Ranking Israel's Prime Ministers

As an American centrist who in Israel would be considered a leftist (which shows how far to the Right Israel's democracy is), I will now rank Israel's prime ministers. I rank them primarily on their contributions to Israeli security and to peace with Israel's neighbors, but also on their contributions to Israeli democracy. I will not rank those prime ministers whose term in office was less than two years, as less than half a term is too little to fairly judge a prime minister by.

First, David Ben-Gurion (1948-1954, 1955-63)  Ben-Gurion had the historic understanding of his environment, of what history demanded and of timing to build the framework for a state during the 1930s and 1940s as head of the Jewish Agency. He then managed to divorce the Jewish Yishuv from Britain in 1945, without provoking a fatal reaction. He conducted a victorious war strategy in 1948-49 after having wisely accepted the UN partition plan. Later he built an alliance with France to replace the British connection. I could write a column about all of his faults, but in the largest matters he was correct.

Second, Yitzhak Rabin (1974-77, 1992-95) Rabin conceived the strategy of separating Egypt from its Arab allies and thus preventing the Arabs from going to war against Israel. He materialized this strategy through the September 1975 Sinai Agreement, mediated by Henry Kissinger. In his second term he realized that there was no Palestinian or Jordanian alternative to the PLO with whom to make peace. Not really trusting Arafat for good reasons he did his best with the cards dealt to him. Unfortunately for Israel and peace, the religious Right deprived Israel of him before he could see it through.

Third, Menahem Begin (1977-83) Begin made Israel into a real democracy by forming the Likud, under coercion from Sharon and Weizman in 1973, and then leading it to victory in 1977 (in a campaign managed by Weizman).  He devoted his first two years in office to making peace with Egypt and the peace was as much his initiative as Sadat's. But he gave in to Sharon and involved Israel in an unnecessary war with Lebanon, which is why I'm putting him at number 3 rather than number 2.

Fourth, Levy Eshkol (1963-69) Eshkol like Ben-Gurion served as his own defense minister but then in June 1967 gave way to Moshe Dayan. Eshkol built up the defense forces by providing them with the necessary weapons for victory in 1967. He also strengthened the relationship with the United States and won the first major American arms sale in 1963. Had Eshkol served later he would have probably been open to peace with Israel's Arab neighbors.

Fifth, Shimon Peres (1984-86, 1995-96) Peres oversaw the withdrawal from most of Lebanon following the First Lebanon War and brought hyper inflation under control during his first term in office. His second term when he took over from the assassinated Rabin was too short to really accomplish anything. As foreign minister Peres arranged for the Oslo agreement in 1993. 

Sixth, Golda Meir (1969-74) A sentimental favorite with Americans but a bete noir with the Israeli Left, she missed possible opportunities for peace with Egypt in 1971-72 by spurning Sadat's offer of a Sinai deal. But after wisely presiding over a disastrous war that she helped to bring about, Meir traded territory for stability with Egypt and Syria via Kissinger in order to gain the release of Israeli POWs.

Seventh, Ariel Sharon (2001-2006) Sharon unleashed the IDF on Arafat in response to the Al-Aksa Intifada and reconquered the West Bank in March 2002. He built the barrier inside the West Bank to protect Israel and the settlements from Palestinian terror attacks. And then he disengaged from Gaza, but with no coordination with the PA so that Hamas was able to exploit the withdrawal politically.

Eighth, Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-99, 2009-2012) Netanyahu spent his entire first term and his second term to date attempting to avoid hard decisions that would upset his coalition of the Right. He agreed to a territorial withdrawal at Wye in October 1998 but never carried it out. As leader of the opposition in 1995 he presided over protests that created the political climate for Rabin's assassination.

Ninth, Ehud Olmert (2006-2009) Attempted to negotiate a peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Until more memoirs and minutes of the negotiations emerge it is impossible to assess the blame for the failure of the talks. Due to his political weakness he responded to provocations by Hamas and Hezbollah by twice going to war and presided over indecisive results that hurt Israel's image and hurt many innocent civilians in Lebanon and Gaza. 

Last, Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-92) Shamir treaded war while he steadily settled the West Bank and Gaza. Although this settlement was begun under Begin, the latter had more positive accomplishments that earned him a much higher rating. Until 2009 Shamir presided over the most nationalist government in Israel's history from 1990-92. He was dragged kicking and screaming to the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He also presided over Jonathan Pollock's betrayal of the United States.

If I were on the Right, I would probably rank them as follows: 1) Begin; 2) Shamir; 3) Netanyahu; 4) Ben-Gurion; 5) Meir; 6) Sharon; 7) Olmert; 8) Eshkol; 9) Rabin; 10) Peres. Although some on the Right, especially among the settler Right, will rank Sharon dead last as a traitor to their cause.

Will Netanyahu Attack Iran?

