The Haj - Leon Uris [166]
‘British Spitfires? Against us?’
‘British Spitfires. You better hear the rest. We shot them down in a dogfight. We’re trying to find their pilots now. A half hour after that, the American ambassador called to advise me that if we don’t go into an immediate cease-fire we will not get a single penny in aid. Do you have the faintest notion how bankrupt we are, Gideon?’
Gideon cracked his fist on the table. ‘Fuck them!’ he screamed. ‘Why is everyone breaking their asses to save the Egyptians! Where the hell were they when Jerusalem was being starved out! Where! Well, I for one am glad we shot their fucking planes down—glad!’
The Old Man waited until Gideon calmed himself. ‘Nu,’ he said, ‘what do you think I should do?’
‘Here is some petrol to put on the fire,’ Gideon said, sliding Abdullah’s letter over the desk. Ben-Gurion read it and threw his arms apart in a gesture of futility. ‘This Abdullah is a real dog. Several hundred of our boys were killed trying to capture Latrun and now he tells us to take the Gaza Strip and hold it for him! The chutzpa!’
‘Think of it, B.G. If we take Gaza, Abdullah will give us Latrun and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City in exchange. More than that ... when we go into negotiations in Rhodes, it will be a powerful bargaining chip. The Egyptians will give us anything to allow their army to escape.’
Ben-Gurion shook his great white-fringed head.
‘Eventually, ten years, twenty years we must have to talk peace. Our first peace treaty has to be with Egypt. Unless it is, no other Arab state will follow. If we humiliate them further now, it will be fifty years before they will be ready to talk peace.’
‘Humiliation, my ass! They will only talk peace when they have no other alternative. They will only keep a peace treaty as long as it suits their purposes. I’ll tell you how grateful the Egyptians will be if we hand the Strip to them. They will turn it into a massive guerrilla base and launch a thousand attacks on us. We will pay for giving them Gaza in blood ... in blood for the rest of our lives.’
Ben-Gurion arose and walked to the window, seeing nothing as he stared blankly out to the greenery. ‘I will see Yigal immediately.’
‘You mean for a cease-fire.’
‘That’s what I mean.’ He returned to his desk. ‘My comrade, we started this dream hoping beyond hope to create a tiny speck of a state. We now have much more than we believed possible. We have a viable state. Penniless, with terrible borders, but viable. If we play with a weak monarch like Abdullah, targeted for assassination, we will get sucked into one round after another of endless little wars.’
‘But you won’t stop those wars by giving up the Gaza Strip. You’ll only encourage the Egyptians. They are depending on our softness and they will take every advantage of it,’ Gideon argued.
‘So I have been told. We can fight these wars only as long as we are right. That must be our gamble. Our energies must pour into other things. We have Jews to bring out of those wretched detention camps in Cyprus. We have to find the remnants of our brothers and sisters in Europe and bring them home. We have to get the Jewish communities out of the Arab countries before they are all slaughtered. We have to have a merchant marine, a national airline, we must remake the desert. The world must proclaim our scientists and artists and academicians. The Jewish state has too many priorities to play the Arab game.’
‘Remember, B.G., every time they raid us from the Gaza Strip in the future, that you have paid a fool’s price to save the pride of a gang of decadent Egyptian butchers.’
‘Then find us new neighbors,’ Ben-Gurion said. ‘It may take a long, long time, but Israel has a special mission, unique in the world. We represent the interests of the western democracies ... yes, even the British, who threaten us with arms, and the Americans, who threaten us with economic blackmail. Eventually, they will become