Golda (43 page)

for delay.

Nonetheless, Yigal Allon, her deputy prime minister, devised a com- prehensive plan for the West Bank to guide the government in its imme- diate planning. To provide Israel with maximum security and the smallest possible increase in its Arab population, he proposed that Israel annex a strip of land six to nine miles wide along the Jordan River, most of the sparsely populated Judean desert along the Dead Sea, and a wide swath

of land around Greater Jerusalem. The heart of the West Bank—its great Arab cities and most densely populated towns—could be returned to Jor- dan or become the basis for an autonomous state. A mild supporter of some version of Allon’s design, in the absence of a peace partner, Golda refused to set off the internal political explosion she knew would ignite the minute the government adopted it, or any other plan.

But Golda had to face the conundrum of what to do with the West Bank and its residents while she waited for the Arabs to agree to negotia- tions. Should the government incorporate them fully into Israel? Isolate them entirely? Who would provide water and education? To whom should the Arab residents pay taxes? Would their relatives from Egypt and Jordan be allowed to visit them? Should Israel build industry there to provide work for the Palestinians?

The actual governance of the territories fell to the Ministry of De- fense, which left Dayan to make such daily decisions, and Dayan was the most ardent annexationist in the government. “We should see our pres- ence in the territories as permanent,” he’d advocated in a secret memo written to the cabinet in October 1968. To consolidate that hold, Israel should build towns along the mountain ridge near Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin to “dismember the territorial contiguity” of the West Bank.

In his imagination, those towns would provide West Bank Arabs with jobs, and the Israeli government would modernize local hospitals and roads, education systems and power grids. While the Israeli military would provide security, the civilian administration would remain Jorda- nian, except in the area of Israeli settlements. West Bank Arabs would thus continue to vote for representation in the Jordanian parliament and travel on Jordanian passports.

Dayan’s chimera of two peoples living in the same territory but swear- ing allegiance to different countries, only one of which had ultimate control, wasn’t a classic political formula, he acknowledged. But turning the West Bank into the mistress of two nations would lay the groundwork for a firmer future peace by binding Arabs and Israelis together economi-

cally and creating a network of relationships. Knowing Israelis and pros- pering under their benign rule, he believed, would inevitably blunt years of enmity.

That sort of “benevolent colonialism,” as Sapir called it, horrified most of Dayan’s cabinet colleagues. Nonetheless, as the sort of emir of the West Bank, he gradually began putting his policies in place. He abolished travel restrictions to allow Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza to travel throughout Israel and the territories without permits. Then he established an Open Bridges scheme so that people and goods could move freely between Israel and Jordan. Family members from Jordan, Egypt, Syria—or anywhere else, in fact—could visit relatives on the West Bank, Gazans could send their children to study in Cairo, and political figures in both areas could travel without restriction. Finally, despite enormous opposition from men like Sapir, who objected to using Arab laborers as Israel’s “hewers of wood” and “drawers of water,” resi- dents of the occupied territories could cross the old Green Line to work in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The opening of Israeli markets to Palestinian employment and to ex- ports of their fruit, vegetables, and fish pushed up the real gross national product in the occupied territories by an average of almost 30 percent per year. Private investment skyrocketed, as did jobs and new businesses. In 1971 alone, more than 106,000 Arab visitors crossed Dayan’s open bridges, up from 16,000 in 1968.

Cockily ignoring the concomitant rise in terrorism, Dayan blithely as- sured his colleagues that his program was working and urged the party to abrogate its “oral doctrine,” its internal policy that held that Israel would annex Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Sharm el-Sheikh but not the West Bank, and rewrite its platform, which said nothing about future borders, to reflect his pipe dream.

But Dayan wasn’t done. Next he lobbied the government relentlessly to accelerate the pace of Jewish settlement in the territories and to begin building a deepwater port at Yamit, in the northeast corner of the Sinai Peninsula. On both those issues, he was in the clear minority. “Why do

we need a deepwater port in a military buffer zone?” Sapir asked causti- cally.

Ever the political operative, Golda took no position, trying to hold the Labor Party together against the emerging alliance between Begin’s co- alition, several centrist groups, and a large number of Land of Israel sup- porters, all more amenable to Dayan’s approach than was Labor. If Dayan threw his lot in with the right, she knew that Labor would wind up as the new opposition fighting full annexation.

