The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World
416
The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World
416Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
After Israel won its war of independence in 1948, founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion realized that his country faced the possibility of having to fight Arab nations again in the future. He embraced the idea of developing a nuclear capability and put a young lieutenant, Shimon Peres, in charge of the project. This was the beginning of Israel's quest for nuclear capability, a project that could not have happened without the cooperation of the French. In The Bomb in the Basement, journalist Michael Karpin gives us the most complete account of how Israel became the Middle East's only nuclear power and how its status as an officially unacknowledged nuclear nation affects the politics of that volatile region.
Karpin's research includes exclusive interviews that provide new insights into the key figures behind the program (notably a harsh rivalry between Peres and Isser Harel, the first head of Mossad). He explains how different U.S. administrations have dealt with Israel's nuclear status, from Eisenhower's disapproval to Johnson's open support. And he shows how the key to Israel's nuclear capability has been its policy of "nuclear ambiguity."
A compelling account of a complicated history, The Bomb in the Basement raises provocative questions about how Israel's nuclear arsenal may affect not only its own future, but the future of the entire Middle East.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743265959 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2007 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Dreadful Journey
Ben-Gurion stood in silence at the edge of the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, tears rolling down his cheeks. A British major stood at his side and described the scene of horror he had witnessed when he entered the camp as it was liberated six months before, on April 15, 1945. There were piles of corpses between the long lines of barracks. One of the heaps of bodies was higher than the roof of the barracks. On the pathways lay hundreds of living skeletons. Thousands were dying of starvation and disease inside the huts. In the five days that followed, fourteen thousand inmates died of typhus and dysentery. The British army lacked the means to cope with a disaster of such dimensions. To wipe out the typhus epidemic, they had to burn the barracks. They rounded up German civilians from the vicinity and ordered them to bury the corpses. The Germans picked up the bodies and threw them into the pit. This is where they were buried, said the major, pointing at the roped-off mound of loose earth in front of them.
Ben-Gurion was stunned. A seventeen-year-old camp survivor, Tamar Shpruch, remembers seeing him, a short, sturdy figure in a cloth coat, hunched up and weeping. She remembers that day — the date etched in her memory, October 27, 1945. She had pushed into the circle of Jewish survivors surrounding him because she knew his name. She did not know then that he was the leader of the Jews of Palestine, then under the British mandate.
Years later, Ben-Gurion's closest aide, Yitzhak Navon, who in the late 1970s was to become the fifth president of Israel, related that Ben-Gurion had never been able to free himself of the scenes he had witnessed in Germany in the autumn of 1945. "When he remembered that journey, he would emotionally describe what he had experienced, and tear at his hair and ask, 'How could it happen? Such horrible slaughter. Such awful atrocities,'" Navon recalled.
David Ben-Gurion traveled to Germany in mid-October 1945, five months after the Nazis surrendered to the Allies, to get a firsthand impression of the aftermath of the destruction of European Jewry. In the displaced-persons camps, he met those who had survived the ghettoes and the death camps, among them distant relatives and acquaintances from his birthplace in Poland. From them he heard tales that left him in shock. The scope of the Holocaust was already known across the world; this is not what astonished Ben-Gurion. But for a Jew who had spent the war years far from the European inferno, this first human contact with the living testimonies from hell was stunning, heartbreaking.
Ben-Gurion visited the Dachau concentration camp, outside Munich, and the extermination camp at Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover. At Dachau, he paced the length of the barracks that had housed the inmates, and gazed at the narrow, wooden bunks into which they had been crammed. At one end of the camp, he stood in shock facing the crematorium. The stench of burned flesh still hung in the air. On the vast plateau where the Bergen-Belsen camp had been built, Ben-Gurion stopped at the memorial monuments that had just been put up over the mass graves, and copied into his notebook the epitaphs inscribed on them.
Groups of excited survivors pressed around Ben-Gurion, and he stood among them, listening patiently to their accounts, and asking questions. What had they gone through? How had the Nazis abused and tortured them and murdered their families? Who had rescued them? Diligently, he recorded their replies in his notebook. Survivors spoke all at once, the stories of their ordeals tumbling out, and he made no attempt to hush them, but listened patiently, asking an occasional question in Polish or Yiddish, sometimes uttering an emotional phrase in Hebrew.
He asked in Polish if they were ready to go to Palestine. Some said "Yo" in Yiddish, and others "Ken" in Hebrew — yes. Some shouted "Bravo!" and clapped their hands. He told them the journey was perilous, that the British had imposed a blockade along the Mediterranean coastlines to prevent Jews from reaching Eretz Yisrael (Hebrew for the Land of Israel, what was then Palestine), beyond the minuscule immigration quota that they had set. Perhaps the survivors who wanted to go would have to break the blockade by force, launch hunger strikes, face dangerous situations. Most responded with enthusiastic cries of "We are ready," and "Give the orders."
Ben-Gurion spoke quietly. He said there was only one solution to the dire condition of the Jewish people: "Eretz Yisrael as a Jewish center, which does not rely on others but builds its strength, its will and its independence." Tamar Shpruch remembers that sentence, which Ben-Gurion would repeat in various versions countless times in the years to come.
Someone began to sing the anthem of the Jewish partisans who had fought the Nazis, and others joined in. They sang all of the verses in Yiddish; some of them wept. Ben-Gurion listened, visibly moved. After the song, there was quiet. Ben-Gurion said it was the first time he had heard it, and asked how many Jewish partisans there had been. "Many," "thousands," came the reply from the crowd. For Ben-Gurion, the fact that thousands of Jews had fought the Nazis was a tremendous revelation. Not all the Jews had surrendered abjectly and gone passively to their deaths, as the world had been led to believe. Many had chosen to fight back. He asked them to dictate the words of the song and he wrote them down, slowly in his notebook:
You must not say that you now walk the final way,Because the darkened heavens hide the blue of day.
