The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (60 page)

In May 1980, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman resigned from office over policy differences, and the prime minister took over the defense portfolio. Weizman thought Begin far too intransigent and Begin thought Weizman far too conciliatory in the ongoing negotiations with Egypt on the Palestinian autonomy idea. Ultimately, both were content to see the backs of each other.

The prime minister relied heavily on General Poran to guide him through the labyrinth of his new ministry, and it was Poran who brought him to an armored corps base in the foothills of the Judean Mountains one evening in June, to see firsthand how a brigade of tank reservists readied themselves to be deployed for a thirty-two-day stint in the Nablus sector of the West Bank to counter the terrorist incursions.

In addition to Freuka Poran, Begin was accompanied by the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Raphael Eitan, aka Raful, a stocky, phlegmatic, and highly decorated soldier. Yechiel and I tagged along to get an idea of the premier’s new responsibilities.

He was received by the base commander, Assaf, a friendly, bulky fellow in his forties, dressed in drab olive green fatigues, with a shock of curly hair that was partially covered by a knitted yarmulke. A successful entrepreneur in civilian life, the officer’s epaulettes ranked him as colonel.

The visit began in a hut which looked as if it had not seen a cleaning implement in a month. The place reeked of Lysol. A few flowers
brightened
the brown Formica tables and the sun-faded curtains. The only other decoration in the room was a floor-to-ceiling wall map which Assaf used to point out the tricky, rocky terrain his brigade was readying to patrol, and where suspected
PLO
terrorists were thought to be hiding. He then led us out to a gravel compound, where ammunition trucks were parked alongside a dozen tanks. In the glare of headlights, squads of reservists were loading shells under the watchful eye of the second-in-command. An unsmiling sort, he sharply ordered his sergeants to gather their crews so that the exercise could commence. Next he inundated Begin with a stream of technical data about top speeds, fire power, range, armaments, maneuverability, and other details.

“Crews, prepare to mount the tanks!” he barked. And then, “Crews, mount!”

We all watched while the engines of the Patton
M
-60s ignited, coughed and roared. Then, as the clanking armored column began to move off, snorting through a curtain of diesel fumes and whirling dust, Assaf slid into his command jeep with Freuka at his side, and Yechiel and me at the back. Mr. Begin and Raful followed in the Chief of Staff’s
4WD
.

The tanks clawed at the grey stones, moving down a rugged slope that terminated in a long, rock-strewn valley, stretching into a narrowing
v
, and dominated by steep, partially wooded hills. At the valley’s tapered end was the rubble of broken concrete blocks, earthen bricks, and pulverized plaster. And rising out of the debris, like the effigies of some bizarre shrine, were the practice targets
–
a semicircle of blown-out tanks and half-destroyed armored personnel carriers.

Creaking and shuddering on their tracks, the steel beasts fired their practice salvos with savage precision, creating a cacophony of thunderclaps and flashes reminiscent of the thumping finale of Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
. Then, on some unseen signal, one of the behemoths began crawling along the valley floor, and Assaf plugged into the command network and held an open earphone toward us so that we could listen in.

“Driver, sharp right! Stop! Obstacle on left flank. Now, forward! Full speed! Reverse! Now, sharp right again! Go! Gunner, combat range! Two thousand meters! Fire! Loader, reload! Driver, faster! Watch out, another obstacle on your left! Gunner, combat range, fifteen hundred meters! Fire! Good! Direct hit!”

After a couple of hours of this, the crews eased themselves out of their protective gear and helmets, slipped off their rifles, and bivouacked around bonfires at an encampment on the valley’s edge, where Begin peppered them with questions while they munched on hefty sandwiches. He asked why it was necessary for the tank commander to give such precise instructions to his driver. Couldn’t the driver see where he was going?

“Yes and no,” the brigade commander answered. “When a driver’s hatch is closed, he can see virtually nothing on his flanks beyond a seventeen degree radius, which is about the range of his periscopes. He has to rely largely on his commander in the open turret to guide him.”

A picture flashed through my mind of a
CNN
news report I had seen the week before. The reporter had stated that the Israeli tank we were watching on our screens, crawling along an alleyway in a West Bank town with its turrets closed, was maliciously grating its flanks against the shuttered storefronts to vandalize them.

