The Lion’s Gate Page 9

  Sharon was a realist. He recognized, as did Ben-Gurion and Dayan, that the Arabs had as legitimate a claim to this land as we did, and that they possessed pride and courage and anger, against which no rejoinder existed except the sword. He often quoted the Zionist fighter and pioneer Ze’ev Jabotinsky:

  As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rabble but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful issues only when they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers. Only then will the extremist groups with their slogans “No, never” lose their influence, and only then will their influence be transferred to the more moderate groups. And only then will the moderates offer suggestions for compromise. Then only will they begin bargaining with us on practical matters . . . when that happens, I am convinced that we Jews will be found ready to give them satisfactory guarantees, so that both people can live together in peace, like good neighbours.

  18.

  THE SPECIAL NIGHT SQUADS

  This day, May 30, 1967, I am in the port city of Eilat, touring military installations. No one will let me pay for a meal. “Just keep well,” says the restaurant owner at lunch, “and bring us victory.”

  Can I tell him I can’t even get myself assigned to drive a truck?

  Moshe Dayan, still lacking official authority, continues visiting forward military encampments, reviewing plans with commanders, and assessing the state of mind of the troops.

  Pressure continues to build on Prime Minister Eshkol to give up his position as minister of defense. From my sources, I have learned that Menachem Begin with several colleagues of his right-wing party, Gahal, has paid a visit to Ben-Gurion last night at the former prime minister’s apartment in Tel Aviv. I would have sooner expected a pack of hyenas to sit down to supper with a lion. But this shows how desperate the situation has become.

  Apparently Begin appealed to the old man to join with him in an attempt to oust Eshkol entirely, replacing him at the head of a unity government with Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion even agreed, I am told. But Eshkol would have none of it.

  Flying home from Eilat, the news is of King Hussein signing a defensive alliance with Nasser. Now Jordan is in it. Nothing can prevent war. When it comes, I fear, we shall have to fight on two fronts, even three if Syria enters the fray.

  Worse, Hussein’s pact with Nasser means that brigades from Iraq will be permitted by Jordan to cross its territory and even to take up positions on our border. A child can see, now, that Eshkol must give up the defense portfolio to someone who understands war. Will he? I am thinking of Ben-Gurion. The aircraft’s shadow speeds over the washes and tamarisk groves of the Negev Desert that he loves so dearly.

  No Jew since Moses has stood as tall as this squat, stocky Pole, or brought into being, by force of will alone, such prodigies. On my office desk sit five phone messages from him. I have answered none. I can’t.

  Four days ago I met privately with Ben-Gurion at the Desert Inn in Beersheba. The position he took with me is that Israel cannot defeat the Arabs without the military support of at least one superpower. I did not contest him. What purpose would it serve?

  What is so frustrating and infuriating to me about the Eshkol government (and I include Ben-Gurion in this indictment, even though he is a fervent opponent of Eshkol) is that its lack of decisiveness to launch an immediate attack is setting the nation up for calamity and our brave soldiers for an ordeal of fire. Every hour that the government delays in making this inevitable decision is another hour in which our enemies grow stronger, dig in deeper, and move more troops and tanks into positions from which they can be dislodged only by the expenditure of our young men’s blood.

  The combat arms of Israel are a match, on ground of our choosing, for Egypt and her allies combined. But our leaders do not believe this. Eskhol doesn’t. Neither does Ben-Gurion. Begin himself is simply desperate.

  Ten days ago I visited Arik Sharon, with his division, at Nitzana on the Egyptian frontier. Sharon’s eyes shone when he took me over the maps. “We will be bathing in the Canal in one hundred hours.”

  I am glad that my daughter, Yael, has been posted to the headquarters of this commander. She will see sights such as this desert has not witnessed since Napoleon.

  Beyond my family, two men have influenced my life and thought more than any others. The first is Ben-Gurion. He believed in me when his contemporaries considered me too young or too intemperate and when I myself could see no farther than my shadow’s fall in front of me.

