My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (30 page)

After this success, and another, and a third, the engineer’s audacity knew no limits. Under his command, Israeli scientists, engineers, and technicians developed remarkable know-how. They turned Israel into a self-sufficient nuclear nation. No longer a French protégé or an American dependent, the Jewish state was now perceived worldwide as an advanced nuclear power.

And then there was the final stage of the process. The American inspectors’ visits of 1968 and 1969 passed without a hitch. Together with the physicist Amos de Shalit, the engineer would exhaust the inspectors and lead them astray and yet again manage to obscure the secrets of Dimona. But after the eighteen-hour inspection of July 12, 1969, Golda Meir changed tack and undertook a forthright dialogue with the Americans. Under the influence of Henry Kissinger, the United States also changed tack. In late September 1969, in a meeting between the newly elected U.S. president, Richard Nixon, and Prime Minister Meir, the United States and Israel reached an unwritten understanding concerning Dimona. The reactor on the Rotem Plateau had become a fait accompli, and the international community accepted and adopted Israel’s policy of opacity regarding its existence.

What interests me most is the event the engineer says occurred in December 1966. This was the moment in which, according to international publications, Israel assembled the first metallic sphere that could take out a city. Were there really no goose bumps? Did the hands not tremble? Was there really no sense that we had eaten the forbidden fruit? Did the engineer feel no fear or trepidation at all?

My host does not confirm or deny the relevant international publications. “But let’s say they are accurate,” he says, smiling. “What’s all the fuss? Isn’t it clear that Israel must defend itself? Isn’t it clear that Israel must deter its enemies? Someone had to do that job. Someone had to be at the Weizmann Institute in 1955 and in France in 1960 and in Dimona in 1966.”

It had to be done, so he did it. And he did what he did as best he could, helming one of Israel’s first high-tech enterprises. And this enterprise
demonstrated Israel’s acumen and cunning and wherewithal, surpassing all expectations and guaranteeing Israel a half century of life.

As I glance up from my notes to the beaming face of the engineer, my first thought is of his murdered father. Though the murder occurred four years after the end of the Arab Revolt, the shooting in the orange grove in the spring of 1943 affected the engineer in the same way that the wave of violence of 1936–39 affected his generation. The murder turned him into a tough, formidable fighter bent on revenge. The spoiled and intellectually indifferent adolescent became a fearless soldier, free of inhibitions. He fought as commander of a Golani infantry platoon, as the operations officer of Hemed Gimmel, as an engineer in France, and as the director of Dimona. He invested his inner strength and his steely determination in the Jews’ national struggle for their land and against the Arabs. The obligation to guarantee the existence of Israel swept aside all other concerns. At every juncture the engineer had only one mission: To make sure the Jews would not die. To make sure that no enemy would rise up from the bush and fell them one fine spring morning.

My second thought is about the Arab villages the engineer destroyed in 1948. Even if he does not say so, it is clear that a straight line leads from those villages to Dimona. The expulsion of 1948 necessitated Dimona. Because of those dead villages it was clear that the Palestinians would always pursue us, that they would always want to flatten our own villages. And so it was necessary to create a shield between us and them, and the engineer took it upon himself to build that shield. We would not allow the Palestinian tragedy to jeopardize the monumental enterprise designed to end our own tragedy.

My third thought is about the engineer himself. The more I listen to him, the more I understand that he cannot delve any deeper. He does not possess Ben Gurion’s historical acuity, Amos de Shalit’s tragic insight, or Dostrovsky’s dialectical shrewdness. He truly does not comprehend the complexity of his actions, the problematic aspects of his deeds. He has no perception of the enormity and the horror of his accomplishments. He is possessed by a strong national imperative, an iron
will, an impressive propensity for action. But he does not have the ability to see his life’s work in perspective. His ability to
do
is derived from his ability not to see the implications of his deeds.

