A Dove Among Hawks: Moshe Sharett –
the Political Tragedy of an Israeli Leader
Yaakov Sharett
Moderation or escalation - these were the two basic alternatives in the entwined domains of foreign and defense policies confronting Israel's leadership immediately after the historic and bloody victory in the War of Independence in 1948-1949, and that have confronted government after government unceasingly to this very day. It was the choice of history that these two contradictory and fateful alternatives were first epitomized by David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. These two outstanding leaders had stood together at the helm of the Yishuv - the Jewish community of
It took
But how did it all start? How did it evolve? Why has escalation, as represented by Ben-Gurion, and not moderation, as represented by Sharett, held the upper hand for so long?
Touching briefly on a few landmarks of Sharett's personal history might give us some relevant answers to these intriguing questions. Sharett was born in 1894 in the city of
After four difficult years in
Sharett, by nature a rationalist and
by position and capacity keenly aware of the do’s and don’ts governing the
international arena, wanted
Generally speaking, Ben Gurion, a man
of vision, felt much less bound by mundane considerations. He saw history as a
flow of time punctuated by sudden opportunities to be seized upon for
establishing faits accomplis. Level-headed Sharett was not oblivious to
historical opportunities, but argued that once the miraculous advent of Israel
occurred, and once the majority of UN members recognized the increase of its
territory resulting from its victory over the various Arab armies which tried
to destroy it while defying the UN decision of November 29, 1947 to partition
Palestine, it should refrain from future adventurous political and military
operations. Ben Gurion disagreed. His political philosophy harbored a messianic
strain, manifested time and again in his urge to engage militarily in
geopolitical changes which would expand
It seems appropriate to cite here from
historian Michael Breecher’s interview with Sharett where the latter delineated
the differences between himself and Ben Gurion: “I am quiet, reserved, careful.
Ben Gurion is impulsive, impetuous, and intuitive. My capital C is Caution; Ben
Gurion’s capital C is Courage”. On another occasion, right after the
Anglo-French-Israeli collusion in the 1956 War (which had been the reason for
his ousting from Government), he said:
As it appears that standing at this
country’s helm entails adventurism and deception, and seeing that I am not able
to do either, it follows that I am not fit for that position. My nature
dictates that I consider the risks and not rush into an adventure. I shall be cautious
and not tempt fate. Therefore, I shall neither lie nor instruct others to lie.
This is neither an expression of self righteousness nor show of it. It is an
admission of my limitations and my acknowledgment of them. There is a chasm
between our political thoughts and actions – they do not converge.
I am prepared to assume that in the
end, history will justify both the deception and the adventurous campaign. Be
it as it may, there is one thing I am certain about: I, Moshe Sharett, am
incapable of these deeds. I therefore cannot stand at this country’s helm.
*
During the War of Independence, when
Ben Gurion’s proposal to his cabinet that the IDF exploit a certain opportunity
and occupy the southern part of the West Bank was outvoted by a majority of one
– that of Sharett – Ben Gurion was deeply annoyed and later accused Sharett
more than once of being responsible for that missed opportunity about which
“generations will mourn”. (Ben Gurion’s disciples corrected this omission and
put an end to the mourning in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel’s eastern border
moved up to the Jordan river at the expense of the occupied Palestinians and
their West Bank territory, but Sharett’s refusal to accept Dayan’s strategy for
solving Israel’s security problem was justified when the solution fathered a
new, much more acute problem – for who-knows-how-many generations to mourn).
*
After
At the time Sharett was no longer a
cabinet member – having been forced to tend his resignation a few months prior
to the outbreak of war as mentioned above – however, there is no doubt that he would
have vehemently opposed going into that war, to say nothing of Ben Gurion’s
predilection for territorial expansionism.
