On a bright and beautiful afternoon in May 1947, I sat in a chair at the edge of the mountainside, nursing two goats. A great band of fog was collecting below on the banks of the Kinneret, infusing the wind with a delicate mist.
“Shimon? Shimon!” I heard from behind. I turned to see a close friend running frantically toward me.
I stood up, surprised, concerned. “What is it?” I asked.
“Levi Eshkol is here again,” he said through panted breaths. “He’s here with a letter from Ben-Gurion.”
“What is it about?”
He paused again to catch his breath.
“You,” he stammered. “It’s about you.”
Eshkol, I would soon learn, was there to retrieve me. All the members of the kibbutz were called to a special meeting, where the contents of the letter were shared. He was writing to ask that I once again be relieved of my important kibbutz duties so that I could undertake another effort, allowing me to serve the underground Jewish army, known as the Haganah—which would later become the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Though it was Ben-Gurion making the request, the rules dictated that Alumot’s members would have to vote to release me. And so Ben-Gurion aimed not to command, but to persuade. He was convinced that our War of Independence was coming, which meant that military preparedness and a focus on security would become our next great imperative. “Look at this as one of the many tasks of the kibbutz, a new field to work,” he wrote, hoping to convince the kibbutz membership that this new mission was central to their own. After a brief deliberation, and in common cause, the members voted to honor Ben-Gurion’s wishes. I was to report to Haganah headquarters, an unassuming red house (known, uncreatively, as “The Red House”) on HaYarkon Street in Tel Aviv.
It was a call I was proud to answer, but how I could help, I wasn’t quite sure. I had no training beyond defending Ben-Shemen. I knew nothing of building armies or preparing for war.
When I walked into the Red House, I was relieved to see a person I recognized, a fellow member of Kibbutz Alumot. “Do you know where I’m supposed to go?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “No one told me you were coming. Do you know what you’re supposed to be doing?”
“No, I don’t know. Ben-Gurion sent for me.”
“I see. Well, Yaakov Dori, the chief of staff, is quite ill, so his desk and chair are empty. Why don’t you sit there for now?”
A few hours later, Ben-Gurion entered the offices, flanked on either side by military advisors. As he walked by, he caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye.
“Shimon, good, you’re here,” he said, fishing from his pocket a few sheets of well-worn paper, which he handed to me. It was a list in two columns, one short and one long.
“These are the weapons we have,” he said, pointing to the first column, “and these are the weapons we need. If we shall have only what we have, we are finished.”
Ben-Gurion’s concerns were not without merit. Developments in the United Nations suggested that the General Assembly was likely to vote on a resolution that would create a partitioned Palestine, and lead to the establishment of a Jewish state. In isolation, this was cause for elation. But Ben-Gurion was deeply worried. He expected that war would be declared on the newly formed Jewish state, both from inside its new borders and from its Arab neighbors. What good is the birth of a new state, he would say, if it’s immediately strangled in its crib? Ben-Gurion set out to transform the Haganah for this very reason: to ensure that the newly formed state wouldn’t find itself without a military to defend itself. “This will no longer be a war of platoons,” he said. “It is essential to set up a modern army.”
“What can I do?” I asked Ben-Gurion as he handed me the extensive shopping list of weapons.
“It’s simple,” he said. “Find these weapons for us as fast as you can.”
I returned to my borrowed desk to review the document, but found it was like reading a shopping list in a language I didn’t speak. I opened the desk drawer to get a notepad and pencil to start taking notes when I noticed, inside the desk, a letter addressed to Ben-Gurion that Dori must have saved. It was written by one of our generals, one who had been offered the position of chief of staff and, as the letter indicated, had chosen to turn it down.
“I don’t desire to be chief of staff for six days,” he wrote, an explanation that made little sense to me until I asked a colleague to explain it.
“Why did the general turn down the job?” I asked.
“A lot of reasons.”
“Like what?”
“The bullets,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the list,” he said, pointing at one of the entries for what we already had. “Six million bullets.”
“That sounds like a lot,” I admitted. The man laughed.
“When the war comes, we’ll need a million bullets a day.” Before walking away, he added, “Not an easy job.”
This was what the general had meant—that he was not willing to wage a defensive war with less than a week’s worth of ammunition. It was stunning to hear for two reasons: First, I knew—all of us knew—that the state would face danger in war. Great danger, even. But grave danger? To be so ill-equipped that we would exhaust our supply of ammunition before week’s end was a terrifying prospect. But even more shocking than the revelation itself was the notion that someone so expert could be asked to assist in such an important cause and would turn it down because it seemed too hard. Ben-Gurion was not asking for help on a side project with little importance; he was asking the general to help with the most central project of all: the defense of a state not yet born, and the realization of the Zionist dream. The magnitude of the challenge may have seemed overwhelming, but what possible answer was worthy of our history—and our future—other than an emphatic and hopeful “yes”?
I could hear my grandfather’s words echoing in my mind: “Always remain Jewish.” Being Jewish meant many things to me, but first and foremost it meant having the moral courage to do what was required on behalf of the Jewish people. At the time, I may have lacked the experience and rank to know much about the weapons on Ben-Gurion’s list, but decisions needed to be made about ammunition and alliances and weapons and war, and rather than run from the challenge, I fully embraced it.
•••
I am perceived by many to be a man of great contradictions. For the past forty years I have been known as one of Israel’s most vocal doves, as a man singularly focused on peace. But the first two decades of my career were spent not in pursuit of peace but in preparation for war. For a time, it was said that I was one of Israel’s most assertive hawks. In this it is assumed that I must have changed, that my efforts and outlook were defined by a sweeping moral transformation. There is a certain poetry to that narrative, but it invents a paradox where none actually exists. It was not me that changed; it was the situation that changed.
Peace is a purpose—a goal worthy of the chase, while war is a function—born out of reluctant necessity. No rational person could prefer the latter. When peace first appeared possible, I pursued it with all of my energies. When Arab leaders were open to negotiation, I said I prefer negotiation, too. The vision of the prophets was one of peace and justice, of morality and tolerance. “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” the Torah tells us. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” This was the guiding vision of the Jewish people. But it must be remembered that there was a time when our circumstances were quite different; a time when, rather than negotiate, our Arab neighbors sought only to destroy us. There was a time when Israel stood defenseless in a sea of enemies, a time of extraordinary and constant danger. These were the years before peace was possible—the years when I was a hawk without compromise.
Our neighbors’ malign intentions were not the only reason we faced almost certain destruction. The Middle East was under a Western arms embargo, as the United States, the British, and the French pledged to remain neutral in its affairs. In practice, Israel was the only real victim of the embargo; the Soviets were eagerly supplying weapons to the Arab states that were threatening our destruction, even if the West was not supplying us. Thus, our enemies had a free flow of weapons to equip their already vast armies, while we had six days’ worth of ammunition, a militia made up largely of farmers and Holocaust survivors with no formal training—and no clear path to the weapons we would depend upon once attacked.
The only way to protect ourselves was to break the embargo—to purchase weapons illegally, and secretly bring them home.
Days earlier, I had been milking cows on a kibbutz. Now I was being thrown into one of the most dramatic periods of my life. I would build friendships with arms dealers and partnerships with arms smugglers. I would undertake secret missions using fake passports, working in the shadows to purchase as much as I could. In time, I developed an expertise, both in granular details of the arms we were seeking, and in the work it would take to acquire them. I would learn everything from the defects inherent in a particular type of rifle, to the fuel supply needed to carry a warship across the Atlantic. And I would become well versed in the strange combination of deference and demand that was required to get the best equipment delivered on time. But at the beginning, all I knew was that my task was essential and there was no time to waste. I was intensely curious to learn all I could about these technical details, but I was not at all curious about the reason I had to do so: it went without thinking.
