13
After making peace with Egypt, Menachem Begin took a sharp right turn. Having given up the last grain of Sinai sand, perhaps he just couldn’t contemplate further concessions. Or perhaps his capitulation to Egypt’s demands in Sinai had been planned in advance so that he could avoid any retreat from the West Bank. In any case, Begin’s new nationalist stance shaped legislation, policy, and his cabinet.
In October 1979, ill and exhausted, Moshe Dayan left his post as foreign minister. The Speaker of the Knesset, Yitzhak Shamir, a hardliner who had opposed the peace agreement with Egypt, was appointed foreign minister in his place. In May 1980, Ezer Weizman resigned as defense minister in protest over new settlements being built in the West Bank. Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon, who had pushed for the new settlements, demanded the post, but Begin hesitated. He remarked to a colleague, “If Sharon were defense minister, he might well send tanks to surround the prime minister’s office.”1 Eventually he relented and named Sharon to the post in August 1981.
In June 1980, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law, spelling out that all of Jerusalem was a united city under Israeli sovereignty. It was a declarative act that only underlined the situation that had existed in Jerusalem since the Six-Day War, but it was also a message to the world.
A much more explosive message came eleven months later, when eight Israeli Air Force F-16 jets bombed “Osirak,” an Iraqi nuclear reactor ten miles southeast of Baghdad. Begin had lived his entire political career traumatized by the Holocaust, and his fear of a nuclear weapon in the hands of Israel’s enemies was deep-rooted. Under the “Begin Doctrine,” no Arab country was to be allowed to develop an atomic bomb.
On June 30, 1981, Likud scraped past the Labor Alignment to achieve a second election victory for Begin. Israel’s politics had truly shifted. Begin formed a narrow coalition of right-wing, religious, and Mizrahi parties, with Sharon and Shamir as senior ministers.
The Reagan administration in the United States was furious over the Iraqi reactor bombing, accusing Israel of using weapons supplied for “self-defense” in an operation far from its borders and going behind the back of its ally. The administration froze the supply of further F-16s—the standard punishment over the next couple of years whenever Israel stepped out of line.
Begin had high hopes for the new president and a more favorable attitude after Carter’s censoriousness. Ronald Reagan was instinctively pro-Israel and remained so throughout his presidency, though his friendship was severely tried. During the US presidential campaign, he said that the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran had “increased Israel’s value as perhaps the only remaining strategic asset in the region on which the United States can truly rely.”2
But Reagan had decided to sell Saudi Arabia five Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft. The administration insisted that selling AWACS to the Saudis would bolster their ally as a bulwark against both Iranian and Soviet influence in the region. Israel claimed that the advanced technology would render its air force transparent to the Arabs. Begin mobilized Israel’s supporters on Capitol Hill as well as American Jewish organizations.
On September 9, 1981, he arrived in Washington for his first meeting with Reagan. The new president surprised the Israelis by agreeing immediately to Begin’s request for the countries to sign a strategic cooperation agreement. Reagan’s disposition quickly soured, however, when news filtered back of Begin lobbying against the AWACS deal in his meetings in Congress. In the run-up to the Senate vote, Reagan sternly warned, “It is not the business of other nations to make United States foreign policy.”3
In December 1981, in another nationalist gesture, the Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli sovereignty to the territory captured from Syria in 1967. The Reagan administration, infuriated by the unilateral move, suspended the strategic alliance in retribution. When the US ambassador to Israel, Sam Lewis, went to deliver the message to Begin, Begin was furious. “What kind of language is this—punishing Israel?” Begin demanded. “Are we a vassal state? Are we a banana republic? Are we fourteen-year-old boys that have to have our knuckles slapped if we misbehave?”4
Making matters worse, before Lewis could relay Begin’s message to the White House, the media was reporting it. “Boy, that guy Begin sure does make it hard to be his friend,” Reagan observed.5
Israel’s chief supporter in the US administration was Secretary of State Al Haig. Major critics included Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, White House Chief of Staff James Baker, and Vice President George H. W. Bush, whose invitation as guest speaker to the Jonathan Institute conference in 1979 hadn’t made him a fan of Likud. To counter their influence on Reagan’s Middle East policy, Begin departed from his policy of leaving diplomacy to professional diplomats of the old Labor establishment and appointed his own man as ambassador in Washington.