The time we've longed for will at last draw near,
And our steps, as drums, will sound that we are here.
Ben-Gurion's host in Germany was General Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander. Smith gave Ben-Gurion a military escort and introduced him as head of the Jewish community in Palestine to Eisenhower. According to Ben-Gurion, Eisenhower received him with a "warm welcome" and called him "the moving spirit behind the enterprise of building Palestine." Fifteen years would pass until the two would meet again: In 1960, Eisenhower, as president of the United States, was host to the first-ever visit — albeit not a state visit — to the White House by an Israeli prime minister: David Ben-Gurion. Then Ben-Gurion would plead for arms to meet Israel's defense needs, but now, at Eisenhower's Frankfurt headquarters, there were other matters on the agenda. Ben-Gurion first thanked Eisenhower for the adequate treatment given to the Jewish refugees, then suggested that they all be concentrated in one area, under a form of "self-management," and that they have "physical training, drill exercises and discipline," in order to bolster their confidence in themselves and to "minimize contacts with Germans."
But bolstering the self-confidence of the refugees and boosting their spirits was not what was on Ben-Gurion's mind when he met with the supreme Allied commander. Since the end of the world war, Ben-Gurion's acute political sense had led him to concentrate on building up the military strength of the Jews in Palestine. Ben-Gurion wanted to integrate some of the refugees, at least the younger ones, in his plans to defend against what he was sure was an imminent attack by the Arabs. If conditions could be created within the displaced-persons camps that would make it possible to organize the young Jews in semimilitary formations and even to train them in the use of light arms, they could then be shipped to Palestine and sent into the battlefield immediately after disembarking. The British were still refusing to give up their mandate and remove their army, and so were thereby delaying the declaration of Jewish independence. But to Ben-Gurion that event was visible on the horizon, and he knew that when it came, a bitter struggle with the Arab states would ensue. Ben-Gurion's analysis proved very accurate.
One evening at the end of October 1945, a few days after Ben-Gurion's visit to Bergen-Belsen, emissaries from Palestine loaded Tamar Shpruch's group of halutzim onto a military truck that had been stolen from a British army camp not far from Belsen. The truck set out for the port of Le Havre in France, on the English Channel. Two days later, the truck reached its destination and stopped. A handsome young man in an English officer's uniform lifted the canvas cover of the back of the truck, climbed in, and said in perfect German, "My name is Meir Mardor, but everyone calls me Munya. Our people stole this truck from the British army for you. Soon you'll be boarding a cargo ship that we bought in America and outfitted here. You are part of the quota that the British have set for Jewish immigration into Palestine, and therefore I do not expect you to have any problems. Soon we'll meet in Eretz Yisrael." Minutes later, the group was climbing the ship's gangplank and onto the upper deck.
In those days, Mardor was one of the heads of the underground organization known as "Ha-Mossad l'Aliyah Bet," or the "Institute for Illegal Immigration," which had been set up by the Zionist movement in order to smuggle displaced Jewish refugees from across the continent to European ports, and from there by ship to Palestine. From Ha-Mossad l'Aliyah Bet evolved Ha-Mossad le'Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim (Institute for Intelligence and Special Duties), or "the Mossad" in short, founded in 1951, Israel's equivalent to the CIA.
Munya Mardor would later become the director of RAFAEL, the Israeli government's arms development agency. Mardor, according to foreign reports, headed the team of experts who developed Israel's atomic capability.
While Tamar's ship was leaving Le Havre on its way to the Mediterranean, Ben-Gurion was in Paris. There he summoned senior Mossad operatives and ordered them to step up the pace at which they were shipping the refugees out of Europe, despite the British blockade of the Palestinian coast. For months he had concentrated a great deal of effort on enlisting the support of French military and political officials who had fought the Nazis as members of the Maquis. They had emerged from the underground only a short while before, when the Allies had invaded Europe and liberated France. He conferred with some of the heads of l'armée juive, the "Jewish army," which had fought as part of the French underground. He also met with commanders of General Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces, who had operated in exile out of London and had now returned and were filling key posts in the interim government in Paris. This network of French support assisted Ben-Gurion in setting up a sophisticated operational headquarters in Paris. Senior French government officials and army officers helped Mossad overcome the obstacles placed by the British in the way of the migration of Jews to Palestine. They enlisted military experts, contributed funds, and even supplied the Mossad operatives with weapons.
Support was forthcoming from the very highest echelons of the French government. The foreign minister, Georges Bidault, quoted de Gaulle to Ben-Gurion. "I have been to Palestine," the French leader said, "and I have seen that the Jews are the only force that is building it." Bidault himself said at the meeting that "the government of France relates with sympathy to Zionism." In 1938, Bidault had led the French opposition to the Munich agreement with Hitler. Immediately after the French capitulation to Germany, the Vichy regime arrested him. He was released on probation, joined the Maquis, and was involved in an underground newspaper, Combat, whose editor was the writer Albert Camus. At the end of May 1943, after the legendary underground leader Jean Moulin was captured by the Nazis and killed in prison, Bidault replaced him. Before D-Day in June 1944, he was made responsible for coordination between the invading Allied forces and the Maquis cells. A Catholic, he felt close to Zionism mainly because of the common fate of the Frenchmen and the Jews in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. He was not alone; many of the leaders of the Free French felt remorse over the fact that some French circles had cooperated with the Nazis in the "Final Solution." Some of them declared this openly.