There was only one country that was willing to send us arms directly: Czechoslovakia. The other satellite nations behind the Iron Curtain had joined the arms boycott against us, but Stalin saw opportunity in the Western embargo, believing that a show of support might bring our young socialist country closer to his communist empire. And so he let the Czechs supply us with the arms we desperately needed. There was a stunning symbolism to what we received; most had been manufactured at facilities set up by the Nazis in occupied Czech territory. The very same weapons that had once been used against us would now be used to try to protect us.
Within six months of my having arrived at the Haganah headquarters, I had helped stockpile an incredible trove of arms—and just in time. During the last week of November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly’s two-month-long debate on UN Resolution 181 came to a head. If the resolution were adopted, it would put an end to the British mandate and partition Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, thereby leading to our declaration of independence, and likely to armed conflict. But none of us knew, inside or outside government, if the resolution had the votes to prevail. Its adoption required a two-thirds majority of member nations, a challenge more akin to scaling a cliff than climbing a mountain. On November 26, we listened to the debate on our radios, as the representatives of nation after nation came to speak, holding our destiny in their hands.
The Arab nations were uniformly opposed to the resolution, making the case that the UN lacked the authority to even consider the matter. The representative from Saudi Arabia referred to the resolution as a “flagrant aggression,” and was followed by the Syrian representative, who called it “the greatest political scandal of all time.” The USSR, which had once opposed the partition plan, was the first to support the resolution, arguing that the one-state solution was “unworkable and impractical.” In the same speech, the representative dismissed the claims of the Arab nations, insisting that the UN not only had the right to intervene in the name of international peace, but was duty-bound by its charter to do so.
When the debate was over, it remained unclear whether we had enough support. Even on the day of the vote—November 29, 1947—there were still seven nations that hadn’t announced their intentions. And though we had gotten commitments from a great many nations, we weren’t convinced that all would be kept.
As dusk settled over Tel Aviv, scores of people gathered in Magen David Square, where loudspeakers had been set up to broadcast the vote. As the static cleared, we could hear Osvaldo Aranha, the president of the General Assembly, call for a vote on the resolution. We listened attentively, along with Jewish communities from all over the world.
“Afghanistan? No. Argentina? Abstention. Australia? Yes.”
Every nation called, every answer called back, rang in our ears until it felt we had stopped breathing entirely. Ben-Gurion and I paced as we listened, as though our steps had the power to speed up time.
“El Salvador? Abstention. Ethiopia? Abstain. France? Yes.” At this there was a sudden commotion in the hall, followed by an aggressive banging of the gavel.
“I call on the public, and I hope that you will not have any interference on the voting in this debate,” the president of the General Assembly warned, apparently addressing the gathered crowd in the gallery. “I am confident in the way you will behave regarding this serious decision taken by this assembly,” he continued sternly, “because I have decided not to allow anybody to interfere in our decision!”
The moments passed. People held tight to each other in the square as the remaining votes were cast, hoping, if not yet believing, that something extraordinary was about to happen.
“Uruguay? Yes. Venezuela? Yes? Yemen? No. Yugoslavia? Abstain.” Again we heard the gavel bang, this time to signify the end of voting. And then, the simple words that would change the course of Jewish history: “The resolution . . . was adopted by thirty-three votes; thirteen against, ten abstentions.”
A raucous cheer exploded from the crowd. There were warm embraces and incredulous laughter, tears of hope and of joy, moments of reflection. As word traveled through Tel Aviv, Jews took to the streets in a spontaneous outpouring. Ben-Gurion and I stood together as we watched thousands of Jews joining hands with one another, dancing the hora over and over again. Never once, in our two thousand years of exile, had there been a more ambitious dream for our people than the dream to return home. It had been just over fifty years since Theodor Herzl started the movement “to lay the foundation stone of the house which is to shelter the Jewish Nation.” By the standards of world history, we had achieved this with remarkable speed. But by the standards of our recent history, most immediately the murder of six million innocents and near extinction of European Jewry, we could never forget that we were nearly too late.
It was easy to get swept up in the wonder of the moment, but Ben-Gurion and I knew the celebration was premature. A United Nations resolution alone would not guarantee us our state.
“Today they are dancing in the street,” he said to me with a wariness in his voice. “Tomorrow, they will have to shed blood in the street.”
He was right. In the days after the resolution, we began to get reports of Arab militiamen attacking Jews in the settlements. We received harrowing cables from around the Middle East, of Jews being attacked in retaliation for the vote. There were detailed accounts of devastation—of synagogues and homes turned to ash in Syria, of mobs chasing down Jews from Egypt to Lebanon. The Arab League had declared its intentions—to prevent the resolution from being enacted and force the Jews out—to destroy the State of Israel before it could ever be drawn on a map. They had begun the process of carrying through on that dark pledge.
It was in that context that Ben-Gurion put in motion an effort to draft a formal declaration of independence. Though the British lost their mandate in the region as soon as the United Nations resolution had passed in November, a firm date had not been set for them to leave. Now it appeared that they would pull their final troops out of Israel on Friday night, May 14, 1948, at the stroke of midnight. Ben-Gurion intended to make his declaration just prior to their departure, to ensure no gap between the end of the British mandate and the beginning of our independence.
During the rare quiet moments in those otherwise frenetic days, it wasn’t only the work ahead that occupied my thoughts; it was my firstborn daughter, Tsvia, who knew nothing of the world but the love of her parents. Tsvia, who had just learned how to call for her father. “Abba, Abba!” I could hear her say over and over in my mind—a beautiful if haunting reminder of what was at stake in the battle to come.
On the afternoon of May 14, 1948, in the final hours before the Sabbath, I sat at my desk preparing for war, while Ben-Gurion stood at the center of a dais in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, prepared to say the words that would consecrate our state. Because of the extraordinary security risks, we ensured that the guests and journalists present had only learned of the meeting and its location in the minutes before it began. As ministers made their way past the honor guard of the Haganah and through the flashbulbs of photographers, the commotion attracted cheering crowds to the streets. The attendees entered one of the museum’s galleries to the sound of the soon to be named Israel Philharmonic Orchestra playing. The walls were filled with works from the private collection of Tel Aviv’s mayor—Meir Dizengoff—paintings by Jewish artists that depicted Jewish life during two millennia in exile.
The thirteen temporary governing ministers took their place on the dais, on either side of Ben-Gurion. Behind the man who had led the Jewish people to this moment was a portrait of the man who started us on our journey: Herzl was now watching over the culmination of a dream he had for us all.
Ben-Gurion gaveled the room to order and, wildly enthusiastic, those assembled broke out in a spontaneous rendition of “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem that had been banned by the British. Then Ben-Gurion said the words that all who gathered had waited a lifetime to hear: “We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel.” The room erupted with a combination of the boisterous applause of victory, and the gentle tears of grief. It was, at once, a reminder of how far we’d come, and of how much we had lost.
At the end of the ceremony, the orchestra played “Hatikvah” while the audience stood in respectful silence. What they had sung together earlier was a call to action for a nation, dispersed but with a common dream. Now it was so much more—not just a rallying cry of hope, but a melody of historic vindication; not just the anthem of a movement, but the anthem of a sovereign state.
