Golda (19 page)

Arriving on a Friday afternoon in the midst of the worst blizzard in half a century without enough money to pay for a taxi, Golda called Montor, Ben-Gurion’s best connection. “I’ve got to have money for arms,” she told him. “I’ve got to get it from the UJA [United Jewish Appeal]

because . . . the Arabs are not playing card games.” Montor required no convincing, but worried what purchasing weapons would mean for their tax exemptions; the leadership of the UJA, as well as that of the other major Jewish charities, had already refused.

Undaunted by the opposition of the other leaders of the major Ameri- can Jewish organizations, Montor decided that Golda’s only chance was to go to Chicago for the annual meeting of the Council of Federations and Welfare Funds, one of the largest Jewish charities in the country. She wasn’t particularly welcome; in fact, the executive director of the council wouldn’t give her a speaking slot. But Montor, a notorious battering ram, mounted pressure through members in Minneapolis and New York until the council agreed to allow Golda to speak at lunch on Sunday, when he knew the
balabatim,
the rich guys, would be in the room.

The 800 wealthy men gathered at the Sheraton Hotel that day con- trolled the American Jewish fund-raising machine. Rich, cynical, and hard-nosed, they were most definitely not Golda’s crowd, and Golda, in a simple blue dress, her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, was most defi- nitely not one of them.

As usual, she spoke off the cuff:

The nations of the world have given us their decision—the establish- ment of a Jewish state in a part of Palestine. Now in Palestine we are fighting to make this resolution of the United Nations a reality, not because we wanted to fight. . . . The Mufti and his men have declared war upon us. We have to fight for our lives, for our safety, and for what we have accomplished in Palestine, and perhaps above all, we must fight for Jewish honor and Jewish independence.

All we ask of Jews the world over, and mainly of the Jews in the United States, is to give us the possibility of going on with the struggle. . . . I want to say to you, friends, that the Jewish community in Palestine is going to fight to the very end. If we have arms to fight with, we will fight with those, and if not, we will fight with stones in our hands.

I want you to believe me when I say that I came on this special mis- sion to the United States today not to save 700,000 Jews. During the last few years the Jewish people lost 6,000,000 Jews, and it would be audacity on our part to worry the Jewish people throughout the world because a few hundred thousand more Jews were in danger. That is not the issue. The issue is that if these 700,000 Jews in Palestine can remain alive, then the Jewish people as such is alive and Jewish inde- pendence is assured. If these 700,000 people are killed off, then for many centuries, we are through with this dream of a Jewish people and a Jewish homeland. . . .

Merely with our ten fingers and merely with spirit and sacrifice, we cannot carry on this battle, and the only hinterland that we have is you. The Mufti has the Arab states—not all so enthusiastic about helping him but states with government budgets. . . . We have no gov- ernment. But we have millions of Jews in the Diaspora, and exactly as we have faith in our youngsters in Palestine I have faith in Jews in the United States. . . .

I want to close with paraphrasing one of the greatest speeches that was made during the Second World War—the words of Churchill. I am not exaggerating when I say that the Yishuv in Palestine will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end.

You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will. . . . You can only decide one thing: whether we shall be victorious in this fight or whether the Mufti will be victorious. That decision American Jews can make. It has to be made quickly within hours, within days. And I beg of you—don’t be too late. Don’t be bitterly sorry three months from now for what you failed to do today. The time is now.

Montor listened from the back of the room, surveying the crowd care- fully. “Sometimes things occur, for reasons you don’t know why, you don’t know what combination of words has done it, but an electric atmosphere generates, people are ready to kill somebody or to embrace each other,”

he later said. “That is still vivid in my mind, that particular afternoon. The delegates of Dallas were all . . . strongly non-Zionist, but they said they were going back to Texas to get so much money they wouldn’t know what to do with it. . . . She swept the whole conference.”

