Say it with Flowers

Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS

Yes, indeed. In preparation for the Annapolis meeting, the Prime Minister has put the Foreign Minister in charge of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

You might well ask: Isn't it natural for the Foreign Ministry to deal with foreign policy?

Well, it may be natural in other countries. In Israel, it is not natural at all.

Already in the first years of the state, the Foreign Office was the butt of jokes. A friend of mine composed a catchy jingle, that can be roughly translated as "The Foreign Office / is very important / Because without it / What would its officials do?"

The state was born in war. Its heroes were the army commanders. The architect of the state, David Ben-Gurion, laid the tracks on which the state has been moving to this very day. Until his last day in office, he was both Prime Minister and Defense Minister. He never bothered to hide his profound contempt for the Foreign Office.

The whole of that generation was party to this contempt. Real men, with a Sabra accent, went into the army, became generals and manned the Defense Ministry. Weaklings, with an Anglo-Saxon or German accent, went into the Foreign Office, became ambassadors and paper-pushers. The difference was there for all to see.

That also found expression in personal relations: Ben-Gurion tortured the first Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, whom he saw as a potential rival. And indeed, when Ben-Gurion decided in 1953 to retire temporarily to the desert settlement of Sdeh Boker, Sharett became Prime Minister. He paid for it dearly: when Ben-Gurion came back from his self-exile, he trampled on Sharett and, in preparation for the 1956 Sinai campaign, removed him altogether.

He turned the Foreign Office over to Golda Meir, but bypassed her, too. The Sinai-Suez campaign was prepared by the young Shimon Peres, the Director General of the Defense Ministry and Ben-Gurion's admiring servant. He helped to organize the French-British-Israeli collusion for the attack on Egypt. In return for our readiness to support the French in their war against the Algerian insurgents, the French gave us the nuclear reactor in Dimona. All this behind the back of the Foreign Ministry.

Throughout the years, that's how it went. The important issues in foreign relations were handled by the Prime Minister's Office and the Defense Ministry, with the assistance of the Mossad. Our ambassadors around the world heard about it on the news.

This may not be a peculiarly Israeli way of doing things. These days, presidents and prime ministers conduct their own foreign policy. Quick flights, the international telephone and e-mail enable them to communicate among themselves. In almost all countries, foreign ministers are fast turning into glorified office boys (or girls).

In our country, this is especially pronounced, because of the central role the army plays in our national life. In the Israeli card game, one general outweighs ten ambassadors. The evaluations of Army Intelligence and the reports of the Mossad trump all the papers of the Foreign Office - if anyone reads those at all.

I could not help smiling when I read about Tzipi Livni's decision to set up a peace staff.

51 years ago, one week before the Sinai campaign, I published an article entitled "The White General Staff", which became something like my flagship. It said that since the achievement of peace was the main task of our state, it was unacceptable that there was no professional body dealing exclusively with this matter. I proposed the creation of a special Peace Ministry. The Foreign Office, I maintained, was unsuited for this task, since its main function was to wage the international struggle against the Arab world.

To popularize the idea, I said that as a counterweight to the "khaki General Staff", which prepares war operations, we needed a "white General Staff", which would prepare for peace opportunities. Much as the army General Staff prepares contingency plans for any military situation, the white General Staff should prepare plans for peace operations. This staff should be composed of experts on Arab affairs, diplomats, psychologists, economists, intelligence specialists and so forth.

Ten years later, I repeated this proposal in a Knesset speech which was later included in an Israeli anthology of important speeches. I repeated the observation that in all the huge government apparatus, with its tens of thousands of employees, there were not even a dozen officials charged with working for peace. 

This was preceded by a rather amusing episode. Eric Rouleau, one of the most distinguished French journalists in Middle Eastern affairs, arranged a secret meeting between me and the Tunisian ambassador in Paris. That was after Habib Bourguiba, the legendary president of Tunisia, had made a historic speech in Jericho, in which he, for the first time, called on the Arab world to make peace with Israel. I asked the ambassador to encourage his president to continue with this initiative. The ambassador proposed a deal: Israel would use its influence in Paris to urge the French to improve their relations with Tunisia (which were at a low) and in return Bourguiba would renew his initiative.

I hastened home and arranged an urgent meeting with the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban. He brought along Mordechai Gazit, the chief of his Middle East department. Eban listened to what I had to say and answered with a few non-committal words. When he had left, Gazit burst out laughing.

"You have no idea how this place works," he said, "If Eban had taken this thing seriously and ordered his office to prepare a report on French-Tunisian relations, they wouldn't be able to find anyone to do the job. In all the Foreign Office there are perhaps half a dozen people dealing with Arab affairs."