Golda (14 page)

It was an odd sort of schizophrenia, inherent in the
yishuv
’s need to fight the British on domestic issues while maintaining an international alliance with them, but Golda proved adept at judiciously balancing wheedling, pleading, and threatening to preserve it. When the British followed the White Paper immigration quotas to the letter, factoring in their estimates of the number of illegals who’d slipped by them, Golda first wielded guilt. Then, playing on their traditional chivalry, she pleaded in the most womanly possible fashion—and no one in the
yishuv
underes- timated Golda’s ability to use femininity to advantage.

When they were recalcitrant, she turned to public humiliation, derid- ing them at marches and protests well supervised by British troops: “They . . . fight like lions against the Germans and the Italians, but they won’t stand up to the Arabs,” she said mockingly. In an offhanded man- ner, she referred to the camps where they kept illegal refugees as concen- tration camps. But the next morning, she’d cordially show up for tea with British officers and colonial officials, careful to preserve a facade of civil- ity.

The conflicts went well beyond immigration. On the eve of Shavuot, the Va’ad sent seven teams of young people into isolated areas of the country well outside the proposed “Jewish” zone in the dead of night to erect watchtowers and stockades. By the time the British awoke, it was too late for them to destroy the settlements since British law defined an exist- ing community that could not be destroyed as one with a tower and a wall. Almost fifty settlements were erected along that model to strengthen the Jewish presence, often so far off the road that building materials had to be hauled in by donkey.

“Our way in this country, our Zionist war, must be different from the war of every other nation,” Golda preached. “Any other nation entering a war doesn’t dream . . . that in the war period itself it will have to build, to

construct, to develop. We cannot afford to wage war without construct- ing. Such a war has no meaning for us, no reason.

“Britain is trying to prevent the growth and expansion of the Jewish community in Palestine, but it should remember that the Jews were here two thousand years before the British came.”

* * *

The British couldn’t take the insurrection lying down. It wasn’t just that the Jews were flouting the law; they had begun to act as if they were no longer subjects of the Crown. As in so many anticolonial rebellions, the blend of arrogance and defiance that drove the rebels was almost unbear- able for men who thought of themselves as masters of the realm. A crack- down was as essential to their sense of authority as it was to their control over Palestine.

When a Jew named Eliahu Sacharoff was caught with thirteen bullets, one more than the law permitted, he was sentenced to seven years in jail, although an Arab found with a rifle and eighty-six bullets two days later received six months’ imprisonment. Suddenly, kibbutzim were searched for illegal weapons and travelers stopped and deprived of the arms they needed to defend themselves. The
yishuv
was put on notice that Jews could no longer flout the law.

As the head of the political department of the Histadrut, in October 1943, Golda took the stand at the trial of two men rounded up during this period, charged with the illegal possession of 300 stolen rifles and 105,000 rounds of ammunition.

“You are a nice, peaceful, law-abiding lady, are you not?” Major Bax- ters, the prosecutor, asked her.

“I think I am,” Golda responded flatly.

Then Baxters read from a speech Golda had delivered three years ear- lier, quoting her as saying, “We never taught our youth the use of fire- arms for offense, but for defensive purpose only. And if they are criminals, then all the Jews in Palestine are criminals.”

“What about that?” he pressed.

“If a Jew who is armed in self-defense is a criminal, then all the Jews in Palestine are criminals.”

“Were you yourself trained in the use of arms?”

“I do not know whether I am required to answer to that question. In any case, I have never used firearms.”

“Have you trained the Jewish youth in the use of firearms?”

“Jewish youth will defend Jewish life and property in the event of riots and the necessity to defend life and property. I, as well as other Jews, would defend myself.”

Again, Baxters quoted the witness. “There are not enough prisons and concentration camps in Palestine to hold all the Jews who are ready to defend their lives and property.” Did she say that? he asked.

“If a Jew or Jewess who uses firearms to defend himself against fire- arms is a criminal, then many new prisons will be needed,” Golda an- swered.

“And are they ready to do all that you said in your speech, which I read before?”

“They are prepared to defend when attacked,” she answered. “Everybody in Palestine knows, as do the authorities, that not only would there have been nothing left, but that Jewish honor would have been blemished . . . if brave Jewish youths had not defended the Jewish settlements.”

When Golda was turned over to the defense counsel, he led her back into the history of Jewish self-defense, beginning with the massacre of Jews in Hebron a decade earlier.

“That was in 1929, and the same thing happened the same year in Safed,” she said. “In 1936, there was a night of terrible slaughter in the Jewish quarter of Tiberias, and all this could only happen because there was no Haganah in those places.”

The president of the court cut her off. “I ask you to limit yourself only to what concerns this case and not go backwards, or otherwise we’ll soon be back to a period of two thousand years ago.”

Golda interrupted him. “If the Jewish question had been solved two thousand years ago . . .”

“Keep quiet!” the president ordered her.

“I object to being addressed in that manner.”

“You should know how to conduct yourself in court.”

“I beg your pardon if I interrupted you, but you should not address me in that manner.”

* * *

“Zionism and pessimism are not compatible” was one of Golda’s favorite phrases, but by 1943, even die-hard Zionist optimists were rattled. React- ing to British pressure, European countries had cracked down on the smuggling of Jews from their ports, virtually halting illegal immigration. And after the surrender of France and the German alliance with Italy, Palestine itself seemed in imminent danger of attack by the German and Italian armies. The Haganah drew up its own defense plan and launched a mobilized fighting force, the Palmach. If the Germans come, Ben-Gu- rion decreed, all Jews in the British army should desert with their weap- ons, the
yishuv
should gather around Haifa, fortify Mount Carmel, and fight to the death.

