Begin Protects Sadat

When Arab terrorists hatched a plot to overthrow the regime of President Anwar Sadat decades ago, Israel's Mossad likewise came to the defense of the Egyptian regime. Like today, a hardline leader had just taken office as Israel's prime minister. In an unlikely gesture, the newly elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the Mossad to turn over details of the plot to Egypt's intelligence chief.

Mossad officials were stunned by Begin's orders. Like Israel's current prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, many observers considered Begin an unrepentant hawk, someone who would not yield to advocates of what he believed would be a risky withdrawal from Arab lands in exchange for a tentative peace agreement with the Palestinians. Yet Begin wanted to send a signal to Egypt and the rest of the Arab world that even he was ready to negotiate.

The plot against Sadat had been orchestrated by Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. Acting on the Mossad report that Prime Minister Begin turned over to Sadat, Egypt's security officials were able to quickly seize Qaddafi's agents. Five days later, President Sadat launched an attack against Libya. The Egyptian government explained that the raid was "in retaliation for Libyan aggression," and it accused Qaddafi of trying to overthrow Sadat by engaging in a "large-scale terrorist plot" in alliance with members of an Islamic extremist group.

When the Egyptian retaliatory strike against Qaddafi was completed, Sadat vowed, "We are ready to repeat this lesson unless this maniac stops playing with fire." The warning against Qaddafi echoes Mubarak's recent denunciations of Nasrallah. In an editorial published in a state-controlled Egyptian newspaper, Nasrallah was branded a "monkey sheik," charging him with being "a bandit and veteran criminal who killed your countrymen," pledging that "we will not allow you to threaten the security and safety of Egypt." Similar to the threats against Qaddafi for his plot against Sadat, Nasrallah has also been put on notice: "If you threaten its sovereignty, you will burn!"

Source

Begin and Carter

In a book review of "A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East", Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, of The Electronic Intifada, makes some observations on Menachem Begin:

...There was a marked change in US policy with the ascension of Lyndon Johnson who ushered in a pronounced pro-Israel tilt. A convert to Zionism out of political expedience, Johnson was quick to revoke the restrictions Kennedy had been trying to impose on Israel's nuclear program. Kennedy had kept Israel at a wary distance and opted for conciliation with Arabs. In contrast, writes Tyler, Johnson "had put himself in the service of Israel like no other previous president," deferring judgment on key occasions to his coterie of informal Jewish advisers which included among others a former member of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun [?]. Unlike Eisenhower, Johnson would accept Israel's conquests during the 1967 war, ignoring the judgment of his own cabinet, and would thereby permanently undermine the UN charter.

...Jimmy Carter was likewise challenged by the lobby when he became the first US president to broach the idea of a Palestinian "homeland." However, he proved a more formidable adversary. Though he occasionally ceded ground, through sheer tenacity he also managed to extract concessions from the Israelis. The conviction with which Carter threatened to cut funding in response to Israel's 1978 invasion of Lebanon led Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to exclaim "It's over" before ordering a withdrawal. In stormy sessions with Begin, according to Moshe Dayan, Carter delivered his indictments which "could not have been expressed in a more hostile form." (So "disgusted" was Carter with Begin's tactics that he said he would have asked Begin to "get the hell out" had he not been a guest.) It was this same tenacity that would eventually allow him to force Israel to withdraw from the occupied Egyptian Sinai peninsula, despite Begin's reluctance and the opposition of the lobby. Carter's wish for a comprehensive Middle East peace would not come to fruition as a result of his failure to win re-election in 1980.

Begin Center Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 25

Menachem Begin Heritage Center Bulletin Vol. 5 No. 25 | 7 April 2009


TOTAL NUMBER OF VISITORS SINCE OCTOBER 2004: 481,072

CHAG PESACH SAMEACH!

WISHING OUR READERS A CHAG PESACH SAMEACH V'KASHER!


A FEW WORDS ON FREEDOM

Before Irgun soldier Dov Gruner was hanged by the British on April 16, 1947, just after the Pesach holiday, he wrote a letter to Menachem Begin in which he stated that he did not regret his role in the Irgun Zvai Leumi and that he believed in what he was fighting for, even though it eventually led to the final moment in the hangman's noose.

