The Fighting Family
Review of Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics and Ideology from Begin to Netanyahu, by Colin Shindler.
324 pp., Tauris, 1995.
And Summing up: An Autobiography, by Yitzhak Shamir. 276 pp., Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994.
And Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis between the U.S. and Israel, by Moshe Arens. 320 pp., Simon and Schuster, 1995.
And A Zionist Stand, by Ze’ev B. Begin. 173 pp., Frank Cass, 1993.
And Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism, by by Benjamin Netanyahu. 152 pp., Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.
Avi Shlaim
London Review of Books, 9 May 1996.
On 17 May 1977 Menachem Begin and his Likud union of nationalist and
liberal parties won their first electoral victory. This election
represented a major landmark in Israel’s history. It
brought to an end three decades of Labour rule and ushered in a new
era, which was to last fifteen years, during which the right-wing Likud
dominated Israeli politics. When Likud came to power, the
literature on it was very sparse; by the time it fell from power, in
June 1992, this literature had expanded considerably.
Colin
Shindler’s book Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream represents a
valuable addition to this literature on a number of counts.
First, whereas most of the existing books deal with specific issues
such as the peace with Egypt or the Palestinian uprising against
Israeli rule, or the war in Lebanon, Shindler tries to explain the
Likud phenomenon as a whole. Second, in order to explain what
makes the Likud tick, Shindler explores in some depth its historical
and ideological background and particularly the legacy of the founder
of the Revisionist Zionist movement, Ze’ev Vladimir
Jabotinsky. Shindler also traces the influence of
Pilsudski’s Poland, Mussolini’s Italy and the Irish
struggle against Britain in moulding the outlook of Menachem Begin and
his successor, Yitzhak Shamir. Third, while the subject matter of
this book lends itself all too easily to partisanship and polemics,
Shindler remains remarkably balanced and fair-minded throughout.
He picks his way carefully through the tangled history of this fiercely
ideological and rumbustious movement and manages to avoid the twin
pitfalls of hagiography and blind hostility.
The 1977 election signified much more than a change of
government. It represented the triumph of Revisionist Zionism
after half a century of bitter struggle against mainstream Labour
Zionism. The two movements were animated by different aims,
different values and different symbols. In his acceptance speech
in May 1977, Menachem Begin referred to ‘the titanic struggle of
ideas stretching back to 1931’, a reference which must have
puzzled most of his listeners.
In 1931, at the 17th Zionist Congress, Ze’ev Jabotinsky launched
a frontal attack on Chaim Weizmann and forced him to tender his
resignation as president of the World Zionist Organization.
Weizmann typified the Zionist establishment’s piecemeal approach
of acquiring land, building settlements and working in cooperation with
the British mandatory authorities towards the final goal of
statehood. For Jabotinsky Zionism’s was primarily a
political movement, not an agency for economic development and
settlement on the land. He denounced Weizmann’s `Fabian
tactics’ and insisted on a forthright statement that the aim of
the movement was a Jewish state on both sides of the river
Jordan. Weizmann was appalled by the utter lack of realism, by
the romantic melodrama, and by the myopic militancy of Jabotinsky and
his followers. The battle lines were thus firmly drawn between
territorial minimalism and territorial maximalism, between practical
Zionism and political Zionism, between a gradualist approach to
statehood and militant declarations calling for instantaneous
solutions. In 1935 the Revisionists seceded from the World
Zionist Organization in protest against its continuing refusal to
declare a Jewish state as its immediate aim and formed their own New
Zionist Organization which elected Jabotinsky as its president.
Jabotinsky
regarded Arab opposition to Zionism as inevitable and he believed that
efforts aimed at reconciliation were doomed to failure from the
start. It was utterly impossible, he argued, to obtain the
voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting Palestine from
an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. Nor would
he settle for the partition of Palestine into two states. His
version of the Zionism dream demanded a Jewish state over the whole of
Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. Britain had established
the Emirate of Transjordan on the eastern part of the Palestine mandate
in the early 1920s. Jabotinsky bitterly denounced this original
sin and remained uncompromisingly opposed to the partition of the
Western part of the Land of Israel. Partition, he observed,
was unacceptable not only from the point of view of the Revisionist
Zionists but also from the Arab point of view because both sides
claimed the whole country for themselves. Only superior military
power, he concluded, could eventually compel the Arabs to accept the
reality of a Jewish state. And only an ‘iron wall’ of
Jewish military power could protect the Jewish state against continuing
Arab hostility. Disdain for diplomacy and reliance on military
power in dealing with the Palestine Arabs thus characterized
Revisionist Zionism from the very beginning.