Placating Dayan proved nearly impossible because he kept upping the ante. In the midst of the Grand Debate, a series of party discussions de- signed to build a consensus about the territories, he added a new demand: that Israelis be given the freedom to buy land on the West Bank. When Eban and Sapir objected that such a policy would inevitably undermine prospects for peace, he sneered and proclaimed that he would not remain in the party if it retained a dovish cast.

Golda tried to resist him, arguing that allowing Israelis to purchase West Bank land would inevitably provoke real estate speculation that would hurt the local population. On the floor of the Knesset, Dayan’s al- lies in the opposition fought back viciously, comparing her to the British, whose White Papers barred Jews from purchasing land outside given re- gions. When she still refused to give in, they spread the rumor that she was caving in to pressure from the United States.

The Grand Debate tore at the fabric of Labor during 180 hours of meetings, involving eighty speakers, and it ended with a whimper at a party meeting in April 1973. For six months, Golda had exercised iron control to prevent any change in the party platform, and thus a split in the party itself. But as the final evening of debate wore on, it became clear that none of the major combatants was mollified. Eban and Sapir repeated their laments against creeping annexationism while Dayan asked huffily, “Does Zionism end at the Green Line?”

Unable to contain her frustration, Golda cut off discussion. Since the debate had solved nothing, she asked Yisrael Galili, a close adviser who was notorious for producing the type of vague language that obscures all

differences, to draft a platform that would be victory “not for the hawks or the doves, but for the party.” Galili tried to work in secret, but the argu- ments within the party leaked to the press, especially when Dayan added yet more demands: that the new party Knesset list include fewer doves; that Jewish development around Jerusalem be stepped up; that three dozen new settlements be planted on the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and in Gaza; that businessmen be given tax credits for investment in the territories; and that the government commit itself to a huge amount of new funding—more than $300 million—for urban settlements. He shrugged off the accusation that he was making annexation inevitable. But his schemes represented a revolutionary change in government policy that, to that point, had limited most settlements to security areas.

As late as June 1973, Golda still hadn’t budged in her opposition to Dayan’s policies. “It is unthinkable that there should be under our rule a population composed partly of citizens of Israel and partly of non-citi- zens,” she declared. “I don’t want a binational state and I don’t want to be obliged to count apprehensively every day how many Jewish babies have been born.”

In July, however, smelling the danger that the shifting political winds posed to her party, she gave in to the pressure and declared that the ter- ritories “strengthened the foundations of the state.” On the surface, the Galili document, which Golda wound up drafting, looked like a compro- mise: Dayan got less than he was looking for. The port at Yamit would only be studied, and while private land purchases were approved in prin- ciple, the government retained the right to regulate them. But no one was fooled. Dayan had won. The new guidelines, the underpinning for the creeping annexationism Labor had long rejected, were a dramatic depar- ture from its old moderation, a telling testament to the power of a dogged minority to change the course of a nation.

The official acceptance of the plan by the party secretariat was a chill- ing moment in the history of Labor, and in Golda’s political life. The deal had been sealed, but Eliav could not resist speaking. “This document has been brought to us by flailing the lash of time and the scourge of panic

and haste,” he shouted. “This document chastises with scorpions what I understand to be the values of the Labor movement.

“There are many in this hall and in this land, throughout this move- ment, in town and country, whose souls weep in silence because of this document. I feel myself the emissary of this public. I will be the voice of this ideological Jewry of silence.”

When he finished, Golda rose slowly, her fury at his apostasy barely contained. “I have lived through fifty years of political activity . . . and we never before had a comrade who set himself up as a messiah,” she roared. “Lyova Eliav, who is in truth a pioneer and volunteer, has taken upon himself to be the voice of the Jewry of silence in this land, the Jewry that is afraid to speak its mind and weeps in silence. What kind of picture is drawn here? Whip, lash, fear, silence. What is all this? Are we speaking of the Jewry of Russia or Syria?”

