By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — I had occasion to host the just deceased-Yitzhak Shamir, the diminutive and fiery former prime minister of Israel, along with the foreign minister at the time, the late Abba Eban. It was 1983, Shamir was in office, and the two rivals were both featured speakers at the International Conference in Jerusalem of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.
I was the New York-based North American director of this global agency for liberal Judaism and the conference director at the time. Some 700 leaders of progressive Jewish communities, from North America to Britain to Hong King to South Africa and back to Argentina were in attendance. We convened at the round and stylish Jerusalem Hilton. Ronald Reagan was president and, though Israel was, as always, alert to terrorist threats, the World Trade Center still stood in New York and nobody had ever heard of Al-Qaeda and world jihad.
I had the honor and hassle of welcoming and shuttling the various eminent speakers from the Israeli government; at one point I had to literally pull Jerusalem’s burly mayor, Teddy Kollek, out of a lobby phone booth in order to get him to the podium on time. Teddy was the most effusive and boisterous mayor of the Holy City. He actually cared about getting fresh milk to the Arab babies of the Eastern section of the painfully divided city—just as much as he was determined to rebuild the “Cardo,” the Jewish enclave that had been ransacked by the Jordanians and was already blossoming again as the fashionable district of stores, agencies, apartments, and performing spaces.
Politically adversarial feelings in Israel are not tempered by any instinctive sense of decorum or civility. Prime Minister Shamir, the hard-core, Russian-born, right-wing former freedom fighter who had no intention of negotiating with the Palestinians, could not have been more different than the dovish, mellifluous, intellectual Abba Eban—of South African roots and aristocratic origins. Shamir was short, firm, and bellicose. Eban was tall, plump, and suave. They despised one another and now they were coming to the large suite I maintained as an anteroom for speakers. I had read and studied about them in school; now they were both in my chamber and not talking to each other. Two lovely “stewardesses,” on hand as a gift from El Al Airlines, offered them coffee. They drank in silent contempt of each other, though Eban, a renaissance man, truly brilliant and quite affable, made pleasant chat with everyone but Shamir.
A large chocolate cake arrived and I offered some to my two restive guests. Shamir, speaking to me really for the first time, essentially grunted in my direction: “I am not eating with him.” Eban, visibly salivating for the dessert, said to me: “Oh, I’ll have cake.” And he did have cake—that is, the entire cake.
Israel lives. We remember Yitzhak Shamir, the stubborn little man who held off the Arabs and we recall Abba Eban, who learned how to talk with and listen to them. And we needed them both.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com