Last week on one particular day the foreign policy and defense tollgate site Real Clear World featured two separate articles on Israel and Iran: one claiming that the former would attack the latter and the other the opposite. The case for attack consisted of reports of Israel Air Force aircraft practicing bombing attacks over Italy, statements by Israeli politicians, and the danger to Israel of Iran launching an out-of-the-blue nuclear missile attack on Israel. The case against consisted of the argument that Israel lacked sufficient aircraft to be able to thoroughly damage the extensive Iranian nuclear infrastructure--much of which is located underground--and thus any delay caused by bombing to the Iranian nuclear program would be temporary, the opposition of Washington to such attacks, and the likely blow-back damage that both Israel and the U.S. would suffer from Iranian revenge attacks. Will Netanyahu attack then? The truth is that I have no inside line into the psyche of the Israeli premier and even he probably does not know the final answer to that at the moment.

Bibi watchers are divided between those who see him merely as a shallow politician interested only in keeping his coalition together so that he can remain in power and those who see him as an ideologue interested in implementing neo-Revisionist Likud ideology. During his first term in office that meant stopping the Oslo process. During his second term that means keeping Israeli settlement activity going and weakening the peace process by destabilizing Israel's natural Palestinian partner, Mahmoud Abbas. When he ran for the premiership in January 2009 he made several statements about the dangers posed to Israel's future by Iran's nuclear project. The two politicians Netanyahu most admires surprisingly do not include Menahem Begin, the founder of the Likud's main component, Herut, or his successor Yitzhak Shamir. Instead he likes to quote Revisionist Zionism founder Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Winston Churchill. Jabotinsky warned in the interwar period of the dangers of a Holocaust among European Jewry even before Hitler had come to power in Germany. Churchill warned of the danger of Hitler to the international order and peace. For Netanyahu the Iranian leadership--personified by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad--embodies both dangers. He is a personal threat to the survival of Jews living in Israel and a threat to the Middle East order.
  

Barack Obama has been content to try and stop the Iranian nuclear project through international nuclear sanctions. In this he has the support of Western Europe and the opposition of Russia and China--a more favorable situation than Bush faced vis a vis Iraq in 2002. Washington has also probably cooperated with covert Israeli efforts like the Stuxnet computer virus that reportedly destroyed several hundred Iranian centrifuges that were being used to enrich uranium. But Obama has resolutely opposed using force against Iran for good reason--the U.S. military is already overextended by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the international economy is very weak. With so much tinder and kindling lying around in the form of bad debt in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and the United States it does not do to play with matches.

So far Netanyahu has been content to warn Washington, support economic sanctions against Tehran, and support covert measures such as Stuxnet, possible sabotage or missile development sites, and assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. When Netanyahu contemplates Iran he should keep in mind that Churchill not only worried about the dangers of Bolshevism and supported Western intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-19, but he also came to support a balance of terror between the West and the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Part of growing up as a nation means learning to live with ambiguity and danger and knowing what one can change in one's environment and what one must learn to live with. Netanyahu's real role as a great Israeli politician might be to help Israel come to accept this as well.

Israel and the American Diaspora: A Troubled Relationship

Israel has long had a troubled relationship with American Jewry. I believe that this is primarily due to three reasons. First, Zionism as an ideology was conceived in late nineteenth-century Europe--a rather hostile environment for Jews. Hence, it conceived of the natural state of the diaspora (a Greek word meaning dispersion or exile) as anti-semitic. So Israel has problems relating to a country that is philo-semitic, that is one that is welcoming of Jews. This has been the case since the American Revolution and is due to America being both a democracy and being Protestant and not Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Second, most affiliated Jews in America are either Reform or Conservative, two denominations that do not receive official recognition as Jewish in Israel. This is because religiously Israel is like Europe before the Reformation or like Islam today. Most of these Reform and Conservative Jews would be secular Jews in Israel with no attachment to a synagogue. In America synagogues function as community centers and rabbis as community leaders. Third, under Labor Zionism the ruling ideology was anti-capitalist and thus opposed in class terms to the most successful Jews in America--the capitalist businessmen. The Labor Zionists were happy to take American money but thought that the Jews who earned it were somehow to be looked down upon.

Traditionally Israel has demanded three things from American Jews. First, that they glorify Israel and thereby promote aliya (immigration to Israel) by its members. Second, that they support a number of welfare projects within Israel through donations. Third, that Jews use their clout politically to vote for American governments that were and are pro-Israel.  They were to do all of this without having any real input into Israeli policies. American Jews were supposed to lobby for Israeli policies like professional diplomats, making no distinction between one government and the next. They were to embrace limited settlement in the occupied territories, then unrestricted settlement, then peace with settlements, and then military repression against the Palestinians.