Israel’s public radio station broadcast the event live. The declaration traveled with tremendous speed across the country and around the world. In their modest homes, in the midst of great uncertainty, the people of Israel heard Ben-Gurion’s words. They listened on behalf of the millions who had perished at the hands of the Nazis, and the millions more who remained in constant danger around the world. They listened on behalf of the past—on behalf of the pioneers who first set out on a journey toward home, who found imagination in necessity, and used it to carve a path. And they listened on behalf of the future, on behalf of generations of Jewish children and grandchildren not yet born, from whom our centuries-long fight drew its sole purpose.
Predictably, as soon as we had our independence, we faced war from all sides. On May 15, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq attacked. In the north, Syria sent a brigade equipped with tanks and armored vehicles and an artillery battalion to attack the Jewish settlements on the other side of the Kinneret. The Egyptian military invaded from the south, assailing the nearby cities, settlements, and kibbutzim. They conducted bombing raids of Israeli airfields and southern settlements, and eventually of the central bus station in Tel Aviv, which they destroyed. Jordan, meanwhile, was marching its Arab Legion into Jerusalem, where it instigated some of the heaviest fighting of the war, in the process cutting off supplies and creating a dangerous shortage of food and water, not just for the soldiers but for the people of the city.
Outnumbered and outgunned, we refused to be outmatched, and our forces used whatever they had to defend their positions. At Kibbutz Degania, Syrian forces were stopped in their tracks by a resistance force of Israelis, equipped with Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. So it went in settlement after settlement, where Israelis fought back, repelling the advances of Arab forces. With the arrival of a major weapons shipment from Czechoslovakia, the Israeli Air Force was able to take to the sky and respond with powerful attacks, sending the advancing Egyptians into chaos and effectively ending the Iraqi incursion.
With the British no longer controlling the borders, a flood of Jewish immigrants made their way to Israel. Some had gone straight from Nazi concentration camps into refugee camps, where they had to wait permission to make their way to Israel. In Cyprus, for example, some twenty-two thousand Jews waited for two years. Others had been forced out of neighboring Arab nations more recently. They arrived without homes, after dangerous journeys, and turned right around to fight on behalf of their new state. We had started the war in May 1948 with fewer than thirty-five thousand troops. Before the end of the fighting in 1949, more than one hundred thousand had taken up arms for the Zionist cause.
The IDF battled on the front lines with extraordinary courage, following the orders of Ben-Gurion as he managed strategy from headquarters. War plans were defined and ordered there. Intelligence was processed and analyzed there. It was as if the heroes on the great lines were the beating heart of the effort while the headquarters was its brain. Without spare moments for deep contemplation and patient analysis, we were doing all that we could to shape the modern infrastructure of the military that our new state, under fire, was trying to assemble. At times rest seemed as distant a dream as victory.
The distance between Ben-Gurion’s responsibilities and my own were vast by any measure. But the distance between our offices was, for a time, only the width of a thin piece of plywood. This made it possible for Ben-Gurion and me to build a relationship during those stressful months, one that eventually transformed me from one of his greatest admirers to one of his closest advisors.
Such a surprising turn of events I could not have imagined only months earlier. But the bonds formed during times of crisis are unusually strong. At first, our partnership developed quite informally. Ben-Gurion seemed to like how hard I could work, and how little sleep I tended to need or desire. (I even kept one of his handwritten notes on my desk, which read simply, “Shimon, don’t forget to turn off the lights!”) Over time, he began to trust me and to rely on me, in ways that surprised those who were more experienced and senior than I.
“Why do you trust that boy?” I would overhear them asking. His answer was always the same.
“Three reasons,” he would say. “He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t say bad things about other people. And when he knocks on my door, he usually has a new idea.” It was too simple an answer to persuade my detractors, but for me, it was the perfect response to a question I had so often asked of myself: Why me? In time, my relationship with Ben-Gurion would expand, both in personal trust and in formal responsibility, as I rose through the ranks of government. But for as long as Ben-Gurion lived, my formal position never reflected the scope of my influence or the depth of our bond.
By early 1949, the Arab nations were on the defensive—injured, in retreat, and exhausted from war. What Israel had lacked in resources we had made up for with ingenuity and organization. And what our enemies had bountifully possessed they thankfully had squandered in the chaos. In February, the Egyptians relented, signing an armistice agreement and giving up the fight. One month later, Lebanon signed, and in April, Jordan did the same. The last holdout—Syria—gave in on July 20, 1949. By then we had run through our weapons stockpiles, leaving us vulnerable and exposed. For the time, though, the war was over, replaced with an armistice we knew to be fragile and uneasy. For all that was lost—all the lives that were lost—there was to be no doubt of what was gained: control of our own territory and, indeed, our own destiny.
•••
During my first days at Haganah headquarters—before the War of Independence, before the United Nations resolution—I had an unusual encounter. I had been sitting at my desk reviewing documents when I heard a thundering commotion erupt from inside Levi Eshkol’s office. Teddy Kollek, who at the time headed the Haganah’s mission in the United States, had flown back to Tel Aviv for the very fight he was now engaged in. For months he had grown increasingly furious about the disorganization at headquarters. He had come to complain vigorously to Eshkol, citing, among other things, dozens of cables he’d sent to Tel Aviv that had gone ignored and unanswered. Our underground contacts in the United States had become one of our most important sources of arms, Kollek reminded Eshkol, and such disarray, he insisted, could be our undoing. Finally, Kollek gave Eshkol an ultimatum: assign someone to respond promptly to all of his cables, or accept his resignation.
I didn’t know any of this when I heard Eshkol shouting my nickname through the door.
“Jungermann!” he yelled, Yiddish for “young man.” “Jungermann!”
When I entered Eshkol’s office, Kollek was still visibly angry.
“Oh good, here he is,” Eshkol said in Hebrew. “Jungermann, do you know English?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Have you been to America?”
“No,” I replied again.
Eshkol cracked the slightest smile. “Perfect,” he said. “You’re just the man I need.”
Kollek was incredulous—and instantly enraged—but Eshkol paid him no attention.
“Don’t worry,” he replied coolly. “He’ll do a better job than anyone.”
With this, he excused me from his office and I returned to my desk, a bit embarrassed by the scene. Eventually, as the war went on, Kollek would learn that he could trust me, that I would respond to his cables with diligence and deliberateness. Nevertheless, the memory of that morning stayed with me like a pinched nerve in my spine, a prodding reminder of my own deficiencies.
And deficiencies there most certainly were. Without English, I lacked a common language with most of the world, and that, I knew, would hamper me. But English was just a small part of it. During the war, Ben-Gurion had come to rely on my advice, and I feared the well I’d been drawing from was insufficiently deep. I had been thrown into a world where knowledge of global affairs and of history was essential, where facility with economics and political science was the prerequisite of wisdom. I hadn’t gone to university. I hadn’t even earned a high school diploma. What talents I naturally possessed had been sufficient to this point, but it seemed inevitable that I would hit a ceiling; for all I knew, I already had.
In the spring of 1949, with our independence secured, I approached Ben-Gurion and explained my concerns, and asked his permission to rectify them. I told him that I wanted to go to New York to finish my education, and at the same time, represent Israel as part of the Defense Ministry’s mission in America. With his enthusiastic blessing it was settled. On June 14, 1949, Sonia, Tsvia, and I made our way to the other side of the world.
Once in New York, we moved into a seven-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at the corner of Ninety-Fifth Street and Riverside Drive. We called our apartment “the kibbutz,” because we shared it with several others, mostly men who worked for the Israeli government. Sonia would cook breakfast for everyone on Sundays, and each of our roommates took turns babysitting Tsvia. From our windows we could see bands of majestic elm trees, and behind them the glittering reflection of the sun on the Hudson River.
