Last Thursday, journalist and TV moderator Dan Margalit passed away at the age of 87.
Margalit undoubtedly belonged to the pantheon of famous Israeli journalists, who, for better or worse (mostly for better) left a mark on Israeli journalism and TV programs. Though Margalit started his journalistic career in Haolam Hazeh (1959-1961), he first gained fame in 1977.
On March 15 of that year, he published an article in Haaretz, revealing that in contravention of the country’s laws on foreign exchange control, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s wife, Leah, had a modest bank account in Washington, DC. The account was in her and her husband’s name, dating from the time Rabin had served as Israel’s ambassador to the US (1968-1973).
Rabin immediately admitted that such an account existed, and that he was equally responsible for opening it with his wife. Aharon Barak, then the attorney-general, finally decided to prosecute Leah, but also called on Rabin to resign as prime minister of the transition government he headed at the time (the government had fallen previously because of a crisis with the National Religious Party). Rabin had already decided not to run at the head of the Labor Alignment ticket in the approaching general elections.
Story uncovered by Margalit
Subsequently, Margalit stated that he had not expected that uncovering of the story would end Rabin’s premiership. However, it was not this story that ended the very long rule of the Labor Alignment (Labor Party, Mapai) but the fact that the Israeli public was fed up with the corruption that surrounded this rule, as well as the social inequality and economic illiberalism for which it was responsible.
In the subsequent 1977 watershed election, Menachem Begin had garnered enough votes to form a coalition and become the head of the government. But Rabin’s political career did not end. He eventually returned to serve as prime minister after the Labor Party won the 1992 election.
The story Margalit uncovered was special for different reasons: He personally believed that a prime minister acting contrary to the law was unacceptable and that it should be brought to light, even though his own political inclinations were more Center/Left than right-wing. For Margalit, the naked truth was more important than any political considerations.
In retrospect, this story, and how it evolved, was important because it concerned a prime minister who took responsibility for even minor wrongdoing and/or failures, contrary to what we are currently experiencing. Margalit enabled Rabin to present himself as a mensch, rather than a cynical politician who knows no boundaries in his desire for power.
Margalit also had other sides to him, and I am not referring to accusations regarding incidents of sexual harassment on his part, mostly from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which were never addressed legally.
Margalit's writing on Shamir
In October 1983, Yitzhak Shamir replaced Begin as prime minister. Margalit wrote an article in Haaretz (October 28, 1983), in which he questioned the sagacity of Shamir’s decision to be interviewed by the British historian Nicholas Bethell, author of The Palestine Triangle (1979), about the use of terrorism.
Bethell had published an article, “Moyne: The motive that went astray” in The Times of London two days earlier. The article allegedly focused on the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne – the British colonial secretary who resided in Cairo – by the Lehi underground movement of which Shamir had been one of the leaders. In fact, however, the article focused on the use of terrorism.
Bethell presented two explanations that Shamir gave for the motive: one in an interview Shamir had given him several days after the 1977 elections while he was preparing to write The Palestine Triangle (an interview that I attended as Bethell’s research assistant at the time); the second given by Shamir to Shlomo Nakdimon of Yediot Aharonot, several days after he assumed the premiership, in 1983.
In an interview with Bethell in 1977, Shamir stated candidly: “There are times when you have to use such methods… take the case of the Palestinians. A few years ago, no one spoke about a Palestinian people, about a Palestinian state. But now there’s quite a consensus in the US and Europe that there is a Palestinian question and a Palestinian movement for independence.”
After being asked by Bethell whether he thought that killing Lord Moyne had helped the Jewish cause, Shamir said: “Without doubt… governments don’t give attention to any problem, until such sharp methods are used…
“There are times when you have to use these methods. But you have to keep within certain limits. For instance, with us, the limits were not to kill any civilians… In that respect, we were not like the Arab terrorists today. They attack only civilian targets.”
When asked about the Moyne assassination by Nakdimon in October 1983, Shamir concentrated on Moyne’s destructive attitude toward the Zionist endeavor in general, and specific events in particular, as the background to Lehi’s decision to assassinate him.
In other words, he described the assassination as an act of personal revenge – and not a means to convince the British government to change its approach.
Bethell was inclined to believe the earlier version, which Shamir gave before Begin started forming his first government and administration (in which Shamir was appointed Knesset speaker), and was still free from any stately mannerisms and considerations. All that was soon to change.
Yet Margalit simply saw the two interviews as emerging from a similar state of mind that refused to distinguish between the situation before 1948 and the current situation (October 1983).
In a detailed article I published in The Jerusalem Post on November 10, 1983, regarding this whole episode, I criticized Margalit for failing to take into account the fact that Shamir’s interview with Bethell had taken place several days after the 1977 elections, and that Margalit had been flimsy with his dates.
For many weeks after my article was published, every time Margalit ran into me at the Knesset, he asked me caustically: “When do you plan to attack me again?”
“I have no plans to attack you again. Just be careful with your facts,” was my regular reply.
I never quite understood why Margalit had been unable to take some sincere criticism at face value – not as an attack.
The writer has written journalistic and academic articles, as well as several books, on international relations, Zionism, Israeli politics, and parliamentarism. From 1994-2010, she worked in the Knesset library and the Knesset Research and Information Center.