Prevarications and nimble instincts

Jerusalem Post ^ | Feb. 25, 2004 | YEHUDA AVNER

[yonif]

Israeli life is at once grotesque and heroic. We have a penchant for hyperbole and wild passions: visionary firebrands, biblical diehards, Tel Aviv high jinks, secular zealots, party dogmatists. It is hard to find a footing in the soft moss of composure here.

I once asked prime minister Levi Eshkol why this was so, why time makes short shrift of our tranquil moments, What drives us to be so fractious, to approach even minor matters with an air of immoderation and embattlement?

This itch arose out of a paragraph I was grappling with in the preparation of a draft of an address to be delivered by the prime minister to an English-speaking immigrant audience on Israel's 16th Independence Day, 40 long years ago.

My diary notes him peering at me over the top of his spectacles and saying with a frown, "Boychik, we are still at war. We still face terrorism. We live with menace. We are absorbing hundreds of thousands of refugee immigrants. We are not yet a nation. We are a motley bunch of traumatized tribes trekking home, each with its own pekelech of neuroses."

He fell silent after that, presumably mulling over the enormity of it all until, with a deep sigh, he stretched his shoulders as if to ease the burden and, seeking sanctuary in his famed Yiddish wit, said, "Mein teirer yunger mann, disputation is in our blood. Shouting at each other keeps us together. We're a stiff-necked, peculiar people (am k'shei oref, am segula) of non-conformists, with a tenacious memory and sensitivity to the smell of anti-Semites. So how can you expect us be normal? We wouldn't be Jewish if we were."

As he said this, eyes smiled behind heavily framed spectacles, set in a homely, family friend countenance. And, with his heavy fountain pen, he scribbled hasty corrections, syntax be damned, and then read the whole draft out loud, vainly trying to get his tongue around wily consonants and tricky vowels, his mouth contorting like a fish in his hapless bid to anglicize his Yiddish diction.

When advisers urged him to pep up his delivery, practice elocution, improvise, rehearse, he would dismiss it all with a gravelly "stam neirishkeiten – mere nonsense," and admonish, "At my age I'm not about to pretend to be what I'm not – a performer."

THIS UTTERLY likable man, who served as prime minister between 1963 and 1969, suffered from one handicap: he had no rhetoric, no eloquence, no charisma, no crowd appeal in any tongue. Genuine to a fault, his sizzle fizzled in front of a throng.

Levi Eshkol's thickset body, hefty shoulders, gnarled fingers, and the waddle of his walk suggested a time in his life when he had swung a scythe, pushed a plow, heaved a sack, and sweated in dust and heat. For he was an old pioneer, a man of the fields who became a Labor leader, then a planner of rural reclamation and, after that, a builder of new towns and factories.

He was a water expert, too, who knew every stretch of every water pipe in the countryside. Thanks to him, an irrigation pipe as wide as a bus – the National Water Carrier – funnels winter rains to this day from the north to the south, turning Negev into meadow.

His mixture of irreverence, affability, and authenticity sprang from the soil of Oratova, the Ukrainian hassidic shtetl into which he was born 69 years before.

As prime minister he was an accessible and easygoing chief who delighted in folksy banter and who had that elusive common touch that made ordinary people feel wanted. His personality invited a confessional trust and, being a quiet persuader and a ponderer, he would spend hours talking problems through, giving each man his due, easing tensions with his droll Yiddishisms. However, to an increasingly frightened nation in the late spring of 1967, this smacked of indecisiveness, vacillation, procrastination, and an incapacity to make quick and hard decisions.

So he was pressed into forming a government of national unity when Gamal Abdul Nasser's Egypt suddenly mobilized and ousted the United Nations peace-keeping force from Sinai, blockaded Eilat, dispatched a great army and air force to Israel's frontier, and ostentatiously and ceremoniously signed military pacts with other Arab nations to throw the Jews into the sea and to annihilate the State of Israel for all time.

Dispassionate specialists speculated whether this now lonely, isolated, and abandoned tiny state could conceivably survive a combined Arab onslaught. And, as the crisis deepened, the unthinkable came into view: Nasser had poison gas. He had used it in his quagmire war in Yemen months before. Intelligence indicated he might use it again. Rumors spoke of 40,000 fatalities. Israel had no gas masks. Burial societies readied public parks as cemeteries.

In Washington, foreign minister Abba Eban was about to meet president Lyndon Johnson for crisis talks when he received a frantic call from the prime minister. (It was my job to transcribe it.) Eshkol brought Eban up to date and then, beside himself with disbelief and anger, burst out, "Zug zu der goy az meer hoben tzu teen mit chayes – Tell the goy we are dealing with animals." I could see the vein in his forehead swell.

The rest is history.

This week marks the 35th anniversary of Levi Eshkol's passing.

History, I sense, is treating him with deepening deference. For all his apparent prevarications and equivocations and convoluted diplomacy, it was his nimble instincts and piercing shrewdness that ultimately convinced the world that the Jewish state had done all it could to avoid war, and that Israel's very survival was at stake. What is more, it was his prudent pre-war vision as prime minister and defense minister that prepared the IDF for the fight of its life, just as it was his courageous will that helped see the nation through. So yes, verily, the Six-Day War was Levi Eshkol's triumph.

May his memory be blessed.

The writer, a veteran diplomat, served four Israeli prime ministers, including Levi Eshkol. avner28@netvision.net.il

[yonif]

Ping.

[Jaguar Girl]

This is wonderfully written.