ABSTRACT
Sometime later in the evening, Hassan El Tohamy rang me up and intimated that he wished to see me urgently on an important matter. We met, and Tohamy told me that the internal situation in Israel was in a shambles. For one thing, people were divided for a number of reasons; there were some strongly in favour of peace, and these called for the occupied territory to be restored to its owners. And a split had occurred within the Israeli government with respect to a number of topics, notably on the creation of settlements and on how to reply to the American questionnaire. There was also growing opposition to Begin, whose intransigence had metamorphosed into inflexibility, and this posed a threat to the peace for which President Sadat’s initiative had paved the way. Begin’s health, too, was failing, and the latent conflict between himself and several other ministers had now come out into the open and was becoming violent. Tohamy confided to me that there had been a rapprochement between Perez and Weizman, adding that what he called his private sources provided him with the most detailed information from within Israel itself. We must, he urged, strike while the iron was hot. We had achieved a major success in organizing the meeting with Shimon Perez, and this had weakened Begin’s position while strengthening that of Perez. The next step, he proposed, should be to invite Weizman to meet President Sadat in Foeschel, since this would help to further sap Begin’s position, topple his government and lead to the formation of a new government whom it would be easier to communicate with.