PROFESSOR MOSHE ARENS was an old-school Revisionist, embodying the Jabotinskean values of hadar—decorum and Jewish nationalism. He had been active in the movement since his teens in New York. He moved to Israel in 1957 after completing his engineering studies at MIT and the California Institute of Technology, becoming a professor of aeronautics at Technion in Haifa and then chief engineer at the Israel Aircraft Industry. He became a Likud MK in 1973, and Begin offered him the Defense Ministry after Weizman’s resignation. Arens, who always lacked burning political ambition, turned down the second most powerful position in Israel because he opposed the agreement with Egypt. He didn’t want to be the minister in charge of dismantling the Sinai settlements. In early 1982, Begin asked him to go to Washington.
Arens was the first former US citizen to be appointed Israel’s ambassador in Washington. Begin wanted him there with his American accent and connections, rallying support for Likud policies in a way that a professional diplomat couldn’t. Beneath his unflappable and always courteous exterior, Arens was an unrelenting hawk. He was to be not only Israel’s ambassador but also Begin’s personal envoy.
Before leaving for the United States, Arens needed a deputy head of mission as his number two in Washington. His first choice turned him down. Then he remembered Benzion Netanyahu’s son who had made such an impression three years ago organizing the Jonathan Institute conference. The job interview, which took place in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel, was short and conducted in English. Arens believed that diplomacy in Reagan’s America “didn’t call for a Metternich, but public-relations expertise. I saw how our interlocutors in Washington were more impressed when we gave good performances on television.” Arens wasn’t looking for a wingman in the corridors of the White House and Congress. He wanted a number-two man who could tour the TV studios and charm the pundits.
Netanyahu didn’t hesitate, saying yes the moment Arens made the offer without waiting to notify the furniture company. He’d had enough of civilian life as a sales executive. Deputy chief of mission (DCM) at the Washington embassy was a dream job. It would allow him to live with Fleur in the country she preferred while at the same time serving his country.
Arens left for Washington in April, arriving at what he described as “a low point in the US-Israeli relationship.” Bibi had to first clear his bureaucratic hurdles. The Foreign Ministry’s union objected to outside hires filling professional diplomatic posts. Netanyahu’s appointment had been approved by Foreign Minister Shamir and they couldn’t block it forever, but they could delay the employment and accreditation process. Bibi’s already low opinion of Israeli diplomats from his Boston hasbara days hardened. It would take three months for his affairs to be settled.
On June 24, he gave up his US citizenship, as required by all Israeli diplomats. War had broken out, and he was needed to face the American media onslaught.
THE RABIN GOVERNMENT had supplied arms to the Christian militias fighting the Palestinians in Lebanon in 1976. In 1981, as fighting intensified, Begin took Israel’s involvement up a notch, ordering air strikes to help the embattled Christians. The Palestinians bombarded Israeli towns in the Galilee. In May 1982, Sharon traveled to Washington to brief Haig and the Pentagon. He left them with little doubt of his plans to invade Lebanon. Haig urged restraint, but Sharon and Begin were just looking for the right opportunity.
On June 4, following the attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador in London, the cabinet authorized Operation Peace for Galilee. The operation was presented as limited to forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) from Israel’s border and focused on destroying the Palestinians’ military infrastructure. The Israeli cabinet and the White House were assured that the IDF would not enter Beirut and that it would avoid confrontation with the Syrians. But Sharon and Begin had much grander plans. The IDF exceeded the forty-kilometer line in the first days of the Lebanon war, not only mopping up PLO fighters but also engaging the Syrians on the ground and in the air.
Arens was fighting his own battle in Washington. Reagan and Haig were in Europe, meeting North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. Bush and Baker were running the show, threatening sanctions against Israel. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US ambassador to the United Nations, one of Israel’s staunchest allies in Reagan’s cabinet, met with Arens secretly. “Bush has taken charge and only God knows what he’s going to do,” she warned.6
On June 11, Reagan and Haig returned to Washington. All talk of punishing Israel was put on hold until Begin arrived for a crucial meeting ten days later.
The exchange between the two leaders in private was testy. But Haig, who was becoming increasingly isolated in the administration, won that day. Publicly at least, the administration was supporting Israel. To the reporters outside Reagan said, “All of us share a common understanding.” The headline the next morning in the Washington Post was “REAGAN BACKS ISRAEL.”
With the IDF closing its siege on Beirut, Sharon and Begin ignored entreaties from the Reagan administration and its senior envoys on the ground, Philip Habib and Morris Draper, who were frantically trying to achieve a ceasefire.