Menachem Begin wrote at that time:

"Great is the courage in Israel at a time of destruction and in this time of resurrection. We will be proud of them all and in all of them we will recognize holiness. But in the ladder of Jewish heroism, there is one level which is supreme. And from that level arise those who are Harugei Malchut. They were fighters whose fighting was not passive. It was active. They were revolutionaries whose revolution was not without choice but initiated. They went to the gallows and their heroism was not once. It is eternal. From their bleeding hearts, a song of freedom was sung. The song that sang how there is no purpose in being slaves anymore and that liberty would win and justice would arrive. And now, G-D of Israel, I tell You: Because You have given Israel such children as these, I say ‘Yitgadal V’Yitkadash Sh’mei Rabbah’."



** On Holocaust Remembrance Day and on Memorial Day, the tours of the museum have been cancelled that would cause visitors to be inside the museum when the national siren takes place. This means that on Holocaust Remembrance Day there will be no tours at 9am or 9:30am and on Memorial Day there will be no tours at 10am or 10:30. Otherwise, the museum hours are as usual until 7pm.

We remind all our visitors to make reservations in advance to avoid disappointment, especially during the holidays. Reservations can be made at 02-565-2020.


LINKS

A few links to special coverage of various items:

From the Begin Center Diary Blog, readers may want to review Yehuda Avner's recollections of the peace process HERE.

Or read Ted Mann's account of that time period HERE.

Reader's may also want to peruse the speech that outgoing Prime Minster Ehud Olmert gave at the special session of Knesset that was held to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Treaty with Egypt HERE.

Finally, a video recording was made at the commemoration for Rabbi Aryeh Levin. The Chief Rabbinate Choir performed the song Ana B'Choach which can be viewed HERE.


NO BULLETIN NEXT WEEK

In honor of the Pesach holiday, we will be liberating ourselves from writing the bulletin next week. We will return on April 23 with coverage of Pesach events.

A Missing Peace Partner

Michael Slackman writes in the New York Times of Egyptian disillusionment and lack of support for the 30-year old peace treaty with Israel.

Well, in describing that it happened like this

Thirty years ago, President Anwar el-Sadat broke ranks with his Arab allies, visited Jerusalem and agreed to peace with Israel.

it's no wonder.

If you de-personify the Israelis while glorifying Sadat of Egypt, why should you have peace? Anyone heard of Menachem Begin?

Peace is between peoples and once you eliminate Israelis as people, real-live persons, why peace?

The Bombing Of Iraq's Reactor Recalled

In the London Times, an excerpt:

An Israeli colleague was sent on an assignment so secret and sensitive that it was years before he would share the full story with friends.

He was dispatched by Menachem Begin, then the Prime Minister, to European capitals with orders to meet editors, politicians and opinion makers to spread the word that Israel was increasingly concerned about Iraq's nuclear programme and would do anything to stop Saddam Hussein building the bomb. The warnings, intended to prepare Western public opinion, were largely dismissed as sabre-rattling (one editor insisted on discussing a new lavatory system designed on a kibbutz) - until June 1981, when Israeli Air Force F16s bombed the plant to rubble.

A few days ago a chill went down my spine when an articulate and intelligent senior Israeli official made exactly the same argument about Iran's nuclear programme at a briefing in London. He described an Iranian nuclear weapon as an existential threat to the Jewish state, which would defend itself whatever the consequences. These warnings are not new but the political and military circumstances are conspiring to make an Israeli attack on Iran a probability, unless the Middle East experiences dramatic changes in the coming weeks and months.

It is a widely held conclusion among nuclear experts that Iran now possesses enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb. It would still have to be enriched to weapons grade at the centre in Natanz before being made into a warhead. But Iran has mastered the technology and has the raw materials. Building a nuclear bomb is now only a matter of time...

Recalling the Yammit Expulsion

No trauma erased, no lesson learned

By Lily Galili

"Before you say anything, I want to tell you that in April we're having a protest rally to commemorate 27 years since the evacuation of Yamit," replied Avi Farhan to the as-yet-unasked question: How do the Yamit evacuees see the peace with Egypt after 30 years?.

Three people showed up for a more in-depth discussion: Farhan, who turned the evacuation into a mission, when he was evacuated both from Yamit and later from Elei Sinai during the Gaza disengagement; his friend Yitzhak Gabai, who also went through a dual evacuation; and Mati Gordon, who was evacuated (uprooted, as they put it) only once and then took up residence inside the Green Line.

Farhan is now living temporarily in a rented apartment in Sderot. Gabai has been living since the disengagement in the so-called refugee camp in Kibbutz Carmia. They are both still waiting to reach an agreement with the state to settle in Kibbutz Neveh Yam, south of Haifa.

