“The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership”, by Yehuda Avner

 

715 pages, The Toby Press, ISBN-13: 978-1592642786

In the forward to his book The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, Yehuda Avner warns his readers that his “is not a conventional biography or memoir, nor is it a work of fiction”. Well, then, what is it? It is, if I may be so bold, an interpretation of people and events as he understood them, which is what anyone can claim of any memoir ever written; in Avner’s case, however, he goes beyond mere the mere recording of events or impressions of people and has actually “taken certain story-telling liberties by resorting to time-honored literary devices of narrative, dialogue, scene-setting, and reasonable constructs of conversations, without impinging too much…on historical truth”. In other words...he made stuff up; perhaps not out of whole cloth, but there are times throughout this book in which dialogue is invented to recreate scene and events he was not party to. Hmmmmm…alright, then.

But just who was this guy, anyway? Yehuda Avner was born Lawrence Haffner in 1928 in Manchester, England; he emigrated to Israel in 1947. Over the course of his not-boring career, he would work as a Speechwriter and Secretary to Levi Eshkol (third Israeli Prime Minister from the HaAvoda, or Israeli Labor Party) and Golda Meir (fourth Israeli Prime Minister, also from the HaAvoda), and as an Advisor to Yitzhak Rabin (fifth Israeli Prime Minister from the HaAvoda), Menachem Begin (sixth Israeli Prime Minister from the Likud, or National Liberal Movement), Shimon Peres (eighth – and three-time – Israeli Prime Minister, first from the HaAvoda and then later from the Kadima, or Forward Party). Avner also served in various diplomatic positions at the Israeli Consulate in New York and in the Israeli Embassy to the United States, and as Ambassador to Britain, Ireland and Australia.

There is a reason for Avner’s peculiar, as I see it, title, for the Israeli PMs he worked for are at the center of his book. After the beginning chapters – in which he records his early life in Manchester, his emigration to Israel, his actions after Israel declared independence, his work on a kibbutz and return to England (all accomplished in six chapters and less than a hundred pages!) – he writes a one paragraph “interregnum” in which seven years of his life (his marriage included) are dispatched. For this is first and foremost a professional history if his life. Though his book is long – 58 chapters spread over 700 pages – and can drag when the author reminisces about this or that, Avner is a quite the gifted writer and provides an enlightening insider’s look at the state of Israel, from its foundation to his retirement in the mid-90s.

After having read Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert (reviewed on August 14^th, 2017), as complete a history of the modern State of Israel as one could hope for, it was wonderful getting another, insider’s take on the history of the Jewish State from someone who witnessed it rise from the very beginning and who had a hand in some of the most important decisions to affect not only his nation, but the Middle East and the World, as well.