When I mentioned this to Assaf he laughed in a cynical sort of way and said, “I can promise you that that driver was doing his level best to avoid hitting those storefronts. In such narrow confines, the slightest fraction of a turn can cause a scrape without the driver ever knowing it.” To which the prime minister, in a mixture of challenge and mischief, turned to me and said, “Yehuda, why don’t you check that out?”

“Check what out?”

“Climb in and see what a tank driver sees when his hatch is closed.”

Dismayed at the prospect but too embarrassed to admit it, I submitted to big meaty hands bundling me onto a tank turret, giving me a helmet, then seizing me by the waist and armpits and lowering me through a narrow hatch, shoulders crammed, torso twisted, legs dangling, and suspending me thus until my feet rested on the driver’s seat below. I squiggled down further to squeeze my backside into the seat, and found myself entombed inside a cramped steel belly encrusted with instrument panels, packed shell racks, and other fearsome paraphernalia. The stench of cordite, diesel, oil, and sweat was overwhelming. So was the claustrophobia.

The author
testing a tank’s maneuverability, June 1980, Judean Mountains

Assaf’s tinny voice scratched through the helmet’s earphones: “I’m sealing you in now
–
closing the hatch.”

Everything went black. I was not a happy warrior.

By the eerie beam of a searchlight mounted on the turret I could make out three periscope slits, one directed forward and the other two angled off at either side. I was seeing what a tank driver sees
–
a constricted vision that gives no view either of the flanks or the rear.

I was ready to climb out, but Assaf’s voice scraped through again, “On the floor there’s the accelerator pedal. You’re in neutral, so just press on it. Get the feel of the engine.” I did, and had the sense of being inside a percussion instrument.

After what seemed an eternity, Assaf opened up the beast and hauled me out, whereupon the prime minister calmed my fevered senses by leading the soldiers in a round of benevolent applause. He then bid farewell to the men, saying he would meet up with them again later in the night, and drove off with Raful, Freuka, and Assaf for what Freuka was later to describe as Mr. Begin’s induction into the challenges which reserve soldiers face during tough economic times. For in that season of 1980, Israel had slid into an economic trough.

Assaf, I was later told, had made a name for himself among the top brass for his groundbreaking initiatives to sustain the
esprit de corps
of his men, many of whom had hit upon hard times but nevertheless reported for duty when summoned. Senior military officials everywhere called upon him for advice on how to set up mutual aid programs, employment schemes, and morale-boosting family get-togethers, just as he had succeeded in doing for his troops.

It was not hard to figure out why such men were so willing to lend each other a helping hand: it was the infectious camaraderie of an army composed overwhelmingly of reservists aged anywhere between twenty-two and forty-five, who, year after year, tore themselves away from hearth and home to team up for hazardous frontline duties that joined them in a bond impossible to describe and just as impossible to break. This was why Freuka had deliberately chosen this particular base. He wanted Begin to meet Assaf and assess the results of his initiatives.

The high morale of his men was evident as Yechiel and I, awaiting the return of the prime minister and his party, sat chatting and munching with them around the bonfire. The second-in-command, whom I’d taken to be a hard-nosed sort earlier, tossed me a smart-ass grin, and said, “How did you enjoy the feel of sitting inside a tank?”

“Great,” I lied.

“Then let’s go for a spin; you’ll see what it feels like on the move.”

“Brilliant idea,” cried Yechiel roguishly. “Put him in. He’ll enjoy it.”

Before I had a chance to protest, a bunch of grinning soldiers pounced on me with all the wisecracking banter of boy scouts at a summer camp, strapped a helmet and body gear onto me, and squeezed me into the loader’s seat. When I looked up, I gazed upon the second-in-command grinning down at me from the commander’s turret. Instantly, he switched on the searchlight, and speaking into his headset ordered, “Driver, take us across the valley, up the hill, and back.”

The man in the tank’s belly sent the monster jolting, rumbling, lurching, and crunching over the valley’s rocky floor toward the target area, and then up a terraced slope, causing my head to bounce on my shoulders like a jack-in-the-box. I could not begin to imagine what the real thing was like, jammed into this creaky metal box in actual battle, in a world of screaming shells, fire, and explosions, deafened, befuddled, exhausted, and scared. By the time we clattered back to the bivouac I was utterly drained, my face assuredly as gray as my hair, and all I could do in response to the guffaws and backslaps that greeted me on every side was to muster a sheepish grin.