The Revisionist
movement had its own para-military force, the National Military
Organization, the Irgun, which was commanded by Jabotinsky until his
death in 1940 and by Menachem Begin from 1943 until its dissolution in
June 1948. In 1939 the Irgun called off its campaign against the
British mandatory authorities for the duration of the Second World
War. Some of the more militant members of the Irgun, led by
Avraham Stern, broke away to form a small underground movement known as
‘The Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’, better known
as the Stern Gang. Stern saw Zionism as a national
liberation movement and he advocated an armed struggle as a means of
independence. He saw the British as foreign conquerors and he was
unwilling to wait until the war against Nazi Germany was over before
initiating the military revolt against the British occupation of
Palestine. On the contrary, he made approaches to Hitler’s
Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in the belief that ‘the enemy
of our British enemy must be our friend’. Stern’s
successors, a triumvirate consisting of Israel Eldad, Natan Yellin-Mor
and Yitzhak Shamir, continued to resort to terrorist attacks and
political assassinations in their campaign to drive the British out of
Palestine. But after the end of the Second World War they turned
to the Soviet Union in the search for allies against Britain.
Immediately
following the declaration of independence in May 1948, both of these
dissident organizations where dissolved and many of their members
joined the ranks of the Israel Defence Forces. Menachem Begin
formed the Herut or Freedom party which adopted the Irgun emblem - a
hand holding a rifle on a map of Palestine which stretched over both
banks of the river Jordan. The veterans of the Irgun continued to
call themselves ‘the fighting family’. The Stern Gang
also turned itself into a political party, ‘the fighters
list’ which won one seat in the Knesset in the elections of 1949.
Menachem Begin
remained the undisputed leader of Herut until his sudden withdrawal
from political life in 1983, in the aftermath of the ill-fated war in
Lebanon. Herut was returned with 14 seats in the first Knesset.
The official Revisionist Party was routed, failing to gain
even a single seat. A year later, the two parties merged.
Begin did not abandon the Revisionist dream of a Jewish state over the
whole Land of Israel, including the West Bank of the river Jordan which
was captured by King Abdullah of Jordan in 1948 and annexed to his
kingdom two years later. But, while preserving his doctrinal
purity, Begin proved adept at forming alliances with liberal,
nationalist and ultra-nationalist groups as well as break-away groups
from the Labour Zionist movement. Thus Herut became Gahal in 1965
as a result of a merger with the Liberal Party, and Gahal became the
Likud in 1973 as a result of another merger with three small
nationalist splinter groups.
By 1955 Herut had
emerged as the second largest party and the principal opposition to the
Labour-led government. But until 1967 it remained outside all the
coalition governments. The political climate in Israel in the
first two decades of independence tended to de-legitimize Herut.
David Ben-Gurion pursued a deliberate and effective policy of isolating
and ostracising Herut. His famous principle for forming coalition
governments was ‘without Herut or Maki’, Maki being the
acronym of the Israeli Communist Party. Gahal joined the
government for the first time during the crisis of May 1967 and
Menachem Begin became minister without portfolio in the
government headed by Levi Eshkol. In July 1970 Begin and his
colleagues left the National Unity Government headed by Golda Meir in
protest against the Rogers peace plan which, they claimed, involved a
new partition of the Land of Israel and a betrayal of the historic
rights of the Jewish people. But their three years in government
had gained them a large measure of political legitimacy and thus helped
to prepare the ground for the Likud’s rise to power in 1977.
Menachem Begin was
63 when he became prime minister and he continued to live in the
past. No other Israeli prime minister before or since has been so
divorced from the political realities of his day. He was an
emotional man who was deeply traumatized by the Holocaust and
haunted by fears of its recurrence. He understood
contemporary events primarily through the filter of his own terrible
experiences during the Holocaust. Many of his enemies, including
Britain, the Arab states and the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
featured in his picture of the world as reincarnated Nazis.