  I have been his army man. I have served him and argued with him and studied under him. A thousand times I have yielded to positions he has taken, which I knew were misguided or misinformed, and whose implementation I would have suffered from no other man, for the sole reason that I adored him and knew that he must be followed, right or wrong. He founded Israel. He was Israel. He brought the nation forth with his will and his spirit, as Moses with a staff brought forth water from the stone.

  This was Ben-Gurion, for whom no honor is too exalted and no expression of love too great.

  The other man was Orde Charles Wingate.

  When war comes, as it surely will, tomorrow or the day after, a thousand captains and lieutenants of the Israel Defense Forces will outthink and outwit and outfight the enemy, employing (though few will realize it) principles and doctrine that were stitched into the fabric of our army by this Indian-born British officer who fell in love with us, and we with him, in Mandate Palestine three decades ago.

  I am given credit far too often for founding the fighting ethos of the IDF. This spirit began with Wingate.

  I met him in the summer of 1938. I was twenty-two; Wingate was thirty-five, a captain, formerly of artillery but at that time in intelligence, conducting a survey of Arab gangs and saboteur bands. He came to Tel Shimron, near my home at Nahalal, traveling in an ancient jalopy, alone save for his batman, whose services as a tea brewer or boot polisher Wingate eschewed in favor of the man’s skill as a mechanic.

  Wingate was a type such as only England produces. Seeking a posting in the Sudan, he rode his bicycle across Europe and traveled on foot south from Cairo. He learned his raiding skills fighting bandits in southern Sudan.

  From 1936 to 1939 in Palestine was the season called by Jews the Bloody Riots and by the English the Arab Revolt. For once, the British had a use for us.

  At that time the main target of the Arab gangs was the Iraq Petroleum pipeline. They would strike at night in bands of five or six, digging down to expose the pipe, which was buried only a meter or so deep. A volley of gunfire would riddle the line, soaking the sand with oil. The raiders would set it ablaze with Molotov cocktails or flaming rags wrapped around stones. The fires would burn for days. The pipeline could not be protected along its length, and patrols were useless against such tactics of hit-and-run.

  Wingate proposed the creation of a force—the Special Night Squads—that would employ British officers and Jewish guides and troopers to carry the fight to the enemy. He sold the idea to General Officer Commanding Archibald Wavell, the same general who later gave his blessing to another proponent of unconventional warfare, Major Ralph Bagnold, whose Long Range Desert Group fought alongside David Stirling’s SAS behind the lines against Rommel and the Afrika Korps during World War II.

  Wingate was unlike any Britisher I had met. He ate onions as fruit. He carried three or four with him always, wrapped in newspaper. On a trek or sitting by the fire, he would dig into his knapsack, pull out a fresh onion, and sink his teeth into it the way anyone else would bite into an apple. He was a champion rider who could jump a fence higher than his head. He believed that Arabs feared the night and based his fighting philosophy on attacking in the dark. Raiding the gangs who preyed upon the pipeline, Wingate mounted the taillights of his vehicles up front,
so the enemy couldn’t tell in which direction he was moving. Reconnoitering Arab camps, he made us wear sandals bought at local markets so that our tracks would be indistinguishable from those of native shepherds. He believed patrols worthless, but ambushes indispensable. When the doctrine of the day was based on walls and guard towers, he taught us to go “outside the wire,” to befriend the night, move fast and strike in ways, at hours, and from directions that the enemy least expected.

  I had served as a scout for the British Army and as a commander in the Mobile Guards of their Jewish Settlement Police. I came to despise the idea of parade ground order. Wingate felt the same. “Keep your rifle clean and kill your man before he kills you.” That was all he wanted of discipline.

  Once, raiding a camp of Arab saboteurs, I had our men dress as British soldiers. I made them smoke English cigarettes and eat English bully beef, so they would even smell like the real thing. Wingate approved. And if you think such precautions extravagant, believe me, the Bedouin can smell an Englishman from a Jew a hundred meters away.

