Golda (41 page)

Elated, Halter returned to Paris and called his Egyptian friends, who promised to discuss the possibility of such a meeting with Nasser. Then Halter flew to Cairo himself. “Do you seriously believe it’s possible to talk about peace with Israel?” Nasser asked. The two men discussed the tan- gle of forces at work, then Nasser ended the meeting cryptically. “You’re an artist. I’m glad to have met you. Come back to Cairo.”

A week later, Halter’s Egyptian contacts called to set a date for Eliav’s visit. Then came another phone call asking for a postponement. After several weeks of silence, a new date was set, but the meeting was then put off once more. It’s impossible to know whether it would ultimately have occurred because, within days, Nasser was dead of a heart attack.

Despite that disappointment, Halter tried again in 1971 and secured Golda’s agreement to enlist Pierre Mendes-France, one of France’s lead- ing socialists, as an intermediary. But Mendes-France fell ill and was un- able to travel. She cooperated with Halter once more when he approached her in May 1972 about a pullback from the Suez Canal. Halter’s Israeli contacts had told him that Golda would not be receptive. But Golda was never quite so inflexible as she was reputed to be. “I’m in favor of with- drawing a few kilometers to let the Egyptians reopen the canal,” she told him. But allowing Sadat to move his army across the canal was “unthink- able.”

Then she softened. “If they agree to negotiate—which is what we’ve always asked them to do—we’ll discuss it with them then,” Golda said. “But we don’t have to state our intentions beforehand.”

Halter, however, was looking for more, for some conciliatory promise that he could dangle in front of the Egyptians. “If you want them to agree to that meeting at least, they’ll have to have something to gain from it,” he argued.

“They have everything to gain from it!” Golda shot back.

“Israel has even more,” Halter responded. “For the Arabs, what’s at stake is the territories they lost in 1967. For Israel, it’s peace.”

“The Arabs don’t need peace?” Golda asked.

Finally, she relented. “I agree to a withdrawal from the canal. I also agree to letting in as many Egyptian civilians as it will take to clear the canal. But when it comes to the army, even just a symbolic force, I’m on my guard. But if the Egyptians were to accept direct contacts, then . . .”

Free to sound out the Egyptians, Halter returned to Paris and reported back to Golda, in Yiddish via the Israeli diplomatic pouch, that Egypt’s new foreign minister seemed interested. A secret meeting would be set up in London. But that peace prospect fell victim to terrorism.

chapter fifteen

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.

B

y 9 a.m. on September 5, 1972, Golda was locked in the cabinet room on the ground floor of the Knesset, frantically consulting by phone with German chancellor Willy Brandt. At dawn, eight terrorists from Black September, an offshoot of Yasir Arafat’s Al-Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had stormed the apartments of the Israeli delegation to the XXth Olympiad. Within minutes, two Israelis were dead and nine others roped together on chairs and beds, the bullet- ridden corpse of one of their colleagues at their feet. If 234 Arab prisoners locked in Israeli jails and two leaders of the German Red Army Faction imprisoned in Frankfurt weren’t released, the Israeli athletes would be

murdered, the kidnappers announced.

For three years, terrorist raids had been mushrooming in Israel and beyond. During Golda’s first years in office, fedayeen based in Lebanon and Syria had repeatedly snuck across the border to bomb Israeli apart- ment buildings, set off grenades in markets, fire bazookas at school buses, and plant bombs in public places.

As Israel’s domestic security became savvy in thwarting their assaults, the terrorists had moved into Europe, using Western European capitals as the bases for new operations. They attempted to assassinate Ben-Gur- ion while he was on a trip to Denmark, bombed a Jewish-owned depart- ment store in London, planted explosives in the Israeli government tourism office in Copenhagen, and tossed a hand grenade into the head- quarters of Zim Shipping in London. During a raid on the El Al office in Athens, they murdered a Greek child.