My host looks at me quizzically, as if trying to read my thoughts. I answer his silent questions candidly. I tell him that his accomplishments are almost incomprehensible in scope. In the mid-1960s, Israel was a nation of 2.5 million people that nevertheless succeeded in acquiring for itself a capability that Germany, Italy, and Japan still do not have. Despite its small size and the difficult circumstances in which it existed, it was perceived as one of the six leading powers of the world. And it did not stop there. Immediately after crossing the threshold, according to international publications, it built an arsenal of dozens and dozens of nuclear warheads: A-bombs and H-bombs, low yield and high yield, nuclear artillery shells and nuclear mines. If even a fraction of what has been written over the years is true, I tell him, then we’re talking about a stupefying success. According to non-Israeli nuclear experts, even during the early years, when the engineer was in charge of Dimona, the facility in the desert succeeded in producing its wares not only with French separation technology but with an Israeli method. Those experts claim that with proven imported technology and with homegrown, novel technology, the scientific installation produced what no one imagined it could produce: an astonishing capability of mass destruction.

The engineer smiles. He neither confirms nor denies.

But the technological achievement is only part of the story, I say. No less astounding than Israel’s ability to build a bomb was Israel’s decision to act as if it did not have a bomb. In the beginning there were two schools of thought: those who believed in the bomb absolutely (like Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres), who thought that national security could be based on the bomb, and those who opposed it absolutely (like Allon and Galili), who believed the bomb would ultimately endanger national security. But after the security seminar Ben Gurion conducted at a retreat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in 1962, a synthesis of these two approaches emerged: a doctrine according to which Israel would be a nuclear power but would act is if it were not. This way it
would not goad the Arabs or accelerate the nuclearization of the Middle East; it would not adopt a reckless and immoral security strategy. Concerning anything and everything nuclear, Israel would be much, much more cautious than the United States and NATO. Concerning anything and everything nuclear, Israel would be the responsible adult of the international community. It would well understand the formidable nature of the nuclear demon and would keep it locked in the basement.

The engineer smiles with what seems to be appreciation of this analysis.

I go on. There is a third achievement that is just as important, I tell him. The Dimona decade (1957–67) is also the first decade of Israeli normalcy. It is not only physicists and nuclear engineers who travel to Paris in those years. Painters and sculptors study at the École des Beaux-Arts, writers and poets frequent Latin Quarter cafés. Returning to Israel, they bring with them Sartre, Camus, Brassens, Prévert, and a new individualistic spirit. So do their colleagues who travel to New York and London. Some are influenced by W. H. Auden, some by Philip Larkin, others by Andy Warhol. Tel Aviv becomes a city of cultural and artistic fervor in which young Israeli-born artists and writers rebel against old-guard Zionist edicts. In Kibbutz Hulda, young Amos Oz writes his first groundbreaking short stories. In Jerusalem, A. B. Yehoshua writes modernist novels expressing the voice of a new generation. While a French nuclear reactor is built in the Negev, Israel becomes a modern Western nation, in which “I” replaces “We.” There is a remarkable link between these two processes: Dimona is not only an expression of modernity and individuality but a facilitator of modernity and individuality. Under its new bell jar, the new Israelis can be more relaxed and less mobilized. They can be far more liberal and loose than they were before, and they can actually pursue personal happiness. Dimona enables the inhabitants of the Jewish national home to live relatively sane and full lives that are not fundamentally different from those of Western Europeans.

For almost half a century, I say to my host, the three achievements were valid. The bell jar solution worked. Dimona was astounding in its existence and in its opacity, and in the quasi-normalcy it fostered. Dimona symbolized the best of Israel of the 1960s: the vision, imagination, soberness, daring, tenacity, power, restraint, and resolve. A stern rule of rationality. A security-mindedness that was not imperialistic. A patriotism
that was not chauvinistic. A unique combination of diplomatic ingenuity and intelligence sophistication. And a modicum of modesty. A matter-of-factness. A concise understanding of reality and a valiant effort to manage this reality. An attempt to find a rational solution to an insane situation. Dimona gave Israel half a century of relative security and gave the Middle East forty-six years of relative stability. Because of the regional conflagrations that erupted periodically during this period, Israelis did not consider the much greater fires that could have broken out. Dimona prevented total wars. It brought about peace agreements. But after forty-six years, the question remained: Was it right? And what would happen when the Arabs possessed a demon of their own? Didn’t the engineer and his colleagues open the gates of a future hell?