  Wingate’s family were members of a sect called the Plymouth Brethren, Old Testament Christians. He knew the Books of Moses better than any Talmudic scholar and believed in them more passionately. Wingate loved not just Israel, but the idea of Israel. That contemporary Jews could and would re-create the Israel of the Bible became his passion. Our young people called him HaYedid, “the friend.”

  Whenever Wingate came to Nahalal, he stayed with my family. He and I would talk all night. Wingate had drawn up plans for a Jewish army, which he imagined as a formation under British command only until the establishment of the Jewish state.

  “You will need this army then,” he said, “to fight the Arabs.”

  Wingate identified with Gideon from the Book of Judges. He loved Kibbutz Ein Harod because Gideon had fought in that place in biblical times. The first morning he came to Camp Shimron, as our young people pressed around him, I could see in his eyes that his vision for this land was identical to ours and that he would burst his heart to help us bring it into being. The principles Wingate espoused—fighting at night, the employment of stealth and surprise, taking the battle to the enemy, the use of unconventional tactics, timing, and weaponry—became the core precepts of the Haganah and later the IDF.

  As chief of staff in 1954 I issued a directive that every Israeli officer in a combat berth must undergo parachute training, whether he served in a paratroop unit or not. I included myself in this order. I jumped five times. I broke my leg the last time. Arik Sharon, commander of the paratroop brigade, pinned my jump wings to my breast at the graduation ceremony. I was standing in a plaster cast.

  Why did I order all IDF officers to participate in paratroop training? Because to jump, one must overcome fear. It is the closest thing to actual combat. Jumping builds esprit. To jump with your mates makes you brothers. In any army paratroopers are elite warriors.

  Two nights ago a reporter asked me what Israel must do, now, at the brink of war.

  I told him we must jump out of the airplane.

  Our ministers cannot congregate in rooms like Talmudic scholars, parsing political and diplomatic solutions. The combat commander learns that under fire he must often make a decision, any decision, because even a wrong decision is less dangerous than none at all.

  Orde Wingate was killed fighting the Japanese in Burma during World War II. He was commander of the legendary Chindits force, the 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. He died on March 24, 1944, when the Mitchell bomber on which he was returning from Burma crashed in the jungle of northeast India.

  What would Israel not give now to have our old friend, and his fighting spirit, standing again at our shoulders?

  19.

  THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE

  On the afternoon of June 1, 1967, a demonstration of women took place outside the Labor Party headquarters at 110 Yarkon Street in Tel Aviv. The wives and mothers, many of whom were Labor stalwarts, demanded the establishment of a national unity government and the resignation of Prime Minister Eshkol as minister of defense.

  “We want Dayan! Give us Dayan!”

  Eshkol watched the demonstration from the windows of the party offices. He referred to the protesters later, with the humor that didn’t fail him even in this hour, as “the Merry Wives of Windsor.”

  Shlomo Gazit took the oath of the Haganah at age sixteen in 1942. He would serve into the 1970s and 1980s, first as chief of intelligence and later as minister in charge of the territories.

  This demonstration was no joke, however. The people wanted Dayan. To understand why, one must go back to 1956, to what was called in Israel Operation Kadesh but became acclaimed around the world as “the Sinai Campaign.”

  In four days—one hundred hours—under Dayan’s leadership as chief of staff, the IDF routed the Egyptian Army and overran the Sinai Peninsula from Sharm el-Sheikh to the Suez Canal. This lightning victory humiliated Egypt’s new president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who by arming his nation with the latest Soviet weaponry, by deliberately and aggressively confronting the Western powers, Great Britain and France, and by threatening war with Israel had set himself up not only as the champion of his own people but of the entire Arab world.

  To Israelis, Moshe Dayan’s name became synonymous with victory.

