The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Read Online Free PDF

together, knowing that his chief operations officer was urgently awaiting his return to approve an action against a British police station that was to take place almost immediately. So he said, “I know Reb Dovid is a truly honest man with impeccable kosher credentials, but – ”
    “But what? All you have to do is to tell that to the dayanim . They’ll believe you.”
    “I’m sure they will. It’s just that – ”
    “Just that, what?”
    “It’s just that you’ll have to ask somebody else.”
    “Somebody else? What’s wrong with you, Reb Yisrael – you’re so busy all of a sudden?”
    “Yes, I am.”
    “With what?”
    “Urgent things – things I have to attend to myself.”
    “What kind of urgent things?”
    “Important things.”
    “Bah!” huffed the beadle, and he swung on his heels in disgust.
    Years later at a political rally, an exalted Reb Simcha approached Mr. Begin and told him how, on the Saturday night following the declaration of independence, he was sitting at home with two of his shul-goers, one a stone mason, the other a plumber, drinking a l’chayim to the new state, and as they were sipping their schnapps they had their ears glued to the radio listening to a voice which they instantly recognized, a voice that declared, “Citizens of the Jewish homeland, the rule of oppression has been expelled. The State of Israel has arisen…”
    “We couldn’t believe that you, our Reb Yisrael Sassover, were Menachem Begin, our commander of the Irgun,” said Reb Simcha jubilantly. And then, shoulders squared, “You knew, of course, I was a secret member of the Irgun.”
    “Of course I knew,” said Begin. “So were almost half the shtiebel . But you all abided by the oath not to tell, and not to reveal to each other to which secret cell you belonged.”
    In truth, by the time I got to know Menachem Begin he did not talk all that often about those secretive days except when in the company of his old and trusted colleagues, and when he did his tone was more often wistful than gleeful and witty. For lurking behind his underground anecdotes was the anxiety and insecurity of living a fugitive existence, forever weighed down by the devastating responsibility of issuing life-and-death commands in response to the repressive actions of the British. Hunted ceaselessly, he could socialize with no one but his immediate family, select members of his Irgun High Command, and a few trusted couriers. Nevertheless, his military, moral, and ideological authority over the Irgun was uncontested. His followers admired him to the point of adulation. And by dint of his cunning and revolutionary strategies calculated to humiliate the British by hitting time and again at their symbols of power, compelling the authorities to choose between repression and withdrawal, he made his little Irgun army appear to British eyes much larger than it actually was.
    It is estimated that at the height of the revolt leading toward Israel’s independence in 1948 there were less than a thousand members who had taken the Irgun oath, and only a few hundred of them were capable of mounting operations at any one time. Hardly anybody served full-time, and only very few received any kind of pay. Almost all continued in their regular civilian jobs, which provided ideal cover for their activities, some of which were extraordinarily spectacular, others spectacularly controversial. One such was the blowing up, in July 1946, of Jerusalem’s famed King David Hotel, a splendid imperial establishment of the day, on par with the Shepheard’s in Cairo and Raffles in Singapore. In its early days the King David hosted such royalty as the Dowager Empress of Persia, the Queen Mother of the Egyptian royal house, and King Abdullah I of Jordan, who arrived with a retinue on horses and camels. The hotel also afforded asylum to three royal heads of state who had to flee their countries into exile: King Alfonso VIII of Spain, Emperor Haile Selassie of