The journalist Martin Sieff has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. Mr. Sieff served as Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (UPI) from 1999 to 2009.
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Menachem Begin personally banned me from the Prime Minister's Office in Israel in 1978 by daring to describe him publicly as a pre-World War II Polish nobleman with delusions of grandeur.
Those comments appeared in an op-ed article by me published on 8 December 1978 by the then pro-peace process and Labor Party-supporting mildly left of center Jerusalem Post (Its ownership and political identity moved for a while radically to the hardline nationalist right a decade later. Ironically, I was then twice offered its editorship by its new owners. I turned them down on both occasions).
Begin, as prime minister of Israel was then flying to Oslo to receive in person the Nobel Peace Prize which he had been awarded jointly with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt for their ongoing negotiations to end more than years of war between their two countries.
However, Begin's trip was controversial because Sadat had chosen not to go since the peace negotiations were far from being completed and had hit more of their interminable deadlocks and apparently irresolvable conflicts.
I had come to Israel to do research in the state archives for my doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics on "The Role of Palestine in British Imperial Planning, 1918-45." And like so many postgraduate students before me I had outrun my generous funding and needed a job to keep body and soul together. Through friends, I was then able to wrangle a job as a researcher in the archive or archion of the Jerusalem Post newspaper. The literary editor, a brilliant writer and wit, a delightful man from Manchester in England called Alex Berlyne, told me he had helped get me the job because he didn't want to see an Oxford man starve.
In the event, I never finished or submitted my PhD thesis and stayed in the news business. I am still there 48 years later. The pay was far better. You met infinitely more admirable and fascinating people. And it was a lot more fun. It still is.
Consequently, I wrote, "Prime Minister Menachem Begin's trip to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize for an unarranged peace while his co-awardee President Anwar Sadat of Egypt stays away will earn Israel the derision and contempt of the world."
In words that have an eerie resonance today I continued, "In his haste to receive in person a purely ceremonial honor, the Prime Minister is further undermining the international credibility of his government and the popular respect it so recently enjoyed among the peoples, if not the governments of the Western World."
I then explained that a dominant trait in Begin's personality had been exposed by the entire episode.
"This is his obsession with 'image' - the public honors and plaudits he receives at the expense of the actual interests of his country."
In this, I pointed out that Begin followed his political mentor Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of right-wing, uncompromising, nationalist Zionism "in his addiction to 'image' over deed."
For, I explained, "Jabotinsky proclaimed, and Begin has always repeated, the importance of the concept of hadar to the Jewish state - a noble, almost regal dignity and decorum, a pride and martial honor that should mark the 'new Jew' of the Redemption."
Hadar, I therefore pointed out, was in direct contradiction to the then-declining philosophy of David Ben Gurion, first prime minister and founding father of Israel, who had insisted on "the creation of facts" in building up Jewish society and eventually military power in their own independent state.
"Appearances did not count, substance did. You did not wear ties, you built settlements. And if the reality did not always live up to the ideal, the ideal remained the standard by which the reality was judged and the settlements were built."
I then noted that my own teacher and mentor at the University of Oxford, the legendary historian of political philosophy Sir Isaiah Berlin "once shrewdly pointed out that whereas the founders of the Zionist left were frustrated Russian revolutionaries - cast in the image of pre-Revolution social democrats - those of the right were frustrated Polish gentlemen."
From this I then concluded that Begin's "high-flown oratory, the obsession with form over substance, even the so un-Israeli compulsive neatness and elegance all come from hadar as applied by a frustrated, would-be pre-war Polish nobleman."
When I wrote those words and even when they were published, I did not dream of the nerve I had touched. Those comments drove Begin wild.
On December 10, 1978, two days after my article appeared on the op-ed back page of the Jerusalem Post, Begin flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for which he had been awarded jointly with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for ending more than 30 years of war between the two countries.
In fact, the peace treaty would not be completed and signed until the following year. Begin and Sadat both indeed shared credit for the compromise they made to achieve it.
Begin in fact agreed to return all of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, which Israel had held for more than a decade since conquering it in the 1967 Six Day War.
Sadat returned nothing, but he risked his life with the powerful and numerous extreme Islamic elements in his country and would indeed lose his own life to them, being assassinated while reviewing a military parade to celebrate Egypt's early combat victories over Israel at the start of the 1973 War of Ramadan, or Yom Kippur War, between the two countries.
My dear friend the late Mark Segal was the Jerusalem Post's veteran and outstanding chief political correspondent at the time and was part of the Israeli press contingent accompanying Begin to receive the highest honor of his life in Oslo. Mark personally recounted to me afterwards what happened next.
The door from the prime minister's personal compartment flew open and Begin's chief of staff Yehiel Kadishai stormed out waving a rolled-up copy of the relevant daily issue of the Jerusalem Post in his hands and cried,
"Who wrote this scurrilous filth! These lies! This evil slander! Who is this - this poisonous serpent! (Begin and his closest people really did talk that way) This character assassin! This mad dog! This-This Martin Sieff???"
To which Mark told me, he replied, clearly trying not to laugh uncontrollably at this point, "Well - He's this very erudite young Irishman who writes for the Jerusalem Post.'
"Hu lo zeh!" Kadishai then screamed back in Hebrew: "Hu lo zeh! Hu oyev! Oyev!" - "He's not this! He's not this! He's an enemy! An enemy!"
And so it was, that before Begin returned from Oslo, I had been informed that my press credentials would not be accepted for any query at the Prime Minister's Office - which did not bother me. I was too junior to have ever been sent to contact it for any query anyway and within eight months I would be back in Belfast where my future career awaited.
Nor did Begin and Kadishai's rage hurt me in the slightest during my continuing improbable sojourn on the Jerusalem Post. Its editor at the time, the legendary and much-loved Ari Rath, gave me a pay rise on the spot for the article.
Ari was a child refugee orphan from the Nazis in Austria who after his own eminent journalistic career in Israel lived into his mid-nineties back in Vienna after having fled the right-wing nationalist regimes dominating modern Israel. He knew all about standing up to puffed-up ridiculous little failed bullies and jerks. After his retirement he spent the rest of his life working tirelessly for peace, mutual cooperation and understanding between Israel and the Arab world.
The affair was both misleading and significant. For Begin, for all his ridiculous nature did make peace with Egypt, much as the much-derided US President Donald Trump at least prevented outright war from breaking out between Russia and Ukraine during his first term of office and has been trying, certainly unsuccessfully, to end the continuing bloodbath there.
However, then Begin went on to needlessly throw Israel into the bloody chaos of Lebanon, an event that led to the generations-long domination of the south of that country by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah or Party of God - exactly the opposite outcome that Begin, at his worst, predicted or expected when he sent the Israeli army there in 1982.
Today, we see a still tiny Israel with a population of 7 million taking on Iran, with a population of 90 million that is openly and seriously backed by both Russia and China. It is as if my native Ireland declared war upon, and demanded unconditional surrender from, Britain or Germany today. Even Begin never dreamed of committing such a lunacy.
I never liked, trusted or respected Menachem Begin at the time: But I appreciate him by comparison a lot more now.