Golda (31 page)

Suddenly, a well-orchestrated outcry flared out of the camps of Rafi and Herut, the primary opposition party, led by Menachem Begin: This is a dangerous time and Eshkol has no military experience. Establish a National Unity government of all the political parties and bring Ben- Gurion back to lead it.

Eshkol dismissed the agitation. “These two horses cannot be hitched to the same carriage,” he said of a proposal that would have him work for Ben-Gurion. And with Golda’s hearty support, he also rejected the cre- ation of a National Unity government.

On May 22, perhaps emboldened by U Thant’s easy agreement, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to vessels bound for Israel, again defying inter- national law and the United Nations. Still Eban found little outrage in the Western capitals, only stern admonitions against a preemptive strike. Pres- ident Lyndon Johnson made some noise about organizing an international flotilla to sail through the straits with an Israeli ship. “Nice gesture,” Golda called it, remembering all of Eisenhower’s promises about Israel’s right to defend itself if Egypt ever again closed the international waterway. But what would happen after the international flotilla sailed away?

Israel “will not stand alone” as long as it does not act alone, Johnson promised Eshkol. In response, Eshkol asked Johnson what he wanted Israel to do when faced with such direct aggression. LBJ reassured, pres- sured, and cajoled. But he did not answer Eshkol’s question. Israel’s lead- ers knew what that meant: you’re on your own.

With thousands of Egyptian and Syrian troops on her border, UN

troops decamping, and UN observers being kept off Syria’s Golan Heights, Yitzhak Rabin, the military chief of staff, knew that more than free pas- sage through the canal was at stake. “It is now a question of our national survival,” he said,

So began
Hahamtana,
the Waiting. The reserves were called up— every adult under the age of fifty-five years—and those left behind started clearing out basements and restocking them as emergency shelters. Pri- vate vehicles were commandeered for military use, factories closed to al- low workers to join their reserve units, and the elderly began delivering the mail. Although not a member of the cabinet, Golda was too embed- ded in the inner circle not to be pulled into the planning, so she made the regular trek to Jerusalem and kept the coffeepot hot for the ministers who dropped by her house.

Rabin urged a preemptive strike. But caught between the clear danger from the Egyptian-Syrian alliance and the equally clear warnings he was receiving from Washington, Eshkol hesitated, worried about a repeat of the firestorm of criticism that rained down on Israel in 1956.

Mistaking Eshkol’s desire to calm the tension for dithering, the public grew increasingly susceptible to the organized drumbeat for him to step aside, especially once Moshe Dayan emerged as the new, Rafi-inspired savior. “Eshkol’s a coward,” they chanted, now demanding that he form a National Unity government with Dayan replacing him as minister of de- fense. Dayan, Dayan, Dayan. The chant crescendoed into a chorus, as if the cocky general were Israel’s only possible salvation.

As the anti-Eshkol demonstrations continued, the Mapai secretariat, the inner circle, convened. Suspecting that the youngsters were trying to use the war frenzy to undo the political damage she’d inflicted on them, Golda protested that any change in the government was unnecessary, harmful, and equal to a vote of no confidence. “A whispering campaign has been started to the effect that there will be additions and changes in the country’s leadership and I wish to make the following proposal,” she said. “The party thinks the Government in its present form is fine and opposes the participation of the opposition on a permanent basis.”

Realizing that the nation needed to hear from him directly, Eshkol went on television to allay public fears. But a poor speaker at his best, that night Eshkol was exhausted. As an Israel in need of reassurance watched and listened, he fumbled, lost his place, and stuttered his way through a dry, legalistic speech, shattering the national morale.

Bringing the opposition into the government in a wall-to-wall national coalition became inevitable, but convinced that the anti-Eshkol move- ment was the result of an elaborate political theater, Golda resisted. “A one-woman stumbling block” of destructive political fanaticism obstruct- ing national unity,
Ha’aretz
called her.

Hoping to deflate the growing hysteria, Golda finally threw her sup- port to the creation of a national war council, one step short of a full Na- tional Unity government. But that didn’t mollify Gahal or Rafi, which refused to cooperate with any scheme that didn’t include Dayan’s ap- pointment as minister of defense. “Over my dead body,” she told a meet- ing of the Mapai and Ahdut Knesset caucus.

