Golda (2 page)

In more serious interviews, she proved equally droll. Responding to a question from a
New York Times
reporter about the occupied territories,

she answered, “We’re not so fortunate that the quarrel between us and the Arab countries . . . is a question of territory. . . . The Arab countries are in lack of a little more sand? . . . If that were the question, somehow during the last 21 years I suppose we could have found some solution—a little sand for him, a little sand for us. Come on, are you dealing with adults, with heads of states?”

In Los Angeles, Governor Ronald Reagan fawned over her, while Greg- ory Peck and Jack Benny competed for her attention at the Hollywood gala. She took Henry Kissinger along on a sentimental stop at her old ele- mentary school in Milwaukee, where 243 African-American pupils pre- sented her with a scrapbook of little Goldie Mabovitch’s old report cards and photographs of a serious young woman in a high-necked blouse.

From the presidential suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, she basked in her unlikely star power. Almost 3,000 Jewish leaders flew into town for a sold-out dinner organized in her honor. And more than 15,000 people sporting shalom golda buttons welcomed her at City Hall, where vendors did a brisk business selling miniature Israeli flags for seventy-five cents each. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Golda,” proclaimed may- oral candidate John Marchi. Lindsay spoke of the “inseparable bond of spirit” between the city and Israel, declaring, “Madame Prime Minister, New York is yours.”

Golda responded with her coy trademark public humility. “I know you are not here to greet me but, through me, the people of Israel, the mothers and fathers, the young boys in the trenches on the hills on the Suez and on the Jordan, the young widows, orphaned children and, yet, a people whose spirit is high, whose determination is unwavering,” she said.

She was, at best, half right. Israel might have been the subtext, but the story of Golda’s visit was Golda herself. “To think that that woman with such a sad face played such a role in building a homeland for the Jewish people,” said one old man who’d traveled across town to hear her speak at City Hall Park.

It was an extraordinary reception for a woman everyone assumed was nothing more than a caretaker prime minister. David Ben-Gurion, Isra-

el’s feisty founding father, had met with Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisen- hower, and John Kennedy but never managed to wrangle an official invitation to Washington. Golda’s predecessor, Levi Eshkol, was hosted by Lyndon Baines Johnson, but with little hoopla, and when he visited New York several months before his death in February 1969, city officials barely acknowledged Eshkol’s presence.

But the sassy nicotine-stained grandmother who wore baggy suits and orthopedic shoes, spoke with an accent in every language but Yiddish, and led one of the smallest countries in the world had become an inter- national luminary. She topped the Most Admired Woman charts in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, packed auditoriums from Milwaukee to Boston, and was celebrated not only in Hollywood but also in halls of power from London to Lagos. Her autobiography be- came an international best seller; both Anne Bancroft and Ingrid Berg- man would rush to portray her onstage and on-screen.

Golda wore the sheen of a triumphant Israel in the days before that triumph became fashionably suspect and radiated moral certainty at a time when to be sure of one’s morals was still honorable. Perhaps because of her age, her sarcastic wit charmed when it might have offended com- ing out of the ruby red lips of a woman in a lithe young body. The pack- age was perfect, from her sensible shoes, frumpy dresses, and swollen ankles to her old-fashioned handbag and omnipresent Chesterfields.

She managed to translate her warts—prosaic warts with which so many could identify—into reassuring virtues. She made people forget, then, that the same grandmother who heaps food on you also shamelessly manipulates you into obedience. That the line between dogged idealism and willful blindness is, at best, fine. Or that moral certainty can easily slip over the edge into intolerance. In an era when we needed our Goldas unsullied, she made it easy to overlook the obvious.

Most of the stars in the political and cultural firmament are larger- than-life creatures, more beautiful, more brilliant, richer than those of us who lead prosaic lives. Objects of veneration, they nonetheless are
other.
Golda’s very ordinariness—her world-weary mien, the undisguised wrin-

kles that mapped her face, her straightforward language and blunt man- ner—allowed her to surmount her extraordinary role and to seem accessibly plebian. Her genius lay in her ability to use her ordinariness, to become a canvas onto which others could project their hopes, their political moral- ity, and their personal fantasies. Unlike most celebrities, she reflected not the baser instincts of her minions but their deepest idealism.

Immensely savvy in reading an audience, Golda did so, often with considerable calculation, never hesitating to exploit her personal history or her experience with oppression. She writ large her Russian-Jewish- American-Israeli Cinderella story and, while deprecating the movement, still managed to tug at feminist heartstrings. At a moment of rampant political cynicism, with her candor and indifference to political correct- ness, she successfully peddled herself as unpackaged, devoid of any po- litical slick, the slickest political trick of them all.

Almost four decades later—thirty years after her death—Golda still retains remarkable star wattage. In 2003,
Golda’s Balcony
opened and played to packed houses on Broadway for fifteen months, making it the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. At the White House celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of Is- rael, it was a portion of Golda’s autobiography that was read during the ceremony on the South Lawn presided over by President Bill Clinton. T-shirt companies do a brisk business selling garb emblazoned with Gol- da’s pithiest quotes. Collectors still compete for Golda memorabilia— crystal paperweights, vintage photographs, magazine covers emblazoned with her image, and recordings of her speeches. Even Americans who can’t conjure up the name of the current prime minister of Israel recog- nize her visage.

Yet the Golda of legend is bereft of the complexity and subtlety that define a full human being. The least introspective of women, she left behind no diaries and few letters that might provide a path through the mythology. Even with her closest friends, she was discreet to the point of obsessiveness about her personal life. And no one—from her son to her worst enemies—seems able to measure her against anything but her tow-

ering reputation, which people maintain by alternately protecting or rail- ing against it.

