A MOMENT Interview With Abba Eban
A MOMENT INTERVIEW WITH ABBAEBAN Abba Eban, former Foreign Minister of Israel, is currently a member of the Knesset. He is also a contributing editor of this magazine. There's been some talk...
...The discussion has been documentary, verbal, juridical—it has not affected anything concrete, tangible, on the ground...
...My impression is that when I said that I was worried by what Sharon and other people were reading into the notion of strategic cooperation, Haig indicated that he was worried by it, too, and that Israel would find out that it was not the American intent that Israel should become an aircraft carrier for the United States...
...he made peace with us because of our strength...
...there were about 100,000 people on it...
...In the Camp David accords, the West Bank and Gaza are defined as territories of "indeterminate status," a status to be determined not unilaterally by Israel, but by a quartet consisting of Jordan, Egypt, Israel and the Palestinians...
...I don't think the Israeli public would accept our sending our troops outside Israel for extra-Israeli adventures...
...So far, what has happened js that the parties have met in about 20 different cities...
...I think part of our reaction to the recent meetings was not to the idea of alliance, but to the exaggerated rhetoric with which the meetings were reported to us...
...For him, Israel is still an idea...
...He is a very effective campaigner...
...That's absolute nonsense...
...But he sees a man in a swimming pool and says, "Here's Beverly Hills...
...Linowitz said that 80 percent of the problem had been solved...
...I remember a point during the Camp David discussions when people were saying that 90 percent of the problems had been settled, that only two things hadn't been settled—is Israel going to give up Sinai, and will Egypt make peace...
...I don't know what he means by the word "Jew...
...The effort will be to put something on the bare bones that already exist, the areas where there is a clear mutuality of interest and concern...
...So there's real tenacity there...
...No party can succeed if its leading team is visibly discordant...
...He would seize your arm, and you wouldn't recover the use of it for several weeks...
...If it is believed that our security is threatened by Afghan-like events, why not have a formalized way of discussing what we know and what the United States knows about the likelihood of something like that happening elsewhere...
...Not only did we not volunteer to go to Korea or Vietnam, but we managed to say to presidents of the United States to whom we had every reason to show deference, to Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, "That's a very interesting proposal, Mr...
...Is that a meaningful term...
...They don't...
...You can usually appeal to him if you prove your formal point...
...For example, if there's a document that you've signed and it's a treaty, you have to carry it out...
...discipline...
...With Eshkol and Golda, when our leadership visibly derived from Diaspora Jewry, things were different...
...How long, after all, can the State of Israel maintain a total autarchy of its defense, 100 percent control...
...We shouldn't exaggerate their victory...
...There was no great effort to insist on having Herut-oriented people in government or diplomatic posts...
...When Ben Gurion spoke of strategic cooperation, which he did very often, he spoke of it in the context of Israel's security...
...When he was in opposition, he didn't brandish the yarmulka in the Regency Hotel...
...He doesn't talk like them, his rhetoric is utterly removed from theirs, his world is not the Mediterranean world at all...
...I would simply stop arguing semantic problems, and switch to concrete elements...
...One's dramatic sense is thrilled by his success...
...Now, I don't really accept that, because I don't think that Israelis vote on the personal element in the way people vote for the American president...
...Begin, for whose qualities I have admiration in many ways, is—in my opinion—a Jew who hasn't yet immigrated to Israel...
...That's true of most Parliamentary countries...
...And therefore the ecstasy and euphoria with which the arrival is celebrated might be somewhat out of proportion...
...He has a certain vagueness about whether a place is a kibbutz or a moshav, and a rather innocent wonder about what a kibbutz is like, as though a kibbutz were a place in Tibet that you can't go and see...
...The incentive for the Palestinians is that this is the first incarnation of their Palestinian nationhood on a national rather than a municipal basis...
...The North Vietnamese were brought to the table by military pressure, and the fact is that Egypt made peace with us because of the hawkish elements in our policy, because of our obduracy...
...The fact is that the diplomacy of Camp David was not very important, nor was the manner in which the treaty was drafted...
...He attacks social democracy as the ideology of the "Ashkenazi elite...