Every day brought a new report—attacks on embassies in Bonn and The Hague, the bombing of a Swissair plane bound for Tel Aviv, letter bombings on three continents, the murder of the Israeli consul in Istan- bul, and the killing of the wife of an Israeli diplomat at the embassy in Paraguay.

By 1972, Palestinian terrorists had established a worldwide infrastruc- ture of training camps and offices. The defeat of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in the Six-Day War had seriously eroded the credibility of Arab state lead- ership and opened the way for Arafat, a long advocate of open guerrilla warfare, to seize control over the PLO, which the Arab League had founded in 1964. But Arafat’s militancy was too tame for George Habash and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist cadre within the PLO sworn to eradicate the “Zionist entity” through military struggle.

In the months before Munich, their assaults had become increasingly spectacular. Four terrorists hijacked a Sabena plane out of Brussels and landed it in Tel Aviv to force the release of 117 fedayeen—only to be ap- prehended by the Israelis. A three-man hit squad from the Japanese Red Army, supported by a breakaway faction of the PFLP, opened fire with machine guns in the waiting lounge at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, massacring twenty-six travelers, including twelve Puerto Rican pilgrims. And they had already begun plotting the assassination of Golda herself, although the missile strike order by Abu Yusuf, Arafat’s chief deputy, against the airplane carrying her to Rome was thwarted by Israeli intelligence just moments before landing.

In the face of the onslaught, Golda was helpless. Holed up in “Fatah- land,” the region along the southwest slopes of Mount Hermon in south- ern Lebanon, they’d taken over villages and set up a network of supply lines. When Golda sent planes to attack those bases, the United Nations howled, condemning Israel for its attacks while staying silent about the provocation. And the Europeans, lukewarm about ferreting out the ter- rorists in their midst, were giving in to their blackmail by releasing con- victed hijackers and bombers. A tradition of terrorism was taking root, and the international community had no strategy for dealing with it—in- deed, was encouraging it by caving in to terrorist blackmail. And every at- tempt to force the United Nations to face the new reality was thwarted by the Arab and Soviet blocs.

“This thing has spread like an infectious disease the world over,” Golda told the Knesset. “Can it be possible that governments . . . should acquiesce in this state of affairs on the presumption that they will emerge unscathed? Is it possible that there is no power in the entire world, in dozens of countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere . . . to put an end to this?”

The Mossad urged Golda to order agents into Europe to assassinate the leaders of the terrorist cells, but Golda resisted their pleas to take the war to the enemy. “Golda believed that the European states would wake up in the light of the terrorist offensive on their soil,” said Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad.

Then came Munich. Golda wanted to send the Sayeret Matkal, the commando unit that had freed the passengers of the Sabena plane hi- jacked five months earlier, to Germany. But the German authorities re- fused and instead opened negotiations, offering the Black September terrorists a virtually unlimited amount of money for the release of the athletes or high-ranking Germans as substitutes for them. When they re- fused, Chancellor Brandt contacted Arab leaders, but none was willing to intervene. Anwar Sadat wouldn’t even come to the phone.

Finally, pretending to give in to terrorist demands for safe passage to Cairo, the Germans planned a rescue mission at the airport using a team

of snipers—little more than weekend competitive shooters, in fact—and a group of armed German police hidden on the Boeing 727 the terrorists would think was their ride to freedom. But the police unit on the airplane mysteriously abandoned its mission, armored cars were caught in traffic, and a bloody firefight broke out between outgunned German snipers and the Palestinians, ending in the murder of all the Israelis.

Golda watched in agony as the world ignored the lesson of Munich. The five dead terrorists were delivered to Libya, where they received he- roes’ funerals. The three surviving terrorists were imprisoned by the Ger- mans but were quickly released after a new set of hijackers seized a Lufthansa passenger jet.

Kurt Waldheim, the secretary-general of the United Nations, placed the question of terrorism on the agenda of the General Assembly, the first time a secretary-general had ever added a substantive agenda item. But a number of Arab and African countries took exception to the initiative he hoped to launch, so his antiterrorism proposal was shunted off to the le- gal committee for study, where they languished and died.