It was by now close to midnight, and Begin and his party returned. He stood on a rise, flanked by the chief of staff and the brigade commander, the reservists arrayed in front of them, some sitting, some lying down. A tank spotlight picked out the prime minister’s heavy spectacles, high forehead, and powerful chin, and standing there against the blackness of the sky he looked ten years younger than his sixty-seven years, crisp in a chalk white, open-necked shirt.

“I’m speaking to you now as minister of defense,” he began, “and I salute you all for your devotion and courage, and the assistance which you are rendering to each other.”

The reservists’ sun-beaten faces were all turned to him, smiling their approval. They liked that.

“As you know,” continued Begin, “the
IDF
lives by a code of ethics in battle
–
a
Jewish
code of ethics
–
even when operating against the
PLO
’s savage terror which you are about to counter in the Nablus sector. Ours is an army in which human rights transgressions are brought to light. Penalties are paid for the abuse of innocent civilians, and justice is done.” Then, turning to Assaf, he said lightly, “But I don’t suppose, Colonel, you have problems of that sort with men like these.”

“Well,” answered Assaf, looking Begin straight in the eye, as if wanting deliberately to take up the point, “occasionally problems of that sort do arise.”

There was a faint stirring among the ranks.

“Like what?” asked Begin.

“Well, we quite often have to make difficult choices when operating in civilian areas where suspected terrorists are lurking.”

“Can anybody here give me a concrete example of a difficult choice any one of you have had to make, personally?” called Begin to the men.

A hand shot up. “I have,” answered a tall, gawky fellow, with deep-set eyes and yellow teeth.

“What do you do in civilian life?” asked Begin.

“I’m a truck driver, but I’m out of a job.”

Begin nodded in empathy, and he said, “Tell me whatever is on your mind.”

The man shrugged his shoulders and in a flat, inflectionless voice told how, on the outskirts of the West Bank town of Jenin, the tank he commanded had come face-to-face with a parked Mercedes partially blocking his way. It was standing outside an isolated Arab house. So he ordered his driver to crush the car, shove it aside, and move on.

“Why didn’t you knock on the door and tell the car’s owner to move it aside?” asked Begin sharply.

“And what
–
leave the safety of my tank?”

The chief of staff quickly intervened. “Standing orders, Mr. Prime Minister, are that a soldier may not leave his tank under any circumstances in an environment that is possibly hostile.”

“I see,” said the defense rookie.

“And, besides,” added a sleek-looking fellow, who said he was the tank driver and a history lecturer in civilian life, “we were dead beat. We were sleep deprived. We hadn’t closed our eyes in thirty-six hours. It was hot. We were fed up. And we were still hurting from the loss of two of our men who had exited their tank in that exact area.”

Assaf explained somberly that on a previous tour of duty a small explosive device had slammed into the side of one of his brigade’s tanks in a Jenin alleyway, causing minor damage. Contrary to orders, two of the crew got out to inspect the damage, and were gunned down.

“I see,” said Begin morosely.
“
Lo pashut
” [not simple]. And then, after a long pause, he squared his shoulders and began addressing the men in a precise and ministerial tone. “Let me explain to you what we – all of us – are up against. Classic warfare is fundamentally a contest of wills fought to impose so much stress on the enemy that he loses the will to fight. A war of terror has the same intent, but with a singularly insidious twist: the enemy can be anybody, anywhere. He is without uniform or identification. His targets are random. His weapon is fear. He knows no constraints. He comes in all guises, often in the dress of his victims. He seeks to shatter nerves and break morale by flaunting the impotence of the authorities to protect their people. He uses his own women and children as his shield. He seeks to goad the defender into ever-harsher counter measures so as to stoke the general hate. He goes all-out to sow despair and to brutalize the agitated hearts of the other side. And in so doing, he strives to corrupt the defender’s military professionalism and discipline through combat stress, demoralization, fatigue, boredom and overkill, the very things we’ve been talking about. Well” – this in a final arpeggio – “no enemy is going to brutalize our hearts, nor corrupt our military professionalism and discipline. The IDF has a tradition of humanity, fighting a foe that knows no humanity. Ours is a Jewish army defending a cause that is moral and just. This is why we shall, with the help of the Almighty, vanquish those who seek our destruction.”