...The sheer childishness of it...
...The existing establishment was not fundamentally disturbed...
...The word "Israeli" does—as well as all sorts of other words...
...The actual clods of earth, the soil, the places, the landscape, the map are quite foreign to him...
...We took the calculated risk, and the autonomy cannot be implemented if now the government seeks to make it risk-free...
...Everyone speaks of the need for "new leadership," but when you ask people in polls who they want to do this, or that, or the other thing, they keep coming up with familiar names...
...His rhetoric and his temper are affected by the rhetoric of Wilsonian nationalism and Garabaldi nationalism and 19th century liberalism, nationalism as a revolt in order to establish freedom, and there is a certain formalism that leads him to accept that there are Queensbury rules in politics...
...It's enough to make you believe in the attraction of opposites...
...On the 30th of June, the feeling was that if we could force an election within a few months we might get that extra little percent we hadn't got...
...You don't have to be very sophisticated to say, "I'm not going to travel in an airplane in which the pilots are hitting each other over the head, and if, by the grace of God, we should land safely, I'm not going to travel with that airline again...
...Nor are we innocent about the implications...
...Look at Boston and what it has meant to be Irish in Boston...
...Now, however, we are in the second period, and its trends give me great concern...
...Begin and the Sephardic underclass, as if they speak the same language...
...A "greater Israel" has now become the official dogma of the Israeli government—although, I should note, not all 61 members who voted for the coalition believe in that dogma...
...We should be as strong as Israel can be, and get as much deterrence as we can out of an alliance system...
...Now it appears that what the United States has in mind is much more what the Israeli opposition has in mind, an evolutionary development of something that already exists...
...And here it is helpful to remember our own history...
...He's never been to Nablus, never been to Tulkarem, never been to Ramallah...
...For Israel, the authority satisfies the non-domination theme without prejudicing the claims of a final settlement...
...He must have suffered a great sense of exclusion, certainly intensified by his eight electoral defeats...
...If the United States, to manifest its presence in the Middle East, needs services, why do we have to read that the nearest hospital for Americans is in Weisbaden...
...their strength by deterrent alliances...
...The crux of the matter is the self-governing authority, and, if we were in power, we'd ignore philosophical questions like, "Where is the source of power?," which is almost a theological question...
...I think it is more potent for them than the Balfour Declaration was for us...
...And then there's this unfortunate effort to exploit ethnic divisions in the country...
...The notion of Begin receiving the Nobel Peace Prize would be an inherent absurdity if it hadn't earlier been awarded to Le Due Tho and Kissinger for the bombing of Cambodia...
...That has laid us open to anxieties in the United States, where people began to wonder whether the Labor Party was becoming anti-American...
...The essence of an interim agreement is that you can disagree on a final settlement and maintain reticence about it...
...This caused a simultaneous alarm in the United States and in Israel...
...Isn't there a sense in which the entire country these days has begun to feel itself an outsider in the family of nations—and is, in that sense, more in tune with Begin's own deepest feelings...
...And our loss was unexpected...
...At one stage, it meant that you were not in the establishment...
...It's true that Ben Gurion did deviate from that once, when he suggested that Israel should send a contingent to fight in the Korean War...
...And as to Sharon, he's almost non-Jewish...
...In the end they solved the problem by giving him something mechanical to do, like opening the Ark...
...But the Israeli government said, "No, that's not our role...
...It seemed to me that by signing the Camp David accords, Begin really renounced the West Bank and the Gaza...
...An outsider is what he has been for most of his life...
...The first is resilience...
...He wasn't accustomed to the idea of power...
...Might we push this concept of the outsider...
...Can we turn to the Labor Party...
...So the first thing is to be honest and to say that discussions haven't begun...
...If you're going to do something, there's no point in not doing it well...
...What are your observations about how those discussions are going...
...Here, to his credit, Begin was rather low key...
...But I remember that once, when Sadat came, Begin did a rather generous thing, allowing the leader of the opposition to speak in the Knesset...
...And the intervals between they fill up with quotations from the Camp David agreement...
...I note this when I listen to his foreign minister, Shamir...