One of these conscience-stricken Frenchmen was Abel Thomas, an officer in the Free French forces, who had returned to Paris with de Gaulle. He had just learned that his younger brother, Pierre Thomas, a lieutenant in the French Resistance, had been tortured by the Gestapo in the Dora-Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany, where he died of starvation on February 22, 1945, at the age of twenty-three.
Pierre Thomas was not a Jew; he was killed because he fought to liberate his country. Abel heard about the suffering of the Jews in the displaced-persons camps, and felt a commonality of fate. He decided that from then on, he would give as much help as he could to the remnants of the Holocaust. This would become his life's mission.
Ben-Gurion would meet Thomas only in the late 1950s, when the special relationship of the Israelis with the French, whose seeds Ben-Gurion planted in 1945, would reach fruition. At issue when they met was a Soviet threat to launch missiles against Israel, and Thomas was one of the senior French government officials who would move mountains to provide Israel with the means to defend itself. Strange as it is, one could say that the murder of the young Frenchman Pierre Thomas was a crucial early link in a chain of events that years later allowed Ben-Gurion to realize his vision of arming Israel with a nuclear capability.
David Ben-Gurion, the man who conceived the idea of the Jewish doomsday weapon, was born in 1886 in Plonsk, a small provincial town in eastern Poland, which earlier in the 19th century had been conquered by the Russian czarist empire. More than 70 percent of the population of Plonsk were Jews. Avigdor and Sheindel Gruen named their fourth son David Yosef. Avigdor Gruen was an educated, well-read man who spoke several languages and made a living from writing petitions and giving legal advice. Although he wasn't a law graduate, the authorities permitted him to appear in court. "My father gave me my love of the Jewish people, for the Land of Israel, and for the Hebrew language," David Ben-Gurion wrote to his family in New York when Avigdor died. Actually, it was his grandfather, Zvi Arieh Gruen, who taught him Hebrew, which he learned to speak and read fluently.
Young David was weak and sickly, and his mother pampered him and favored him over his brothers. He became very attached to her. "My mother died in my childhood, when I was ten," he related many years later. "But I remember her well, as if she were still alive, and I know she was the epitome of purity, love, nobility, humanity, and devotion."
David Gruen was a classic product of the second generation of the Zionist revolution, which had begun in Eastern Europe a few years before he was born. The revolution's primary goal was to free the Jews from Europe, a hostile environment filled with anti-Semitic hatred, and to settle them in their own land. There they would build a sovereign, modern nation with a single language and a rational economic structure. The vision was to establish in this Land of Israel an exemplary society, secular and democratic, and to create a new type of Jew: a free and productive citizen who would shed the long black coat worn by the ghetto Jew, shave off his side-locks and beard, drop the preoccupation with religious studies and devotions, and let go of the belief that the Land of Israel would be redeemed only by divine providence and the coming of the messiah. The Jews, the early Zionists believed, must discard the traits that characterized the Diaspora in Europe: conservatism, provincialism, narrow-mindedness, and blind resignation to the blows of fate.
"From the age of five, it was clear that I would settle in the Land of Israel," Ben-Gurion told his biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar. In those years, most Jewish migrants headed for the New World. Only a few had the courage to make their way to Palestine. There were fewer than eighty thousand Jews living there in the summer of 1906, when the boat carrying the twenty-year-old David Gruen anchored off Jaffa. That day, he wrote in his diary that he was charmed, happy, and "totally intoxicated." In a letter to his father he gushed in poetic Hebrew: "The air was wonderful, full of sweet scents like the air of the Garden of Eden, clean and clear as pure glass; in that air we could see a distance of dozens of miles." He was in love with the Land of Israel. That night, out of sheer excitement, he couldn't sleep a wink. A week later, he contracted a fever, and a physician, Dr. Stein, advised him to go back to Russia. "There is nothing you can do. You simply can not stay here," he told him. David Gruen did not take his advice, of course.
When he was twenty-four and an agricultural laborer, a halutz in the Land of Israel, he adopted the ancient Hebrew name Ben-Gurion. He was a Zionist and a socialist: He believed Jews had the right to establish a national home of their own in the Land of Israel, and aspired to set up a cooperative, egalitarian Jewish society there. He had been steeped in Zionism at home, and he believed in it with all his heart, uncompromisingly. His socialism developed in the ideological ferment that spread in Russia after the failed revolution of 1905.
Ben-Gurion had abandoned religion in his youth. In one swoop, he turned secular, giving up the tefillin along with prayer and the precepts of Judaism. When his father learned of this, he slapped his son on the cheek for the first and only time in his life, but David was resolute, and his father gave up.
Ben-Gurion was a stocky man, with dark eyes, curly hair, and a disproportionately large head. From an early age he tended to withdraw into himself. His hunger for learning was insatiable, and his memory phenomenal. Strict with himself and determined, he read books obsessively. For most of his life he kept a diary, in which he documented his life hour by hour, event by event. It is therefore easy to follow his steps and to understand his motives.
From an early age Ben-Gurion knew he was meant for greatness; he was driven by a deep sense of mission. His authority was natural and people felt secure in his presence. However, he would pose difficult objectives for himself and his followers. So it was when he informed his comrades in 1932 of his desire to make the socialist camp the majority in the Zionist movement. "When I presented the concrete challenge for the first time...many of the comrades said it was impossible," he wrote to friends three years later. When in November 1929 he announced his decision to bring about a Jewish majority in the land of Israel, his audience thought he was fantasizing. At that time there were five times more Arabs than Jews in the country.
