origin. (Moshe Dayan 1976, p. 159.)
‡ As tensions increased, Ben-Gurion received a small request from Shlomo Lavi. Once a year he went on a hike in the south, along with some friends from Ein Harod with whom he had served in the army. They took automatic rifles and he used an ancient Mauser pistol dating from his time in Hashomer. Could David, whom he admired so much, help him out? The defense minister ordered that an Uzi submachine gun be given as a gift to Lavi, along with two magazines and three hundred bullets. (Lavi to Ben-Gurion, Jan. 7, 1956; Argov to the director of Israel Military Industries, Jan. 1, 1956, BGA.)
§ At one of those creative moments he sometimes had, Ben-Gurion fantasized about the possibility of digging a tunnel under the Red Sea that would provide Egypt with a direct link to Jordan; his models were the tunnels under the Hudson River in New York. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Aug. 28, Dec. 25, 1955, ISA.)
** It was not easy for him to get hold of the commander. The girl who answered the phone asked for his name. He said, “Ben-Gurion.” She asked which Ben-Gurion. He said, “The defense minister.” She thought that was very funny. It took a while before he convinced her. “It was only after several further exchanges that she believed that it was really me talking, and then I received what I had asked for,” he wrote. He also told the story to the Cabinet. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, Aug. 2, 1956, BGA; Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Aug. 5, 1956, ISA.)
†† It was a return game—Israel had lost the first 5–0. The Cabinet devoted an extended discussion to the results, during which Ben-Gurion announced that he was considering establishing a national soccer team within the IDF. He said that he had not listened to the game because he knew Israel would lose. He had never been to a soccer game, he said, but he liked it when Jews beat gentiles and not the reverse. The discussion provided him with another opportunity to hark back to his trip to Moscow in 1923, and he did not let it pass by. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, July 15, 1956, ISA.)
‡‡ Fedayun tried hard to attack Sde Boker. A car was blown up by a land mine planted about three miles from the kibbutz gate. Another mine was discovered before it went off. A terrorist was discovered and shot dead as he attempted to enter the commune. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, Aug. 15, 16, Oct. 15, 1956, BGA.)
§§ Israel’s relations with Britain took a very bad turn at that time, following a major reprisal raid in which Israeli forces blew up the Qalqilya police station. Some one hundred Jordanians and eighteen Israelis died. A few weeks earlier, Ben-Gurion had told the Cabinet: “With all my confidence in the Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish people, I do not think we have the strength to fight the English.” (Moshe Dayan 1976, p. 246ff.; Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Aug. 12, 1956, ISA.)
*** In fact, the IDF dead numbered more than 170. Many years later, Ben-Gurion said that it was the one speech he regretted making. “I talked a little too much,” he said. He was, he said, “drunk at the time.” Ben-Gurion very seldom regretted anything he said or wrote. As such, his remorse over his victory speech is reminiscent of his comment that he would not repeat the eulogy of Herzl that he sent to Shmuel Fuchs when he was seventeen years old. (Ben-Gurion interview with Malcolm Stuart, April 1968, transcript, BGA, p. 83; Ben-Gurion interview with Levi Yitzhak Hayerushalmi, Feb. 28, 1972, BGA, p. 15.)