A not altogether dissimilar instance
occurred about two years earlier, in February 1954, when Minister of Defense
Lavon and Chief of Staff Dayan pressed for the military annexation of a strip
of Southern Lebanon and for the establishment there of a Christian state which
would undoubtedly in their views make peace with Israel. At that time Ben
Gurion, out of Government and staying in kibbutz Sde Boker in the distant
Is there
any chance that the Arab League would accept
*
To reiterate: Once the State of Israel was established, the clash
between level headed, moderate and cautious Sharett and volatile, messianic Ben
Gurion was inevitable. The problem facing the leadership of
Ben Gurion went even a step further. According to his
line of thinking, it might very well be that the series of military
retaliations would not suffice. At a certain point, then, a preventive war
against all or one of the Arab states would become inevitable. It is indeed not
clear whether this reasoning originated with Ben Gurion or with Chief of Staff
Moshe Dayan, who had a far-reaching influence over him. It was Dayan’s tenet
that the War of Independence did not “end” as it should have with the IDF reaching
the river
Sharett’s political philosophy clashed
head-on with the above. His course of thinking did not follow from the present
to the future, but on the contrary, from the future to the present. While
acutely cognizant of the Arabs’ spirit of revenge towards Israel, he reasoned
that since Israel was forever destined to be a small non-Arab island in the
vast Arab ocean, and since ultimately it must reach peace with its neighbors,
for it cannot live on the sword forever, she should, from the outset, pursue a
policy calculated to blunt the sting of their 1948-49 trauma. The Arabs must be
given time to heal their wounds and come to terms with the new
Sharett was outraged by the spirit of
revenge and retaliation that was generally rampant among the commanding
officers of the IDF. A modern state, he argued, cannot behave as a Bedouin
tribe in the wild desert. “These men are beyond me,” he wrote in his diary
about the IDF officers. “They have grown accustomed to the idea that the army’s
morale cannot be sustained without giving it license to vent its emotions by
bloodletting from time to time.” Following a bloody incident when a Jewish
settler in a border area was murdered by an Arab infiltrator, Sharett the
public-minded statesman could not ignore outraged public opinion over a chain
of such incidents and therefore, against his better judgment, approved a
military retaliation. On the same day he confided in his diary:
This murder was considered the last
straw and anger must be assuaged. This is the only logic, and none other. I do
not believe that retaliation will make the slightest difference from a security
point of view. On the contrary, I fear that it will launch a new chain of
bloodshed in the border area. The edifice I have tenaciously taken pains to
construct for the past months and all the measures of restraints I tried to
install against Israeli retaliatory steps – all this is liable to be wiped out
with one fell swoop. Come what may, I feel that I have no alternative.”
Whether or not Sharett was right in
this prognosis, he was practically alone in calling for its implementation.
Even after Ben Gurion’s surprising retirement from the Government towards the
end of 1953, paving the way for his replacement by his second-in-command, Sharett’s
premiership was untenable. For one thing, although Ben Gurion kept to his
distant kibbutz in the
Still, as evident from his diary, on
assuming office Sharett planned to quell the IDF’s prognosis, i.e. that
It is important to bear in mind that Sharett’s
tenure of less than two years as Prime Minister was not only fraught with
obvious, objective difficulties, but also too short-lived. Thus he never did
really have a “fighting chance” to implement his political agenda. As if to
prove Sharett’s precarious position, a most unhealthy situation evolved in
February 1955 when Ben Gurion, in the wake of the forced resignation of Defence
Minister Pinhas Lavon, returned from Sde Boker to become once again Minister of
Defence under Sharett’s premiership. This unhealthy situation was corrected a
few months later, when after the general elections of November 1955, Ben Gurion
regained his former premiership. Sharett, acknowledging Ben Gurion’s seniority,
remained in his new cabinet as Foreign Minister but was cruelly torn between
his will to serve as a moderate balancing weight in the new political
constellation and his clear awareness of his political weakness opposite the
revived Ben Gurion-Dayan coalition. It was obvious to all political observers
that his days in Government were numbered.