With the momentum from Chicago, Montor sent Golda on the road, to luncheons for women’s groups and dinners with leading fund-raisers, for breakfasts with the wealthiest and private meetings with the skeptical in Omaha and Tulsa, Houston, Dallas, Cleveland, and New York. Honing her message, Golda shared accounts of the conversations she was having with Haganah agents in Europe searching for weapons. One called her to report that he could buy planes in Czechoslovakia and captured German equipment in France but had no money. “Money is not any of your busi- ness,” she recalled telling him. “You stay there.” Another cabled that he could buy tanks if he received $10 million immediately. “OK, I’ll get it for you,” she promised.

Stopping mid-anecdote, Golda then turned to her audience and shook her head coyly. “I had a lot of chutzpah. Where was I going to get ten mil- lion dollars?” The answer was left hanging.

Golda was not all sweetness and charm. When a crowd in Texas proved recalcitrant, she walked out. At a women’s luncheon in Atlanta, a woman upset by the recent marriage of Paul Robeson’s son to a Jewish girl asked Golda, “How do you feel about a Jewish girl marrying a Ne- gro?” Flashing to Sarah’s new beau, a dark-skinned Jew from Yemen, Golda lashed out at the woman about racism and the Jewish concept of justice.

Out of place among the American Jewish glitterati, Golda was always nervous, and no place was worse for her than Miami. “I remember com- ing down to the patio which was so beautiful and seeing the people there dressed with all that beauty,” she later recalled. “I was sure that they couldn’t care less. I was sure that when I began talking, they’d walk out of the room.” She ended the day with $5 million in pledges.

On February 3, she reported to Ben-Gurion that she had already raised $15 million.

Back in New York, Golda again approached the leaders of the major fund-raising groups, the United Jewish Appeal, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the National Refugee Service. When they again raised concerns about their tax status, Golda began weeping. This time around, Henry Morgenthau, former secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Roosevelt and chairman of the UJA, intervened. “The UJA is here for the purpose of saving the Jewish people and we can’t save the Jewish people unless the Jews in Palestine . . . are able to defend themselves. . . . If Golda Meyerson says that they have to have arms and we are the only place where they can get the money to buy the arms, I’m afraid . . . you’re going to have to accept my decision. We’re going to include Golda Mey- erson and her request in this year’s campaign.”

By February 25, she had $25 million. A week later, Sharett recorded in his diary that she’d brought in $30 million and hoped for as much as

$40 million before her departure.

By the end of her trip, Golda had become starkly blunt, and just as bluntly stark. “You have a choice,” she told a crowd of New Yorkers. “Ei- ther to meet in Madison Square Garden to rejoice in the establishment of a Jewish state or to meet in Madison Square Garden at another memorial meeting for the Jews in Palestine who are gone.”

In March, Golda flew home to Jerusalem, having raised $50 million that Haganah agents in Europe were using to purchase rifles and ma- chine guns, ammunition, and airplanes.

“Someday, when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible,” Ben- Gurion wrote.

* * *

By the time Golda returned home, El Kaukji’s troops were regularly at- tacking roads and isolated settlements. Volunteers from the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, including a young Egyptian whose parents had migrated from Palestine named Yasir Arafat, were training at bases in Hebron and Bethlehem. Forces led by the former mufti had laid siege to

Jerusalem, cutting water pipelines and keeping the road impassable. And the Arab League was readying twenty thousand volunteers to cross the borders the moment the British Mandate expired.

“You will hang on to Jerusalem with your teeth,” Ben-Gurion in- structed, despite the British suggestion for a wholesale Jewish evacuation. It was no easy task. The population was living under a hail of bullets but the city’s Jewish defenders had just 500 rifles, 400 Sten guns, 28 machine guns, and a few mortars. Ben-Gurion couldn’t send them more; the en- tire
yishuv
had only 10,000 rifles.

Golda imposed a brutal system of rationing, three ounces each of dried fish, lentils, macaroni, and beans each day, supplemented with 1.5 ounces of margarine and a few drops of water. Still, the city’s stocks were almost depleted.

“DOES WORLD INTEND REMAINING SILENT?” Golda cabled

the UN. She received no reply.