...And then there is his resourcefulness in the electoral sense...
...Suddenly it appeared as if Israel would go off on airlifts to protect American supplies, would do things that had no direct connection with Israel's security...
...Sadat did not make peace with us because of our rectitude...
...The basic ideology of the country, in the normative sense, had been and remained social democracy...
...In fact, Likud very nearly didn't make it...
...Instead, let us agree to take this institution, to decide how many members shall it have, how shall they be elected, what are its powers, what are not its powers, what may it do, what may it not do, and so forth...
...If Israel is likely to be in that position, isn't it sensible to have supplies in place, in proximity...
...Therefore, to portray the Camp David agreement as anti-Palestinian is bizarre...
...Can one say that Begin is more "Jewish" than the Rabins and the Pereses, and hence more in tune with the fundamental traditions of Israel...
...The educational system, the army, the smallness and compactness of our society make it possible to get results within decades rather than generations...
...For example, we have the traumatic episode of the airlift of supplies to Israel in the 1973 war...
...His personal contribution to the election was very great, great enough to explain the difference between victory and defeat...
...actually, he proposed it in obedience to a request from Truman...
...They'd find that in Israel we have a quicker program for the elimination of such tensions...
...And on our side, I don't think enough was done to point out that the development villages were the creation of the Eshkol-Sapir period, and to point out also the paradox that with all their boasting, Likud offered less representational satisfaction than we did, and that their social philosophy is completely incapable of solving the economic problems that are at the heart of the matter...
...There are hospitals in Israel, and in Egypt for that matter...
...So how can you talk about a lack of success...
...I'm now afraid that Likud will call for that early election in order to get out of the straight jacket of a one-seat majority...
...Our view should be like that of a social democratic state in Europe...
...The language that Begin speaks is, above all else, the language of the outsider...
...And we have suffered from this since 1974...
...I'm sure that Americans can find parallels...
...And above even these matters, the war against the Labor movement transcends political differences...
...party hymn of Betar to a national anthem, making legitimacy depend very largely on membership in "the fighting family...
...He didn't give a damn what it would be, an ambulance or anything that would justify flying the Israeli flag there...
...It's absurd...
...if Nye Bevan had run in Bournemouth, he would have been defeated...
...We had an unsuccessful transition from the Golda period...
...And, in point of fact, the first Begin administration had a quite superficial effect...
...We go from M irage to Mystere to Phantom to,F-16 and F-15— it's becoming absurd.' Twenty-five million dollars for an airplane, with the technology improving and becoming more expensive all the time, and with your adversary having almost unlimited resources...
...And that was a tremendous innovation...
...Aside from matters of policy, there is now a much greater assertiveness about basing our history and our future on the Jabotinsky myth, elevating the Nobody speaks a language more foreign to the Sephardim than Begin...
...I think that explains why the Altalena sank...
...Now that really ought to be clear to the Palestinians, too...
...That's elementary...
...Now, of course, he is the vindicated outsider...
...We'd ignore as well the question of what would happen after autonomy, because we disagree about that—they say it will be a Palestinian state, Begin says it will be part of Israel, the Labor Party says most of it will be joined to Jordan...
...After thousands of years of history and the Zionist revolution, we are an instrument...
...It wasn't easy to get Israel out of that...
...This is another paradox...
...Then, it seemed to me that the election of the Begin government in 1977 had been episodic, and would not change the character of our society...
...Might it not be his outsiderness that attracts the underclass...
...That's the problem we face in the coming months...
...So it really is quite extraordinary that he has the appeal he does...
...Autonomy is not consistent with the idea of a unitary structure...
...All the way at the end, near the kitchen...
...If it had been a popularity contest, you'd have to conclude that the voters found Peres as popular as Begin...
...He's the one who said to Weinberger or to Reagan that Israel is a great aircraft carrier, a notion that I find tremendously degrading...
...Sharonization would of course be much worse than Beginization, because Begin does, to come back to his positive qualities, have a respect for the rules of the game...
...If people were to take the subject out of its particular Israeli context and study it comparatively, they'd find it's really not unique...
...But the fact is, of course, that it is in his own country...