I enrolled in night classes at the New School for Social Research, which turned out to be a most remarkable institution. Its faculty included some of the world’s most decorated intellectuals, people like Justice Felix Frankfurter, who could enchant the whole student body with his ambitious, if occasional, lectures. The New School would become one of the most formative places of my life, a source of learning I still depend on more than six decades later.
The early months were difficult. Taking courses that required a fluency in English at the same time that I was learning the language proved frustrating at times. But within a few months, I could comfortably engage someone in conversation. That’s when the real New York became fully alive to me. I was taken by how highly people spoke of one another, how willing they were to give credit to others. I loved how generous they were with subtle acts of kindness. I loved, too, the myriad accents that punctuated the city—so many of us still learning to speak English. It seemed the ambitious promise of the United States was alive in the minds of all who had come there—as though the “American Dream” were its own force of nature.
I would often return to the “kibbutz” after class and continue reading my textbooks well into morning. Those hours alone were an enchanted intellectual ballet—but no matter how few hours that left for sleeping, I still arose every morning with a job to do.
Though the war was over, the posture of the American mission hadn’t changed. Israel did not have the weapons to defend itself. Our stockpiles had been decimated by the war, leaving us with mismatched artillery and makeshift aircraft, our defensive chances almost entirely reliant on a team of engineers of robust will and expert repair skills. Yet the Western embargoes remained in place. Even the United States, whose early recognition of the state had been so generous, refused to sell us weapons at these most vulnerable early moments. We were left without choices at a time of unparalleled stakes. And so we took the only path forward, as I rejoined the strange world of black market dealings, and set about building a national defense force.
It seemed there were countless adventures. Once, I arranged to meet with arms dealers in Cuba at the Tropicana Hotel. They had set the meeting for twelve o’clock. But when I arrived at the hotel that afternoon and asked to be let in, the guard laughed in my face. Through his broken English, I realized what he thought was so funny: the meeting wasn’t scheduled for noon; it was scheduled for midnight. What a novice I must have appeared to be. It was certainly an early lesson about the kind of work—and kind of people—I was dealing with. On another occasion, I arranged to purchase two British destroyers that the Colombian government no longer needed. I worked out the deal with the Colombian president and foreign minister in Bogotá, but before signing, I needed to fly to the port of Cartagena to inspect the ships myself. A senior Colombian general escorted me to a small airport, where we boarded a well-worn plane. About an hour into the flight, somewhere over the dense rain forest, the left engine of the plane burst into flames. The burly general looked to me with panic in his eyes.
“You have to decide what to do,” he said.
“What are our options?” I asked him, trying to remain calm.
“We can crash-land in the jungle, but I think it could take us weeks to hike out.”
“And the other option?”
“Keep flying to Cartagena and hope the plane doesn’t explode.”
I paused for a moment. “I’ll take option two.” We continued on our dangerous journey, each silenced by fear. Thankfully, the trip ended safely on a runway (and the destroyers were in excellent condition).
Still, for all the international excitement, most of our work was focused on deals we could broker in the United States. There we bought tanks and airplanes and all kinds of artillery, often from suspiciously sinister characters. We then had to smuggle them out of the country in parts, something made possible only by a partnership we had forged with the Teamsters, the labor union that represented the truckers. One of our most sympathetic and helpful advocates was the head of Detroit’s local Teamsters chapter, a man named Jimmy Hoffa.
But of all the characters I worked with during those years, none was more fascinating, more boisterous, or more singularly invaluable to our efforts than a decorated Jewish-American pilot and aviation engineer named Al Schwimmer. During the War of Independence, Al joined the Israeli Air Force along with a raucous crew of fellow American pilots, where they quickly developed a reputation for being uncommonly brave, if a bit reckless and rowdy.
When the war was over, Al returned to California, but he remained deeply committed to the cause of our newborn state. On a remote corner of a quiet airfield just north of Los Angeles, he rented a modest airplane hangar—not much more than an oversized shed. He purchased a sparse collection of tools and hired a small crew he knew he could trust, among them his fellow pilots from our war. Inside the hangar, in what looked—at best—like a makeshift operation conceived of by amateurs, Al and his team had created, in secret, an impressively agile maintenance shop on our behalf.
It seemed impossible, at first glance, that Al’s team could build the first aircraft for El Al, the newly created Israeli airline, whose name means “to the skies.” And yet this was the very thing they intended to do. In retrospect, this is less surprising than it was then. I have known a great many people of tremendous talent in my life—but I don’t know that I’ve ever known someone as good at their craft as Al Schwimmer was at his. With a remarkable lack of resources, he and his team seemed capable of fixing and flying any plane in any circumstance. I remember a time when I had tried and failed to purchase thirty surplus Mustang aircraft before the U.S. military destroyed them (as was standard with such matériel). Having escaped my grasp, the planes had been cut in two, and had their wings amputated for good measure. But to Al’s team, this was merely a minor detail: they quickly purchased the parts from a Texas junkyard, reassembled and tested the planes, then disassembled them for shipment to Israel.
Over time this alliance with Al became one of our most important relationships. Whatever planes we purchased in the United States we sent to Al. Sometimes he would fly the finished aircraft to Israel himself, by way of the North Pole—not a particularly safe route, but easily the shortest. We concocted all sorts of schemes to smuggle the planes out of the United States, including a cover story that the planes were part of a movie. (Al actually set up a fictitious movie company, and I hired extras, to create the impression that the planes were taking off as part of a live-action scene. But rather than returning to the runway, they were flown directly to Czechoslovakia, where they were loaded with weaponry and ammunition, bound for Israel.)
During one of my visits to California, Al asked for my assistance with a rescue operation. One of our best pilots, Roy Kurtz, had gone down over Newfoundland while attempting to transport a plane to Israel. Al wanted to conduct a search-and-rescue operation, but to do so he needed quiet access to an Israeli aircraft. Given Al’s risk-loving reputation, El Al had been reluctant to offer up one of their assets for such a dangerous mission. Eventually, I was able to secure their agreement, as long as I accepted their one condition: that I never leave the plane’s sight.
For seven days we flew over the icy wasteland, making ever-larger concentric circles around where Al thought the crash might have occurred. At night, we would land on an airstrip in Goose Bay in Labrador, Canada, then return at daylight to the skies. Those hours aloft were tedious yet powerful. As we surveyed the land below, we fell into deep conversations that lasted for days—conversations about our highest aspirations and our deepest anxieties; conversations about Israel and its precarious position given the unsustainable nature of our current defenses.
After seven days, we had to face the tragic reality that Kurtz was not to be found. But I like to think that the mission was not in vain, that as a posthumous act of patriotism, Kurtz had brought Al and me together. As we searched for him over the tundra, Al and I arrived together at the same ambitious conclusion, one that had the power to transform Israeli security: to defend itself, Israel would need to be able to repair its own planes—and build new ones. We would need to take Al’s California-based operation and move it to Israel, then invest in a massive expansion, transforming the enterprise from a wily start-up into a full-fledged aircraft industry. Doing so would extend the lives of the aircraft we were purchasing (wherever we were purchasing them from); in addition, Israel’s hangars were filled with war-damaged albeit repairable aircraft—if only we’d had the facilities to make such repairs. There was also an opportunity for profit, Al argued: The world was still flooded with thousands of surplus World War II aircraft. Al believed he could buy them, repair them, and then export them to other countries—serving not just a military function but creating a commercial industry. We even fantasized about a time when we would be able to design and build our own planes.