Every piece of news from Europe left them to wonder if anyone in the European Diaspora would survive to join them. In a forest near Riga, 35,000 Jews murdered. In Odessa, 19,000 Jews burned alive by Romanian and German troops. Then, in August 1942, Jewish leaders in Switzerland sent word about rumors of the extermination of Jews deported from War- saw and Lvov and gas chambers built in concentration camps.

When that information was brought before a Histadrut executive meeting, most of its members refused to believe it. Even for Jews who’d lived through pogroms, such systematic slaughter seemed fantastic. Golda, however, was certain that those first suggestions of the nature of the Holocaust were true.

“What can we do, first of all, to let them know that we know and that we’re doing something about it?” she asked. “And second, we need to do something.”

Clinging to denial, her comrades couldn’t face planning for such a

drastic scenario, so they dismissed Golda’s pleas. That night, she returned home to her new apartment in a workers’ cooperative by the sea, put on her housecoat, and said to the children, “It’s bad enough that the rest of the world doesn’t and won’t help us, but our own people, some of them, just don’t understand what is at stake.”

Fixated on making contact with the Jews in Europe, Golda didn’t dis- tract herself trying to convince her colleagues that what they were hear- ing was true. Instead, she put out feelers everywhere, both within Palestine and abroad: How can we open a line of communication to Jews inside Nazi Europe? What can we do to support whatever underground exists?

Finally, a Histadrut emissary reported to her that he’d found an “unsa- vory contact” who had offered to become the
yishuv
’s liaison with Polish Jewish freedom fighters for 75,000 British pounds. Golda talked the His- tadrut and the Jewish Agency into giving her part of that money. Then she went on a mission to raise the rest. “How do you know the money will ever reach the Jews?” asked a wealthy businessman she approached. Golda didn’t dance around the issue. “They’ll be lucky to get 10 percent,” she said. “But who knows what weapons or influence that small sum might buy?”

Simultaneously, Golda barraged the British with new pleas for relaxed immigration quotas, for help rescuing Europe’s remaining Jews, besieg- ing every soldier, official, or visitor from London. When she described the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the mounting number of mass graves to one officer, a man she liked, he cut her off. “I could see in his worried, rather kind blue eyes that he thought I had gone quite mad,” she said. “He told me not to believe everything I heard.”

There was, of course, little that the
yishuv
could do, and the sense of helplessness was excruciating. In April 1943, the Histadrut Executive Coun- cil received a message from Warsaw, through one of the convoluted net- works they’d established with Poland. Should we take a last stand? Ghetto resistance fighters asked. By then, more than 300,000 ghetto residents had been packed into cattle cars and shipped to Treblinka. Only 55,000 or so remained, and they knew that their deportation was imminent.

Surrender or die was the oldest Jewish dilemma, and
yishuv
leaders were alternately exhilarated and chilled by the image of Masada, where a band of first-century Jews chose the latter course when Romans stormed the fortress where they had taken refuge. Others debated how to reply, but Golda refused to consider sending ghetto organizers advice. “How can we, in Tel Aviv, tell them to die?” she screamed in agonized frustration. Before anyone could respond to her outburst, an underling interrupted the meet- ing. The news had come on the radio that the ghetto uprising had begun. With a handful of pistols, seventeen rifles, and homemade Molotov cock- tails, 750 young people had fired on 2,000 well-armed German troops, forcing them to retreat.

In their need to take action, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion still tried to induce the British to launch a Jewish brigade in Palestine itself. But Golda couldn’t take her mind off Europe. The ghetto uprising persuaded her that cells of resistance must exist, not only in Poland, but also in Russia, Germany, and Hungary. Each act of sabotage, each refusal to be carted off to death would spread hope and, perhaps, create some sense of insecurity among the Nazis. The
yishuv
needed to find a way to send its own fighters to assist.

The Haganah was training a small band of men and women born in Europe to parachute in behind enemy lines, and they offered to help Al- lied prisoners of war to escape, to make contact with partisans and sabo- tage British-chosen targets. But knowing that the Haganah had its own agenda, the British refused to send them in. With her singular tenacity, Golda pushed and prodded until the British relented, although they se- lected only a token group of thirty-two. The parachutists were given strict orders to confine themselves to Allied war orders. But none of them was about to ignore their other brief, given to them by the Haganah, to find the Jewish resistance.

But no matter what Golda did or how hard she worked, a crippling sense of helplessness ate away at her. Her migraines kept coming, and she was exhausted. But she couldn’t stop. She had to figure out how to handle complaints about the rationing of everything from sugar and oil to shoes,

how to get to meetings during blackouts in Tel Aviv. Rommel was moving toward Palestine from North Africa, Jews were being gassed in Poland, and she had to do something, no matter how small.

“I have sometimes wondered how we got through those years without going to pieces,” she later wrote. “But perhaps physical and emotional stamina is mostly a matter of habit, and whatever else we lacked, we did not lack opportunities for testing ourselves in times of crisis. . . . One can always push oneself a little bit beyond what only yesterday was thought to be the absolute limit of one’s endurance. . . . I don’t recall ever having felt ‘tired’ then, so I must have gotten used to fatigue. Like everyone else, I was so driven by anxiety and anguish that no day (or night, for that mat- ter) was long enough for everything that had to be done.”

chapter seven

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

T

he colored lights danced off the fountain in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Circle for the first time since 1940, as a mile-long procession wended