Haunted by demons from the past, he was unable to make realistic
assessments of the balance of power between Israel and her enemies
which were essential to the conduct of a sound foreign policy.
Shulamit Hareven dubbed him `the High Priest of Fear’ because of
his psychological compulsion to uncover and play on the innermost
anxieties of the population. But it was precisely these anxieties
that also made Begin such an ardent believer in Jabotinsky’s
concept of an ‘iron wall’ of military power to protect the
Jewish people from its many adversaries.
Although his
behaviour could be erratic, Begin never wavered in his ideological
commitment to the Land of Israel and he was nothing if not an
ideologue. It was an article of faith which stayed with him all
his life that the Jewish people had a historic right to the whole of
its Biblical homeland. In a speech to the first Knesset he
condemned Ben-Gurion for acquiescing in Jordan’s occupation of
the West Bank. Restoration of the Jewish state could not begin,
he proclaimed, until ‘our country is completely cleansed of
invading armies. That is the prime task of our foreign
policy’. In another speech to the Knesset, on 3 May 1950,
Begin referred to the ‘vassal-state that exists on our
homeland’ and in a Biblical analogy labelled King Abdullah
‘the Amonite slave’.
After
Israel’s victory in June 1967, Begin became an outspoken opponent
of relinquishing the West Bank. He objected to UN resolution 242
because it meant the redivision of the Land of Israel. The
Likud’s manifesto for the 1977 elections was categorical on this
point:
The
right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal, and is an
integral part of its right to security and peace. Judea and
Samaria shall therefore not be relinquished to foreign rule; between
the sea and Jordan river there will be Jewish sovereignty alone.
Begin did not recognize
the concept of a Palestinian people because to do so would have implied
their right to national sovereignty in the areas where they
lived. For him, as for the old guard of Mapai,
‘Palestinians’ meant Palestinian Jews as understood in the
pre-state days. He never spoke of a Palestinian nation. His
definition of the Palestinians was quintessentially Jabotinskyian in
that it focussed on their status as a national minority. They
were part of a wider Arab nation that had already realized its right to
national self-determination in some twenty countries. Within the
Land of Israel they were a minority entitled only to civil and
religious rights.
The PLO was
perceived by Begin not as a national liberation movement but as a
terrorist organization pure and simple. He made no distinction
between the policies of its different factions, between radicals and
moderates. They were all latter-day Nazis, while the PLO’s
covenant was the equivalent of Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf. This attitude, too, was unambiguously stated in the
Likud’s 1977 election manifesto:
The
so-called Palestinian Liberation Organization is not a national
liberation movement but a murder organization which serves as a
political tool and military arm of the Arab States and as an instrument
of Soviet imperialism. The Likud government will take action to
exterminate this organization.
When Begin came to power
he had the option of giving concrete expression to his life-long
convictions by annexing the West Bank. He did not exercise this
option because he also wanted to achieve peace with Egypt. Asked
by a reporter whether he intended to annex the West Bank, he replied
‘you annex foreign land, not your own country’. Begin
was prepared, however reluctantly, to give back the whole of Sinai, and
even dismantle Jewish settlements there, in return for peace with Egypt
because Sinai was not part of the Biblical Land of Israel. For Begin,
however, the withdrawal from Sinai was not a prelude or precedent for
further withdrawals but a means of ensuring permanent Israeli control
over the West Bank.
Begin passionately believed that the historic right of the Jews to the
Land of Israel overrode all other claims. He was unable to
distinguish clearly, however, between historic right and a political
claim to sovereignty. The ‘Framework for Peace in the
Middle East’ which he signed at Camp David used language that was
distinctly foreign for the Revisionists and consequently lost him their
support. The Framework recognized ‘the legitimate rights of
the Palestinian people and their just requirements’. Begin,
however, insisted that the Hebrew version referred to ‘the Arabs
of Eretz Yisrael’ rather than to ‘the Palestinians’.
Similar sophistry
was applied by Begin to the UN resolutions that were said to be the
basis of negotiations. UN resolution 242 called on Israel to
withdraw from territories ‘occupied in the recent conflict’
in return for peace. In Begin’s view the Six Day War had
been a defensive war during which the West Bank had been purged of
‘foreign aggressors’. Accordingly, while
applying to Sinai, resolution 242 did not apply to the West Bank.