What was impermissible and beyond the bounds for Breira in the mid-1970s became kosher for Israeli governments in the 1990s. Figures like Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir who were deemed to be terrorists by the Zionist establishment in the 1940s became the establishment in the late 1970s and 1980s. After having seen various Israeli governments fail to make peace with the Arabs, some American Jews became impatient and have now started lobbying for their own American Middle East policy in Washington. The establishment American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) now has competition in the form of J Street, and organization with 40 local chapters and 170,000 supporters after only three years in existence.

American Jewry and the Israeli government are moving in opposite directions. American Jewry is becoming more assertive and the Israeli government is becoming more closed off. Israel is becoming less democratic and American Jews are remaining defiantly Democratic.  Expect fireworks in the near future.

What has changed in thirty years?

I recently finished reading Yehuda Avner's memoir, The Prime Ministers, which was published last year to some positive reviews. It is a hefty volume of 703 pages not including notes and index.  Avner was a British Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1947 and after the 1948 War of Independence worked briefly on a religious kibbutz in the Galilee before he joined the Israeli foreign service. Eventually, because of his native English, he ended up serving as a wordsmith to four Israeli prime ministers from 1963 to 1983 before he finally became Israel's ambassador to his native country. The years covered in this book were important ones in Israeli history: they included four major wars (1967, 1969-70, 1973, 1982), the peace process between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s and the change in alliance by Israel from France to the United States.

Clearly the peace process was not a theme that Avner considered important. He has a chapter on it in his section on Rabin (which only covers Rabin's first term as prime minister from 1974 to 1977) and a couple of chapters on it in the half of the book that he devotes to Menahem Begin. The book's major themes are the relationship with Washington and the individual personalities of the prime ministers. Whereas I felt that I did learn something about Levi Eshkol, the first prime minister to follow David Ben-Gurion in 1963 and about whom little has been written, I cannot say the same about Golda Meir. A long chapter is devoted to an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Yet of President Sadat's peace initiative of February 1971 that Meir abruptly rejected we hear nothing. So we have no way of knowing whether or not it was genuine in his opinion. Likewise, Henry Kissinger's separation-of-forces agreements of 1974 are just mentioned in a single sentence in passing.

The real revelation in the book is the story of a meeting between Avner and a childhood friend of Kissinger's who became a noted psycho-analyst. The latter diagnosed Kissinger as suffering from severe problems from his abrupt exile from Germany at age 15 during the Nazi period. Avner illustrates this with an incident where the man calls out to Kissinger using his original German name Heinz. Kissinger pretends to ignore him but with a look of disgust on his face--for the painful memories that the name has dredged up. The psycho-analyst tells Avner that Kissinger is ashamed of his Jewish background and will compensate for it in his shuttle diplomacy by bending over backwards to appease Israel's enemies. Avner advised Rabin of this diagnosis. But it never affected Rabin's personal friendship with Kissinger and Rabin continued to visit him every time he visited Washington. And the two were quite friendly during the signing ceremony for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at the White House in March 1979.

Fully half the book is devoted to Begin's premiership. Avner relates many telling incidents of Begin's personality that paints the man as friendly with traditional Jews but prickly with both foreign Jews and some secular Israeli Jews. Avner relates several incidents of Begin telling of figures whose government's are sympathetic to Israel such as Margaret Thatcher and her foreign minister, Lord Carrington, as well as Ronald Reagan and Casper Weinberger. Nothing here is really new--there is little of real novelty to reveal about Begin after the wave of biographies that appeared in the late 1970s, after he was elected, and after 1983, when he resigned from office in a severe depression.

Avner relates in great detail the ceremonies that accompanied the start of Sadat's 1977 peace initiative from his reception in Jerusalem to the breakdown of talks in Tel Aviv in January. But then he just relates that the talks broke down and he doesn't take up the story again until the ceremony on the White House lawn in late March 1979. He skips over the trip to Ismailiya in December 1977, the Leeds Castle talks in July 1978 and the Camp David Summit in September 1978 as well as Carter's summit diplomacy in March 1979.

The only topic that is really adequately covered is the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. But the treatment is again not analytical but rather personal and anecdotal. He relates a summit at Johnson's Texas ranch in early 1968, a White House dinner for Rabin in September 1974 when Rabin told a white lie about it being Avner's birthday to cover up the fact that the dinner wasn't kosher (in accordance with Jewish dietary laws).

One gets the feeling that if Avner's career been a couple of decades later he could have happily related the exploits of Shamir, Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon. But the book would have been much longer because he would have been writing about three Likud premiers and only one Labor premier. It's a pity--Shamir still lacks a biography in either English or Hebrew. Today Netanyahu allows his foreign minister to do his insulting for him. Begin and Meir did it themselves.

If Avner's publisher had possibly been willing, he could have fleshed out the section on Meir and released the book in two volumes about six months or a year apart.  But usually authors are the servants of publishers, not the other way around. This book is recommended for Americans who want anecdotes about the Israeli premiers of this period, but not for Americans interested in the peace process.