It was a beautiful dream. I imagined a world where Al and his team were based in Tel Aviv, where his ingenuity could be leveraged without the limitations of distance. I imagined a world where each plane that we purchased could double or triple its flying life, allowing us to increase the size of our fleet many times over. It wouldn’t solve all of our security challenges at once, but it could put us on course to solve many of them. The idea expanded in my mind like an aging star, with a great heat and grand brightness that displaced other thoughts. For the rest of our flights together, and in the days and weeks to come, I was preoccupied with tactical questions, eager to make real the world Al and I had together imagined.
An idea so bold would surely face headwinds. In the years after the War of Independence, Israel had plunged into financial crisis. We were recovering from a costly war at the same time that we were encouraging—and experiencing—a mass immigration. In three years we had doubled the population from six hundred thousand to 1.2 million, but we hadn’t yet built a state that could sustain it. The new arrivals were forced to subsist in immigrant camps that were little more than tent cities. Food was provided by the government in communal dining halls, but it was strictly rationed. In some new immigrant camps, there was only one toilet for as many as fifty people. The conditions were harsh and unsanitary by any measure, and yet by 1952 more than 220,000 people were forced to live this way. Those who had settled in Israel early also faced intense rationing, instructed by the government about how much food they could purchase—even how many pairs of shoes they could own. Poverty was the central condition of our young state, a national emergency worthy of our urgent attention.
Given all this, what other response could I expect from my fellow Israelis except skepticism? I knew there would be those who dismissed the idea without a thought, considering it a preposterous notion from an idealistic young man. And yet I also knew that I was right, and that in being right, I should be willing to stand alone, that the doubts of those without imagination were no reason to abandon an important idea.
And so I made the decision to pursue the building of an aviation industry in a country without enough food for its people. Ben-Gurion had called upon me to help secure the state, and it was him, first and foremost, I hoped to convince. By stroke of luck, I learned that he would be making his first trip to America as prime minister and planned to include a stopover in California. To believe in Al’s idea, Ben-Gurion would first have to believe in Al, and that, I knew, would only be achieved if he could see the possibility for himself.
When he arrived at Al’s workshop, Ben-Gurion was astonished. Al and I escorted him through the hangar and demonstrated some of the team’s best work. At one point, Al pointed out the equipment the team used to repair and rebuild the aircraft.
“What?” Ben-Gurion asked in utter surprise. “With this tiny collection of machines, you can renovate planes?”
Schwimmer nodded.
“We need something like this in Israel,” Ben-Gurion replied. “Even more, we need a real aviation industry. We need to be independent.” It was exactly what I had hoped to hear.
“I think you’re right,” Al replied.
“I’m glad you think so,” said Ben-Gurion. “We’ll expect you to come back to Israel to build one for us.”
Ben-Gurion returned shortly after to Israel, where he began to have initial conversations with his military advisors and cabinet about pursuing our aviation effort. Not long after, he sent a cable to New York: it was time for Al to go to Israel—and it was time for me to come home, too.
I was eager to return—to shift from one ambitious mission to another, even grander one (though I was admittedly disappointed to be doing so just a few credits shy of my degree). As Sonia and I packed our bags, we reminisced about our time in the city—what a blessing it had been for both of us. We knew in some ways it would be hard to leave, and we expected we’d return to visit. But as bittersweet as leaving New York would be, it was nothing compared to the excitement with which we imagined stepping back onto Israeli soil.
Back home Al and I took meetings with military leaders who, as expected, were certain that such a program was a folly. The chief of the air force thought the idea ludicrous, that Israel had neither the need nor the capacity to do what we described. We met with economists and industry experts who thought it laughable that we would ever be able to export planes to foreign markets; they were convinced that the world would look with a skeptical eye on any Israeli-made products. “Our only industry is bicycles,” one shouted, “and you must know it recently shut down! What madness is it to think we can build planes when we can’t even build bicycles?”
We spoke to engineers who were certain that Israel lacked the expertise needed to build and manage such a complicated operation. We spoke to cabinet ministers who fumed about costs.
“With what money shall we pay for this?” one minister barked. “Israel isn’t America, in case you have forgotten. We don’t have the budget. We don’t have the manpower. And we certainly don’t have the need!”
In almost every meeting, we found the same set of circumstances—a courteous but firm dismissiveness. “The idea was too big to be true,” I wrote many years ago, “and nebulous enough for them to try and stifle it on the spot.” And yet I knew that we would never achieve great things if we let austerity become an obstacle to audacity. To build a stronger, more prosperous state, we had to set our gaze higher than our temporary limitations.
In normal circumstances, these reactions would have been the likely deathblow, delivered before we’d even begun. But in those days, Ben-Gurion had extraordinary influence, and could exert enormous pressure. I pleaded with him to do so in this case. What he offered was far more than I had expected. He not only agreed to move the project forward, but also told me I was expected to oversee it myself. I was just twenty-nine years old, and suddenly I was being appointed deputy director of the Defense Ministry.
In January 1952, my family and I returned from the States and moved into a small apartment in Tel Aviv. Two months later, Sonia gave birth to our first son, Yoni. It was a time of celebration and anticipation. At home, I had a beautiful family and incredible love. At work, I spent my days side by side with my mentor and hero, who gave me his blessing to chase an improbable plan.
We faced repeated obstacles. I’ll never forget the day that the Ministry of Finance told us that they would be cutting our initial budget in half. What a shortsighted decision it was, and a symptom of a dangerous way of thinking—for a young country or a young business. When you are small and weak, you must ask: What kind of investments will let you grow? “Investments” can mean many things: time, money, and—perhaps the most important of all—heart. So many times in our lives we struggle to confidently leap forward, averse to the possibility that we will fall flat. Yet this fear of taking risks can be the greatest risk of all.
Of course, when you are part of a team, others might have an apprehensive veto power. What then? Rather than shutter our effort, I searched for another way. I’d come to believe that when you have two alternatives, the first thing you must do is look for a third—the one you didn’t think of, that doesn’t yet exist. Within my authority, I set aside a modest amount of defense ministry funds to make up for a fraction of the shortfall. Then I reached out to private donors, people who instinctively knew the necessity of the risk I wanted to take. We raised millions of dollars from those channels, allowing us to work around bureaucratic resistance and jump-start our initiative. We named the company Bedek Aviation, which means “maintenance” in Hebrew, and started construction on our first hangars in 1954.
Breaking ground didn’t stop the criticism. Nor did the maintenance work we started before even finishing construction. Still, from the moment we began our work, I knew we would succeed. And within five years, when the aircraft industry became Israel’s largest employer, the wilting criticism trailed off into a quiet murmur on the margins. The idea, born in the skies, was well on its way.
In 1959, we would manufacture our first aircraft, which would be used to defend the state during the Six-Day War. In time, we would realize even the most ambitious parts of our vision, building aircraft we would export all over the world—in recent years, even to Russia. Decades after Al first started wielding his wrench, the Israeli aviation industry would be renamed Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), to commemorate the addition of space satellites to its product line. Today, most countries around the world use satellite services, but Israel remains one of a small handful capable of launching their own satellites into orbit.
But in those early months, I was reminded that the aircraft industry was a solution to only some of our problems. The planes lining up for repair looked more like they belonged in an aviation history museum than in a maintenance shop—a curated collection of retired aircraft from all over the world not intended to return to the sky. The question I had considered over Newfoundland—of how to make our security sustainable—had only been partially answered. In the meantime, we remained vulnerable.
