Moshe Arens, who held several senior positions, including foreign minister and defense minister, died on January 7, 2019 – 93 years after he was born in Lithuania. The anniversary of his death, marked this week, provides an opportunity to remember a decent man who brought Benjamin Netanyahu into politics. The rest is history.
Like his protégé, he grew up in the United States. Both were active in Betar, the youth movement of Revisionist Zionism, and both studied at MIT. Here ends the similarity; take for example their professional careers.
Before entering politics, Arens made his living as an aeronautical engineer. He taught at Haifa’s esteemed Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and was among the leaders of the team that developed the Kfir fighter plane, for which they won the Israel Defense Prize.
When he was appointed as Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Arens chose the marketing manager of Rim, a furniture company, as his deputy. While studying, Netanyahu (then known as Benjamin Nitai), was employed by Boston Consulting Group and later headed the now defunct counter-terrorism Jonathan Institute, founded in memory of his brother.
As Arens’s deputy in Washington and later in the Foreign Ministry, as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Netanyahu did not set policy and was not required to manage major staff or budgets; his job mostly entailed speaking.
In a sentence – Arens made a plane and Bibi made an impression. However, this piece is a testament to Arens and I will avoid further comparisons.
He took a stand against the far-right
AS EARLY as 1984, Arens warned that some settlers might take the law into their own hands. In 1988, when the racist party Kach and its leader Meir Kahane – forerunners of Otzma Yehudit, part of the current coalition, and of Itamar Ben-Gvir, now an influential cabinet minister – were forbidden from standing for elections, it was Arens who expressed Likud’s support of that decision.
He held liberal values. Thus, while he thought that Israel should consider annexing the territories, he did not behave as though the areas were void of people. Rather, he suggested the possibility of giving locals citizenship; it would be a challenge, but Israel would rise to it.
Arens led public campaigns to alleviate harsh conditions facing the Bedouin and was responsible for eliminating the barriers to positions, such as pilots, which they and the Druze could hold in the army.
He opposed the Nation-State Law enacted in 2018, which defines Israel as a Jewish state without guaranteeing equality to its minorities, as hurtful to Arabs, especially to Druze.
He surrounded himself with worthy people (including his erstwhile deputy) and was open to criticism and comment, even from a junior diplomat, as I was then – he did not want automatic yeah-sayers and did not demand constant approval. It was not superficial mannerisms or condescension that garnered him respect.
Everyone called him Misha. Even those who did not share his principles respected his perseverance. He weighed issues on their merit, not for the sake of a headline or because it happened to be expedient at a particular time. Widely considered a gentleman, when he withdrew from politics in 2002, it was explained that he could not tolerate the intrigue and manipulations surrounding it.
IN A 2018 interview he gave to The Liberal, a Hebrew periodical, he was asked what he thought about the law that would permit egalitarian prayers at a small section of the Western Wall, and was taken off the table due to ultra-Orthodox opposition.
He responded that everyone should be free to live as they choose and added, “but the relations within the coalition do not permit it and they seem to hold Bibi very firmly somewhere. He wants to preserve the coalition and does as they wish, in my opinion not because he is convinced it is the right thing” (my translation -TH).
What else did he see but kept silent, even as Netanyahu’s political survival replaced the public good? Did he regret opening the door to him? Did he feel like the rabbi who created the Golem and lost control over it, like Geppetto, the carpenter who produced Pinocchio?
Perhaps, as I have heard said, because his son Yigal became a left-wing activist, he saw Netanyahu as a successor and, like a forgiving father, tolerated all? We shall never know.
Rest in peace, Misha. We, who are led by Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, have neither peace nor rest.
The writer was Israel’s first ambassador to the Baltic states after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, ambassador to South Africa, and congressional liaison officer at the embassy in Washington. She is a graduate of Israel’s National Defense College.