The engineer likes my analysis but dislikes my questions. He rises from his armchair and says he would like to show me something. He walks slowly to the next room and returns with an oblong album in his hands. The front cover is made of a thin sheet of copper, hammered with the likeness of a dome amid palm trees in the desert.

The photographs in the album are almost all of the dome. The construction of the dome, 1960. The completion of the dome, 1961. Prime Minister Ben Gurion in front of the dome, 1963. Prime Minister Eshkol in front of the dome, 1965. Prime Minister Meir in front of the dome, 1970. Defense Minister Dayan in front of the dome, 1972. And the small group of nuclear engineers who led Ben Gurion, Eshkol, Meir, and Dayan on their tours of the dome. I see the exultant expression on Dayan’s face, the solemn expression on Meir’s face.

I recognize the faces of many of the engineers, who are in their late thirties and early forties. I remember them dancing at Independence Day parties and playing with us children in the sand on summer holidays at the beach. I remember them telling jokes and performing magic tricks for the ten-year-olds we were. And here they are showing Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan the secret. Here they are displaying the quiet resolve of the 1948 generation. They are neither triumphant nor anxious, neither prideful nor fearful. But the expressions on their faces and the way they hold themselves seem to say: It had to be done, and so we did it. It was not for us to ask why.

In many of the photos, the engineer is in the lead. Brisk and determined, he walks ahead, his bald pate shining above thick horn-rimmed glasses and thick lips. He exudes confidence and conviction. He appears proud of the Citroën D3 in which he meets the dignitaries at the helipad and in which he takes them on a tour of his desert kingdom. But the photographs betray nothing of the secret itself; even in this secret album, the secret is kept. Instead I see the heavy trucks of the Solel Boneh building company in the dust of the desert construction site, the emerging streamlined structures of sixties modernism, the palm trees and casuarinas. I see new lawns, bougainvillea plantings. And a large silver dome like a cathedral for a tragic modern age.

And yet, one of the photographs sends a shiver up my spine. It is a photograph of an empty room. Under the dome everything works without human intervention. Everything takes place in silence. If the international publications are correct, in this silence are produced a few dozen grams of enriched uranium every day, and a few kilograms of plutonium every year. If these publications are right, the quiet and matter-of-fact Israelis of my childhood processed the plutonium and fashioned it into black metal buttons. Are these black metal buttons what Golda Meir sees as she faces the camera, terror in her eyes?

There is only one secret the engineer is willing to divulge as he closes the oblong album. In the beginning, he tells me, Golda didn’t much like him, and she didn’t much like the facility he was in charge of. But gradually she grew to like him and began to take a greater interest in the facility. She called it
varenye. Varenye
, the jar of fruit preserves that Eastern European Jews kept in the cupboard for times of trouble, so if a pogrom broke out they would have something to feed their families until the fury passed. When the engineer would enter her office to report the goings-on in Dimona, the prime minister would ask, “Nu, what’s new with
varenye
?”

In October 1973, it looked as if Golda Meir’s Israel might be in need of its
varenye
. Israel was forced to consider its Dimona capabilities, and it decided to make threatening use of them. But even then, Meir was very careful. She acted responsibly and sensibly. According to non-Israeli sources, Israel revealed its nuclear missiles for a brief moment, for Russian
and American satellites to photograph, but never seriously considered using them. Immediately after the danger passed, Dimona disappeared again. But the trauma remained. The Yom Kippur War proved unequivocally that Dimona was Israel’s unseen anchor, an inseparable part of its existence. Without Dimona, Israel was like a lone tamarisk in the desert.

But the historical respite that Dimona gave Israel is nearing an end. Israel’s nuclear hegemony in the Middle East is probably coming to a close. Sooner or later, the Israeli monopoly will be broken. First one hostile state will go nuclear, then a second hostile state, then a third. In the first half of the twenty-first century, the Middle East is bound to be nuclearized. The world’s first multirival nuclear arena might emerge in the world’s most unstable region.