Since Yamit's evacuation, Gordon has been living in Moshav Dekel on the border of Israel, Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The moshav was established to absorb the evacuees from the Yamit region; the region around the moshav then received the name Shalom in honor of the peace agreements with Egypt. But Gordon believes that the only peace, for now, is the peace he has made with himself and his fate. The term "Shalom District" seems to him somewhat far-fetched when he is asked to keep his front door closed with a large rock, after it became unhinged from the aftershock of a Qassam rocket that fell on his neighbor's house.

Although each of them chose a different path, for all three Yamit is still alive. To every meeting Farhan brings the Israeli flag that flew on the roof of his home in Yamit. The rest of the time he keeps it in a safe. From the same bag he pulls out an aerial photo of Yamit and points to its details with the enthusiasm of someone proudly presenting the blueprints of his new house.

"During one of the meetings in the Elei Sinai clubhouse before the evacuation, someone told me that it's easier for me because I've already been uprooted once," says Gabai, laughing bitterly. "I explained to him that that's like assuming it's easier for a man missing one hand to have the second one amputated, than to amputate the first hand of someone with two hands. Does that sound logical to you?"

Eternal disgrace

Farhan recalls how during the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt he said that "Menachem Begin wants to go down in history, and he will - as someone remembered in eternal disgrace." Thirty years later he does not take back his words. "He will be remembered in eternal disgrace when Egypt begins a war against us," Gabai says. "We are still high, celebrating 30 years of pseudo-peace. But the war will come."

We actually began the conversation from the end, with the question of whether they can imagine a perfect peace that would justify the evacuation. Absolute peace with guarantees and collateral and proof on the ground. The kind in which the leader of the country whose territory Israel must evacuate requests it of us personally, in the name of peace, and promises eternal love. The answer is a definite no.

"In such a peace, Itzik Gabai and I could, for example, live in an Egyptian Yamit," says Farhan, "and Farhan would live there as an Egyptian citizen, the way [Israeli Arab MK] Ahmed Tibi and his ilk live in Israel and serve in its parliament. I would be willing to be a member of the Egyptian parliament. On the eve of the signing of the treaty in Camp David, I traveled to Ashkelon, because in Yamit there was no telegraph office, and I sent telegrams to [prime minister Menachem] Begin, [U.S. president] Jimmy Carter and [Egyptian president] Anwar Sadat, with a request to enable us to remain in Yamit on a humanitarian basis. Yehiel Kadishai [Begin's personal secretary] confirmed receipt of the telegram."

And if the Syrian president were to ask Gabai to evacuate the Golan for 25 years, during which relations would mature and in the end he would be able to live there once again? "That's a nice simulation, but it's impossible," Gabai says. "After all, by doing so they're saying that only 25 years from now will there be a peace in which they'll be able to live with me. In such a case I would tell them they should mature first and come back to me in 25 years."

After examining the question from every angle, Farhan and Gabai did not find a single scenario in which an evacuation is worthwhile. The results of the disengagement only reinforced this feeling and increased suspicion of Egypt. Only Gordon says that when Yamit was evacuated he decided he would not be an obstacle to peace, but peace didn't really come. "The peace that exists is not what I dreamed of," he says.

Being a pioneer

A new trauma, it turns out, does not erase an old one. Nor is there any new thinking about personal responsibility for the choices these men made by risking living in a place that was not really theirs, and which was always under threat of evacuation. "In Yamit we certainly didn't feel for a moment that we were taking a risk," they say. They were young, enthusiastic, infused with a spirit of Zionism. "Be a pioneer, settle in Yamit," says Farhan, quoting from the ads published by the government in the 1970s.

The settlement in Elei Sinai is a somewhat different story; here, for the first time, Farhan surprises by saying "I made a mistake." In what way? "After Yamit, I had planned to build a refugee camp next to the Erez crossing," he explains. "On the eve of Memorial Day in 1982, [then-defense minister] Ariel Sharon sent to me Uri Bar-On, his assistant for settlement affairs. Bar-On then suggested to me, in the name of the defense minister, that I build a settlement instead of a refugee camp. Three days later I was already in the minister's office, and he showed me all kinds of places on the map. That was a Sunday. On Friday I was already in the area with senior army officers.

"And here is where I made a mistake. Senior officials in the settlement department suggested that I build the settlement within the Green Line or right on the seam line, and I insisted on an ideological settlement, and made a mistake. I also made a mistake when I blindly followed Gush Emunim [the settlement movement], who with their criteria for accepting settlers didn't accept my sister."

They plan to commemorate their Camp David on April 26, the day of Yamit's evacuation in 1982, at the foot of the monument that was moved from Yamit to the Shalom District when they evacuated. On a clear day the remains of the Yamit-region settlements are visible from the monument.

