Yet despite Entebbe, the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, and the cracks it

Chapter Eleven Yet despite Entebbe, the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, and the cracks it had shaken loose in Israeli society and politics, were yet to play themselves out. The hostage rescue was like a sugar rush, an intoxicating reminder that the army still had the capacity for initiative and precision, audacity and quick-fire victory — like our air strikes in the first hours of the 1967 War. But the rea/ reckoning over 1973 was about to come. It would change Israel beyond recognition, with repercussions still being felt today. It would dramatically alter the course of my life as well. I still remember the moment it hit home, on the evening of May 17, 1977. As Nava and I watched in our tiny living room in Ramat Hasharon, Chaim Yavin, the anchorman on the country’s only TV channel, was handed an exit poll from Israel’s latest national election. He began with three words: Gvirotai verabotai, Mahapakh. “Ladies and Gentlemen, a revolution.” For the first time since the state was declared, Israel’s government would not be in the hands of David Ben-Gurion or his Labor Zionist heirs. Our next prime minister would be Menachem Begin, who had inherited the mantle of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism. He’d headed its youth wing, Betar, in eastern Europe, and led the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the main right-wing militia force before 1948. Lacking the intellectual depth and subtlety of Jabotsinky —a liberal intellectual who, among other things, translated Dante into Hebrew — Begin drew his political strength from his powerful oratory, and a refusal to countenance any compromise in securing what he viewed as the ultimate goal: a Jewish state in all of biblical Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, with whatever military force was necessary to secure and sustain it. But perhaps Yavin should have used a different metaphor in his dramatic election-night broadcast: reidat adamah, an earthquake. Begin’s victory, after the loss of eight straight elections over three decades, was the culmination of seismic rumblings which had been building for years. The big, decisive, shock was the 1973 war. Yet this was not just because of the colossal intelligence failure, or the myriad errors of our military commanders and political leaders. It was the fundamental loss of trust in the cosy, self-perpetuating establishment that had dominated all aspects of Israeli politics, society and culture from the start: Palmachniks like Rabin and Dado; political players like Golda and Shimon Peres; Haganah veterans like Dayan and Bar-Lev; and, of course, the kibbutznik pioneers. Almost all were of East European background — 180 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028028