The document passed unanimously, 78–0, many of the party’s doves having stayed away. Galili hailed the agreement as a rejection of maxi- malism that would hamper peace while Allon bit his tongue and pro- fessed that the platform did not represent “crawling annexation.” And Golda vowed disingenuously that the new watchdog committee set up to supervise private land purchases would guard against speculation or the takeover by Jews of Arab sections of the West Bank.

Golda knew full well that Dayan had limned a fantasy. The territories had to be a bargaining chip, not Israel’s future. But she was never one to throw herself on a sword over principles that weren’t core to her personal beliefs. Lacking a realistic peace partner with whom she might make a bold gesture, she bowed to the inevitable, hoping that she could find a way to hold back Dayan.

* * *

On March 14, 1972, standing before a gathering of Palestinian and Jorda- nian notables in the royal palace in Amman, King Hussein announced a proposal of his own for the future of the West Bank, a federated state of both the East Bank, the current Transjordan, and the West Bank. Each

region would be run semiautonomously by elected people’s councils while the central state would be ruled by the king, a cabinet, and parlia- ment. Other “liberated” territory, by which everyone assumed he meant the Gaza Strip, would be welcome to join.

Hussein’s plan was a version of what he and Golda had been working toward since their first meeting in Paris in the fall of 1965, when Golda was Israel’s sixty-seven-year-old foreign minister and Hussein a twenty- nine-year-old king who’d already been on the throne for twelve years. Hussein had begun meeting with the Israelis two years earlier, encoun- ters generally arranged by his London physician, Dr. Emmanuel Herbert, with Chaim Herzog, the director general of Levi Eshkol’s office.

Early on, the young king had won Israel’s support in his relationship with the U.S. government, which wasn’t sure whether it should continue to prop up an anachronistic, moderate monarch in an era of Nasserian radicalism. Golda had repeatedly urged Washington to maintain its alli- ance with Hussein—even to sell him arms. “We can’t have Nasser sitting in Jerusalem,” she said, raising the specter of war on the West Bank should he be ousted.

Israel and Jordan also had to deal with the ordinary problems of neigh- bors, and Golda entered the picture when Hussein sought to resolve the most vexatious of them, the sharing of water from the Jordan River. Al- ways a target of suspicion for his pro-Western inclinations, Hussein didn’t have enough clout to untangle the water drama, which was hopelessly intertwined with Syrian attempts to choke off Israeli’s growth. But break- ing the ice, he said, was ultimately more important.

“We talked about our dreams for our children and grandchildren, to live in an era of peace in the region,” Hussein told historian Avi Shlaim years later. “And . . . she suggested that maybe a day will come when we could put aside all the armaments and create a monument in Jerusalem which would signify peace between us and where our young people could see what a futile struggle it had been and what a heavy burden it had been on both sides.”

The Israeli-Jordanian contacts even survived Jordan’s entry into the

1967 war despite Israeli disappointment that Hussein had ignored Eshkol’s pleas that he not join the hostilities. All the Israeli leaders understood that the king was caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma, trapped be- tween Israel, his own Palestinian population, and pressure from the other Arab heads of state. So not long after the war, Hussein and Abba Eban had held a spate of meetings to discuss how to implement UN Security Coun- cil Resolution 242 and then to thrash out the conflict between Israel’s war against the fedayeen based in Jordan and the king’s anger at Israel’s regular incursions into his territory to stop them. In 1968, Eban and Allon pre- sented him with the Allon plan. “I was offered the return of something like 90-plus percent of the territory, 98 percent even, excluding Jerusa- lem,” the king told Shlaim. “But I couldn’t accept. As far as I was con- cerned, it had to be every single inch.”

When Golda became prime minister, Hussein tried to arrange an- other meeting, part of his attempt to regain the land that he’d lost in the war. Golda resisted, sending Allon or Eban to impart the bad news that Israel would not quickly surrender the West Bank. But on September 6, 1970, Golda received a vivid reminder of how closely Israel’s fate was in- tertwined with Jordan’s when the PFLP launched its boldest attack, hi- jacking three airplanes and landing them at an old British Royal Air Force base in Jordan called Dawson’s Field promptly renamed Revolu- tion Airport. The terrorists offered to free all 310 hostages unharmed in return for the release of all fedayeen prisoners in Swiss, German, Ameri- can, and Israeli jails.