I wrestled with the question interminably in the early 1950s—even more so when Ben-Gurion took a brief hiatus from government in 1954. He was understandably exhausted from the years of fighting, both physical and intellectual, and had chosen to retire to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the desert of the Negev. At the time, we didn’t know that his retirement would only last little more than a year; we thought, perhaps, the Old Man was finished forever. Before he left, Ben-Gurion made his minister without portfolio, Pinhas Lavon, the new defense minister and me the director general of the Defense Ministry. Moshe Dayan was appointed as its chief of staff. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett became prime minister.
There are few people I have ever known whom I admired as much as Moshe Dayan. He was a brilliant military strategist and one of my closest friends. But it weighed on us both to know that Ben-Gurion would no longer be at our side—and that he had placed in our hands the task of defending Israel from annihilation. This was the reality that kept me at the office late into the evening, and sleepless for so many nights at home. At least we’d had his leadership while struggling to build our military capacity. Without it, my confidence that I could find a reliable source of arms before we again came under attack plummeted.
What we needed, I knew, was a partner—an ally. The closest thing we had to a functional international alliance was our shadowy relationship with Czechoslovakia, which was based entirely on military purchasing and kept secret from the world. In some ways we had taken great pride in going it alone, building our state from the ground up partly as proof that despite our persecution, we Jews were not beaten down. All along we would have accepted the friendship of other nations, but by now it was clear that they were not going to make the effort; we were. We needed to change our standing in the world, to be seen in the eyes of other countries as a friend.
For a state of fewer than two million people, the idea of standing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s major powers demanded chutzpah, to be sure. We could not be seen as a mere vassal, but as a sovereign state. But the British still treated Israel with distrust and ill will, holding firm on their embargo to sell weapons to the Middle East. In recognizing Israel, the United States had given Israel legitimacy in its most important hour. But President Dwight Eisenhower didn’t want to involve the United States in the Arab-Israeli conflict, preferring that his country maintain a neutral position. It was a settled matter—and would be for some time. We were engaged in an uncertain fight for our lives—for the very existence of a Jewish state—and we were doing so while the world closed its doors to us. In this essential pursuit of an ally, it seemed there was only one possibility. After much consideration, I set my sights on France.
Like the British and the Americans, the French had an embargo in place. But I suspected we could find an emotional connection with the French, one that might persuade them to help us in secret. The Radical Party, which controlled French government in those years, had as its leaders many heroes from the Resistance who had lived under the brutal clutch of Nazi occupation. Some had been in concentration camps themselves. Our scars were not the same, but they were caused by the same evil. In this, I hoped we might find common bond.
I also saw practical reasons why France might abide. Their private defense industry manufactured a wide range of weapons, including airplanes and tanks, and Israel represented a potential new customer. Furthermore, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, had become a threat to us both, as Egypt was now funneling weapons to rebels in Algeria, which was still a French colony at the time. Nasser, meanwhile, was still speaking of the great virtue of destroying the State of Israel and ordering regular incursions on our border. If a common bond were insufficient, I thought we might find alliance with France over common cause.
Ben-Gurion had always been skeptical about any partnership with France. “The French?!” he would yell, every time I mentioned them. “The French? They lost the war! Ask them why they lost the war. I want to know.”
“I checked on it, and I have my conclusions,” I replied. “The enemy didn’t cooperate.”
Now that he had left for Sde Boker, I met a similar reaction from Sharett and Lavon. Lavon called the French strategy “silly.” Any effort not focused on changing the minds of the British and Americans was a waste of time, he argued.
In Jerusalem, I had the support and confidence of Moshe Dayan, but of nobody else. I definitely lacked the backing of the Foreign Ministry, which under normal circumstances would have taken the lead on all such international outreach. And yet I was still alit by the spark of imagination. Despite the obstacles, off I went.
•••
When I first left for Paris, I didn’t speak a word of French or know anything about French custom and style. I was unkempt and ill-equipped, on an errand that seemed designed by a fool—that is, myself. And yet I boarded the plane filled with hope, eager to see if I could arrange what everyone else declared impossible. Soon after arriving, I phoned the office of the deputy prime minister, Paul Reynaud, whom I knew to be in charge of foreign arms sales. I told him, through a translator, that I was in town and hoped we could speak. He invited me to his office straightaway.
We had a warm and winding conversation—and a productive one at that. By the time we were finished, he was ready to sell Israel long-range cannons. We would need a great deal more than that, to be sure, but an agreement of this nature was still a watershed moment. It was our first arms deal with a major world power—and the first of many steps we would take toward genuine alliance. What else could I feel but elation?
I got up from my chair and shook hands with Reynaud, thanking him for his empathy and assistance. As he escorted me to the door of his office, I paused, suddenly struck with a question.
“Monsieur, I realize I haven’t any idea how one government pays another.” I suggested that I would deposit $1 million in a French Ministry of Defense bank account, and we could settle the balance later. Reynaud agreed.
Over the course of the next several years, I traveled back and forth between Israel and France many times to purchase arms and equipment for the IDF. I met with generals, with political officials, with members of the French cabinet. With the help of an Algerian Jew named Georges Elgosi, an economist in the French prime minister’s office, I convinced the French government to supply us with several types of fighter aircraft, all of which would be crucial to winning the Six-Day War in 1967. Upon meeting me, Elgosi had decided to invite me to his apartment, where his elderly mother would have the chance, quite literally, to inspect me. I remember her sitting mysteriously in the living room, as though it were her court. When I introduced myself, she asked that I give her my hand. She examined the lines and the creases of my palm as though she were reading a map of my soul. When she finished she looked up at her son and said four simple words: “Do whatever he asks.” Elgosi took his mother’s conclusion to heart, it seemed. The next day, he offered me use of his office, a stone’s throw away from that of Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France. Through Elgosi, I was granted entrée into the world of French politics, where I befriended dozens of French leaders, including the prime minister himself.
I arrived without a word of French, with empty pockets, without any understanding of French culture or courtesy, but instead of condescending and rejecting such a wayward soul, the French leadership adopted me like a lost child. They brought me into their most intimate French circles, introducing me to the country’s greatest politicians and generals and authors and artists. In me they saw a version of themselves, from which we formed an indescribable bond. This was not merely personal: the German occupation had not only been a political crisis but an existential one. For a people who had long thought deeply about what it meant to be French, the occupation and legacy of collaboration had forced a crisis of the soul, and in Israel’s struggles Mendès-France and others may have recognized a similar pull to confront the wounds of the past.
The only barrier between our new friendship was language. During my first trips to the country, I needed a translator to join me. But soon I started using those flights as a chance to learn French myself, studying it intensively, practicing conversations with our French ambassador, and sometimes with myself. In time, I would no longer need a translator.
During one of my trips to Paris, I was invited to dinner at the home of the French army’s chief of staff. I was seated next to his wife. Before the meal began, she turned to me, speaking in a whisper.
“Mr. Peres, may I suggest that you will not need to justify your intentions to me,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“I don’t need a word of explanation for why you are here or what you are fighting for.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
She paused for a moment, as though she were searching for the right words. She pushed up the sleeve of her blouse to reveal her forearm, then twisted it ever so slightly to reveal her answer. She had been stamped and numbered like cattle, tattooed by the Nazis at a concentration camp. She was a survivor.
My efforts in France were not happening in a vacuum. At home, the tensions along our borders were worsening, particularly with Egypt. Nasser was supporting units of terrorists in Gaza. Known as the Fedayeen, the assailants had been sneaking across the border and attacking civilians. Each time we were attacked, we retaliated, but with each retaliation, it seemed, came another attack. The escalation of tension made war feel inevitable, all the more so as our intelligence reports revealed that the Egyptians were developing attack plans.