“As long as the Old Lady is there, she controls the party and she won’t let me in the cabinet,” Dayan complained.

Golda tried to sideline Dayan into the position of minister without portfolio, but he declined. Eshkol tried to tempt him with the post of deputy prime minister. To no avail.

In the midst of the political meltdown, King Hussein of Jordan signed a defense pact with Egypt, putting his own troops under Cairo’s com- mand, raising the specter of a war on three borders. Still, Golda and Eshkol tried everything to keep Dayan out of the leadership, Golda un- derstanding that he’d try to use the defense portfolio to reinvigorate his image as a national war hero, Eshkol hurt by the assumption that he could not run the military. As Eshkol reminded the few who would listen, he had been the modernizer of the Israeli Defense Forces, and Dayan’s track record was less than stellar. Israel’s military genius had predicted that the Egyptians wouldn’t be ready for war until the 1970s. So why were 465,000 Arab troops, more than 2,800 tanks, and 800 aircraft ringing Is- rael?

To appease those sincerely worried about Eshkol’s ability to conduct a war, Golda suggested that Yigal Allon be appointed as minister of de- fense. A founder and commander of the Palmach, Allon had led most of the decisive operations during the War of Independence and was, by far, the most experienced field officer in the country. But Rafi wasn’t really worried about the war; they were making their bid for power. So they re- fused Golda’s compromise, leaving her and Eshkol consulting nonstop with opposition leaders while one hundred female demonstrators stood outside her office with signs reading, golda—enough hatred.

Finally, Golda relented. Elevating Dayan would be politically expen- sive, she knew. But the alternative was simply too dangerous.

With the National Unity government, a wall-to-wall coalition of all Israel’s political parties, in place, the government debated how to respond to the mounting threats and whether to launch the preemptive attack that the military urged. “I understand the Arabs wanting to wipe us out, but do they really expect us to cooperate?” asked Golda, who held no official position in the government but took her place at the cabinet table as if by right. Then, looking from Eshkol to Rabin, she added, “I don’t see how war can be avoided. Nobody is going to help us.”

At 7:14 a.m. on June 4, the Israeli Air Force took to the air, leaving only twelve fighters to defend the national airspace. In less than two hours, while the Arab pilots were still eating breakfast, they destroyed 300 Egyp- tian aircraft on the ground. Turning north, they then hit Jordanian and Syrian airfields. By the end of the day, the Egyptian, Jordanian, and half of the Syrian air force had been decimated.

On the ground, the IDF seized the Golan Heights from Syria, ending the hail of destruction that had been falling on the settlements below for years, and recaptured the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, the same territory Golda had publicly yielded ten years earlier. Three days later, on June 7, Israeli paratroopers captured the Old City of Jerusalem.

The following morning, Golda drove to the Western Wall that had meant so little to her when she and Morris lived in Jerusalem. Stunned by the sight of the most spiritually and historically valuable piece of real

estate in Judaism, hundreds of young soldiers stood there in awe, their weapons slung across their shoulders as they undertook the almost vis- ceral Jewish ritual of wedging notes of hope and prayer into the cracking mortar of centuries-old stones. Not recognizing Golda but seeking fe- male comfort, several soldiers threw themselves into her embrace.

The antithesis of a romantic, Golda was never one to indulge nostal- gia. She didn’t pray or weep over the reunification of the ancient city, then; she flew to the United States to raise money for a national treasury getting dangerously empty.

“Again, we won a war—the third in a very short history of indepen- dence,” Golda told the crowd of 18,000 at a rally in Madison Square Garden two days later. “A wonderful people these Israelis! They win wars every ten years whatever the odds. And they have done it again. Fantastic! Now that they have won this round, let them go back where they came from so that Syrian gunners on the Golan Heights can again shoot into the kibbutzim, so that Jordanian Legionnaires on the towers of the Old City can again shell at will, so that the Gaza Strip can again be a nest for terrorists, so that the Sinai Desert can again become the staging ground for Nasser’s divisions. . . . Is there anybody who can honestly bid the Israe- lis to go home before a real peace? Is there anyone who dares us to begin training our ten-year-olds for the next war?”

The crowd swelled in a chant, “NO, NO, NO!”