...I'm rather more comfortable with that notion now that I've spoken to Secretary Haig, and separated what the Americans seem to have in mind by the notion from the Israeli exaggeration of it...
...So there must be a great accumulation of frustration and even, to some extent, of humiliation...
...The party has two problems...
...That problem obsessed Ben Gurion until the end of his life...
...What happened is that when our mission returned from the United States, Begin and especially Sharon offered very fanciful interpretations of what was meant by strategic cooperation...
...He hasn't met an Arab since he became Prime Minister, except for the two mayors who were expelled...
...The tangible element of the Camp David accord, the substance of the thing, is what is called the "self governing authority...
...There's been some talk lately of the "Beginization" of Israel...
...Perhaps it goes deeper than that...
...How do you react to the notion of Israel as a "strategic asset" of the United States...
...Instead of people boasting that they were brought up on a kibbutz or in Nahalal, they boast that they were on Altalena...
...But perhaps the shared language is not a matter of grammar or vocabulary...
...Perhaps...
...But anyone who signed the autonomy agreement without calculating that risk shouldn't have signed it...
...While there's a long term leadership problem, the immediate decisions will have to be based on the existing gallery...
...There's a total lack of poetic imagination here...
...He once said to a British visitor, "If we're that important to the West, let's be like New Zealand, a foreign country with strong links...
...I also think the Camp David negotiation was a success, in spite of the efforts of his two lieutenants [Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman] to steal it from him, it was basically his success...
...That amounts to creating a populism that is analogous to other right wing populisms—Peronism and so on...
...A technocratic task, which he performed with admirable efficiency...
...You are not impressed by somebody who says, "I'm new, I'm fresh, and this is the first time I've done anything like this...
...It would be better to have 46 seats and be able to form a government than to have 48, as we do, and not be able to...
...Wouldn't it be sensible to cooperate in advance on such things...
...I wouldn't have hesitated to give a negative answer a year ago...
...If there are likely to be dangers of that kind, why wait on Portugal and the Azores and Schmidt and Callahan...
...Now, some of my friends would say, "Look, we had 31 seats and we went up to 48...
...Begin's use of the tradition may be somewhat superficial...
...In international policy, Begin frequently refers to those traumatic occasions when we were pariahs—to the Holocaust, to the period of colonial repression under the British, and so forth...
...The only problem is that Begin himself appears to regret what he did...
...Let there be a four-power guarantee...
...He is not yet a Middle Easterner...
...This lack of "at-homeness" in certain levels of Jewish experience is one of the failures of our education system...
...According to the text of the accord, there will arise a self-governing authority, elected by the Palestinian Arabs, and this will replace the military administration, which will, I quote, "be withdrawn...
...I don't think our party has any reason to get into a demogogic frame of mind, or to say that we are becoming a kind of Cuba, a banana republic, by reason of seeking alliances...
...There's a very large bedrock of people that would vote for any Labor leader or for any anti-Labor leader...
...With Rabin or Gur, the word "Jew" doesn't leap to your mind...
...Nothing has been solved...
...His last communication was to Kennedy, MacMillan and de Gaulle, on the idea of a Western guarantee...
...If I wanted to teach a class about negotiation that was sterile to the point of caricature, I would take this as my example...
...And I was talking with Begin about it, and he said, "Do you remember when Nixon came during Rabin's days as Prime Minister, did you see where I was sitting...
...He sees the exclusion of the Jewish people as a normative condition, and therefore it is normative for Israel to be an outsider to the international community...
...You mentioned that you were preparing a position for the autonomy discussions...
...In fact, after the elections of '77, he seemed to be rather disappointed that he wasn't going back to his seat on the opposition bench...
...It's been suggested that the successful political leaders of the West, these days, are those who tap the deepest traditions of their people...
...President, but please leave us out...
...We oughtn't forget the volatility of popular governments...
...After all, is it so bad that people, after generations of toil, of sickness and malaria, have achieved a kind of collective modest comfort...
...When you think of a real administrative council, which has power, which can levy taxes, which holds elections, in which there are political struggles, which has an emblem—all that is a pretty long step toward seccession...