All that Begin would offer the residents of the West Bank was an
autonomy plan which they rejected out of hand as derisory.
In June 1982,
taking advantage of Egypt’s disengagement from the conflict,
Begin, aided and abetted by defence minister Ariel Sharon, launched
Israel on the road to war in Lebanon. Shindler devotes four
chapters to the war in Lebanon, brazenly misnamed ‘Operation
Peace for the Galilee’, but the real logic behind this war eludes
him. This war was about securing the Land of Israel and it was
directed primarily against the Palestinians, not against Lebanon or
Syria. In its 1977 manifesto the Likud had vowed to
‘exterminate’ the PLO and this was the immediate aim behind
the invasion of Lebanon. The PLO was both the symbol and the
spearhead of Palestinian nationalism which had been gaining momentum
ever since 1967. If the PLO were crushed, Sharon persuaded Begin,
the Palestinians on the West Bank would become demoralized and their
will to resist the imposition of Israeli rule would effectively come to
an end. The war achieved its immediate aim by destroying the
PLO’s military infrastructure in southern Lebanon and forcing it
to move its headquarters to Tunis. But it utterly failed in its
broader aim of defeating Palestinian nationalism.
What Shindler does
bring out very vividly is the impact of Begin’s Holocaust trauma
on his conduct of the war in Lebanon. He gives many examples of
Begin’s tendency to compare Arabs with Nazis. Following an
attack on women and children in Kiryat Shemona by the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, Begin told the Knesset that ‘two
legged beasts, Arab Nazis perpetrated this abomination’.
But the most bizarre manifestation of Begin’s use of analogies
from the Nazi period was a telegram he sent to President Ronald Reagan
in early August 1982, when the Israeli army was bombarding Beirut:
Now
may I tell you, dear Mr President, how I feel these days when I turn to
the creator of my soul in deep gratitude. I
feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing
‘Berlin’ where amongst innocent
civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the
surface. My generation, dear Ron, swore on the
altar of God that whoever proclaims his intent to destroy the
Jewish state or the Jewish people, or both, seals
his fate, so that what happened from Berlin - with or
without inverted commas - will never happen again.
These comments outraged many Israelis. Despite their sensitivity
to the Holocaust, they saw that their leader had lost touch with
reality and was merely chasing the ghosts of the past. Chaika
Grossmann, a Mapam member of the Knesset who had actually fought in the
Warsaw Ghetto, made a direct appeal to Begin: ‘Return to
reality. We are not in the Warsaw Ghetto, we are in the State of
Israel’. The writer Amos Oz, who saw the invasion of
Lebanon as ‘a typical Jabotinskyian fantasy’ appealed to
Begin to resist the urge to resurrect Hitler from the dead each day so
as to kill him once more:
The
urge to revive Hitler, only to kill him again and again is the result
of pain that poets can permit themselves to use, but not statesmen...
even at great emotional cost personally, you must remind yourself and
the public that elected you its leader that Hitler is dead and burned
to ashes.
Anchored in delusions and fed by paranoia, Israel’s war in
Lebanon went from bad to worse. The horrendous massacre
perpetrated by Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies in the
Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in August 1982
dramatically stepped up both domestic and foreign opposition to the
war. Begin’s instinctive response was to turn his back on
his foreign critics. He appealed to the Cabinet to close ranks in
an act of solidarity against a hostile world. ‘Goyim are
killing goyim’, he exclaimed, ‘and the whole world is
trying to hang Jews for the crime’.
But criticism of
the war did not die down. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, one of the few
Jewish American leaders to openly oppose the war, doubted that Begin
could remain in office since he had squandered Israel’s
fundamental asset - its respect for itself and the respect of the
world. A year later, in September 1983, Begin did resign.
‘I cannot go on any longer’ was all he could say by way of
explanation. It was an odd remark which said nothing or
everything. His Zionist dream shattered, Begin was a broken man
and he remained a recluse until his dying day. As Shindler
observes, ‘The emotional and often fanatical dedication which
coloured his way of life, with all its deep depressions and high
emotions, had finally overcome him’.
Yitzhak Shamir was
elected by the Likud to succeed Menachem Begin. The contrast of
temperament, personality and style could have hardly been
greater. One was volatile and mercurial, the other solid and
reliable. One was charismatic and domineering, the other dull and
dour. One was a spell-binding orator, the other could hardly
string two sentences together.