* * *

Israel threw itself into blind euphoria over the latest evidence of its prow- ess, and Golda went back to work to stitch together a new Labor Party. If all the fragments that had broken off from Mapai over the years—Ahdut, Rafi, and Mapam—reunited, Labor could rule supreme without the pesky necessities of appeasing coalition partners, Golda hoped. Such an alignment was not without danger, from Golda’s point of view. Bringing Rafi back into the fold would position Dayan to succeed Eshkol as prime minister, and Golda was firm in her belief that Dayan would be a disas- trous leader. Unlike her feelings for Peres, her opposition to Dayan wasn’t

personal; it was a matter of ideology and loyalty, neither of which he was known to possess. Quirky and intensely individualistic, Dayan wasn’t even loyal to his own beliefs, which swung wildly from day to day, often in dramatic contradiction.

Peres was determined to lead Rafi back into the Mapai fold to give himself and Dayan a shot at power. But no matter how hard he pushed, Golda wasn’t about to reunite with Rafi until Ahdut committed itself to the merger. Ahdut’s members, with a firm Socialist ideology close to Golda’s, would serve as her bulwark against the Dayans and Pereses. And unlike Rafi, which was little more than a vanity party for a handful of young Turks, Ahdut had a strong base in kibbutzim and an influential newspaper. Most important, perhaps, it had as its star Golda’s anti-Dayan, the man she saw as the next prime minister, Yigal Allon.

Golda might have been a sick old woman, but she ran the merger ne- gotiations essential to achieve her vision of a labor-dominated future for Israel with immense political skill. Riding roughshod over anyone who tried to thwart her, she blithely dismissed Rafi’s appeals for electoral re- form, soothed decades of grudges, and faced down Mapai veterans like Eshkol, who feared that Ahdut might overwhelm Mapai. More than ide- ology, the division of key positions, or the new party structure, Golda battled the towering egos endemic among all three parties, overwhelm- ing them with her own.

How did she do it? “She comes clumping along with that sad, suffer- ing face drawn with pain from her varicose veins and God knows what- all,” one old-timer said. “You rush to help her to your seat. She thanks you kindly. The next thing you know you’re dead.”

With opponents, she was alternately ruthless and accommodating, throwing them off balance. The younger men, even those who despised her, found themselves unable to resist her perfectly pitched amalgam of guilt, motherhood, historical privilege, and ruthless application of con- science.

“Golda knew what power was and how to wield it,” said Abraham Har- mon, former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “She was a hard

politician. Either she liked you or she didn’t. And woe betide you if she didn’t.”

No one found Golda easy to battle. “She was the heir to a long Jewish tradition of argumentation,” remarked Abba Eban. “Whenever she saw or heard some kind of dogmatic assertion she would rise up against it in an effort to reveal its superficialities and its weaknesses.”

The Charter of Unity establishing a new Labor alignment was finally signed in Jerusalem in January 1968, but the harmony implied in the founding document was fictive, at best. All the old factional disputes con- tinued, the long-standing rivalries, the ideological divisions. At the first sign of discord, Golda tried imposing harmony through blackmail. “You people don’t really want me,” she complained, announcing that she would not serve as secretary-general. “The last two years have been the most miserable in my life. I have not been properly appreciated.”

It was a classic Golda dramatic ploy to maintain control and followed the script she would act out again and again. Golda threatened to quit. Wringing their hands, party leaders appeared at her house to beg her to reconsider. Golda refused, complaining that she was tired of the infight- ing and the lack of gratitude. Everyone showered her with compliments, soothed her bruised ego, and promised to obey, at which point she re- lented, her power to move forward with her own program bolstered.

When she abruptly resigned again in July, then, no one took her all that seriously. But this time, when the leadership made the usual trek to her kitchen, Golda did not relent. A wave of anxiety spread across the coun- try at the prospect of Israeli politics without Golda, the nation’s towering party boss, and the media threw themselves into an orgy of speculation: Is she really serious? Is she sick? Is she fighting with Eshkol, fed up with Rafi, manipulating the new Labor into an early alignment with Mapam?

All the speculation was correct. Threatened by Golda’s overt attempts to position Allon as the heir apparent, both Rafi and Eshkol were chal- lenging her and her courting of Mapam was ruffling Rafi’s prickly feath- ers. Golda said none of this in public, of course. “I want to be able to live without a crowded engagement book,” she explained. “I want to be able