Treasure Trove

 

Excerpts of an article in the Jerusalem Post, May 4 1979, by Joshua Justman, written upon publication of Moshe Sharett's 8-volume Personal Diary, annotated and edited by Yaakov Sharett, an important and controversial publication at the time, still relevant today. – Ed.

 

The Society is presently working on an abridged English version of the Personal Diary, to be published in the near future.

 

Moshe Sharett was a compulsive writer. He enjoyed the very act of writing, the flavor of words and the quest for precision of expression. He always looked back with nostalgia to his days on Davar, and seemed to find some compensation in the paperwork - memos, reports, letters - he did at the Foreign Ministry, and before that at the Jewish Agency.

 

Despite its copious, almost daily, entries (many dealing with matters of little import), the extensive digressions and the elaborate descriptive passages, this is by no means a diary kept at leisure. Most of it was written under the extremely heavy pressure of work and great mental strain, very often in the middle of the night when he was on the verge of physical exhaustion. "This diary is shortening father's life," Zippora Sharett wrote their son. However, he felt "dutybound" and was "imbued with the desire" to go on.

 

Quite obviously it was a burden, but one which Sharett clung to with tenacity. He was driven to it by the need to find an outlet for a pent-up feeling of frustration rooted in his inability to express his personality fully and independently. It was the barrier of Ben-Gurion's shadow which he sought to break through.

 

Sharett questioned the very tenets of Ben-Gurion's activist policy and rejected as disastrous the path of "teaching the Arabs a lesson" by escalating retaliatory actions aimed at a military resolution. He was out to block and reverse this "wild" trend and to contain the "lust for fighting," with its corrupting effects.

 

Sharett minces no words in accusing the military establishment of manipulating facts, withholding information and falsifying reports in order to justify, or get approval for, retaliatory operations. He was deeply shocked by the cover-up of the Kibya affair, and by the hush- up of a case involving the killing by paratroopers of five Bedouin in an act of personal revenge.

 

The fact that the activist policy In all its forms had the enthusiastic support of the vast majority of the population disturbed him greatly, and he saw in it a grave threat to the State's moral foundations. Politically he saw this policy as leading to a dangerous impasse and to Israel's growing isolation.

 

Sharett agreed that in certain circumstances a retaliatory operation was unavoidable, but warned that such operations "ought be guided by the realization that they will not bring peace closer, but rather make its prospects even more remote." Sharett advocated diplomacy, moderation and restraint as the way to win international support and allay Arab suspicions and fears, develop trust, and ultimately bring about Arab acceptance of the State of Israel. Thus when Ben-Gurion was pointing to the dangers posed by the growing Arab - and especially Egyptian - military might and warning that Nasser was preparing for war, Sharett wrote: "One has to seek an answer to the dangers in non-military measures: in raising a new proposal for the solution of the refugee problem, coupled with a courageous offer of compensation, in mending our relations with the powers and in active striving for an understanding with Egypt."

 

The 1956 Sinai Campaign found Sharett out of the government and on a mission in Asia. It came to him as a profound shock. "We are the aggressors!" - was his one-line entry on the day the news of the war reached him in New Delhi.

 

Sharett then realized why Ben-Gurion had ousted him from the Cabinet a few months before: he would have been an obstacle to the campaign. Some time later, Sharett minutes: "In the midst of taking stock of the gains and losses of this war it is quite obvious to me that I am one of its casualties. As a political man I fell victim to this war and this casualty, too, ought to be counted."

 

No short review can adequately convey the panorama of events and figures presented in this unique diary. The reader is given a new insight into the "Lavon Affair"; he is shown the complexities of political negotiations and disputes; he gets a close-range view of the making of a coalition government, with its behind-the-scenes wrangling and "deals": and he follows the careers of the "men at the top" as they are seen and described by Sharett with sharpness and frankness.

 

Standing out above all this is the moral force which dominated Sharett's personality. He was not a man of extremes, but neither was he a man of compromise when it came to matters of values and conscience. "I...stand before my conscience, the cruel and tyrannical ruler, to whom I am subservient all my life like a willing slave "

 

This extraordinary diary, besides being a unique human document, is a treasure trove for the student of Israel's contemporary history and invaluable for the understanding of one of its crucial periods.