To friends, Golda spoke of the horror of watching Jews being blind- folded and massacred again on German soil while the rest of the world played volleyball, and of the agonizing image of Jews being carried home in coffins while the Olympic bands played on.

“Whoever looks on passively when Jews are being murdered and Is- raeli planes hijacked . . . is dreadfully mistaken if they think the matter ends there,” Golda warned quietly at the memorial service for Israel’s dead. “For if an Israeli plane is hijacked then no plane in the world is safe anywhere, and if Arab assassins are allowed to think that Jewish blood can be spilled with impunity, then the lives of people everywhere are in jeopardy.

“Just as we overcame them on the field of battle, just as we tracked them down in Israel, on the West Bank, in Gaza and over the border, so we will find them wherever they may be. . . . Let each of them know that the State of Israel and the people of Israel have no intention of letting ter- rorism prevail.”

So on September 15, she approved the operation the Mossad had long advocated, an operation to hunt down and assassinate leading terrorists, requiring that each mission receive her explicit approval. “For Golda . . . to consciously plan [and] kill people, there was a hesitation,” said Aharon Yariv, who Golda appointed as special adviser on counterterrorism after Munich. “But there was no other way to deal with the matter.”

Publicly, she laid the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Europe- ans. “Thanks to your inertia and your acquiescence, terrorism will in- crease and you too will have to pay the price,” she told an interview from the Italian weekly magazine
L’Europeo
shortly after the massacre. “Up until today there has been too much tolerance on your part, a tolerance which, allow me to say, has its roots in an anti-Semitism still not extin- guished.”

* * *

The Europeans were loath to accept any responsibility for the rising vio- lence in their own cities and the terror in their airports and flung Golda’s accusations back in her face. “It’s hard to understand how the Jewish people, which should be merciful, behave so fiercely,” Pope Paul VI lec- tured her, reflecting growing European sentiment.

But Golda was as unwilling to consider her complicity as the Europe- ans were to acknowledge theirs. “Your Holiness, do you know what my own very earliest memory is?” she retorted. “It is waiting for a pogrom. . . . Let me assure you that my people know all about real harshness and also that we learned all about real mercy when we were being led to the gas chambers of the Nazis.”

Golda’s rejection of the accusation that Israel was acting unjustly to- ward the Palestinians by denying them a homeland was not a pose for international consumption. In her view of history, the Arabs were a single people, like the Jews, and the notion of a Palestinian people made no more sense than the idea of a Russian or Moroccan Jewish people. When she arrived in Tel Aviv, after all, the Arabs themselves thought of Pales- tine as a fragment of Syria, and as late as 1956, Arab leaders still defined

it that way. Arafat himself fed Golda’s pan-Arabist view. “Palestine is only a small drop in the great Arab ocean,” he said. “Our nation is the Arab nation.”

As Golda was quick to point out to her detractors, historically Palestine had extended from the Mediterranean Sea across the Jordan River to the Iraqi border until the British hacked off a piece of it to create a kingdom for King Abdullah. When the United Nations divided the rest of Pales- tine between the Jews and the Arabs, the Arabs didn’t create a Palestinian state; the Arab area was absorbed into Jordan, and the only complaint was that it didn’t include the Jewish region as well.

“For nineteen years, from 1949 to 1967, the Palestinians were on the West Bank, which was administered by Jordan from the Eastern Bank, which was Jordan, and on the Gaza Strip, which was administered by Egypt,” Golda protested. “I would like to understand why there was no Palestinian entity at that time, why there was no Palestinian people? Why did they not set up a state of their own? The vast majority of Palestinians were on the Eastern and Western Banks. In Jordan, they became Jorda- nian citizens, were elected to parliament, and served as prime ministers and foreign ministers. If they didn’t like the monarchy, why didn’t they establish a republic? If they did not like the name ‘Jordan,’ why didn’t they call it Palestine?”