The
yishuv
hung on without surrendering a single settlement, but news of the attacks chilled what little enthusiasm the international community had for partition. For months, the U.S. State Department, led by Loy Hen- derson, chief of the Near and Middle Eastern Affairs Division, had tried to convince Truman that partition was unworkable and that American sup- port for it would open the region to Soviet influence. Finally, Truman wavered, first succumbing to that pressure and then reversing his stance after visits from his oldest Jewish friends and from Chaim Weizmann himself. Nonetheless, on March 19, without the president’s knowledge, Warren Austin, the U.S. delegate to the United Nations, asked the Secu- rity Council to impose a temporary trusteeship to allow the General As- sembly to reconsider its decision.

Terrified that the chaos would lead the UN to do so, Ben-Gurion or- dered the Haganah on the offensive. During April, they broke the siege of Jerusalem, capturing Tiberias, Jaffa, and Haifa. But those victories proved bittersweet since they intensified Arab panic and provoked mass flight. Wealthy landlords and merchants had departed well before the shooting started in earnest, some 20,000 waiting out the turmoil in Damascus or

Cairo. Then the calls for the departure of the workers began, issued by the mufti and the leaders of the surrounding countries: Don’t work. De- stroy the economy. Finally, as the guns of war echoed ever louder, so too did the message from El Kaukji, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the mufti: get out so that we can get in.

When the Haganah seized Tiberias, the entire Arab population of 6,000 was evacuated voluntarily under British supervision. Two weeks later, 25,000 Arabs bolted from Haifa during an offensive led by El Kaukji. Tens of thousands more began fleeing when Jewish troops took the city.

Ben-Gurion sent Golda to try to persuade them to remain. Again, she was a strange choice, a Jew who spoke no Arabic, a woman emissary to a severely patriarchal society, a Russian who called every riot a pogrom. But Golda was also a woman of common sense. A month before the partition vote, the Jewish Agency Executive Committee had met at her apartment in Tel Aviv to develop an “Arab policy” for their new state. “It would be more than foolish to expect that we can live here in comfort and in peace and not do everything for the Arab minority,” she remarked. “We have no desire to be a master race and have people of a much lower standard among us. Look, we shall have to show the world how we are making up for our 2,000 years of suffering as a minority not by emulating what was done to us but by isolating every single method of making people suffer, and doing away with each of these methods, one after the other.”

Golda asked the city’s popular Jewish mayor to go down to the port to plead with the Arabs to remain. They are too afraid of bombs, he re- ported. She went down to the beach herself to beg them to return to their homes. They would not listen. She enlisted the help of the British army commander. But it was useless.

Golda’s failure in Haifa was not the only demoralizing factor in her life during those hectic days. On March 2, the
yishuv
leadership had decided to form an interim government, and Golda assumed she’d be awarded a top post, the equivalent of a cabinet position. But while she was appointed to membership in the thirty-seven-member National Council, a sort of legislature, she was passed over for inclusion in the

Minhelet Ha’am, the thirteen-person national administration that would run the government until the new state could organize its first election.

It was a bitter blow, but that first cabinet, like every Israeli cabinet there- after, was carefully stitched together to solidify a ruling coalition. After shoring up support for Mapai on the left, the right, and among the reli- gious, Ben-Gurion had only six spots he could hand out to his own com- rades and was forced to choose between Golda and Remez. When Golda complained about her exclusion, Ben-Gurion offered to give her Remez’s spot, but she didn’t have the heart to demand that her companion be pushed aside. Still, her isolation rankled.

“I have been home for several weeks and am not doing anything,” she complained in a letter to Ben-Gurion signed “The Woman Who Saved the State.”

* * *

In mid-April, after months of nonstop work, Golda suffered a mild heart attack and was ordered to bed. But two weeks later, Ben-Gurion had an- other mission for her, and Golda still could not resist Ben-Gurion. The signals from Transjordan had become contradictory, and the Arab world was rife with rumors that British foreign minister Bevin had agreed to al- low King Abdullah to swallow up all of Palestine after the Jews were de- feated and that Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt had decided to let him do so, and then assassinate him and give the former mufti his throne.

Still hoping to keep the king out of the coming war, in late March the National Council had voted to send Golda for a second meeting with him. Abdullah delayed, but on May 10 he passed word through a British intelligence officer that he would see her, but in Amman, not at the border.