The Fifth Horseman (17 page)

Behind Begin, on one of the bookshelves stacked with encyclopedias, was a photograph taken of himself in the disguise which had allowed him time and time again to slip through the streets of Tel Aviv under the noses of Britain’s soldiers: the fiat black hat, black frock coat and straggly beard of a rabbi.

He turned and walked slowly back to the desk at which he had taken the President’s phone call. He was dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt and a dark smallpatterned tie, a reflection of a taste in clothes which, like so many other things, stamped him as a man apart in a nation in which ties were an anathema and baggy corduroys were preferred to well-pressed trousers.

Once again he reviewed the notes he had scribbled on a yellow legal pad during the President’s phone call, punctuating his study with sips of the lukewarm tea flavored with Sucrasit, a sugar substitute, which had constituted his breakfast since his second heart attack. He uttered a silent prayer to the God of Israel. There was no question in Begin’s mind about the significance of the information the President had passed him: it represented the most fundamental shift in power relationships in the Middle East in his lifetime. The American President would perceive it, as he would have to, in terms of the horrible threat being posed to the people of New York. Begin’s duty was to perceive it in terms of the threat it posed to his people and their nation. It was mortal.

A crisis was at hand and Begin well knew that, in that crisis, he could not count on the friendship of the President. He had long ago sensed the rising tide of the animosity the American bore him. For his part, Begin did not dislike the President; rather, he mistrusted him, just as he mistrusted most non-Jews-and, indeed, a great many of his fellow Jews. He had, his political foes charged, a ghetto mentality, a narrow, ingrown attitude ill fitting a world leader, an inability to perceive a problem in anything other than its Jewish dimension.

That was the natural heritage of his formative years, his boyhood in the ghettos of Poland, his youth fighting as a Jewish partisan, his young manhood spent as an underground chieftain with a price on his head, struggling to drive the British from Palestine.

One vision had driven him during those years, the vision of his tutor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose writings lined his study. It was of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel; not the truncated little Israel that his foe, David BenGurion, had accepted like a crumb from the world’s table in 1947, but the real land of Israel, the Biblical land God had promised his forebears.

Consolidating Israel’s claims to the land captured in 1967, which he referred to as Judea and Samaria, and bringing his people peace: those had been the two fundamentally irreconcilable aims of Begin’s years as Israel’s leader. Both seemed far away this December morning. The complex, painfully arrived at Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement had proven to be a chimera. Its failure to come to grips with the Palestinian problem had left a raw and festering wound at the heart of the Middle East.

Instead of enjoying the benefits of the peace they so desperately wanted, his countrymen were living the most painful hours of their existence.

Inflation and the heaviest tax burden any people on the globe were forced to carry stifled their economic life. Immigration had dwindled to a trickle of the infirm and the elderly. Many more Jews left Israel each year than arrived. There seemed little promise left in the Promised Land.

Most important, Israel’s enemies, determined to destroy a peace settlement they believed to be a fraud, were gathering once again. Iraq and Syria were united, the Palestinians resurgent. Behind them, fanatical and militant, was the new Leftist Islamic Republic in Iran with its vast arsenal of sophisticated American weaponry seized in the overthrow of the Shah.

Turkey, where once Israel had counted many a valuable friend, was openly hostile. The oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf, menaced by the Leftist tides to the north, no longer dared to counsel caution to their Arab brothers.

The focal point on which all their ambitions converged was Jerusalem and the Land of Judea and Samaria. Qaddafi’s mad gesture seemed to Begin the inevitable culmination of the conflict that had opposed Arab and Jew for half a century.

Outside, he heard the rasp of approaching motorcycles. A few seconds later there was a knock on his door. His wife entered the study and placed on his desk a white envelope with a red slash across one corner. It was sealed and bore the words “Sodi Beyoter-Ultra Confidential.” Prepared a few blocks away in an austere, barracklike building identified only by a number, 28, and the sign “Center for Research and Policy Planning,” it contained the daily intelligence digest of the most important of Israel’s three intelligence services, the Mossad.