Shamir’s greyness of character and lack of charisma may have
actually helped him to get elected. Some Likud members saw him as
a sort of Israeli Clement Attlee, as a safe pair of hands, and a
welcome antidote to the drama and passions of Begin’s
Churchillian style of leadership.
Yet, in terms of
outlook and ideology, the difference between Begin and Shamir was not
all that great. Both were disciples of Ze’ev
Jabotinsky. Both were dedicated to the Land of Israel. Both
subscribed to the lachrymose version of Jewish history, seeing it as a
long series of trials and tribulations culminating in the
Holocaust. Both were suspicious of outside powers, sharing the
same bunker mentality and both were strong advocates of Israeli
self-reliance.
In some ways
Shamir was more intransigent that Begin. For Shamir there could
be no comprise on the borders of the Land of Israel. He was
strongly opposed, for example to the Camp David accords, and he was
generally unreceptive to the idea of bargaining and compromise, his
natural instinct being to stand firm in the face of external
pressure. Towards the PLO, Shamir’s attitude was
unremittingly hostile. In November 1988 the PLO moderated its
political programme, it accepting UN resolution 242 and opting for a
two-state solution. Shamir, however, dismissed any comparison
between Sadat’s peace initiative and the PLO’s turning over
of a new leaf. He went even further and threatened to imprison
Yasser Arafat if he flew to Israel to talk peace. ‘Hitler
and Arafat belong to the same family of demagogues’, asserted
Shamir, ‘enemies of the Jewish people who think nothing of
killing millions in order to achieve their objective’. Nor
did Shamir yield to the pressure for convening an international
conference to deal with the Arab-Israeli dispute. The
Palestinians characterized this situation as Shamir’s three
‘nos’: no to a Palestinian state; no to talks with the PLO;
no to an international conference. In his memoirs Shamir wrote
that, regardless of all other assessments, he remained as convinced as
he had ever been that the only peace the PLO could offer Israel
was the peace of the cemetery.
In Israel’s
internal history, Shamir was responsible for one innovation: a rotating
prime ministership. The July 1984 elections resulted in a draw
between Likud and Labour. The two parties consequently joined in
a National Unity Government for a period of fifty months. During
the first twenty five months the Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres,
served as prime minister and Shamir as foreign minister and in October
1986 they swapped places. Peres and Shamir were described,
unkindly, but not inaccurately, as the Odd Couple. Mutual
distrust pervaded the relationship between them from the
beginning. But the broad coalition and the odd arrangement of
rotation was in itself a recipe for political paralysis for it gave
each party a veto power over the policies of its partner. The
Labour Party was wedded to the Jordanian option, to territorial
compromise over the West Bank with King Hussein of Jordan. To
overcome the King’s reticence to engage in direct negotiations
with Israel, Labour agreed to an international conference under the
auspices of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security
Council. Likud, on the other hand, was totally opposed either to
territorial compromise with Jordan or to the convening of an
international conference. Shamir believed that an international
conference would imperil Israel’s very existence.
After Shamir
rotated into the top job, he was as indefatigable in scuppering peace
initiatives as Peres was in promoting them. Matters came to a
head over the London Agreement of April 1987 signed at a secret meeting
between Shimon Peres and King Hussein at the home of Lord Mishcon in
London. The London Agreement envisaged an international
conference with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and
negotiations on the basis of UN resolutions 242 and 338. Peres
read the agreement to Shamir but refused to give him a copy although by
now he was the prime minister. Such was the mistrust between
them. Although the London Agreement did not commit Israel to
anything of substance in advance, Shamir feared that it might open the
door to territorial compromise. He therefore sent a private
message to Secretary of State George Schultz in a bid to scupper
the agreement.
George Bush and
his Secretary of State, James Baker, were much less tolerant of
Shamir’s stonewalling than Reagan and Schultz had been. The
eight year honeymoon in American-Israeli relations was over. Bush
and Baker steadily intensified the pressure on the Israeli government
to stop building new settlements in the occupied territories and to
start negotiating. In May 1989 the impossible happened: Yitzhak
Shamir came up with his own peace plan. The plan specified that
the peace process would be based on UN resolutions 242 and 338 and on
the Camp David accords (which Shamir had opposed in 1978) and that
there would be no participation by the PLO and no Palestinian
state. The most important part of the plan was the staging of
elections in the occupied territories to select Palestinian
representatives for the negotiations with Israel.