Ben-Gurion could always foresee events that were still a long way over the horizon. Late in 1936 he spoke of "the impending world war." A week after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, on September 8, 1939, he declared in a speech in Jerusalem that World War I "gave us the Balfour Declaration, this time we must bring about a Jewish state." (In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government promised Palestine as a national homeland for the Jews.) Even before the war in Europe, Ben-Gurion foresaw that it would accelerate the breakup of the British Empire, causing the end of the mandate in Palestine and enabling the establishment of a Jewish state.
Nevertheless, on May 8, 1945, as the war was ending, he walked the streets of London, among the ruined buildings, mingling with the jubilant, excited throng, and was depressed. The same night he wrote this in his diary: "A sad day of victory, very sad."
This was far from the finest hour of the Jewish people, who had paid a great price without even beginning to feel the joy of victory. The Jewish sacrifice appeared to have been utterly pointless, without any profit whatsoever, miserable, and humiliating. Of course, in retrospect it was precisely this great disaster, the greatest in the history of the Jewish people, that marked the beginning of the end of the long Zionist struggle for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel. As the dimensions of the Holocaust were emerging after the war's end, Ben-Gurion was convinced that world public opinion would line up behind the underdog and push enlightened leaders to solve the Jewish problem once and for all. The time of trial for all that he had focused his powers on since his youth was fast approaching.
Ben-Gurion came to this historical crossroads fully prepared. In 1945, at age fifty-nine, he was a mature statesman. Since the age of twenty, when he was first elected to a position of leadership, he had planned far ahead. With great skill, he prepared the Jews of Eretz Yisrael for the decisive moment. By the mid-1940s, he had no doubt whatsoever: A brutal military confrontation would soon break out between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine. If the Arabs lost, they would try again and again and again. If the Jews lost but once, they would be doomed to extinction. The Jews must therefore prepare themselves for a prolonged and determined armed struggle.
This way of looking at the reality of the Middle East seems logical and natural today, with the benefit of hindsight, but it was far from the way the early Zionists saw things. The outlook prevalent among the Jewish Zionist pioneers of the early 20th century was very different. Some were motivated by a desire to shape an ideal, utopian reality, influenced by romantic British and German Orientalism, while others were influenced by European colonialist ideology. The implications of these views would be fateful in the future relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.
Most of the Zionist leadership chose to close its eyes and totally ignore the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs with deep roots in Palestine. This is why since the creation of the modern Zionist movement approximately 120 years ago, a myth has grown up, according to which the first Zionists settled in a country empty of inhabitants. When Ben-Gurion encountered this conception, he would dismiss it. "The illusion that Eretz Yisrael is an uninhabited land, in which we can do as we wish, without taking the local population into account, has caused us a great deal of damage," he declared at a meeting of the Jewish National Committee in 1921. A small and elitist circle, Brit Shalom (the Peace League), supported by the philosopher Martin Buber and the first president of the Hebrew University, Yehuda Leib Magnes, advocated the establishment of a joint Jewish-Arab government in a binational state in Palestine. But Ben-Gurion mocked the naïveté of the Brit Shalom circle, and called its members "rootless," meaning they had lost their fundamental national consciousness.
Another grouping, to which Ben-Gurion belonged in his early years in Palestine, adopted a romantic-Marxist approach, holding that the ignorant Arab peasants, who were being exploited by the effendis (landowners), would welcome the educated and progressive Jews as their saviors. After all, both were members of the working class and as such had a common goal, the overthrow of the capitalists. "We have not come here to steal a country," said Ben-Gurion, "but to build it and revive it" — for the Arabs as well as the Jews. This was Zionism's moral justification. The Arabs "should understand this," primarily because "they are incapable of building the country themselves," and secondly because "they aren't strong enough to eject us." He urged his comrades to display solidarity with the Arab peasant: "The encounter between the Hebrew elite and the Arab laborer should be an encounter of working comrades," he wrote in a 1920 article, "On the Arab Peasant and in His Land," in phraseology reminiscent of a Russian revolutionary, adding: "Only between two free national groups of workers, each of which can stand on its own, will it be possible to establish the harmonious and comradely life which we must place at the foundation of our settlement enterprise in the Land." According to this concept, Ben-Gurion expected two societies to develop in parallel in Palestine, each helping the other. Characteristically, he prepared detailed plans for achieving economic and agricultural cooperation, and he expounded on them to both Jews and Arabs. "The Land of Israel will be for both the Hebrew nation and the Arabs who live in it," he wrote in another article, "The Hebrew Worker and the Arab," in 1926.
Ben-Gurion's optimism was justifiable. During most of the 1920s, the relationship between Jews and Arabs was peaceful. The economy expanded. The British administration in Palestine was successfully governing from day to day, but encountered difficulty in navigating between the competing Arab and Jewish national interests. The complications were a direct result of the conflicting territorial promises that the British government made during World War I.
One promise was made to the Arabs in 1915. On behalf of His Majesty, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, had promised the patriarch of the Hashemite family and Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, control of most Arab lands in the Middle East, exclusive of the Mediterranean coast, in exchange for Hussein's commitment to lead a Bedouin armed revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The legendary Lawrence of Arabia (British intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence) guided the successful revolt that ousted the Turks from the entire Arabian Desert, from the Hejaz in the south (which became part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932) to Damascus (Syria) in the north.
