Begin's Legacy

...Menachem Begins life fails to provide a clear answer Until last summer, he appeared as a giant among the midgets who surrounded him in the upper echelons of Herut and Likud, but for more than 50 years this same charismatic man wandered practically alone in the political wilderness of opposition The Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Egypt stand as a towering monument to his leadership, but the treacherous swamp he led Israel into in Lebanon demonstrates how narrow the distance is between historic greatness and foolish short-sightedness...

...In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that when the matter of picking a replacement for Begin came up in the Cabinet, the Herut ministers, all of whom served in the underground and are Ashkenazim, instinctively sided with Shamir What did surprise was the outcome of the secret ballot on the same issue in the Central Committee of the party, where the Sephardim have a clear majority Shamir won a near 60 per cent majority against Levy Cynics saw this as evidence that the muscle of he party machine overshadowed the privacy of he secret ballot box Optimists looked upon Levy's defeat in a closed vote as proof that ethnic identity is already losing its importance in the minds of most Israelis On a different level, Begin's exit has revived the perennial debate about charisma vs leadership Is charisma the central element of leadership, or is it a secondary component of that very special quality9 Did Begin achieve his status because intellectually he stood far above his contemporaries in the political arena, or because his forceful personality enabled him to prevail even when his policies were wanting...

...Keeping Begin's coalition intact, though, is no guarantee of long life for a Shamir government The unseemly squabble about necessary budgetary cuts that reportedly was the last straw for Begin will resurface as soon as the attempt to salvage the country's economy is resumed Within four months, too, the Cabinet will have to agree on an even tighter, more controversial 1984-85 budget...

...In this respect, most observers do expect a change Nevertheless, for the ruling coalition joining ranks behind Shamir and avoiding any change of composition was critical For if the replacement of Begin required the formation of a new coalition, President Chaim Herzog would have been justified in calling upon Opposition Labor Leader Shimon Peres, as head of Israel's largest single political party, to try to form a government...

...Eliahu Salpeter, who regularly reports for the New Leader from Israel is a correspondent for the daily Ha'aretz...

...Meanwhile, Sharon's throwing his support behind Shamir in the contest for succeeding Begin has added to the feeling that the old era lingers Whether the Foreign Minister made a clearcut deal or reached only an implicit understanding with Sharon, there seems to be little doubt that the deposed Defense Minister could attempt a return to prominence...

...Now the sick, exhausted Prime Minister has stepped down He has left Israel in a sticky political and economic morass Still, it is difficult to venture an assessment of his decades in opposition and six years m office Certainly he had many fine moments-from preventing a civil war immediately after the establishment of the state to signing the peace treaty And there have been many low points-from the attempt of his followers to force their way into the Knesset to thwart the reparations agreement with West Germany to his connivance with former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to mislead the Cabinet and the public about the true aims of "Operation Peace for Galilee " History has its work cut out for it...

...In 1977, Begin finally reached the seat of power He hoped to realize the dream of his life to restore the entire Biblical "Land of Israel" and make lasting peace with its Arab neighbors For a short while he seemed on the verge of performing a miracle The treaty with Egypt, the expansion of West Bank settlements, the early victories of the war in Lebanon, the election there of Bashir Gemayel as President-all appeared to indicate that Begin would enter history alongside David Ben-Gunon as one of the two leaders responsible for creating and cementing the new Jewish Commonwealth People close to Begin know fairly well when the dream began to turn into a nightmare The darkness descended in the second week of the fighting in Lebanon, as the casualty lists mounted and the prospect of quick victory receded into the quagmire of a Christian-Moslem-Druse-PLO-Shiite-Syrian free-for-all...

...For in contrast to former President Yitzchak Navon, a Sephardi Jew as well, Levy is not from the elite old-time families of direct Spanish-Jewish descent that were long ago coopted into the Israeli Establishment He is a new immigrant" from North Africa, having arrived in 1958 at age 20 Like many of his group, he joined Begin's Herut and the Opposition Likud as a form of protest against the ruling Labontes (It was this protest vote that brought Likud to power in 1977 ) Levy and the growing number of others from North Africa, therefore, are not merely mentally more flexible than the Herut old-timers, for them the party represents a populistic social commitment, rather than a nationalistic ideological faith...

...Begin's political career was shaped, at an early age, by three factors First, his religious family background which, as Prime minister,made it easy for him to strike deals with Orthodox coalition partners at the expense of individual religious freedom of conscience Second, the enormous influence of the late Revisionist Zionist leader Z'ev Jabotin-sky, whose extreme nationalism he inherited-without Jabotinsky's liberal poeticism Third, and perhaps most important, the Nazi Holocaust, specifically his murdered father s cries for vengeance, which formed not only his attitude toward the Germans but also his basic belief that all non-Jews bear a streak of anti-Semitism-and consequently, the Jewish people and the State of Israel can ultimately rely only on themselves for survival...

...Although many of the Cabinet members dislike and suspect Sharon, it was David Levy alone who systematically and openly-opposed him prior to the Lebanese adventure and during the peak of the fighting Moreover, under Shamir a resurgent Sharon will be harder to deal with than under Begin The new Prime Minister will not be willing, and Defense Minister Moshe Arens will not be able, to restrain Sharon the way Begin did over an extended period that started long before the tragic events in Lebanon...

...Labor government that had ruled Israel from its rebirth in 1948 lost power to the Likud bloc in the '70s Begin's retirement, however, marks the departure of the last of the generation of Israeli leaders who personally witnessed the Holocaust and made their way to Palestine to fight for the establishment of an independent Jewish State His leaving is not an end, though, in the sense of signaling a new beginning His chosen successor, 68-year-old Yitzchak Shamir, is only two years younger, is similarly of Polish origin, and also fought in the underground Thus the reins have been handed to a member of the "Fighting Family," to an Ashkenazi (i e , European) Jew who is a veteran of Begin's circle Had the succession gone to the other contestant for the Prime Ministership, Moroccan-born David Levy, that would have represented a change akin to the one that occurred when Ben-Gunon quit the center stage...

...The Lebanon crisis, of course, will not disappear either, despite the withdrawal of Israeli troops behind the natural line of the Awali River And the longer the Israel Defense Forces stay in Lebanon while the political situation there continues to deteriorate, the more obvious will become the failure of the entire Lebanese adventure-clearly identified in the public mind with Sharon and Shamir...

...QUESTIONS OF LEADERSHIP Begin's Legacy BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv PRIME MINISTER Menachem Be-gin's resignation has, inevitably, been called "the end of an era " In fact, it is probably both more than that and less than that An era ended here when David Ben-Gunon, Israel's Founding Father, resigned in the '60s A longer one concluded when the...

...In other words, is leadership measured by the gift of persuasion, or is genuine leadership determined by where it leads...

...Thus the general political wisdom in the country these days is that the countdown has already started for the next elections Nor would anybody be very surprised if the Likud ticket were led by David Levy, instead of Yitzchak Shamir, and the Labor ticket had Yitzchak Navon at the top, instead of Shimon Peres...