...The important thing was the great decision, and that was the decision to give up all the terrotories and all the settlements...
...Why does he criticize the swimming pool in the kibbutz...
...In the discussions I had with our voters during the campaign, they said, "We hear he's a great international figure, but we've never seen him...
...the fact is that the 61—and that is an extraordinary number with which to inaugurate an ideological revolution—include at least 15 who can't believe a word of the dogma...
...Unfortunately, in the discussion that has unfolded thus far, the Labor Party could be portrayed as being against the whole idea of strategic cooperation...
...The idea that one should take an interest in what happens in the Arab world is beyond his reach...
...For example, despite having a majority of only one, and, I believe, in defiance of the Camp David accords, Begin inserted into the coalition agreement a statement that after three or five years of autonomy, we will make our claim and fulfill our right to annex the West Bank and Gaza to Israel...
...The other problem is that the alleged reconciliation between Peres and Rabin turns out to have been staged, with traumatic consequences...
...He said to the United States, to Eisenhower, to Dulles, to Kennedy, "You say it's in your interest that Israel should be viable and strong, then, for heaven's sake, give that a more formalized expression, and you'll have a deterrent effect...
...Still, Begin has this perseverance, this extraordinary steadfastness, this capacity to stick his feet in the ground, to endure...
...Begin has now mounted an attack on the kibbutz movement, as though the kibbutz movement were a kind of luxurious holiday camp, and he contrasts its "elitism" to the lot of the suffering city workers...
...I think that until recently we were rather more Jewish than they were...
...When there's talk about our international difficulties, Shamir says, "Well, that's normal, it's always been like that...
...Frankly, my own experience of a few years in opposition leads me to admire somebody who sticks it out for 29 years, and to be astonished at the patience of a party that says to its leader, "All right, you've had eight tries, try a ninth time...
...And then there are, of course, the policy issues, some of which have a constitutional character...
...I'm told that just this Yom Kippur, Weizman went to shul in New York and they wanted to give him an aliya, and he pleaded with them not to because he didn't know what to do...
...So the logic is that we have to make a decision...
...When I congratulated Kissinger on his prize, he said, "You know, we stopped that war by bombing them to hell...
...And a certain amount of constitutional Lyndon Johnson would seize your arm and you wouldn't recover the use of it for several weeks...
...I hope I've been able to correct that impression in my talk with Haig...
...Neither the Arab villages in Israel, nor the million and a quarter Arabs in Judea and Samaria, nor the actual landscape, the mountains of Judea and Samaria, are of any interest to him...
...Israel becomes a toy...
...It was simply a mistake, as I said at the time, to go for Rabin instead of for someone organic arising within the party itself...
...With someone less dramatic, less capable of personalization, Likud wouldn't have made it...
...The first is our lack of success...
...But the interesting thing is that the Israeli cabinet turned that down...
...He convinced himself that the opposition function is an honorable and useful and necessary one...
...Then you start thinking of Cuba and Angola...
...Nonetheless, when you perceive yourself as an outsider, the perception may easily become self-perpetuating...
...If you make their final sovereignty dependent on a forum in which three of the members are Arabs, that amounts to renunciation...
...In fact, he even included Khrushchev...
...Later on, when I was involved, Lyndon Johnson did a lot of arm twisting on me to get us to send something to Vietnam...
...And now he says to the opposition leaders, "All these world statesmen receive you, whereas nobody wanted to receive me, our embassies didn't have any orders to help me be received...
...He is very conscious of his memories as an outsider...
...Now, if we can stabilize our institutions and put on a good parliamentary performance, there's a chance that fortune will swing toward us sometime after April...
...It reminds me that though everybody says you should have a young doctor when you need an operation, when you are on the table what you want to know is how many operations your surgeon has performed...
...My feeling is that within the next few months there will have to be a decision to stop it, because we now have a lesser position in the polls than we had in the election...
...Theoretically, that was a UN force...
...It was really a spectacular event...
...They meet in the morning to work out a communique for the evening that will fix another meeting...
...I'm certain that those who gave Begin the Nobel Prize saw it that way...