Another territorial obligation was made on May 16, 1916, when Britain and France signed the secret Sykes-Picot treaty (the two diplomats who negotiated the treaty were the French François Georges-Picot and the British Mark Sykes), in which the future victorious Allies defined the boundaries of the postwar Middle East. The treaty was in direct contravention of the McMahon-Hussein agreement that had spurred on the Arab Revolt.
A third territorial promise was made to the Jews. On November second 1917, the British foreign minister, Lord Arthur Balfour, issued a declaration announcing his government's support for the establishment of "a Jewish national home in Palestine." The British establishment had a long tradition of supporting the restoration of the Jews in their own land for religious, imperialistic, and even idyllic motives. It has been suggested that the declaration was intended to favor the Jews so that the Jewish communities in the United States and Russia would influence their governments to support the British cause in the war. In any case, this British pledge became the basis for international support for the founding of the modern State of Israel.
Based on the Sykes-Picot treaty, on April 19, 1920, the League of Nations decided to assign Britain the mandate over Palestine and the responsibility for implementing the Balfour Declaration. (France obtained a mandate over Syria, carving out Lebanon as a separate state.)
In 1921, the British divided its mandate in two. East of the Jordan River became the Emirate of Transjordan (today the Kingdom of Jordan) and west of the Jordan River became the Palestine mandate. This was the first time in modern history that Palestine became a unified political entity.
As the '20s drew to an end, the political arena in Palestine began swaying. The rising tide of European Jewish immigration to Palestine (between 1920 and 1930, one hundred thousand Jews came to live in Palestine), Arab land purchases by the Jewish Agency, and the establishment of dozens of new Jewish settlements generated increasing resistance by Arab political leaders. They feared that Jewish expansion would lead to the establishment of a Jewish state.
In 1928, Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem began to clash over their religious rights at the Wailing Wall, the sole remnant of the second Jewish Temple and a holy site to Muslims. The Wailing Wall clashes were tolerable, but tension between the communities had grown and a powerful wave of violence broke out. The grave events that followed caused Ben-Gurion to change his optimistic political outlook in a flash.
On a blazing summer's day — August 23, 1929 — thousands of Arabs, headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, attacked Jews in downtown Jerusalem. Screaming "Itbah al Yahud" ("Kill the Jews"), the mob fell upon passersby, murdering some of them, and looting and burning Jewish stores. The next day rioting spread to other cities and to dozens of smaller communities. In Hebron, fifty-nine Jews were slaughtered; in Safed, ten.
The mandatory (mandate) government's response was hesitant. Only after two days did the British army go into action and quell the rioting. In a week, 133 Jews had been murdered and 339 wounded. Shock gripped the Jews of Eretz Yisrael and the world. It was the first time that Arabs had attacked Jews in an organized onslaught, and was all the more horrifying because the Jews had created the Zionist movement and come to live in the land precisely to get away from pogroms that Russian anti-Semites had perpetrated in the 1880s.
Ben-Gurion's thinking changed rapidly. He possessed an important attribute for a leader: flexibility. His political outlook was never rigid. So when he had absorbed the new situation, he discarded his romantic naïveté toward the Arabs and adopted a pragmatic, determined realism, an awareness of the harsh truth: Two national liberation movements were fighting for the same country.
Foreseeing the future twenty years hence, he wrote: "When a Jewish state is established, it will be attacked by its neighbors." His conclusions were that Arabs would endanger the Jewish entity in Palestine, that they were the true enemy, and it was therefore necessary to bring more young Jews from the Diaspora and to set up an effective defense apparatus. These conclusions seem obvious today, but they were far from self-evident in 1929 and even sounded eccentric. "It is inconceivable that we should live in the Land under the protection of foreign bayonets indefinitely," he wrote, and he told a friend: "It is essential that we solve the security problem with our own resources." The origin of the Jewish army was, therefore, rooted in practical necessity: to respond to the riots instigated by the Arabs.
It was not necessary to exactly match the military power of the Arabs, Ben-Gurion believed. It would suffice if there were two trained Jewish youths for every three Arabs. In the terms prevalent in the Zionist movement in the early 1930s, this was revolutionary. According to the British Mandate census, in 1931 there were 860,000 Arabs and 175,000 Jews in Palestine, and in the age group of twenty to forty, only 30,000 Jews and 100,000 Arabs. Ben-Gurion was demanding that another 30-40,000 young Jews be brought to Eretz Yisrael immediately.
The "disturbances" of 1929, and the "Arab Revolt" of 1936 imbued Ben-Gurion with a deep anxiety, which remained with him throughout his life. In December 1936, at a meeting with his close friends in Jerusalem, he said: "The danger we face is not rioting, but extermination. The attackers will not be only the Arabs of Palestine, but also the Iraqis and Saudi Arabians, and they have warplanes and artillery. We have to prepare seriously to constitute a substantial force in this country, capable of standing up to a massive offensive." His friends looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Others attributed his prophesy of doom to a transient mood. But Ben-Gurion meant what he said, and indeed, his forecast was fulfilled almost entirely twelve years later, immediately after he declared the independence of the State of Israel. And this fear of extermination lasted even after the victory in the War of Independence and led Ben-Gurion to his decision to develop the Israeli nuclear option.
At the beginning of World War II, the Zionist leadership had no doubt that the British government headed by Winston Churchill, Zionism's greatest friend in Britain, would give the Jews their national home in Palestine. The Jews were allies. There were thousands of Jews in the British forces. The Palestinian Arabs supported Hitler, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husayni, had been received as an ally in Nazi Berlin. In 1943, a committee of British cabinet ministers recommended the partition of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs. Churchill called their report "a very nice piece of work." Zionist leaders were quite confident that immediately after the war, Churchill would force his opinions on the cabinet and Parliament, and the way to Jewish independence would be clear.