Interestingly, the
Shamir Peace Plan was not Shamir’s idea. It was suggested
to him by Moshe Arens, the hard-line member of the Likud who became
foreign minister following the elections of November 1988, relegating
Shimon Peres to the finance ministry in the new National Unity
Government. In Broken Covenant Arens gives a highly revealing
account of the rise and fall of the Shamir Peace Plan and of the
deepening crisis in US-Israel relations. Arens found Shamir cool
and unenthusiastic about the peace process and wondered how to get this
‘reluctant dragon’ to lead Israel’s peace
initiative. Shamir seemed to have difficulty with the idea of
Palestinian elections but his cabinet endorsed the plan and the
Americans welcomed it. The only opposition came from three of
Shamir’s ministers and party colleagues - Ariel Sharon, David
Levy and Yitzhak Moda’i - who began a rebellion against Shamir,
accusing him of leading Israel to destruction. Shamir did not put
up a fight for his plan. On the contrary, he allowed this
coalition of ambition to constrain him and he started to
backpedal. This in turn provoked a crisis in the cabinet which
culminated in the Labour ministers walking out on Shamir in March
1990. Shamir then formed a narrow government which he led, or
rather failed to lead, until his defeat at the hands of Yitzhak Rabin
in the elections of 23 June 1992.
Moshe Arens was
probably as close to Shamir as any other Likud leader but he became
increasingly frustrated by Shamir’s inability to agree to
anything that seemed like a deviation from the party’s
ideology. Arens himself was less of an ideologue and more of a
hard-line pragmatist whose central concern was security. Arens
was also a believer in Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall but he concluded
that Israel had reached the point where she could speak to her
Palestinian and the Arab opponents from a position of military
strength. Arens sometimes felt that he was talking to a
wall. At one point Shamir spoke of mobilizing American Jewry to
face ‘a threat to Jewish people’s very existence.
Baker is against us; a new hangman for the Jewish people has
arisen’. With the departure of the Labour ministers from
his cabinet, Shamir regained some of his freedom of action or
rather freedom of inaction. In a heart-to-heart talk with
Arens, he confessed that he was not even sure that a dialogue
with the Palestinians was really necessary. Arens did not
understand then, and does not understand to this day, how his leader
envisaged a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict without meaningful
contact with the Palestinians. Not surprisingly, Arens concluded
that Shamir had become the prisoner of his own ideology. One idea
that Arens did put to Shamir on a number of occasions was that Israel
should abandon the Gaza Strip because it had become a liability but he
was rebuffed by him every time. ‘Gaza is part of the Land
of Israel’, said Shamir.
By his own
account, Shamir regarded peace plans as a threat rather than an
opportunity. ‘The presenting and rejecting of peace
plans’, he writes in his autobiography, ‘went on throughout
the duration of my Prime Ministership; not a year passed without some
official proposal being made by the United States or Israel, or even
Mubarak, each one bringing in its wake new internal crises,
expectations and disappointments - though I had become more or less
immune to the latter’. These plans rarely contained new
elements, Shamir complains; what they amounted to was ‘peace in
exchange for territory; recognition in exchange for territory; never
“just” peace’. Poor Shamir: not once in his
seven years as prime minister was he offered peace on a silver platter;
there was always a price to pay.
Evidently, war was
much more in tune with Shamir’s outlook on the world and inner
feeling than peace. Two days before his electoral defeat,
he addressed a memorial meeting of ‘The Fighters for the
Freedom of Israel’ at Kiryat Ata. His theme was that
nothing had changed since the War of Independence:
We
still need this truth today, the truth of the power of war, or at least
we need to accept that war is inescapable, because without this the
life of the individual has no purpose and the nation has no chance of
survival.
The most charitable
construction one can put on this statement is that the 77- year-old
Revisionist had in mind not war for its own sake but war as a means of
defending the Land of Israel. The Land of Israel was always at
the centre of Shamir’s life. His autobiography does not
shed much new light on his violent life or sterile political career but
the last sentence is highly revealing. ‘If history
remembers me at all, in any way’, he writes, ‘I hope it
will be as a man who loved the Land of Israel and watched over it in
any way he could, all his life’.