For Americans, Golda is frozen in time, fixed in memories of youth and the idealism of another era, an age of different sensibilities. In the collective consciousness, she remains a selfless old lady who worked into her eighties to defend the Jewish homeland from a hostile world, the larger-than-life vice president of the Socialist International who nonetheless managed to win Richard Nixon’s heart, the first female head of state to rule in a Western na- tion. Even those embarrassed that David became a nuclear-armed Goliath patrolling the West Bank can’t resist admiring her as a tough negotiator who also found time to fix tea and cake for Henry Kissinger.

Especially for women who grew up in her shadow, she remains part Superwoman, a dash of Emma Goldman, a smidgen of Nelson Mandela, all wrapped up in the warmth of our grandmothers.

Israelis once shared the American affection for her, and for the same reasons. They too reveled in her sarcasm, her staunch certitude, her strength. She echoed their swagger, softening it with her gray bun and flirtatiousness. But when that smugness was deflated by the Yom Kippur War, they turned all their resentment over the vanishing of their illusion of invincibility on the grandmother they had long adored.

For them, the arc of the Golda story became the tale of a political shark who came out of retirement and ran Israel with an iron fist worthy of a Bolshevik, concentrating power in a small cabal operating out of her kitchen. Leading the nation during the critical years after the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai, she steered Israel into obduracy, ignored peace signals from Arab capitals, and led her people into the exu- berant arrogance that sparked the disastrous Yom Kippur War.

Bitter that Golda didn’t shield them—from their own conceit or the wrath of their neighbors—they ignored the zeitgeist of cocky euphoria she inherited, and the outraged public cries that arose at the mere mention of giving up Hebron. After all, blaming Golda is less painful than introspec- tion about the national intransigence she mirrored or a desiccated politi- cal culture that roped a sick old woman into staying long beyond her time.

It’s more convenient than tarnishing an old warhorse like Moshe Dayan, the champion of permanent occupation, or asking why, if Golda was the architect of Israel’s continued belligerence, peace still does not reign in the Middle East. Just as Americans project their idealism onto Golda, Israelis use her as a foil for absolving themselves.

Like most conventional wisdom, the notion that the truth lies some- where in between is a cheap way of evading the complicated nature of reality. Both the American Golda and her Israeli doppelgänger contain some elements of truth. But neither offers enough of it to be accurate in capturing a complex woman who teetered between idealism and para- noia during a career that spanned more than half a century. In the end, both versions are heavily burnished by contemporary events and evolving mores, and muddled by a dozen colliding political agendas layered onto her memory. Perceived truth, after all, rarely remains static; it shifts, per- force, in space and time. In History 101, no one teaches us that within a decade or two, history will have moved on, casting doubt on much of what we learn. We discover hidden details, new dimensions, and unfore- seen consequences. We become more, or less, forgiving of foibles or frail- ties we once exalted. In the process, we rip the past out of its context and edit it according to our own needs and values, superimposing the present where it cannot belong.

Christopher Columbus, once an intrepid explorer, turns into a racist plunderer five centuries later. Harry Truman, whose presidential approval ratings sank as low as 24 percent, has now found a steady place among the top ten American presidents of all time. And despite his reputation else- where, Genghis Khan remains a hero in Ulan Bator. Well-meaning poli- cies that once seemed so right now seem dreadfully, terrifyingly wrong. As our experiences, our priorities, and our understandings are transformed, so too is our view of the past.

But distance doesn’t necessarily make a sharper lens; it simply ad- justs our focus. If the stubbornness that once seemed so admirable in Golda now appears wanton and her toughness shortsighted, it’s not that she has changed. We have. We know what she could not possibly have

divined. And as captive of our present as she was of her past, we see her against a backdrop of an age that has teetered from idealism to terror, from optimism to cynicism, while she lived and worked in the shadow of pogroms and holocausts, precariously balancing herself between hope and dread.

Exploring Golda in her own context is more than a journey into the life of a woman who turned the ordinary into the historic, who reshaped the Middle East, forged an alliance between the United States and Israel that we now take for granted, and raised the first international voice that offered a prescient warning about terrorism. It is also an opportunity to delve into this moment through the lens of the past, to reexamine who we have become in light of who Golda was.

* * *

During her last weekend in New York in October 1969, Golda turned up at a small private gathering of Jewish intellectuals at the Central Park apartment of writer Elie Wiesel. It was a tense time in America. A month earlier, the Woodstock Nation had erupted, and Henry Kissinger had held his first meeting with the North Vietnamese. Charles Manson and his ersatz family had recently completed their killing spree, William Cal- ley had been indicted for premeditated murder for the deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians, and the trial of the Chicago 8 had begun, presag- ing the Days of Rage.

Golda paid no attention to any of the events reshaping America, too wrapped up in her mounting sense that Israel was losing its international sheen and the plight of the Jewish people its power of suasion as new world horrors captured the international imagination. An old lady still burning with images of Russian pogroms and the helplessness she felt during the Holocaust, she was utterly unprepared for the moment when the world began to fall out of love with Israel. Everywhere she traveled across the globe, she begged and pleaded for understanding, although such leaps of imagination often eluded her.

That night at Wiesel’s, she poured out her heart, providing a glimpse

into the inner Golda. “The world still does not accept us,” she told the guests, who had overflowed the chairs onto the f loor, sitting rapt from 9 p.m. until well after midnight. “The non-Jewish world has been in two groups—those that killed us and those that pitied us. Before the war, the decent non-Jewish people were with us. Now we’re alive and we’re cer- tainly not pitied. If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have a bad image.”

chapter one