Reality proved entirely different. In April 1945, Churchill's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, persuaded him that the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs would harm British interests. First of all, the supply of oil from the Middle East would be gravely threatened. Second, the Jews would encourage the entry of the Soviet Union into the Middle Eastern arena. A month earlier, in March, Eden had assisted in the establishment of the Arab League. The British, in order to demonstrate that they were not about to give up the mandate, closed the shores of Palestine to boats carrying Jewish refugees from Europe. Then in July, the British electorate voted out Churchill's Conservative government. Again Zionist leaders rejoiced; after all, the Labor Party had always taken a clearly pro-Zionist stance and at its annual conference one year earlier, in 1944, had adopted a resolution in favor of a Jewish state in all of western Palestine, with the Arab population transferred to the neighboring Arab countries. Labor's policy was so far-reaching that the Zionist leadership had sought to have the population-transfer proposal kept secret, in order not to antagonize the Arab rulers. Now, with Labor in power, the Zionists were confident that the establishment of the Jewish state was a certainty.
But again, they reaped disappointment. In November, it became clear that Labor would not implement the 1944 resolution. The restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine remained in force. At most, the Labor government would be prepared to appoint yet another committee to investigate the possibilities for a solution to the Palestine question.
This was a heavy blow, and the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, was stunned. For years, the well-oiled and efficient Zionist diplomatic machine he headed had striven to achieve one goal: the fulfillment of the British promises encapsulated in the Balfour Declaration. Weizmann, who was to become Israel's first president and a staunch opponent of Ben-Gurion's nuclear project, had no doubt that after the war Britain would remain the dominant power in the Middle East and would have the goodwill to declare an end to the mandate and enable the establishment of a Jewish state. Now, in London his associates were speaking of "British treachery."
Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, was not disappointed. He had not believed that Britain would give up Palestine easily and willingly. In order to hurry the British retreat he turned to a plan of armed struggle. Weizmann objected strenuously. His entire career as a Zionist leader had rested on one principle: the achievement of Jewish goals through diplomacy, and never through force. His close friend the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin called his policy "patient diplomacy." But Ben-Gurion put it this way at a meeting with Sir Isaiah in Washington, D.C., in December 1941: "Weizmann's patient appeals to history and reason are out-dated weapons. The leaders of the world are listening, but they do not do anything...Ultimately, these people will of necessity behave in accordance with the national interests of their countries. They will not be ready to help the Jews on sunny days or on rainy days...Only the Jews themselves, only their power concentrated in the United States and in Eretz Yisrael will stand them in good stead in any circumstances."
Ben-Gurion both admired and despised Weizmann. He admired how the Polish-born professor of chemistry had persuaded the British to give the Jews the Balfour Declaration, but he thought Weizmann loved England, and the English people, more than Eretz Yisrael.
In the variegated gallery of the Zionist leadership, there were no persons more different than these two, in their nature and their appearance. Ben-Gurion the pioneer, wearing work clothes of simple khaki cloth, was a working-class leader, a revolutionary, working his way gradually up the hierarchy of the leadership. Weizmann, a Jewish aristocrat, had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and never knew a moment's poverty or hardship. The one was short and sturdy, incapable of making small talk or exchanging pleasantries; the other tall and aloof, a man of the world who captivated political leaders, generals, and intellectuals with his charm. Ben-Gurion was down-to-earth, energetic, modest to the point of asceticism, and always traveled third-class. Weizmann and his ever-present entourage went first-class; he relished the good life, fine food and wine, and the company of women. The one was an unpolished autodidact, lacking a formal education; the other a world-renowned scientist, who as a faculty member of the University of Manchester during World War I had developed for the British war effort a synthetic acetone for use in explosives, winning him fame and the affection of the nation.
The relationship between the two was complex. They met and corresponded infrequently, but nevertheless for almost the entire first half of the 20th century they trod parallel courses toward a common goal. Both aspired to see the establishment of the Jewish state. Both intended to use moderate, proportionate means to achieve this, and both were repelled by terrorism. Both preferred reaching a territorial compromise with the Arabs. They divided the work: As president of the World Zionist Organization, Weizmann led the worldwide diplomatic effort, and as leader of the workers in Eretz Yisrael, Ben-Gurion set up the infrastructure for the state-to-be. Ben-Gurion guided the practical Zionism that settled and built the Land. Weizmann was at the head of the political Zionism that negotiated in order to gain recognition for Jewish independence in the Land of Israel. As long as the responsibility for the future of Palestine lay with His Majesty's government, agreement usually prevailed between them. Weizmann would do the diplomatic lobbying in London, and Ben-Gurion would fight the British high commissioner in Jerusalem to be allowed another settlement and another immigrant's visa.
When it became clear that Britain was reneging on its commitment to the Zionist movement, Ben-Gurion laid down new guidelines. He launched an open armed struggle against the British mandate, and at the same time sought American sponsorship for the goals of Zionism. This was an expression of a principle that had gathered strength in the wake of the Holocaust and was highly relevant to Ben-Gurion's eventual decision to develop nuclear weapons: The Jews must not rely on gentiles. They must take their fate into their own hands. Moving the focus of the diplomatic struggle to the United States was intended to exploit the power of the American Jewish community and its influence over the administration in Washington.