In the contest to
succeed Shamir as party leader, the main contenders were David Levy and
two of the Likud ‘princes’, Benjamin Natanyahu and Benny
Begin, the son of Menachem Begin. The other Likud
‘princes’ were deterred from throwing their hats into the
ring by Netanyahu’s popularity rating. In the primaries,
the serious and dignified Benny Begin called Netanyahu ‘a man of
tricks and gimmicks’, a person who lacked political
gravitas. Other members of the Likud also regarded Netanyahu as
an intellectual lightweight, as shallow and superficial, as little more
than the purveyor of sound-bites for American television.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu won the contest on the strength of his popular
appeal and proven skills at public relations.
A geologist by
profession, Benny Begin was elected to the Knesset in 1988 and joined
its influential Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence. A
Zionist Stand is a collection of his articles and lectures that reflect
the mainstream political thought of the Likud Party. In an
article originally published in 1990 under the title ‘A Perennial
Stream’, Begin observes that fifty years after the death of
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Revisionist Zionism remained a perennial
stream, direct and consistent, unlike other Zionist trends which
meander and even retreat as they flow forward.
Benny
Begin’s Zionist stand rests on two pillars: the right of the
Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, and the right
of the Jewish State to national security. In order to realize the
latter, Israel must implement the former in all of `Western Eretz
Yisrael’. In the Introduction he states his political creed
even more succinctly: ‘This land is ours’. It is an
either/or situation, Begin asserts: ‘Either Israel controls
Samaria, Judea and the Gaza district, or a murderous terrorist state
will be set up there, headed by some faction of the PLO or Hamas’.
Using his
background in geology, Begin junior describes the Middle East as
follows: ‘it is a part of the globe in which you will find
numerous political volcanoes, randomly distributed in space, which
violently erupt, randomly in time’. In his book, a
phenomenon that is random both in space and in time, should be defined
as disorder or chaos. As is usually the case with Likud
supporters, Begin’s conviction that instability is endemic in the
Middle East reinforces an almost instinctive resistance to
international peace initiatives. The more they insist, the more
we resist, he observes. Like Yitzhak Shamir, he is guided by the
conviction that it is better for Israel to be criticized than
eulogised. He praises Shamir for cutting ‘the solemn
diplomatic nonsense` in the aftermath of the Gulf War, adding that the
diplomatic course offered to Israel by the United States was a
‘blind alley in a dark neighbourhood, and we considered it both
futile and risky’. The demand that Jerusalem should be
included on the agenda was anathema to him. ‘Jerusalem,
D.C. - David’s Capital’, he asserts, echoing his father,
‘shall forever remain undivided under Jewish sovereignty’.
Benjamin Netanyahu
also hails from a prominent Revisionist Zionist family. His
father, Benzion Netanyahu, is an eminent historian of Spanish Jewry, an
ardent nationalist and long-time supporter of Greater Israel.
Netanyahu junior was born in Israel in 1949, received his
schooling in Israel and America and studied business administration at
MIT. He served in an IDF elite unit for five years, rising to the
rank of captain, so he had some practical experience of fighting Arab
terrorism at the sharp end. In 1982 he was appointed as
Israel’s deputy ambassador to Washington and later as its
Permanent Representative to the United Nations and he was successful at
both posts. While serving in the United States he also gained for
himself a reputation as a leading expert on international terrorism and
he became a frequent participant in talk shows dealing with the
subject. His family set up the Jonathan Institute named after his
elder brother ‘Yoni’ who served in the same IDF elite unit
and who was killed in the raid to rescue the Israeli hostages in
Entebbe in 1976. The main aim of the Institute is to mobilize
governments and public opinion in the West for the fight against
terrorism. A volume edited by Netanyahu under the auspices of the
Jonathan Institute, Terrorism: How the West Can Win greatly impressed
President Ronald Reagan and apparently inspired the air strike he
ordered against Libya in 1986.