Our concerns turned existential when, in September 1955, we learned that Nasser had just signed a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia, our once and brief partner. The agreement included hundreds of aircraft, tanks, submarines, and destroyers, along with countless crates of heavy artillery and ammunition. It was enough to make Egypt a military powerhouse overnight, enough to give Nasser’s threats to annihilate Israel the gnashing teeth of credibility. A month later, in a provocative act, Nasser closed our most vital shipping route, the Straits of Tiran.
By this point, Ben-Gurion had returned to government and was once again prime minister and defense minister. He considered the closing of the straits an act of war in itself and proposed a plan to use force to reopen it. But the cabinet was skeptical, with a majority voting against it. For the time anyway, the provocation went unanswered.
In the meantime, I worried about the French. Having forged our partnership, I wondered how I would sustain it over time, especially given its mottled set of internal political partnerships and antagonisms. The French government had developed a pattern of falling suddenly and with some regularity, shifting sometimes wildly between ideological extremes. Elections had been called for January 1956, and I wondered if the Radical Party’s government could survive.
I decided to spend the next several months waging my own private campaign in Paris. I ventured to build relationships with the opposition, to protect our interests should they soon take over the reins of government. The most important of those meetings was a private dinner at a small Parisian café with the head of the opposition himself—a fascinating character named Guy Mollet.
Mollet was a socialist, as, he knew, was I. In fact, when I first sat down to the table, he greeted me as “comrade,” and we bonded quite sincerely over the worldview we shared. Eventually, we got down to business.
“What is it that you want?” he asked.
I told him the story or our work with the Radicals and was honest with him about my worries. Though I sympathized with his ideological viewpoint, I expressed fear that Israel would be made vulnerable were he to take over the French government.
Mollet listened intently and engaged me thoughtfully over a meal with many courses and many glasses of wine. By the end of the dinner, he made me a promise. “If I shall be elected,” he said, “I shall answer your call of assistance.”
While appreciative of the sentiment, I remained visibly skeptical.
“Why do you doubt this?” he asked.
“It’s not that I doubt you, personally,” I said. “But I know the socialists. When you’re in the opposition, you promise the world. But when you come to power, you forget your promises.”
“Who did this to you?”
I told him the story of the English politician Ernest Bevin. While in the opposition, Bevin had been a good friend to Israel. But once he became foreign minister, Bevin became a great enemy instead, enforcing the White Paper of 1939, even after the British technically had rescinded it.
“I shall not be Bevin,” Mollet responded. “You can count on me.”
On January 2, 1956, I learned that I would indeed need to count on him. The Radical Party had lost the elections and Mollet was charged with forming a government. I was stunned and, despite our warm conversation, quite worried about his willingness—and ability—to ultimately follow through.
Within a few months, I put his promise to the test. It was well after midnight when I received an urgent call, requesting that I come to Ben-Gurion’s office at once. The clashes with the Egyptian Army in Gaza were getting worse, and we feared Nasser was readying a full-scale attack.
“I need you to go to France right away,” Ben-Gurion told me. “I have a letter for you to give to Mollet. See if you can get him to help us.” The letter described our concerns about Nasser, that he appeared to have access to a practically unlimited supply of Soviet arms, and that his actions represented “a terrifying threat to the State of Israel.” Ben-Gurion asked for France’s emergency assistance—making clear that without Mollet’s support, Israel’s very survival was at stake.
I boarded a plane and was soon sitting across from Guy Mollet once again, this time at the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s official residence. I pleaded my case. “I believe you have nothing to worry about. We can help you,” he said. He saw the relief in my eyes on hearing the news, and whispered one more thing to me. “Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t be Bevin?” he asked with a grin and a wink.
In June 1956, Moshe Dayan and I returned to Paris for a meeting with senior military leadership. Dayan made a poised and passionate case that Nasser could soon attack Israel, and raised the possibility of a joint operation with the French. “We shall be ready to act together with you against Nasser,” he explained, “to the extent that you will be ready to cooperate with us.” The French officers in attendance agreed—at least in principle.
“If we are to be prepared,” I interjected, “then we must be rearmed. It is the only way.” I handed the officers a wish list of the weaponry and equipment we needed, having inflated the amounts to give myself room for negotiation. To my great shock, the officers didn’t flinch, or make any effort to counter.
We returned home feeling a greater sense of confidence, and soon began receiving the new weapons from France. We continued to monitor Nasser’s troop movements, while staving off more border incursions. Then, in July 1956, Nasser announced a fateful decision: he intended to nationalize the Suez Canal.
The canal had been operated by the Suez Canal Company, a joint enterprise of the British and French, both of whom used the trade route to transport oil and other essential goods. Having Egypt take control of the canal thus represented a grave economic danger to both Western powers. The French had already been ready to go to war with Nasser. Now the British were similarly inclined.
I was in Paris when Nasser made his announcement, and I spent the next day in meetings with the French defense minister, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury. I returned to Israel the following afternoon and was picked up by Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan at the airport. On our drive to Jerusalem, I briefed them both on the conversations. I told them that the French and the British were both interested in joining forces with Israel to remove the Egyptian threat. The British were willing, so long as Israel committed not to attack Jordan, with whom the British had a treaty. Beyond the details of the campaign itself, which had yet to be determined, there remained a question of timing. The French favored immediate action, while the British preferred two more months to seek a political resolution. Ben-Gurion generally favored the contours of the conversation, though he remained skeptical about the British joining the fight. As to the timing, he preferred the French call for immediacy given the likelihood of an Egyptian attack.
I returned to France shortly after to continue our discussions—to move beyond the general question of whether we would go to war together and into the details of how we would execute the campaign. I was accompanied by Golda Meir, who had recently been named foreign minister. Golda viewed me as one of her greatest annoyances. She was frustrated that I had managed to earn the trust of Ben-Gurion—a man whom she worshipped as the singular figure he was. She was frustrated that he listened to my ideas, even the ones she thought were reckless or fantastical. She was frustrated that I built our relationship with the French outside of the Foreign Ministry, where such a thing would normally take place. I suppose I empathized with her, even while she treated me with such suspicion. She had been at Ben-Gurion’s side for years and I had only just arrived. Were I in her position, I imagined I, too, would have been upset.
Our first meeting in France didn’t improve the situation between us. To our surprise, Guy Mollet didn’t attend, which frustrated Golda, heightening both her suspicions about the chance of military cooperation and her general disdain for me. But it was upon hearing the recommended battle plan that Golda’s impatience turned to fury. The proposed scenario would become known as the “Israeli pretext”: the French and British wanted Israel to attack Egypt first, giving the French and British a justification to intervene in the conflict. “The Israelis will start a war with the Egyptians,” one of the French attendees explained, “and then we will come to separate them. When the Israelis withdraw and the Egyptians do not, we have the pretext we need to expel them [from the Suez Canal].”
Golda found the notion preposterous—a complete nonstarter. She felt I had exaggerated France’s willingness to partner with us, that I had taken us embarrassingly far down an uncertain road. And though Ben-Gurion didn’t agree with Golda’s assessment of me personally, he, too, was concerned about the French proposal. He feared that the “Israeli pretext” would risk our standing in the international community—that we would be viewed as the provocateur, even though Egypt had already committed at least one act of war and many more aggressions against us. In this, he was surely justified. But Moshe Dayan made a counterargument that I found quite persuasive.
“England and France don’t need us,” he told Ben-Gurion frankly. “They have all the aircraft they need to annihilate the Egyptian Air Force. The only advantage we have in this matter,” he argued, “which is the only one England and France don’t have, is our ability to give them the needed pretext to enter the campaign.” Though Ben-Gurion remained skeptical, he believed a deal was still possible. It was time, he concluded, for him to go to Paris himself—to meet with the French and British in person. I cabled Paris immediately to set up the conference.