...These two and a half years with Linowitz and Burg running around have left the situation exactly as if they'd never met before...
...Well, you don't settle things on the basis of documentary verbiage...
...And on the ninth try he happens to succeed...
...The change in perception of the Reagan administration between last spring and this fall shows how swiftly the pendulum can swing...
...The periodic Rabin-Peres duel, created by the parachuting of Rabin to the leadership, set up a situation of malaise in our party from which we haven't recovered...
...How long can Israel stay outside that logic...
...How that can be done while remaining faithful to Camp David I do not know...
...People can seize on such discord much more readily than they can seize on what they read in a platform or in learned papers about inflation...
...Reagan and Begin are often put forward as examples, and contrasted to the technocrats who were so popular in the 1960s...
...In Britain, for example, if Churchill at the height of his power had run in Wales, he would have been defeated...
...You said that there are qualities in Begin for which you have great admiration...
...But you would be surprised if you saw them in a synagogue, and they wouldn't know what to do there...
...With all the advantages of incumbency, with Begin and bombing reactors and the visible lack of unity in the opposition, the fact is that as many people voted for us as for them...
...But we won't have any pendulum swing if we ourselves are pulling in different directions...
...Johnson was almost physically violent with anyone he was talking to...
...Wouldn't it have been easier if there had been supplies pre-positioned nearby...
...the mandarins were keeping you out, and there was a necessity to break in...
...They turned it down because it was an extra-Israeli enterprise...
...What was new in this election was the attempt to exploit the tension by proving that Likud was the representative of the underprivileged, the sans culottes of our social revolution, the unorganized and the unprotected, against the very complacent establishment...
...He doesn't understand that the man is one of a thousand people who've finally become able and entitled to use a swimming pool...
...Yes, and it does permit a kind of vicarious revenge...
...It's very strange, but his connection is still with Zionism as an idea rather than with Israel as a land...
...In 1970, Jordan was almost taken over by a Soviet-oriented Syria...
...he did it...
...He has suddenly discovered the yarmulka...
...The responsibility for that decision was Begin's...
...Still, there seems*to be a peculiar affinity between Mr...
...This is a road that Germany and Belgium and Turkey don't believe they can go alone simply by a physical balance of power, where they believe they have to reinforce The Camp David agreement is more potent for the Palestinians than the Balfour Declaration was for us...
...Can it become a potent political force again, given its obvious current disarray...
...And I agreed with what he did, though I couldn't imagine Ben Gurion or Golda having allowed Begin to speak on the occasion of a visit by a foreign dignitary...
...But that really points to the extraordinary paradox...
...Really, we should diagnose the tension in comparative terms...
...Nobody speaks a language more foreign to the Sephardim than Begin, even in a strictly philological sense...
...Indeed, I believe that his renunciation at Camp David on the Palestine question was much more spectacular than his renunciation on the Sinai question...
...Will you say more about them...
...That's not a quartet that's likely to play Hatikvah...
...Or, still more specifically, his self-casting as the outsider who has finally triumphed...
...that is his framing experience...
...I won't go any further in my historic analogies but I think we now have an ideological battle on our hands in addition to the normal battle between the parties and the conflict over policy...
...Not that we weren't in sympathy with it, but it wasn't our place or our strength...
...Within the next few months, there are decisions that will have to be taken regarding our leadership...
...He endured in his pre-Israel experience, and he endured in his opposition role in Israeli politics from 1948 to 1977, without being completely crushed, without getting up and going away...
...Moreover, by giving the impression that we were opposed to the idea in principle, we laid ourselves open to the charge of inconsistency, because you don't have to read very much to know that Ben Gurion was obsessed with the idea of strategic cooperation...
...But the object of the electoral exercise is to win...
...Until a month before the elections, I'd actually been making plans regarding what we would do in the autonomy discussions...
...We are a solitary people...
...They painted pictures that created revulsion in Israel...
...And if that is what we can expect, then there's no reason to make too much effort to overcome it...
...It was that decision that was crucial...
...The Likud government is a popular government today, but so was the Thatcher government two years ago...
Vol. 1 • December 1981 • No. 7