Weizmann differed with Ben-Gurion on both issues. He argued that an armed struggle against the British would undermine the achievements of Zionism, and he was convinced that the future of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel would be decided according to the wishes of London, not Washington. Abba Hillel Silver, the energetic leader of American Zionists, lined up with Ben-Gurion. Stephen S. Wise, the leader of American Reform Jewry, supported Weizmann's position. After a bitter struggle, Ben-Gurion came out on top. The result of the confrontation was a decline in Weizmann's stature. At the 22nd Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1946, Weizmann failed to win reelection as president of the World Zionist Organization. Six of the nineteen members of the new Zionist executive were Americans.
The diversion of the Zionist diplomatic effort to the United States was a fateful move, perhaps the most important taken by the Zionist movement after the war. Placing the Zionist eggs in the American basket was a significant step forward in the process of achieving independence. Ben-Gurion, with his acute historical and political sense, had determined that America would now lead the free world and decide the fate of the Middle East. The implications of American involvement were a key factor Ben-Gurion would eventually have to take into account in the development of Israel's nuclear capability.
The conflict over whether Zionism's orientation would be British or American had sharpened the antagonism between the two leaders. Some years later, when Weizmann was filling his largely ceremonial post as first president of the State of Israel, and power was concentrated in Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's hands, the nuclear issue sparked a new dispute. Weizmann the scientist (for whom the country's leading research institution, the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, which he ran and where he made his residence, had been named) would marshal all of his considerable influence over the Israeli scientific community to try to sabotage Ben-Gurion's plan to develop a nuclear option.
In the second half of 1945, Ben-Gurion pinned all of his hopes on the American Jewish community and its influence over president Harry S. Truman and his administration. Truman's predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had put Ben-Gurion off, because Roosevelt spoke one language to the Jewish leaders and another to the Arab leaders. But in April 1945, after Roosevelt's sudden death and Truman's swearing in as his successor, Ben-Gurion knew the dice were rolling in his favor. In August, he concluded that Truman would support the Palestine partition plan, and in fact, later that month, immediately after his return from the Allied Big Three's victory summit in Potsdam, Truman announced his wish to see the establishment of a Jewish state. His special emissary Earl G. Harrison, United States representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, traveled to the displaced-persons camps to report on their condition and recommended the immediate transfer of 100,000 Jews to Palestine. The British government ignored the recommendation, but Ben-Gurion was confident that the fate of Zionism was now in good hands. That autumn, on the eve of the fast of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, and after being subjected to an intensive lobbying and softening-up effort by the American Zionist leadership, Truman declared that the United States accepted partition of Palestine. This was the time for Ben-Gurion to launch a huge effort in the United States to prepare for the inevitable military conflict with the Arabs.
Ben-Gurion knew America well. He had lived in New York for three years after the Turks exiled him from Palestine in 1915, and had become fluent in English. In December 1917, he married Paula Monbaz, a New York hospital nurse, and the pair took an apartment in Brooklyn.
Ben-Gurion found similarities between the early American pioneers and the halutzim of Eretz Yisrael. He admired the American Constitution, and the sense of liberty prevalent in the country. The pace of life astonished him. Through the 1940s he visited the United States every two years, staying for several weeks and sometimes for months. Ben-Gurion was in New York from November 1941 to September 1942 and witnessed the country's reaction to the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In May 1942, at a special conference in New York's Biltmore Hotel, Ben-Gurion persuaded the majority of the six hundred delegates of American Jewish organizations to pass a resolution calling for a program of intense activity to increase Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael, including the use of violence against the British mandate. In Zionist history, this resolution is known as "the Biltmore program."
With each visit Ben-Gurion developed a deeper relationship with, and greater esteem for, the leaders of the American Jewish community, such as Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, along with Abba Hillel Silver, Meyer Weisgal, Stephen Wise, Louis Lipsky, and many others. The more he got to know the community and its heads, the more his esteem for them grew. Although most American Jews were at that time not Zionists, he wrote to a friend, "That's where the masses are, that's where the power is, that's where the money is. If we want to do great things, it would be hopeless without America."
In June 1945, Ben-Gurion traveled to New York to raise money for armaments. On his arrival he summoned Weisgal, a Zionist activist, a talented impresario, and a close associate of Weizmann. For hours Ben-Gurion spoke of what was going to happen in Palestine. The Arabs will attack, Ben-Gurion warned, and so there was an urgent need to raise money, acquire arms, and mobilize professional manpower. "He told me at great length what he wanted," Weisgal related in his memoirs. "The main thing was: Can you locate 30 Jews who will follow me blindly, who will do what I ask without asking questions?"
A day later, Henry Montor reported to Ben-Gurion. He was the executive director of the United Palestine Appeal. Weisgal described him as follows: "He had a genius for fundraising, and he knew everybody worth knowing." Montor gave Ben-Gurion a list of seventeen Jews, all of whom, he said, were "men of means, whose dedication to the security of the yishuv could be relied upon." (Ha'yishuv, Hebrew for "the community," was the word used for the Jewish population of Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel.) Everyone on the list was invited to a secret conclave to be held at 9:30 on the morning of Sunday, July 1, at the home of the millionaire Rudolf S. Sonneborn on 57th Street.
Ben-Gurion opened the meeting: "We are soon about to face the armies of all the Arab states, when the British leave the country. We can stand up to them, if we have the weapons that we need. In the ruins and confusion of Europe, there is no certainty that we will be able to get what we thought we would. Most importantly, the weapons that the Haganah has already acquired were adequate to cope with the local Arab gangs, but not regular armies, mostly armed by Britain. It is essential that in due course we build up a military industry, and when this [second world] war ends it will be possible to purchase the necessary machinery and instruments in the USA...Hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions, will be needed for this. Are you ready to provide the necessary funds?"