Sharett himself was certainly aware of
the personal consequences his opposition to the stronger Ben Gurion must
inevitably bring about. His moral integrity and political philosophy led him to
clashes with Ben Gurion – before Ben Gurion became Prime Minister again, as
well as afterwards. Even though he was not a charismatic and feared leader as
was his opponent, he put all his weight against a series of Ben Gurion
proposals in the cabinet to approve military retaliations against Israel’s
neighbors, and at least four times he outvoted Ben Gurion, thus thwarting major
operations planned by Dayan (such as seizure of the whole Gaza Strip, or of the
Eilat – Sahrm-A-Sheihk strip on the Red Sea). It was only natural that the
frustration that Prime Minister Ben Gurion suffered at Sharett’s hands would
exacerbate their relations even further.
But while Sharett succeeded several
times in carrying the majority of cabinet members with him, he was not prepared
to bring about a showdown between him and Ben Gurion in the higher institutions
of their common party of Mapai. For Sharett was essentially not an ambitious
politician aiming at reaching the top. He had no autocratic strain in his
personality and consequently he was neither a feared nor adored leader inside
*
In one major case, Prime Minister Sharett
failed to thwart Minister of Defense Ben Gurion’s proposal for a military
retaliation against
Upon the implementation of the Egyptian-Soviet
arms deal, IDF experts assumed the modernized Egyptian army would be ready to
initiate a heavy military strike against
The party’s choice was to be expected.
Ben Gurion won the day. Sharett tended his resignation. Inasmuch as he believed
in his ability to have a reasonable chance of convincing Mapai’s Central
Committee of the soundness of his policy of moderation and of the basic mistake
involved in opting for a war in which Israel would be the instigator and
obvious aggressor, he characteristically desisted from giving fight. He
reasoned, perhaps correctly, that in that case it was not too far-fetched to
surmise that the resigned Ben Gurion, backed by the whole defense
establishment, would continue fighting him. The result would be a devastating
split in Mapai which would make his position as Prime-Minister untenable.
Moreover, during that momentous event of Ben Gurion’s ultimatum, none of his
Mapai colleagues in the Cabinet sided with him; Sharett, a lonely, single dove
in the midst of warlike hawks, asked himself: “Suppose I do win the rank and
file of the Party, can I go on collaborating with these colleagues, who have
just succumbed to Ben Gurion’s ultimatum and agreed with his aggressive,
escalationist policy?” Thus, on
What Sharett did not know was that throughout
the few last months of his tenure in Ben Gurion’s Government as Foreign
Minister, Defense Ministry representatives, under Ben Gurion’s directions,
began clandestine talks with their French counterparts in order to amalgamate
their collusion towards toppling President Nasser. It was in this context that
on June 22, only four days after Sharett’s forced resignation, an Israeli
mission – established while Sharett was still at the helm of his Ministry – headed
by Dayan and Peres, flew over to France where they agreed to cooperate militarily
with France against Nasser’s Egypt. Little did Sharett know, at the time of his
forced resignation, that Ben Gurion and Dayan had already decided that war
against
And on December 2 he added:
It is possible that from
an historical and objective standpoint, the nation was ordered. as it were, to
seize upon this course of action of the Sinai Operation, and no other. Who is a
prophet to know? But whatever the truth may be, it was evident to all that the
operation and the victory involved casualties and losses and new dangers – in
all aspects and on all fronts. It was also clear to me that one of the
casualties was me. As a statesman I have fallen in the battle, and that loss
should be recorded as well.
But was Sharett the man the real
victim of this fateful military action – of this first optional war of
The question is easier to ask than to
answer. It seems we are confronted here with one of the greatest “ifs” of
Still, the future series of wars and
mini-wars and Intifadas which befell Israel ever since the 1956 War seem to
indicate that while the man and statesman Moshe Sharett has gone under almost
total eclipse, his conceptions of moderation and conflict management are too
obstinate to vanish. Indeed, they seem to be ideas and ideals searching for a
leadership of integrity, high moral principles, courage and eloquence, around which
the people should rally – a leadership which
* A considerable number of historians and observers attribute this term to the 1956 war since that was Israel’s first war of choice and demonstrated a deliberate intention of territorial expansionism.