Fifty of the 70 families living in Moshav Dekel are among the Yamit evacuees, but Gordon prefers to call the area the "entrance to the Philadelphi route" rather than the Shalom District. The streets have been named after trees, though he's put a street sign that says Yamit at the entrance to his house. The moshav's paving stones were brought from Yamit, something Gordon sees as a continuity and Farhan sees as a kind of insult. In the Israeli reality, no trauma is erased and no lesson is learned.

Ted Mann Reflects on The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty

Retired Philadelphia attorney Ted Mann, who was the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at the time, recalls his front-row seat as the drama unfolded.

A Moment in History: Egypt Becomes a Friend

My wife, Ronnie, and I were vacationing in Puerto Rico on March 12, 1979, when Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin tracked me down in my hotel room to tell me that he and President Jimmy Carter had resolved their differences over a peace agreement with Egypt, that he would urge his Cabinet to accept the resolution, and that it would then be up to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to accept or reject the final treaty terms. He was indescribably happy. So was I.
March 1979: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (left) and communal leader Ted Mann after the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

There was much high drama over the next two weeks, in my view totally manufactured, as Carter shuttled between Cairo and Jerusalem, wrapping up the details. A peace treaty was finally signed by Sadat and Begin on the White House lawn on March 26.

Begin and I met after the signing, and he told me that he had been invited by Sadat to come to Cairo the next week to celebrate. He even asked me to join him. I replied that regrettably I could not, as Ronnie and I would be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. So he said, "Bring Ronnie, too, and we will all celebrate together in Egypt."

Ronnie and I flew to Israel, where we boarded Israel's more modest version of Air Force One with the prime minister and his immediate family; Abba Eban and his Egyptian-born wife, Susan; Alexander Schindler, my predecessor as chairman of the Conference of Presidents, and his wife, Rhea; and 15 or 20 of the prime minister's old compatriots from the wars that preceded and followed the birth of Israel more than 30 years earlier. It was a short but unforgettable flight from Tel Aviv to Cairo, with Israeli fighter planes flying alongside us. The Israelis on board -- by then, mostly in their 50s and 60s -- were singing the songs they sang together in the pre-state days. In our grand suite at the Heliopolis Salaam, a new hotel in the outskirts of Cairo, we found silver gifts from Sadat in celebration of our 25th anniversary.

At a reception at one of Sadat's palaces, he and Begin stood next to each other in a reception line. When Begin introduced me, Sadat, tongue in cheek, said: "I know this man; he actually attacked me in my own embassy in Washington last week."

He was referring to a meeting that had followed the peace-signing. The Anti-Defamation League -- America's best-known and highly regarded Jewish organization -- had arranged a meeting between its leadership and Sadat, and then apparently changed its mind about having a separate meeting, and asked me to chair it and to invite leaders of other organizations as well.

Nineteen of us met with Sadat at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. I had expected it to be a purely pleasurable gathering since the agreement between Israel and Egypt had finally been reached. But as he spoke, it soon became clear that he was testing us.

Very calmly smoking his pipe, the president casually commented that in the negotiations, Begin had been unreasonably stubborn on the subject of Jerusalem. (In negotiating peace with Israel, Sadat had insisted that issues related to the Palestinians be included.) When he repeated it a second time, I lit a cigarette to calm my nerves, sharing with him the one ashtray between us.

None of us wanted to disagree with anything Sadat said. We were, after all, his guests, at his embassy. But when he repeated it yet again, I interjected that while we held various opinions about how peace between Israel and the Palestinians might ultimately be achieved, I wanted him to know that every one of us in the room fully shared Begin's view that Jerusalem must remain a united city and be the undivided capital of Israel.

He vehemently denied that he was trying to separate American Jewish leadership from the prime minister, which he correctly assumed I was suggesting. The moment passed, and the rest of the meeting was as pleasurable as we had hoped it would be.

The reception in Egypt was outdoors in the beautiful gardens of the palace. The Israeli and American Jewish guests mingled with Egyptian business and governmental leaders -- all male, their wives sitting on chairs on the periphery. Then we moved to tables nearby, where we all mixed together for dinner. We were entertained by belly-dancers, and Ronnie, to this day, has never let me forget that I promptly fell sound asleep!

But the most memorable part of the trip happened back at the hotel bar, where Egyptian musicians were playing "Haveinu Shalom Aleichem" and other Israeli songs of peace. Israelis and Egyptians danced together, clapped hands together and sang together. It was simply unbelievable. Even now, 30 years later, I have tears in my eyes as I recall it.

It was the end of a remarkable week.