The discussion went on for seven and a half hours, and when it was over the participants agreed to finance the acquisition of weapons and equipment that the young state would require. Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "This was the best Zionist meeting that I've had in the United States." In the secret papers of the state-in-the-making the seventeen American millionaires were given the code name "the Sonneborn Institute," after their host. In the coming years, its members would contribute millions of dollars to buy munitions, machinery, hospital equipment and medicines, and ships to carry refugees to Eretz Yisrael.
The first consignment of machinery for the production of munitions purchased with money from the Sonneborn Institute left New York for Palestine in February 1946. By January 1947, some 950 shipments of dismantled machinery left the port of New York for Palestine. Chaim Slavin, who later become the director of the Israeli Military Industries, had been sent to New York to organize the shipments. Many years later, Slavin revealed in a press interview that in the consignment documents the crates were described as containing "textile machinery." The British customs officials never suspected anything was amiss, and so the equipment reached its destination and became the foundation of the Israeli military industry.
Fifteen years later, when foreign intelligence operatives and inquisitive journalists discovered that a gigantic construction project was under way in the Negev, near the small immigrant town of Dimona, the Israeli authorities maintained that it was a "textile factory." And in official Israeli documents, "the textile factory" became the code name of the Dimona nuclear project.
The Sonneborn Institute would emerge again in 1956-57, when a nuclear agreement between Israel and France was being discussed. Ben-Gurion once again drew up a list of wealthy Jews, this time to help finance the reactor and related installations. The millionaires of the Sonneborn Institute were the first to receive his appeal.
In mid-November 1945, Ben-Gurion returned to Jerusalem and summoned the Representative Assembly of the Jews in Palestine to hear his report on his mission to Germany. A recording of his speech is to be found in the archives of Kol Yisrael, the Israeli state radio station. Ben-Gurion's voice is restrained. From time to time, someone in the audience can be heard sobbing, or emitting a sigh of pain. "I was in Dachau and Belsen. I saw the gas chambers, where every day they poisoned thousands of Jews, men and women, the aged and the elderly, infants and children, led them naked as if they were going to take showers. The gas chambers are really built as if they are shower rooms, and the Nazis would peep in from the outside to see the Jews writhe and struggle in their death throes. I saw the furnaces in which they burned the bodies of hundreds and thousands and millions of Jews from all the countries in Europe (here an outburst of weeping is audible on the recording)...I saw the gallows in Belsen, on which they would hang a number of Jews at once for sins such as coming two minutes late for forced labor, and all the other prisoners had to gather and watch the display. I saw the kennels where they bred the savage dogs that were trained to be set on the Jews on their way to work or to be killed. I saw the platforms, on which naked Jewish men and women were laid and the camp commanders would stand and shoot them in their backs, and I saw the few remnants, the survivors of the six million who were slaughtered in the sight of the world, an indifferent world, foreign, cold, cruel..."
There, in the death camps of Europe, in the encounters with the remnants of Europe's Jews, only two months after the United States had loosed atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the unconditional surrender of Japan, Ben-Gurion reached his first understanding of the deterrent advantage inherent in nuclear capability. True, at that time, when the Jewish nation was at one of the lowest points in its history, before the establishment of Israel as an independent state had been ensured, the very idea of developing a Jewish nuclear option seemed totally fanciful. Nevertheless, the lessons drawn by Ben-Gurion from the death camps meshed naturally with his understanding of the new reality that had been created in the world: There was now a new kind of absolute deterrence, and if the Jews got it no one would dare to contemplate their extermination. Ben-Gurion never publicly expressed the idea in such clear terms, because he was loyal to the rules of secrecy, as were most members of his generation. But a careful reading of his diaries and other writings suggests that the connection between the Holocaust and the ultimate weapon was etched into his consciousness during his visit to the killing fields.
In Israel's War of Independence in 1948-49, Tamar Shpruch fought in the infantry. Then she married Hans Freund, who had been hidden along with his mother by good Germans in Berlin; she left her kibbutz and embarked on a career in special education. In recent years, she has been a tour guide. Although she experienced the Nazi horrors as a young and healthy girl, and although six decades have passed, not a day goes by that she does not see in her mind's eye pictures of the tortured, starving victims in the labor camps, of people falling by the wayside in the forced march from Poland to Germany, and getting shot in the head. To most Israelis, born after World War II in an independent Jewish state, Tamar Freund represents the depths of the existential dread that the Holocaust and the extermination of over a third of the Jewish people has carved into Israel's consciousness. This is the dread that was absorbed by Ben-Gurion during that journey to occupied Germany, the dread that gave birth to the idea of arming the Jewish people with an ultimate weapon of defense.
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Karpin
Table of Contents
Author's Note ix
Introduction 1
A Dreadful Journey 7
The A Team 30
A French Window Opens 57
An Unprecedented Deal 74
First Nuclear Accident 96
A Nuclear Complex Grows in the Desert 117
Dimona Is Uncovered 146
De Gaulle Throws a Monkey Wrench in the Works 168
The Deception That Worked 178
A Mossad Conspiracy 196
The Heir 216
Cleaning the Stables 242
"We Have the Option" 268
A Secret Compromise 287
The Sadat-Kissinger Axis 322
Two Scenarios: War (with Iran) or Peace 337
Notes 361
Bibliography 383
Index 389