Golda (38 page)

No matter the messenger, Golda received the same tidings from all the would-be peacemakers: You can’t base your security on conquered territory. What can we base it on, then? Golda asked curtly. That’s where most negotiations broke down, since no one offered her any realistic countersuggestions.

The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union had bound- less faith in Big Power talks, international guarantees, and UN peace- keepers, and Golda scoffed at them, having developed a strong aversion to international guarantees and international peacekeepers since they had proven worthless in preventing the 1967 war. And the notion of Big Power talks infuriated her, intimating that the Jewish homeland was an adolescent in need of parental supervision.

“We refuse to be a protectorate of the four powers or the six powers or twelve powers, or even twenty-nine powers of the United Nations,” she averred at a United Jewish Appeal dinner in 1971. “We have had UN observers. . . . Demilitarized zones, we have had. . . . And we said, ‘Never again.’ ”

In the face of united Arab insistence that Israel withdraw from every inch of the land it captured in 1967, the United States pleaded with

Golda to at least announce which, if any, pieces of the occupied territo- ries Israel hoped to retain. An old hand at shopping in markets, Golda knew that the first rule of bargaining was never to give away your bottom line. “It isn’t a question of, let’s say, territory . . . or something concrete where you can discuss it and a mediator can try to bring about some com- promise,” she remarked on
Meet the Press.
“The Arabs, to our great sor- row, just don’t want us to be. They want a destruction of the state. . . . There is no compromise on a question of that kind. . . . The question involved is, are they prepared to acquiesce to our lives and presence in the areas? . . . For that it is necessary that we meet them and negotiate with them and if they are not prepared to meet us then they certainly are not prepared to live in peace with us.”

Even if Golda had been inclined to flexibility, she had little room to maneuver politically. After the October 1969 elections, it took her thirty- five days to form a cabinet, and what emerged was an unwieldy National Unity government split between the Greater Israel crowd, determined to annex every square inch of what Israel had conquered, and peaceniks willing to trade away virtually everything, with a dozen ambitious and ambiguous strong-willed personalities in the middle.

As unimaginative in her approach to peace as she was to domestic problems, Golda saw no reason to jeopardize the stability of her govern- ment when she didn’t have a peace partner. So in the face of a morass of competing and colliding agendas, both foreign and domestic, she dug in, and the Israeli people, as distrustful of the outside world she was, ap- plauded her obduracy.

One of the most popular songs during Golda’s tenure was a ditty with a chorus that ran, “The whole world is against us. . . . If the whole world is against us, we don’t give a damn. If the whole world is against us, let the whole world go to hell.”

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Golda was still struggling to stitch together her coalition government when a cluster of peace initiatives fell from Washington. Flattered by

Charles de Gaulle’s enthusiasm for diplomatic cooperation, his bid to re- store France’s waning international clout, President Richard Nixon agreed to his idea for a Big Four Middle East peace effort to end the fighting between Egypt and Israel.

Simultaneously, Henry Kissinger plotted a secret Soviet-American dia- logue as part of his wider vision of using “linkages” between regional conflicts and Soviet-American relations to forge détente: Moscow and Washington would develop a joint plan for peace without consulting ei- ther Cairo or Jerusalem and they would then muscle their respective vas- sal states into accepting. It was a quintessentially Kissingerian concept, built on what turned out to be the dangerously misguided assumption that the Soviets would abdicate power in a contested region in return for friendship with the United States.

Both sets of negotiations were launched, but the former were stillborn, and the secret talks with the Russians bogged down because Kissinger had seriously underestimated the finesse with which the Soviets would dangle cooperation under his nose while shipping massive quantities of armaments to Egypt and Syria.

Then, Secretary of State Rogers moved in with a State Department initiative. In one of his prototypical moments of manipulative theatrical- ity, Kissinger decided that Golda should be kept in the dark about the Rogers plan initiative, although she was due in Washington to discuss arms purchases on the eve of its announcement. So when she tried to engage in negotiations with the president, he seemed to be loath to dis- cuss anything but baseball. “Milwaukee lost the Braves but they got you back,” he said in their meeting in the Roosevelt Room, apropos of Golda’s scheduled trip to her old hometown. “As a matter of fact, the Braves could use you as a pinch hitter right now.”