Fighting Terrorism
is a little book, forcefully argued, and rich in unintended
ironies. Netanyahu defines terrorism as ‘the deliberate and
systematic assault on civilians to inspire fear for political
ends’. Ironically, by this definition both Menachem Begin
and Yitzhak Shamir had been leaders of terrorist organizations in the
pre-independence period although Netanyahu is unlikely to have had them
in mind when formulating his definition. For him terrorism is not
what the weak do to the strong but what dictatorships do to
democracies. More precisely, he regards international terrorism
as the result of collusion between dictatorial states and an
international terrorist network - ‘a collusion that has to be
fought and can be defeated’. There is, of course, a view
which holds that terrorism is the result of social and political
oppression and that it cannot therefore be eliminated unless the
underlying conditions change. Netanyahu mentions this view, only
to reject it out of hand.
To
Netanyahu’s way of thinking, the PLO is nothing but a terrorist
organization working in collusion with dictatorial states.
Israel’s destruction of the PLO base in Lebanon, he claims,
deprived the Soviets and the Arab world of their most useful staging
ground for mounting terrorist operations against the democracies.
Hisballah (‘the party of God’), which was born in the
aftermath of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and continues to fight
Israeli forces and proxies in southern Lebanon, is presented by
Netanyahu as a terrorist organization sponsored by Iran. But
although Iran supports Hisballah, it does not effectively control
it. Moreover, guerrilla warfare would be a better description
than terror for Hisballah’s operations because for the most part
they take place on Lebanese territory, under battlefield conditions,
against Israeli soldiers. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement,
born in Gaza in 1987, fits Netanyahu’s definition of a terrorist
organization rather better because its attacks are mainly directed
against Israeli civilians on Israeli territory. On the other hand,
Hamas’s political links with Iran are much more tenuous than
those of Hisballah and it receives much less material support from the
dictatorships of the region. Far from being part of an
international terrorist network, Hamas is essentially an indigenous
movement with its own agenda of creating an Islamic state in the whole
of Palestine. It is vehemently opposed to the peace process with
Israel and it denounces Yasser Arafat as an Israeli collaborator.
Another irony is that in its early days Hamas was secretly supported by
Israel in what turned out to be a short-sighted policy of ‘divide
and rule’ aimed specifically at weakening Arafat’s secular,
mainstream Fatah movement.
But the greatest
irony of them all is that Benjamin Natanyahu is not just the most
outspoken spokesman against Hamas but also the principal political
beneficiary of its suicide bombings inside Israel. These attacks
have the effect of shifting public opinion against the Labour-led
government and the peace process and in favour of right-wing
politicians like Benjamin Natanyahu. On 31 May the Israeli public
will elect, for the first time in its history, not only its
representatives for parliament but also the prime minister. The
only two candidates in the direct elections of the prime minister are
Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu. Against Yitzhak Rabin, `Mr
Security’, Netanyahu never stood any chance. The
assassination of Rabin by a right-wing Jewish extremist in November
1995 dealt a severe political blow to Netanyahu and gave Peres a
substantial lead in the opinion polls. The spate of suicide
bombings in early March which claimed the life of about 60 Israelis
abruptly reversed the trend and gave Netanyahu a narrow lead of 48
against Peres’s 46 in the opinion polls. To put it crudely,
Jewish terror, which is not even mentioned in Netanyahu’s book,
works against him while Islamic terror works in his favour.
Netanyahu’s prospects of reaching the top of the greasy poll are
thus intimately linked to the continuation of Islamic terror which is
the principal target of his own warlike book.
The Likud, despite
its various permutations since the 1920s, has always remained an
ideological party. The principal difference between Netanyahu and
his predecessors is that they were true believers. They
were faithful, not to say fanatical defenders of the Land of
Israel regardless of the electoral consequences of this stand whereas
he is a pragmatic politician in the American mould who is prepared to
dilute his party’s ideology for the sake of attaining
power. In his book, Netanyahu denounced the Oslo accord as
capitulation by the Labour government to `the PLO’s Phased
Plan’ of bringing about a gradual Israeli withdrawal to the
pre-1967 borders. But he never came up with a coherent
alternative to the policy limited, gradual, and controlled withdrawal
from the occupied territories. And since the majority of Israelis
still support the Oslo accord, Netanyahu began to change his tune in
the lead up to the 31 May elections. `The Oslo accord endangers
Israel’, he said, `but one cannot ignore reality’.
This reality spells the beginning of the end of the Revisionist Zionist
dream of Jewish sovereignty over the whole of the Land of Israel.
Jabotinsky and Begin turn in their graves.
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