The Prime Minister opened the envelope and smoothed the report out on his desk. At 7:01, it noted, Israel’s seismograph laboratories had detected a shock of 5.7 on the Richter scale. Its source had been established as the area of the Awbari Sand Sea in southwestern Libya, an area not noted for earthquakes.

Reading the next paragraph, he started. At 7:31, the report continued, Mossad’s Washington representative had spoken personally to the head of the CIA. The CIA director had given him his personal assurance that the shock was an earthquake.

Even in the most difficult hours of Israel’s relations with the United States, the bonds between the CIA and her intelligence apparatus had been warm and intimate. There was almost nothing the Israelis learned that was not immediately passed to Washington. And now, in a matter critical to Israel’s national existence, the Americans had deliberately, if perhaps only momentarily, lied to her. The implications of that were not lost on the Israeli Prime Minister.

He looked at his wife. She knew nothing of the crisis. But she saw he had suddenly gone pale, an almost grayish pallor seeping over his features.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“This time, we are alone,” he gasped, as much to his own stunned self as to her. “Completely alone.”

The chimes of St. John’s Monastery of the Cross were tolling nine, Jerusalem time, when Menachem Begin’s black Dodge slipped below the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, and up to the unattractive, functional building that housed the center of the nation’s government.‘A quartet of burly young men leaped out, each clutching in his left hand a black leather attache case. Dressed in something other than their blue jeans and leather jackets, they might have been stockbrokers or a group of aggressive young salesmen rushing into company headquarters with their latest orders. Instead those cases contained the tools of their calling as the Prime Minister’s bodyguards, an Uzi submachine gun, three extra magazines of 9mm. ammunition, a Colt .45 and a walkie-talkie.

A few minutes later, Begin took his place at the center of the oval table at which his Cabinet was gathered in emergency session. None of the men at the table had even the faintest intimation of the nature of the emergency that had brought them there. Begin had confided in no one. For a moment his regard swept the room, his dark eyes rendered outsized by the glasses he wore to correct his astigmatic vision. Carefully choosing his words, he began.

“Gentlemen, we are facing the gravest crisis in our history.” With the phenomenal memory for which be was noted, he recollected every detail of his conversation with the President.

Nothing Begin could have told his ministers, no revelation he might have made, could have horrified them more than his words. For fifteen years their nation’s survival had reposed on two strategic pillars, the support of the United States and the knowledge that in the ultimate crisis Israel alone in the Middle East possessed atomic weapons. Now the image of a mushroom cloud rising above the Libyan desert had destroyed the strategic basis of their state.

“We have no choice!”

The words thundered through the stricken silence left by Begin’s speech, their impact underscored by the sound of a heavy fist smashing onto the ministerial table. They came from a barrel-chested man in an old sweater and open shirt, his suntanned face setting off a full head of pure white hair.

“We can’t live with a madman pointing a thermonuclear gun at our heads.”

Benny Ranan was one of the five authentic military heroes in the room, a former paratroop general who’d jumped at the head of his troops in the 1973

war in the spectacular transcanal operation which had paved the way for Arik Sharon’s triumphant encirclement of Egypt’s Third Army. As Minister of Construction, or “Minister of Bulldozers” as he was referred to, he was one of the most ardent supporters of the program to throw up new Israeli settlements on the land Begin called Judea and Samaria. He rose and strode around the table with the swaying gait his paratroopers loved to mimic.

His destination was the mural covering one wall of the room, a photograph of the Middle East taken by Walter Schirra from his Apollo 7 spaceship.

Nothing could have illustrated more graphically the terrible vulnerability of their nation than that kaleidoscope of blues, whites and blacks, its vista sweeping from the Red to the Black Sea, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Israel was just a sliver in its immensity, a strip of land clinging precariously to one edge of the photo.

Ranan gazed at it dramatically. “What this does is change totally the conditions of our existence. All Qaddafi has to do to destroy us is drop a bomb here-” Ranan’s thick forefinger thumped the map in the vicinity of Tel Aviv-“and here-and here. Three bombs and this nation will cease to exist.”

