Peacemaking as Interstate Diplomacy: Samuel Lewis

Abstract

When Samuel Lewis stepped off the plane in Tel Aviv on May 18, 1977, Israel was in the midst of a political earthquake. The previous day, voters replaced the Labor alignment that had governed the Jewish state since its founding in 1948 with a new, right-wing coalition comprised of the Likud, the National Religious Party, and Ariel Sharon’s Shlomtzion. Three weeks later, Menachem Begin, whose Likud bloc had won the Knesset elections, became Israel’s sixth prime minister. The one-time leader of the anti-British, militant Zionist group known as Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), Begin was largely known for having ordered the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, the British headquarters in Jerusalem during the mandate, as well as the 1948 massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Although he had shed much of his extremist image by the mid-1970s, he still envisioned an “undivided land of Israel” and supported the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. When asked after the elections, what his plans were for the “occupied territories” of the West Bank and Gaza, Begin retorted, “What occupied territories? If you mean Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories, part of the land of Israel.” Begin displayed no doubt that he intended to fulfill his campaign pledge of “Israeli sovereignty between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.”¹