The Alternative That Flickered

“My country has left me”

by Yaakov Sharett

 

The year 1954 was Moshe Sharett’s only full year as Prime Minister. He served as Israel’s second Prime Minister and Foreign Minister between January 1954 and August 1955.

 

This brief term can be explained by the fact that Sharett was given the post temporarily after Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, suddenly resigned. Ben-Gurion went to Sde Boker at the end of 1953, but continued to exert his influence from there, since he remained party leader, and even declared that he would be back.

 

Some believe that Ben-Gurion's resignation at the end of 1953 was designed to distance Sharett from the cabinet because he opposed heating up the borders with retaliation operations and warned against launching a pre-emptive war, or even talking about it - because talk just might start it. Indeed, when Ben-Gurion retired, he recommended that his party appoint Levi Eshkol, not Sharett, next Prime Minister. This move failed, but before leaving, Ben-Gurion managed to plant two booby traps for Sharett: He chose the extremist Pinhas Lavon as Defense Minister, and appointed the belligerent Moshe Dayan Chief of Staff.

 

Sharett did not have the slightest chance of overpowering the defense establishment. The IDF top brass ignored his authority and conducted an independent retaliation policy behind his back. Chief of Staff Dayan, who sought a war with Egypt, openly incited the officers against Sharett. In an odd twist of fate, it so happened that in the days of Israel's most moderate Prime Minister, the IDF operated Intelligence Branch agents in Egypt in July 1954 - without Sharett's knowledge and while he was conducting secret negotiations with President Nasser - in what would later be known as "The Affair". When the whole affair exploded, it marked the end of Sharett's term. Ben-Gurion returned to the Cabinet as Defense Minister (after Sharett fired Lavon) and, after the 1955 elections, was appointed Prime Minister again, replacing Sharett.

 

Being an intelligent man and a foreign minister who was sensitive to Israel's international status, Sharett realized that the very establishment of the State of Israel had put an end to the element of expansion in Zionism. He maintained that once the Jewish settlement had become a sovereign state and a member of the family of nations with equal rights and duties, new rules of existence applied to it. One of the most important of them was: no more conquering of territory.

 

Ben-Gurion did not agree. He did not consider the cease-fire lines of 1949 sacred. In his Independence Day speech in 1955, he declared: "Our future does not depend on what the gentiles say, but on what the Jews do."

 

Sharett rejected this ethnocentric and narrow-minded approach. Unlike Ben-Gurion, he maintained - right from the start, without having to learn the lessons of future wars - that Israel would not be able to live by its sword forever, nor could it surrender its resources to the military. Therefore, he demanded that Israel observe a policy of anti-escalation: Violent initiatives were doomed to breed counter-violence, in an endless vicious circle. Favoring restraint and compromise, Sharett drew on his personal experiences. He said in a lecture once: "I cannot expect all of you to spend two years in an Arab village, like I did, to realize that Arabs are humans; that they have a mind, reason, dignity and human emotions, and that they too can be shocked." (from Personal Diary, p. 1,507)

 

Ben-Gurion did not share these insights; hence the two were destined to collide. It was also obvious who would emerge victorious: Ben-Gurion was a charismatic leader of national and international stature. Sharett was a leader whose reasonable ideas and search for compromises could not excite the masses.

 

Faithful to his beliefs, Sharett managed to frustrate Ben-Gurion's initiatives to conquer the Gaza Strip and Sharm al-Sheikh, and prevented several retaliation operations. But it was he who authorized a large-scale retaliation operation (whose scope seems to have been expanded without his knowledge and not for the first time) against the Egyptian Army in Gaza on 28 February 1955. Again, it was ironic that under this moderate Prime Minister, Israel conducted an operation that gave a push to the Egyptian-Czech arms deal which, one year later, led to Israel's first war of choice.

 

Sharett was the main obstacle in the path of Ben-Gurion and his allies to a pre-emptive war with Egypt. Ben-Gurion was thus convinced that Sharett must be removed from the Cabinet. He was deposed four months before Israel went to war.

 

In his eight-volume diary, Sharett wrote that he should be counted among the casualties of the 1956 war, adding:

"My country has left me... It is not up to me to run this country, which seems to be an impossible thing to do without resorting to adventurism and deceit. I am incapable of either. I will forever weigh the risks and not rush into an adventure. I will be cautious and not gamble with our future. I am not being self-righteous nor am I pretending to be so. I am merely admitting to my limitations and accepting them. The two paths are entirely different; one cannot walk both at the same time. The country is going along a path that is not mine. Things have gone too far, Final facts have been established and basic concepts have been taught that can no longer be corrected in this generation. And the next generation is not mine anyway." (from Personal Diary, p. 1,834).

 

From “Those Were the Years”, Nissim Mishal, Yediot Aharonot 1998