Suspecting that Nixon’s reticence was a harbinger, Golda returned home and waited for the bomb to drop from Washington. Two months later, in December 1969, it fell with Rogers’ announcement that he would attempt to negotiate an agreement for an Egyptian promise of nonbellig- erency in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories

with “insubstantial” border changes. To diplomatic professionals, Rogers’ proposal was a masterful exercise in vagueness, spelling out no details about the meaning of either “insubstantial” or “nonbelligerency.” All that, Rogers said, could be worked out once Israel and Egypt had agreed to the basic principle.

At heart, the Rogers plan was a minor revision of UN Security Coun- cil Resolution 242, passed in the aftermath of the 1967 war, shortly after the Arab states rejected Levi Eshkol’s offer to trade all the occupied ter- ritories in exchange for peace treaties. At a summit in Khartoum, they had issued the famous Three Nos: no recognition of Israel, no negotia- tions with Israel, no peace with Israel.

The holy grail of Middle East peace, 242 called for “withdrawal of Is- raeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” an end of the state of belligerency, mutual recognition of all established states, and “secure and recognized boundaries.” At the insistence of the United States and Great Britain, the word “the” had been omitted from the phrase about territories. Assuming that “territories” implied the word “the,” the Arabs used 242 to demand that Israel give up every square inch of what they’d conquered. Parsing the resolution more closely, Israel in- sisted that it left room for negotiations. Rogers’ offering did not. Nor did it include Golda’s conditions for peace, direct negotiations between Arabs and Israelis, and a peace treaty, not some vague promise that they would stop shooting.

In fact, Golda simply didn’t believe all the Arab rhetoric about the occupied territories presenting an insurmountable stumbling block to peace. “Now they say we should go back to the ’67 borders, but that’s where we were, so why was there a war?” she protested. “And we had ’47 borders. . . . We didn’t like them very much, but we said yes to them. But there still was a war. And after the ’48 war they said we should go back to the ’47 borders. But that’s where we were . . . and that’s where they wanted to get us out from. . . . They still nurture a hope that at some time we’ll disappear.”

Golda summarily rejected Rogers’ plan and instructed Yitzhak Rabin,

her ambassador to Washington, to mount a full American Jewish assault against it. “We didn’t survive three wars in order to commit suicide so that the Russians can celebrate a victory for Nasser,” she said. “Israel will not be sacrificed by any power policy and will reject any attempt to im- pose a forced solution on it.

“It’s appeasement!”

Over the years, Golda had refined her message to American Jews until few doubted that they and Israel were one. “It’s our Israel that’s the most important thing, and since it is OUR ISRAEL so together we see to it . . . that it should be safe and that it should develop and it should be a decent Israel in every way,” she preached on her regular trips to the United States. “So we work together. It is not just a figure of speech when we say we have a partnership. It is. . . . And we won’t let you people down. That we promise.”

Calling on the devotion to Israel she’d engendered, as well as the con- tacts she’d developed among America’s most powerful, she and Rabin brought a firestorm of criticism down on Rogers. Cardinal Cushing of Boston urged Nixon to hold out for direct Arab-Israeli negotiations. Sev- enty members of the U.S. Senate and 280 members of the House of Rep- resentatives seconded that call. And George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, denounced the secretary of state for appeasing Soviet and Arab dictators.

A novice at international diplomacy, Rogers was stunned, both at the gall of the prime minister of tiny Israel and at the intensity of the reaction she was able to arouse. His plan—all the U.S. peace plans—was based on the assumption that Israeli dependence on the United States for military aid gave Golda few options but to succumb to American pressure. Per- haps deluded by her lined visage and gray bun, he had severely miscalcu- lated.

If Golda’s initial reaction wasn’t sufficient to drive that point home, her next decision should have convinced Washington that she intended to run Israel’s security affairs without regard for their sensibilities. Weary of the human and economic toll of the War of Attrition, she ordered the

Israeli air force to begin deep penetration bombing of the Egyptian inte- rior with the triple goal of relieving the pressure on Israel’s troops, bring- ing the war home to the Egyptian people, and forcing Nasser to respect the cease-fire that he’d broken by launching the border conflict.

