(Reviewer: Ralph Zulman, Vol. 67, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2012)
Ambassador Yehuda Avner was born in Manchester, England in 1928. He was a founding member of Kibbutz Lavi in the Galilee, and entered the Israel Foreign Service in the 1950s. During his lengthy diplomatic career, he served as Consul in New York, Counsellor at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., Ambassador to Great Britain, Non-Resident Ambassador to Ireland, and
Ambassador in Australia. Between overseas postings, he served as a speech writer and secretary to Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol and Gold Meir, and as adviser to Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres. He is a frequent guest columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
Given this background, Avner was well placed to write an insightful account into the Israeli leaders whom he served. This he has done with his 2010 book The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership. The book comprises an Author’s note, Acknowledgements, a list of “Principal Characters” and a foreword by Sir Martin Gilbert. Its thirty chapters are divided into three parts, headed respectively ‘Beginites and Anti-Beginites’, ‘Coalitions and Oppositions’ and ‘The Last Patriarch, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Prime Minister Golda Meir, Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin’. It concludes with an Afterword, Endnotes, a Bibliography and author details.
Avner states that his book is “not a conventional biography or memoir, nor is it a work of fiction. It deals with real people…” In deed it does so, admirably. In his foreword, Gilbert correctly observes: “Anyone who is interested in the first fifty years of the history of the State of Israel will be both enlightened and entranced by this book.” He concludes, “Yehuda Avner’s book with its cast of fascinating characters, its insights, its vigour, and its zeal, show how right Churchill was. A State was formed, whose leaders guarded it and moved it forward. Their most recent chronicler, himself so often at the centre of the events he describes, has done them proud.”
In her review of the book, US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton describes it as “…a sweeping tome of Israeli politics and history.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls it “…a fascinating account of someone who was an eye witness to many historic moments in the history of the Jewish state. It provides “insight into the actions of our nation’s leaders and offers important lessons for the future.” Brett Stephens in the Wall Street Journal regards the book as providing, “… a front-row seat to the drama of Israeli statecraft in moments of crisis and triumph, tragedy and joy.” For Jerusalem Post editor David Horowitz, it is “one of the most remarkable accounts we are ever likely to get of how Israel has been governed over the decades…the ultimate insider’s account.”
I highly recommend this well-written and absorbing, if perhaps rather lengthy, book to all those who, in the words of Sir Martin Gilbert, are interested in the first fifty years of the history of the State of Israel.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership by Yehuda Avner, Toby Press LLC, 2010, 715pp