That Sunday, a plane from Paris landed in Tel Aviv to take us to the meeting. A small group of us made our way to the airport, cloaked in secrecy. Ben-Gurion wore a wide-brimmed hat to hide his signature white hair. Dayan took off his easily identifiable eye patch and wore dark sunglasses on the trip instead. (There was some irony in Dayan planning armed collaboration in this instance, since it had been a bullet from a French sniper back in 1941 that had resulted in the loss of his eye.)
When we arrived at the airport, Ben-Gurion was taken directly to the villa in Sèvres where the discussions were to take place. Nestled on the banks of the River Seine, Sèvres was a quiet town with a rich history. Despite the formality of the estate and the seriousness the moment commanded, the meeting itself was quite warm. Ben-Gurion described his objections and his demands to a group of Frenchmen who seemed to hold him in the highest regard. The back-and-forth was cordial and comfortable—a beautiful sight indeed. But when the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, arrived, it was as if an ice storm had suddenly blown in.
From the moment Ben-Gurion and Lloyd shook hands, it was clear that neither liked the other. Lloyd was unpleasant and unfriendly, curt with his words, devoid of imagination, and, at times, openly hostile. He regarded Ben-Gurion more as a former enemy than a future ally, more a partner of necessity than choice. The feeling was mutual.
As the conference continued into its second day, Ben-Gurion had not yet decided whether he would accept any plan that required the “Israeli pretext,” but the discussions of tactics continued on with the assumption that he ultimately would. There were a number of proposals batted around among us, but by the end of the session it was clear that only one was feasible. This scenario involved Israel attacking Egypt on the night of October 29, destroying the Egyptian Air Force as it worked its way to the Sinai. The next morning, France and England would demand that Israel and Egypt cease any military action and retreat from the Suez. When Nasser predictably rejected those conditions, the French and British would launch their own assault against Egypt.
When Moshe and I left Sèvres, Ben-Gurion had yet to make up his mind. The two of us ventured down to a nearby café, where we sipped wine while discussing the choices ahead. We didn’t have a good sense of Ben-Gurion’s thinking, and though we were both strongly in favor of intervention, we did not take his choice lightly. It was a complicated decision with broad implications, based on an imperfect set of facts. And Ben-Gurion was forced to make it knowing that in every war, there are elements of blindness. Obviously a defeat would badly damage France and England, commercially and politically. But for us the stakes were incomprehensibly higher, both for our global standing and our own survival. In his hands Ben-Gurion held what I thought of as a “cruel watch,” the hours running out fast before he had to make the decision that might be the end, not just of a country, but of the Jewish future. None of us envied him.
The next morning, we were summoned back to Sèvres. When we arrived, Ben-Gurion was sitting outside in the grand garden of the villa, under a tree. Noticing our approach, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket on which he had written several questions for us. As he read them aloud, Moshe and I immediately realized that we had our answer. He was asking us questions about tactics and timing, about military logistics and political considerations. It was clear, by the very act of posing such questions, that Ben-Gurion was no longer ambivalent about our efforts. He had decided that Israel was going to war.
As the conversation continued, Ben-Gurion asked Moshe to draw up a map of the campaign he envisioned. But out in the garden, none of us had any paper, so I pulled from my pocket a pack of cigarettes and handed it to Dayan. He sketched a map of the Sinai Peninsula, and drew on it flight paths and paratrooper drop locations. When the discussion was over, the three of us realized that we had just produced the first map of what would be a historic campaign. We passed it between us and signed the sketch, which I then returned to my pocket.
Five days later, the war began.
When we first sat down to discuss a possible campaign several months earlier, the French defense minister had asked how long I thought it would take to conquer the Sinai.
“Three to four days,” I told him. He was certain it would take at least three to four weeks. In the end, it took only a few hours longer than my initial estimate. The IDF marched through the Sinai with incredible speed and agility, forcing Egypt into retreat, sending massive convoys of Egyptian vehicles fleeing in the opposite direction of the fighting. Injured aircraft were repaired at our own aviation facilities, where more than one thousand people worked day and night on maintenance. It was so swift, in fact, that by the time the French and British launched their own invasions, the fighting was complete. “Total collapse of the Egyptian Army in Sinai,” I cabled to Paris. “Brilliant and complete victory of the IDF on all fronts.”
By the time it was over, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran had been destroyed, along with nearly all of the Egyptian Air Force. The Fedayeen bases were in shambles. The threat of imminent attack had gone.
In victory, we solidified our partnership with the French, an alliance we could come to depend on until the eve of the Six-Day War. The swift show of bravery by what some deemed “little Israel” gave us newfound confidence and a reputation for tactical brilliance. And it gave us more than ten years without a major war.
It was, for me personally, a time of profound development—a time when wisdom was formed under extraordinary pressure, like a diamond in the depths of the earth’s mantle. I learned about the virtue of imagination and the power of creative decision making. An alliance with France was my “impossible” dream, and I pursued it. The aviation industry was Al’s and my “impossible” dream, and we built it together. We were quick and creative, and boldly ambitious, and in that we found our reward.
But I also learned that there is a cost to dreaming. At first it was my ideas that were ridiculed. Soon, however, it was me—and only by extension, my positions—who took most of the incoming fire. I was attacked and discounted, seen as dangerously naïve, and accused of all manner of terrible things. My detractors couldn’t understand how I had managed to get into Ben-Gurion’s head, or how to get me back out—as if the man they worshipped (as I also did) could be co-opted. And because so much of what I did was in secret—the arms deal, the French alliance, Suez operation—I had little choice but to live in the shadows. My critics often knew—and would only ever know—half of the story.
In this, I came to understand the choice at the heart of leadership: to pursue big dreams and suffer the consequences, or narrow one’s ambitions in an effort to get along. For me, there was only one choice. I knew of no way to become someone else, and so I chose to be myself, and in doing so, to serve a cause greater than myself. I decided that accomplishment mattered more than credit, more than popularity, more than title. It was not that I didn’t want those things; it was that having them in the absence of action and risk and courage would have been empty. There were easier ways to pursue mediocrity. And so I chose not to wallow or to be distracted from my dreams, but instead to think inventively and creatively about a path our young state would follow. I wanted that state to be a flourishing one, a just and peaceful and moral one. And so I let myself dream, and I refused to give in to cynicism.
Were there disappointments along the way? Of course. I’ve had sleepless nights and restless days because of big dreams. I’ve lost elections over them. I’ve lost some friends over them, too. But they never discouraged my imagination. Success built my confidence. Failure steeled my spine.
Experience has taught me three things about cynicism: First, it’s a powerful force with the ability to trample the aspirations of an entire people. Second, it is universal, fundamentally part of human nature, a disease that is ubiquitous and global. Third, it is the single greatest threat to the next generation of leadership. In a world of so many grave challenges, what could be more dangerous than discouraging ideas and ambition?
Throughout my life, I have been accused by many people (in many languages) of being too optimistic—of having too rosy a view of the world and the people who inhabit it. I tell them that both optimists and pessimists die in the end, but the optimist leads a hopeful and happy existence while the pessimist spends his days cynical and downtrodden. It is too high a price to pay.
Besides, optimism is a prerequisite of progress. It provides the inspiration we need, especially in hard times. And it provides the encouragement that wills us to chase our grandest ambitions out into the world, instead of locking them away in the safe quiet of our minds.