http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/031885/850318011.html
Book Review
Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe
Sharett's Personal Diary and Other Documents
By Livia Rokach. Belmont, Massachusetts: Association of Arab American
University Graduates, 1980. 73 pp. $4.50 (paper).
Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss,
March 18, 1985, Page 11
Most Israelis observe a conspiracy of silence by which certain
subjects widely discussed in the Hebrew press are seldom aired in
English-language media. One Israeli who dared to break that code of
silence, however, is the late Livia Rokach, daughter of Israel Rokach,
Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett.
Sharett, a moderate who was Israel's first foreign minister and second
prime minister, kept a diary in which he meticulously recorded his
frustration at the determination of Israel's first prime minister,
David Ben Gurion, to achieve his goals by force, and at the "immense
capacity for plotting and intrigue-making of Moshe Dayan," Ben
Gurion's political protege. Much of the diary concerns the 1954-55
period during which Ben Gurion had yielded the premiership to Sharett,
but still sought to set Israeli policy, first from his retreat at
Kibbutz Sdeh Boker, and subsequently as Defense Minister under
Sharett. Throughout this time, Ben Gurion carried out a policy he
described as "retaliation," but which Sharett saw as one of regular
provocations designed to bring about a new war in which Israel could
seize more territory from the Arabs in Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai,
Syria and Lebanon.
Avneri: "Rokach Did Clean Work"
Sharett's diary was edited by his son and published in Hebrew only.
When Pis. Rokach translated excerpts from it to insert into her book
about this crucial period. and its tragic results, the Israeli Foreign
Ministry threatened her publisher, the Association of Arab American
University Graduates, with legal action if they published it without
the permission of Sharett's son. The AAUG went ahead with publication
and, in the words of Israeli Knesset member Uri Avneri, "the Jerusalem
politicians decided that pursuing a legal course in stopping the
dissemination of the booklet would be a mistake of the first order,
since this would give it much more publicity."
We have the word of Avneri, whose vocal opposition to Israeli war
policies in the 70s and 80s in many ways parallels the silent
opposition of Sharett in the 50s and 60s, that "Livia Rokach did clean
work. All her quotations are real. She did not ever take them out of
context, nor did she quote them in a way that contradicts the
intention of the diary writer."
Through 1954 entries in Sharett's diary we watch the planting of seeds
that led to Lebanon's bloody civil war and to the creation under
renegade Major Saad Haddad of an Israeli-cont rolled Maronite enclave
along Israel's northern border. Sharett attributes the idea to Ben
Gurion:
"This is the time, he (Ben Gurion) said, to push Lebanon, that is, the
Maronites in that country, to proclaim a Christian State..."
The tactics, Sharett writes, were Dayan's:
"According to him (Dayan), the only thing that's necessary is to find
an officer, even just a major. We should either win his heart or buy
him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the
Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will
occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime
which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani
southward will be totally annexed to Israel..."
We see secret raids in 1955 into Arab territory:
"Ben Gurion reported to the cabinet ... how our four youngsters
(Israeli paratrooper reservists) captured the Beduin boys one by one,
how they took them to the wadi, how they knifed them to death one
after the other... When I arrived in Tel Aviv an officer... came to
tell me that the whole revenge operation was organized with the active
help of Arik Sharon, the commander of the paratroopers battalion."
The Story of the Lavon Affair
The diary records the Lavon affair, in which Israeli provocateurs
exploded bombs in U.S. cultural centers and diplomatic establishments
in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954 after being told "to break the West's
confidence in the existing (Nasser) regime... The actions should cause
arrests, demonstrations and expressions of revenge. The Israeli
origins should be totally covered."
When the provocateurs-young Egyptian-born Jews trained in Israel and
returned to their homeland-were caught and tried, Sharett publicly
denied Israeli complicity and accused the Egyptians of "vicious
hostility to... the Jewish people."
In private, however, Sharett deplored "the unleashing of the basest
instincts of hate and revenge... I walk around ... horror-stricken and
lost, completely helpless... What should I do?"
What Sharett should have done is now tragically clear. As Israeli
Prime Minister, had he stood up in the Knesset and denounced Israel's
actions aimed at provoking another Arab-Israeli war, the bloodshed of
1956, 1967, 1970, 1973 and 1982 might have been averted, and the
greatest bloodletting of all-the Lebanese civil war-almost certainly
would not have occurred.
He did not, and today we see an Israel where Ariel Sharon impatiently
awaits his call to direct the next chapter in a tragic history-perhaps
a Masada for the Jews, or an Armageddon for us all.
Richard H. Curtiss is a retired foreign service officer and executive
director of the American Educational Trust.