Aghast, world leaders denounced the Israeli action as a threat to inter- national peace. Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin threatened to increase military supplies to Egypt. And the Arab world accused Golda of trying to topple Nasser.

That’s not my goal, she explained, “although I wouldn’t shed any tears if it had that impact.”

The State Department pressed Nixon to punish Israel by withholding the Phantom jet fighters and Skyhawk attack planes that Golda had re- quested. But the Soviets were already sending the Egyptians advanced MiG and Sukhoi bombers, installing surface-to-air missile batteries, and flying air cover missions for them. Could the United States allow the delicate Middle East balance to be upset?

Nixon knew that he could not, so he dithered, sensing that Kissinger’s “linkages” weren’t working, but unwilling to give up on that high con- cept. Privately, he sent Moscow an expression of “grave concern” over the quickening pace of arms delivery to Egypt, repeating a long-standing plea for a joint arms embargo, although publicly he promised that Israel would be sold whatever military equipment was necessary for self-defense. The Soviets responded by pouring in more SAMs as part of a new inte- grated air defense system they were building that would make Egyptian skies lethal to the Israeli air force.

But Moscow played Kissinger and Nixon with the skill of Vladimir Horowitz. Every time the United States grew fed up and seemed on the verge of selling Israel more aircraft, the Russians coaxed Washington into another round of talks, leading Nixon to hold Golda’s increasingly anxious armament requests in abeyance. By June 1970, however, the balance was tipping dangerously in favor of Egypt. U.S. intelligence estimated that twelve thousand Soviet military personnel were working in Egypt, train- ing combat troops and manning SAM-2 and SAM-3 missile batteries. And

the Soviets were introducing SAM-6 mobile missiles, their most advanced MiG fighters, as well as Tu-16 high-speed jet bombers with long-range air- to-surface missiles.

Rogers decided on one final gambit to cool down the situation and proposed a temporary, ninety-day cease-fire and military standstill to give the United Nations mediator, Gunnar Jarring, time to negotiate with the Israelis and Egyptians. Nixon implored Golda not to be the first to reject the suggestion and pledged that, in return, he wouldn’t pressure her to accept Rogers’ original blueprint. Her first response was an emphatic no, both out of pique over the withholding of military equipment and out of fear that any truce would give the Egyptians time to finish their missile shield unimpeded. Understanding Golda’s temper, Rabin, however, did not transmit that rejection to Rogers and waited in the hope that Golda would cool down and change her mind.

During the last week in July, however, the Egyptians forced her hand by giving in to Soviet pressure and agreeing to the new Rogers plan. Then Nixon sweetened the deal by promising Golda increased economic and military assistance. Still terrified that Nasser would use the ninety- day truce to consolidate his new air defense system rather than to negoti- ate, Golda sought reassurances from Washington that the cease-fire would include a military standstill in the thirty-two-mile truce zone to which the Soviets would also agree. Caught up in the euphoria of pend- ing success, Rogers giddily promised that all sides had accepted those conditions. Trust us, he importuned her.

Still, Golda held out. What about a verification process? asked Golda. Why isn’t the standstill mentioned in the truce documents? Precisely what did the Russians promise?

From his second White House in San Clemente, Nixon appeared on national television and tried to mollify her. “It is an integral part of our cease-fire proposal that neither side is to use the cease-fire period to im- prove its military position,” he announced.

Golda yielded to the pressure and the promises. But during the first

day of the cease-fire, Israeli intelligence discovered that the Egyptians were moving more SAM batteries into the truce zone. Furious, Golda complained to the Americans and demanded that the new batteries be withdrawn. The Americans refused to believe the Israeli evidence, just as they refused to admit that Rogers wasn’t entirely sure what Soviet ambas- sador Dobrynin had actually agreed to in terms of a standstill and that the United States didn’t yet have reconnaissance flights flying over the area. Obsessed with his diplomatic coup, Rogers had neither secured the promised Soviet commitment nor made the necessary surveillance ar- rangements.