On July 25, Haig, who had been frozen out of decision making by a cabal of senior aides led by Baker, tendered his resignation. The accusation that he had somehow “greenlighted” Israel’s invasion was one of the reasons they pushed him out. The previous evening, he had warned Arens that Reagan was “under massive pressure” to act against Israel. With Haig’s departure, Israel had lost its chief backer in the administration. His replacement, George Shultz, was an unknown quantity. But the fact that he had been president of the Bechtel Group, which did a lot of business in Saudi Arabia, was not encouraging.
Netanyahu arrived in Washington in July, immediately joining Arens’s efforts to stem the tide. The Israeli embassy was largely out of the loop. Sharon was directing the army’s moves, only partially updating Begin and the cabinet. In August, Begin complained, “I know about all the operations, sometimes before, sometimes after.”7
Often their first indication of developments on the battlefield came when Arens was summoned to the State Department to respond to reports from Habib and Draper. Arens strenuously defended Israel’s latest action before rushing back to the embassy to try to gather, over the phone, what had happened and why. In some cases he came under friendly fire from Jerusalem for acting on his own initiative. “We’d thank you if you would send your thoughts to us first,” cabled Begin after Arens discussed possible ceasefire terms.8
In this tense period in US-Israeli relations, the two men in charge of the embassy had between them just three months of diplomatic experience. What Arens and Netanyahu did have was their sense of Israeli and American identity and a burning desire to prove that they were equals to their administration interlocutors.
Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian-controlled neighborhoods in Beirut intensified. Habib, inside the city, tried to broker an agreement for the departure of Palestinian fighters. On July 19, after an angry conversation with Sharon, who refused to allow supplies in, Habib was taken ill. Arens was summoned, but he was out of town. Netanyahu went instead. It was his first high-level diplomatic meeting. “Sharon behaved like a bull in a china shop,” rumbled Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. He told Netanyahu that the Israelis must treat Habib with the respect the president’s envoy deserved. Netanyahu, the novice diplomat, was a messenger-boy being reprimanded by a man two decades his senior.9
As the bloody summer in Lebanon wore on, it seemed American diplomacy had achieved a breakthrough. Yasser Arafat agreed to the departure of his fighters from Beirut. On August 25, eight hundred US Marines arrived as part of an international force overseeing the evacuation of fifteen thousand Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat, into further exile. For a moment it seemed that Israel had achieved its objectives—the PLO was denied its last base in a country bordering Israel. Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Phalanges Party and Israel’s ally, was elected as Lebanon’s new president. It was a brief illusion.
On September 1, Begin was taking a belated vacation when Ambassador Lewis arrived at his hotel with an urgent message. Reagan was about to launch his own peace plan: Israel would withdraw from Lebanon and enter talks with Jordan and the Palestinians, resulting in full autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of a Jordanian federation. Begin was stunned. His intention had been to push the Palestinians far away and off the international agenda.
For the Israeli embassy in the United States it was an embarrassment. They had failed to detect a plan in the offing. Arens had returned to Israel for consultations two days earlier, assuring the media that all was well in the relationship. Netanyahu was left to prepare an assessment of the new plan. He had been in Washington for less than two months, and was still without reliable sources in the administration. He counseled waiting for the latest American initiative to blow over, just as like the previous ones. It proved to be a shrewd assessment, but Begin totally disregarded it. Instead he lost no time in angrily rejecting the Reagan Plan.
Arens returned to Washington with orders to nip the Reagan Plan in the bud. They were soon overtaken by events. On September 14, the newly elected president of Lebanon, Gemayel, was killed by a bomb planted by a Syrian agent at Phalangist headquarters. Israel defied Washington’s exhortations and sent the IDF into West Beirut, where Palestinian fighters remained in breach of the evacuation deal. The job of going after these fighters, who were sheltering in Palestinian refugee camps, was given to the Phalangists.
On September 16, Arens and Netanyahu were summoned for another dressing-down by Eagleburger. The undersecretary accused the Israelis of having misled the administration, saying, “Israel’s credibility has been severely damaged here in Washington.” Arens responded bluntly. “I’m not sure you guys know what you’re doing,” he said. The administration’s claim that Israel had been untruthful, he said, was “fabricated.” Following his lead, Netanyahu urged Eagleburger to take the claim that Israel’s actions were “contrary to assurances” out of the State Department’s daily briefing. “If there’s still time, I would suggest you delete this, particularly the Draper business. Otherwise you’ll give us no choice but to defend our credibility by setting the record straight. We’ll end up in a shooting war with each other, and that’s not good for either of us,” Netanyahu said.10
Arens was pleased with his number two’s forceful interjection, adding that Israel could reveal the transcript of the conversation between Begin and Draper. “You may leave us no choice.”