Israel's chief interlocutors with the Palestinians Part I

Ariel "Arik" Sharon's first practical introduction to the Palestinian problem came at the age of 24 when he was picked to lead an elite unit of individualist soldiers, many misfits in the IDF, in implementing Israel's strategy of reprisal raids. Sharon had been raised in a Revisionist Party (forerunner of the Likud) family in a Mapai (forerunner of the Labor Party) settlement in the Plain of Sharon, from which he would later take his name. He joined the prestate Hagana militia at age 15 and was badly wounded at the First Battle of Latrun in May 1948. He had quit the army to become a full time student of Middle Eastern History at the Hebrew University shortly before being picked.

Sharon spent the next three years personally leading raids into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He also was responsible with integrating his commando Unit 101 with a paratroop company to produce Israel's first Paratroop Battalion. On one of the raids in the village of Kibya, Sharon had his men dynamite the homes of the villagers. Although his soldiers called in Arabic for the occupants to come out many remained in hiding out of fear and were killed in the blasts. Some 69 people died and Sharon's reputation was established both within Israel and with the Palestinians.

From May 1948, when the civil war phase of the Israeli War of Independence ended, until June 1967, the Palestinians virtually disappeared as independent actors from international politics. There only collective role was in a series of guerrilla operations from 1953 to 1956 and again from 1965 to 1967. Israel, reacting to a series of Palestinian incursions raided the Gaza Strip in early 1953 and dynamited a police station. The Egyptian government reacted by setting up training camps in Gaza to train Palestinian volunteers in guerrilla warfare. Colonel Nasser used the raids to establish Egypt's position as the leader of the Arab resistance against Israel and within Egypt to outmaneuver General Naguib, the figurehead leader of the Egyptian Revolution. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion used the raids as a middle-finger salute against the international community and to establish a reputation as a protector of Israel's vulnerable immigrant communities and collective settlements that were often the target of the raids.

Sharon, having won the patronage of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, the latter first as chief of staff in the 1950s and then as defense minister a decade later, had risen from major to major general. They had kept others from ejecting him from the army for his recklessness, insubordination, and quarrelsome nature. They saw in him both patriotism and military genius. In 1965, like Erwin Rommel, he transferred from the infantry to armor and became a master of the new (for him) form of warfare. After leading a division in the conquest of the Sinai in June 1967 he became the next head of Southern Command. In this role he had his next encounter with the Palestinians in 1971.

Israel's first political interaction with Palestinians since the mandate came as occupiers in 1967. Yasir Arafat returned to the West Bank in 1967 and for several months tried to set up a guerrilla resistance there while managing to stay one step ahead of the IDF. From 1967 to 1970 most of Israel's military interaction with the Palestinians took place along the Jordan River as the Palestinians had set themselves up along the East Bank as a state within a state. Expelled by King Hussein in September 1970 when they defied his authority, they then moved to southern Lebanon, Fatahland. Gaza was a backwater.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had established a number of cells within the crowded refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. From there they mounted attacks on the small Israeli settlements, populated by Arabic-speaking Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, that surrounded the Strip. Sharon was determined to use whatever methods were necessary to stamp out these attacks. He used rather vigorous interrogation methods and deported the families of those involved in guerrilla activity. Several of his subordinate commanders made their anxieties about his methods known up the chain of command. Gaza was temporarily transferred from the Southern Command to the Central Command. But Sharon had stamped out the insurgency.

In July 1973 Sharon was forced to retire from the IDF after failing to be promoted up the next step. He blamed it on his political sympathies. There is something to this--Ezer Weizman, the former commander of the Israel Air Force, was promoted to deputy chief of staff but was never made chief of staff and quit in frustration. Sharon's failure to win promotion was probably due in equal parts to his personality and politics. In September he had his revenge by forcing four right-of-center parties to combine to form the Likud (union in Hebrew). Sharon joined the Liberal wing of the Likud to avoid competing with Weizman in Herut.

The Israeli Right had foundered for a decade. It consisted mainly of two parties: Herut, successor both to the Revisionist Party of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky and to the Irgun Zvai Leumi underground, representing the nationalist right; and the Liberal Party, successor to Haim Weizmann's General Zionists, representing the small businessmen of the economic right. In 1965 Herut and the Liberals had formed an electoral pact known as Gahal (Herut-Liberal Block in Hebrew).  In 1966 Shmuel Tamir, a former Irgun commander and very successful lawyer was forced out of Herut by Begin for challenging him and formed the Free Center Party. And in 1968 when Rafi combined with Mapai and Ahdut Ha'Avoda on the Left to form the Israel Labor Party, David Ben-Gurion remained outside out of spite and formed the State List. Sharon by combining these four parties made something that was greater than the sum of their parts.