  I encountered Dayan first in 1950, when I was a very young editor of Maarachot, the military monthly. The paper had commissioned histories from various commanders of the War of Independence and Dayan had sent in an article about his conquest of the Arab towns of Lod and Ramla. I rejected one word in the piece as being bad Hebrew. Describing the captured armored car his forces had used, the famous “Terrible Tiger,” Dayan had employed the slang term hanamer hanora’l. Proper Hebrew would be hanamer hanorah.

  One afternoon, out of nowhere, a great roar came from the street entrance of our offices. “Where is this Shlomo Gazit!”

  Dayan burst in, dispensing colorful language and demanding that hanamer hanora’l remain. His logic was, significantly, that men who had bled and died had called the vehicle by that term. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for Maarachot.

  Dayan won, of course.

  Two years later he was promoted to chief of operations, the number two position in the army, capping what was, even by Israeli standards, a meteoric ascent for an officer only thirty-seven years old. At the time, I was the head of the office for the outgoing operations chief, General Mordechai Maklef, who was moving up to chief of staff. Maklef took me aside. “Dayan is a field commander; he knows nothing of the General Staff. Will you stick around for a month or two, Shlomo, and help him find his footing?”

  I agreed. Dayan, however, did not regard my presence in such a benign light as had Maklef. To him I was a spy, left behind by the new chief of staff to keep an eye on him. Every suggestion I made, Dayan rejected. Every cause I championed, he rebuffed. By the end of two weeks, I was ready to tell him, “Either you go to hell or I do, but I cannot continue under these conditions.”

  Then one day we were in a meeting. Dayan was chairing it. He passed me a note. I don’t remember what the meeting was about or what question he asked me, but for some reason I wrote my answer in the form of a limerick.

  Dayan took the note. I could see him scan it with his one good eye. That eye became scarlet with fury. For a moment I thought Dayan would actually rise from his chair in anger. Then at once his eye grew bright with humor.

  In that moment, Shlomo Gazit was moved from the impossible to the possible.

  Dayan divided the world into two categories: those who were “impossible,” with whom he could not work, whose presence he would not suffer; and those who were “possible.” To colleagues and subordinates in the latter class, he granted free rein and such latitude as did no other commander.

  This was how Dayan ran his staff and how he directed the army. “I don’t want to do anything that someone
else can do.”

  Why waste his time? If Gazit can do it, let him. Can this problem be handled by Morele Bar-On? Let Morele do it.

  Dayan saw his role as the performance of that which only he could do.

  At school my classmates and I were taught that a six-foot man could see roundabout on an unobstructed plain for a distance of two or three miles. If that man were two feet taller, he could see, perhaps, for five miles.

  Dayan was this second man.

  His vision extended beyond others’.

  In 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. This move took the world by surprise. It enraged the British and French, whose stockholders owned the Suez Canal Company. At once these European powers determined to retake the Canal by force and to remove Nasser from power.

  Secret negotiations began between Britain and France and Israel. A scheme was hatched whereby Israeli paratroopers would seize a position so close to the Canal that it threatened war with Egypt. The British and French would, for public consumption, seize upon this outrage and demand that Israel and Egypt—like bad boys in a school playground—knock off the roughhousing and retire to their corners. Egypt, of course, would refuse. Voilà! The pretext for armed intervention would have been established.

  British and French troops would seize the Canal. The status quo ante would be restored.

  Ah, but first: Could these Jews do the job the British and French required? Was their army up to it? Did they even have an army? Remember, Israel in 1956 had been a state for just eight years. Only eleven years had elapsed since the terminal horrors of the Holocaust.

  General Maurice Challe (who in 1961 would be a leader of the failed Algerian coup against President Charles de Gaulle) represented France at the initial discussions. Dayan, who had by then been promoted to army chief of staff, led the Israeli delegation. I was the interpreter. Dayan brought in his commanders. “How long will your forces require to capture all of the Sinai Peninsula?” asked General Challe. It was clear that he anticipated a reply in terms of months.