The Road not Taken
By Yaakov Sharett
Moshe
Although Sharett had not remained idle since his first,
political “death” - in fact, he died while actively and successfully
functioning as the chairman of the World Zionist Oganization and the Jewish
Agency - he was clearly a man deeply frustrated and depressed throughout his
last nine years. It seems he was too strong to calmly accept his abrupt,
complete distancing from his life's calling - standing at the helm of the
political front of the Yishuv for 15 years as the head of the Jewish Agency's
political department (1933-1948), and then as the foreign minister of the newly
born Jewish state for eight years.
Sharett the man, the statesman, his deeds, his
achievements and failures have been clearly and quite naturally almost
completely forgotten. Not only was he the first Israeli prime minister to have
died; he left the Israeli scene so early that the vast majority of Israelis now
alive were born or immigrated into Israel after his disappearance from public
consciousness. The 20 shekel bill carrying his picture and excerpts of one of
his great speeches, the many streets, suburbs and foundations all over the
country carrying his name prompt nobody to ask: Who was this man, after all?
However, in the main it was not chronology which made a
major contribution toward Sharett's absence from the active national memory,
but his staunch “dovish” political line, which he pursued consistently as a
foreign and prime minister. While along the pre-state years at the Jewish
Agency executive he and the Agency's chairman Ben-Gurion successfully
cooperated in the common Zionist struggle to achieve Jewish statehood in
Palestine, it soon became clear that once the great aim has been achieved, a
constantly widening rift has occurred between No. 1 and No. 2 of the state and
of the Israeli Labor Party leadership.
While
prime minister and defense minister Ben-Gurion, who conducted IDF's successful
fighting in the War of Independence, reasoned that in view of the Arab vengeful
feelings and cries for “a second round,” Israel's Arab neighbors should be time
and again reminded of Israel's military prowess, and consequently favored a
policy of harsh military retaliation following Arab terrorist infiltration into
Israel, not so foreign minister Sharett.
Sharett thought that for the time being, Arab cries for
a second round were irrelevant, for it would take them several years to rebuild
their armies. Israel, he reasoned, should use these years for toning down Arab
intransigence; any military blow dealt by the IDF to an Arab neighbor cannot
but revive and deepen animosity, thus if Israel indeed sought peace, it should
endeavor to lower the flames of hatred and vengeance, not intensify them. “Can
The Sharett-Ben-Gurion controversy was not conducted
between equal forces, for the whole Israeli military establishment, headed by
charismatic chief of staff Moshe Dayan, stood firmly behind the defense
minister. Dayan, too, for his part, favored a second round - but an Israeli
one. He reasoned that the War of Independence had really not ended and that
That Dayan succeeded in convincing Ben-Gurion to accept his prognosis and plans is well documented. Obviously, it sealed Sharett's ouster from the political arena, for - and this too is well documented - Sharett succeeded more than once to convince the majority of Cabinet ministers to vote down Ben-Gurion's and Dayan's proposals for mounting military operations against an Arab country (the most famous case was Sharett's success in toppling Ben-Gurion's proposal to occupy
