Book with dedication from US ambassador to PM Begin found at Jerusalem book swap station
Short note from Samuel Lewis, US envoy from 1977 to 1985, in a book by Kissinger on the Nixon era, offers former premier ‘the highest admiration and respect’
A recent visitor to a self-serve library at a popular Jerusalem park received a bigger-than-usual surprise on Tuesday when they opened one of the items to its cover page and found a footnote from history.
The book, “Years of Upheaval,” is former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1982 account of former US President Richard Nixon’s second presidential term. A Facebook post from Shuki Ben Naim on Tuesday revealed that the cover page of the edition found at the free library featured a note from former US ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis to former prime minister Menachem Begin.
The note reads as follows:
“To Prime Minister Begin, With the highest admiration and respect, from his friend, Sam Lewis.”
Ben Naim assisted with deciphering the dedication but was not the person who found the book on Tuesday. He said it is unclear what will happen with the book — whether its now-owner will keep it or decide to sell it.
“At any given time, it’s possible to find there a few Kissinger books, but the vast majority of them do not have a dedication to Begin from the American ambassador to Israel,” Ben Naim quipped to The Times of Israel.
The memoir was discovered amid stacks of books at a small but popular self-serve library in a central Jerusalem park that runs along an old train line near the capital’s German Colony.
Lewis was ambassador from 1977 to 1985. This was a time rife with dramatic developments in the region, such as Israel’s historic 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, the Camp David Accords, and the start, in 1982, of the first Lebanon war.
Begin was prime minister from 1977 to 1983, while Kissinger was US secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.
During his time in Israel, his first ambassadorship, Lewis was no stranger to controversy nor to disagreements with Israel’s leadership. When Israel extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights from Syria in 1981, after 14 years of military rule over the disputed region, Washington protested the move. In response, Begin summoned Lewis and raged at him, “You have no moral right to preach to us. Are we a banana republic?”
Subsequently, Lewis was recalled to Washington just as Israel prepared to return the Sinai to Egypt after agreeing on arrangements for the demilitarization of the area. But he was to remain in Israel with his wife Sally until 1985, only to visit it again over 50 times in the years following his return to Washington.