Unbeknownst to them, as they were meeting in Washington, Phalangist fighters were entering the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. A thirty-six-hour killing spree, in which at least seven hundred Palestinians (some estimates go as high as three thousand) were brutally murdered, had begun. As news of the massacre began filtering out of Beirut, and photographs of piles of corpses were screened around the world, a shocked Reagan said, “All people of decency must share our outrage and revulsion.”11 He stopped short of directly blaming Israel.
Arens and Netanyahu were called to meet a shocked Shultz, who relayed the administration’s “demand” that “you get your forces out of West Beirut!” It was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and under any other circumstance, summoning an Israeli diplomat on that day would have been unthinkable. Arens responded that he was “horrified, moved and touched by this event just as you are. If anything, even more so because of our proximity to the event.” He blamed the Lebanese Army for not controlling West Beirut and said the massacre had been carried out by Phalangists who had “entered the camps from the east.” He added: “At 2 o’clock we became aware of what was happening and immediately moved in and got the Phalangists out.”12
What Arens may not have known when he met with Shultz was that the Phalangists had gone into the camps at Israel’s urging to “mop up” Palestinian fighters, and that from its early hours, Israeli officers and journalists had been receiving news of the ongoing carnage and updating senior generals and ministers. It took a day and a half for the IDF to order the Phalangists out. Netanyahu remained silent throughout the meeting.
Eleven days after the massacre, the Marines returned to Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force that included France and Italy. It was an ill-fated mission. On April 18, 1983, an explosion tore apart the US embassy, killing 63, including 17 Americans. On October 23, an explosives-laden truck smashed into the Marines barracks. A simultaneous attack was carried out on the French base. Altogether, 241 Americans, 58 French, and 6 Lebanese were killed. The attacks were carried out on orders of the Iranian regime. The perpetrators were operatives of a shadowy new Shi’a organization, Hezbollah. Four months later, Reagan ordered the Marines to leave Beirut.
Relations between Washington and Jerusalem were on the mend. The targeting of US troops in Beirut had convinced many Americans that they were essentially on the same side as Israel. A key figure in the rapidly improving relationship was Shultz, whom Arens had subjected to a personal charm offensive. Shultz proved amenable not only to frequent meetings with Arens, but also to social get-togethers. Shultz and his wife, Helena, frequently met with Moshe and Muriel Arens outside office hours. Many in the administration believed the mild-mannered Arens to be a likely successor to Begin and were interested in getting to know him. Sending Israeli American diplomats to Washington had proved an effective strategy, even before Bibi captivated the capital’s media elite.
IN HIS FIRST days in Washington, Netanyahu, with the help of the embassy’s press officer, had compiled a detailed list of the main movers in the town’s punditocracy—the senior White House and State Department correspondents, bureau chiefs, and foreign policy commentators. Within weeks he had met all of them and had begun compiling a similar list of New York’s media elite, whom he cultivated on frequent trips there. Israel was rarely out of the headlines, and Bibi was always available for a quote, or some intriguing insight from “a senior Israeli official.” Young, personable, and oozing self-confidence, he quickly became a fixture on news shows.
Ever a perfectionist, he worked assiduously on his televisual skills, taking lessons from professional coaches and spending weekends rehearsing at home with Fleur using hired video cameras. He learned how to keep his eye fixed on the lens while presenting the left side of his face, the side without the scarred lip. He practiced his delivery of terse and soundbite-heavy sentences and memorized the leading anchors’ first names. He even learned the mystery of male makeup. His favorite venue was ABC’s Nightline. The late-news show, presented by Ted Koppel, had started three years earlier during the Iran hostage crisis. America’s latest Middle East disaster in Lebanon was a natural subject for extensive coverage. Bibi established a close relationship with Koppel and his producers. One media monitoring organization keeping count of interviewees claimed that in the 1980s Netanyahu was Nightline’s most-interviewed “terrorism expert.”13
Bibi’s practice of making frequent appearances on the kinds of shows that were watched within the Capital Beltway, including The MacNeil/Lehrer Report (later NewsHour) and Evans and Novak, where he wasn’t assured of an easy ride, yet still braved the grilling, was rapidly opening doors for him in Washington. He was gaining access in particular to a new generation of Republican politicians, thinkers, and officials who were instinctively more pro-Israel than the old establishment and more receptive to the free-market, antisocialist Likudniks. Many of them were Jewish.