He turned back to his fellow ministers. The booming parade-ground voice dropped in register to a hoarse whisper. “What would our life be worth here knowing that at any second, any minute, any hour, a fanatic who’s been screaming for our blood for years can incinerate us instantly? I couldn’t live like that. Could any of you? Could anybody?”

He paused, aware of the impact his words were having on the men in the room. “Forty centuries of history has one lesson for us. We Jews must resist any threat to our existence with all our strength. We have to destroy him, gentlemen. Right now. Before the sun is high.”

Ranan placed his forearms on the table so that his heavy trunk leaned forward and the lingering smell of the garlic and cheese of his breakfast hung on the air. “And we will tell the Americans what we intend to do once we’ve done it.”

Again, quiet muffled the room. The Deputy Prime Minister struck a match and thoughtfully lit his pipe. Yigal Yadin’s bushy moustache and his bald head were as much a part of Israel’s political scene as Ranan’s bulky figure. He was an archaeologist, a humanistic warrior who was the architect of Israel’s victory in the first war she had had to fight with her Arab neighbors, in 1948.

“For the moment, Benny,” be noted, “the people who are menaced by Qaddafi’s bomb are not here. They’re in New York.”

“That doesn’t matter. What matters is destroying Qaddafi before he can react. The Americans will thank us for doing it.”

“And suppose Qaddafi still manages to detonate that bomb and destroy New York? How much gratitude do you suppose that will inspire in the Americans?”

Ranan sighed. “That would be a tragedy. An appalling, ghastly tragedy. But it’s a risk we’re forced to take.

What would be a greater tragedy-the destruction of New York or the destruction of our nation?”

“For whom, Benny?” Yadin asked. “Us or the Americans?”

“There are three million Jews in New York,” noted Rabbi Yehuda Orent, leader of the religious party that was a part of Begins ruling coalition, “more than there are here.”

“This is where they belong.” Ranan shook his head. “What’s at stake here is more important than any number of Jews. We’re the expression of the eternal vocation of the Jewish people. If we disappear, the Jewish people will cease to exist as a people. We’ll condemn our seed to another two thousand years in the wilderness, in the ghettos, in dispersion and hate.”

“Benny,” the Prime Minister noted, “I must remind you the Americans have asked us to avoid taking any unilateral action against Qaddafi.”

“The Americans?” Ranan gave a growling, scornful laugh. “Let me tell you something, the Americans are going to sell us out. That’s what they’re going to do.” His hand waved toward a bank of black telephones in one corner of the room. “They’re on the phone trying to talk to Qaddafi right now. Dealing away our land, our people, behind our backs.”

“And suppose we do negotiate over those settlements.”

Those words from the mouth of General Yusi Avidar, head of Shimbet, Israel’s military intelligence agency, stunned the room. At the head of his tank battalion in 1967 he had defeated the Arab Legion in the crucial battle for the West Bank. “Giving them up won’t mean the end of Israel. Most of the people in this country didn’t want them there in the first place.”

“What’s at stake is not those settlements.” Ranan’s answering voice was deep and controlled. “Or New York. It’s whether this nation can exist beside a Muammar Qaddafi armed with thermonuclear weapons. I say it cannot.”

“And for that you’re ready to run the risk of seeing five million innocent Americans slaughtered, of making enemies of the one people whose support and help we need?”

“I am.”

“You’re mad.” Avidar sighed. “It’s insane. It’s this damnable, sick Massada complex driving us to destruction and suicide again.”

Ranan was totally composed. “Every minute we waste talking brings us closer to our own destruction. We have to act right now, before the world can organize to stop us. If we wait, we’ll have no West Bank, no Jerusalem, Yassir Arafat and his thugs on our doorstep, our hands tied behind our backs by the Americans, and Qaddafi posed to slaughter us. We will have no more will or reason to exist.”

Menachem Begin had followed the argument without intervening, anxious to let every opinion enter into the debate. Now, softly, he spoke to his Defense Minister. “Does this nation have any military option to stop Qaddafi other than an all-out preemptive nuclear attack on Libya?”