Weizman was a pilot during the 1948 war. He
was commander of the Israeli air force from 1958-66. In the 1967 war, he
directed the critical early morning surprise attack against the Egyptian air
bases. In 1969, he retired from the military and the entered politics. In 1977,
he became Defense Minister under Menachem Begin. In 1993, he was elected
President of Israel. He was the nephew of Chaim Weizmann who was the first
President of Israel.
It was in November 1977 that Sadat came to
Jerusalem and spoke in the Knesset. The
next step, in order for the peace process to maintain momentum, was for Israel’s
Defense Minister to visit his Egyptian counterpart in Egypt. But Weizman had
recently badly injured his leg and ribs in a car accident. The last thing he
wanted was for himself, the Defense Minister, to hobble painfully on crutches
on his first encounter with Egyptian officials.
This meeting of the Defense Ministers was to
be a secret. Weizman made life miserable
for his doctors at Tel Hashomer Hospital. They told him that a plaster cast on
a broken leg has to stay on for six weeks. That’s what it says in the
books. He yelled back, “in that case,
get a new book!” He writes that “he urged them to work miracles, telling them
to defy medical history and speed up the rebonding of the fractures” in his leg
and ribs. They had not the faintest idea of why he was in such a hurry! After endless pleading, the doctors gave in
and took the cast off after four weeks, and Weizman was willing to do the visit
with a walking stick. (There was a time when a walking stick was a sign of
importance!)
But how should
he get to Egypt? There was no airline with a route at this time between the two
countries! Eventually, it was decided to utilize the help of the United States.
A U.S. Air Force plane was summoned from Frankfurt. The crew had no idea why
they had been summoned in such haste to come to Israel and why they were to fly
on to Egypt!
Now comes the critical question: What
present should Weizman bring to Sadat? After much consultation with his wife
and friends, he decides on a large, handsome clock. Why? Because he thought of
the following inscription: “To President
Sadat, the leader who moved the clock forward.” He also remembered that Sadat
was pipe smoker, so Weizman had a top quality pipe brought in from Paris. He
had it inscribed “may you always smoke this pipe peacefully.” His present to the Egyptian Minister of War
was a Galil assault rifle, manufactured by the Israeli military industry. The
inscription on it said: “May you never have to use it.”
On his
flight to Egypt, all he could think about was the first time he was there. It
was May 29, 1948 and he was a young pilot. The state had been proclaimed two
weeks before and Israel was fighting for survival. An Egyptian army column was heading
toward Tel Aviv. The situation was desperate, as there was almost no effective
Israeli force separating the Egyptian column from Tel Aviv. The air force had
four planes supplied by Czechoslovakia. Weizman and three other pilots were
ordered to bomb the Egyptian column. This was Israel’s first air force mission.
The attack was successful and significantly delayed the march of the Egyptian
column. Now, here he was flying to Egypt again –under such different circumstances!
He had spent
his military career studying Egypt from afar. Now, was getting shockingly close
views of everything. But he had to constantly remind himself not to act like a
spy, but like a potential peace partner.
After greeting the Egyptian minister, he
was taken to meet Sadat at Ismalia. The city he recalled was full of smoke and
rubble from Israel’s incessant bombardment. Now Ismalia was totally changed,
looking vibrant and full of life.
When Weizman
was brought to Sadat, Weizman was walking with his walking stick and was in
intense pain. “Ya Ezra!” Sadat shouted. (Sadat mistook his first name for “Ezra,”
a common name among Egyptian Jews.) “Are you still walking on that stick of
yours?” Weizman could not take the subtle insult. The idea of the Defense Minister of Israel
limping to meet the Egyptian President was not to his liking. Weizman
continues: “I twirled the walking stick
around my head. With an agonizing heave, I flung it across the lawn, speeding
it on its way with a resounding Arabic curse: “Yahrab beto!” (=damn the stick!)
After a tense pause of a few seconds, Sadat burst out laughing!
What exactly
happened at Camp David during those 11 days in Sept. 1978 with President Carter?
As to clothing,
the guests were requested to dispense with ties. But this was too informal for
Begin. When you go see the President, he proclaimed, you should always be
properly dressed. He would never let himself be seen in less than formal
clothing. On the other hand, Carter walked around in jeans or running shorts,
and Sadat normally wore his track suit.
Weizman was
once lying down in his cabin, almost nude, when Carter entered. What is the
protocol in such a situation, Weizman wondered.
Weizman was
perturbed by the large number of lawyers in the various delegations. He
observed that there are lawyers who find a solution to every problem, and there
are those who find a problem for every solution. Camp David, he observed,
teemed with the second kind!
The camp’s
medical unit was on constant alert. Two of the conferences’ leading figures,
Begin and Sadat, suffered from heart ailments.
After the
first three meetings of Carter, Begin and Sadat together proved fruitless, it
was decided not to have any more direct meetings with Begin and Sadat together.
Begin and Sadat each remembered with anger the harsh demands and statements made
by the other. It was felt better to have
the further negotiations conducted by ministers and aides.
Today we
know that the summit worked out. But the Israeli delegation did not know that
at the time. Reading this book you see the tremendous pressure that they were
under! Until the end, they felt that not only would the summit fail, but Israel
would be blamed.
-----
Weizman’s son
Sha’ul was severely wounded in 1970 by an Egyptian sniper. Years after it
happened American television reporter Mike Wallace asked him if he hated the
man who had shot him. (Wallace was surely attempting to goad him into a
politically incorrect answer.) His son replied “Definitely not! How can I hate
someone I don’t even know!” Ezer observes that his son’s answer pleased him
very much. He writes that “it may sound strange, but I have never harbored any
resentment towards those Arabs who have inflicted injury upon the State of
Israel or on my own family. [But] I have long felt scorn and contempt for
certain Arab leaders who embroil their citizens in costly and hopeless wars.”
---
My favorite
observation in the book is one that Weizman made about circling in an airplane
before one is given permission to land.
In a tense period in the Egyptian-Israeli relationship, he observed that
the Egyptian airport controllers kept his plane in the air a long time before
giving it permission to land. He suggested that this was a good way to measure
the relations between two countries: how long you are kept in the air before
you are given permission to land!
---------------------------
Mitchell First can be reached at
MFirstAtty@aol.com He recalls going to a
large pro-Israel rally in Washington D.C. about 20 years ago where one of the
speakers from the U.S. government confused Ezer Weizman with Chaim Weizmann!