While American Jews for nearly a century have overwhelmingly voted Democrat, Reagan came close in 1980 to beating Carter among Jewish voters (39–45 percent). During his presidency, a growing number of Jews, including many who formed the backbone of the nascent neoconservative movement, began to gain influence in the Republican establishment. Their parents may have thrilled at the thought of Jewish socialist pioneers building the Jewish state, but the capitalist Bibi Netanyahu was their kind of Israeli.
With the glamorous Fleur at his side, Bibi swiftly became the darling of the new wave of Reagan Republicans. Colleagues at the embassy complained that the deputy chief of mission ran his own social diary, detached from the diplomatic demands of the embassy’s calendar. Arens, however, gave Bibi the backing to plow his own furrow. They were both outsiders to the diplomatic corps and enjoyed ignoring the professionals, who they knew weren’t Likud voters anyway. Arens’s conviction that mass media hasbara was the way to conduct diplomacy had been strengthened. Visual news images seemed to influence Reagan more than anything else.
During a meeting with Shamir in August 1982, Reagan spoke of being deeply moved by a photograph of a Lebanese baby girl who had lost her arms in an Israeli bombing raid. She had come to symbolize the war for him. He put the photograph, which had been taken by the UPI news agency, on his desk during the meeting, telling Shamir and Arens, “Listen, this has got to stop.”14 At Netanyahu’s request, the IDF tracked down the family and discovered that it was actually a boy in the photograph. He still had both his arms; in the photo, one of them had been broken and bandaged, creating the impression of amputation. UPI subsequently corrected the caption, and the White House was notified. Netanyahu would later use embellished versions of this story to demonstrate how poorly the Israeli government dealt with propaganda.15
Begin initially believed that Israel was blameless for the Sabra and Shatila massacre. He thought the world holding Israel responsible for “Arabs killing Arabs” was “a blood libel.” But public pressure, culminating in a mass protest of hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv, forced him to set up a national commission of inquiry. The Kahan Commission delivered its report in February 1983, ruling that Sharon as defense minister bore “indirect responsibility,” as he had ignored warnings that the Phalangists were likely to carry out mass murders in the camp. The commission recommended Sharon be removed from his post.
Bibi thought Sharon had been treated shamefully. Many years later, he said that saying Sharon “should have anticipated what others would do is a very, very surreal judgment.”16 As a civil servant, he couldn’t express this view publicly. But he read in advance and approved a newspaper column his brother Iddo wrote criticizing Sharon’s removal. Meanwhile, Sharon’s fall created more immediate problems for Bibi. Begin asked Arens to return to Israel immediately to replace Sharon. This time, Arens relented and took the appointment as defense minister. His term as ambassador had ended after less than a year.
Arens’s departure could have meant the end of Netanyahu’s diplomatic career as well. The new ambassador in Washington would be unlikely to allow him the same latitude. As a political appointee, he could be removed at short notice. He began lobbying to become Arens’s successor.
The idea of appointing a thirty-three-year-old with no political standing and only six months of relevant experience to Israel’s most sensitive diplomatic posting may have seemed absurd, but Netanyahu believed he was the best man for the job. He was convinced he was destined for even greater things and had little time to waste. Neither was he hiding his ambition. During that period, a senior IDF officer studying at Georgetown met him on a flight from Washington to New York and had a startling conversation. “I asked Bibi on the flight, ‘Where do you see yourself in ten years?’ Without hesitation he answered, ‘As prime minister.’ ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to first overcome the Likud dinosaurs like Shamir, and then the Likud princes.’ Bibi answered, ‘The dinosaurs are dying out and the princes are too blue-blooded to fight for the crown. I’ll get there.’”
Netanyahu had his supporters, particularly among his new friends in Washington. One of them, William Safire, actually wrote, in his New York Times column,
The Israelis should also make certain their new ambassador to the U.S., replacing Mr. Arens, is not only tough-minded and bilingual but also able to make full use of access to the U.S. public that our television offers. The current number two man in the embassy, Benjamin Netanyahu (brother of the slain hero of Entebbe), would be a superb surprise choice: a former soldier and U.S.-trained management consultant, he kept his cool and operated effectively in Washington during the worst moments of the Beirut period. He is 33 and not a professional diplomat; in this curious period, those are both assets.17
Arens endorsed his protégé’s candidacy, but the appointment of Israel’s ambassador to the United States is made jointly by the prime minister and foreign minister. Begin by then was increasingly detached from the daily business of government. Shamir, who had always been underwhelmed by Bibi, thought the idea absurd. Israel’s ambassador to France, Meir Rosenne, a veteran of thirty years’ service in the diplomatic corps, who, unlike most of his colleagues, also held right-wing views, got the job. Netanyahu began casting around for a new one.