Golda (54 page)

“What’s all the Messianic euphoria?” Golda asked cynically.

Golda arrived at the airport just as Sadat’s plane was circling Tel Aviv in preparation for landing, thousands of Israelis standing in the streets and applauding. Emerging onto the red carpet laid across the tarmac and a fanfare of trumpets heralding his arrival, the Egyptian president made his way down the long receiving line, shaking the hands of the generals with whom he had long done battle.

When he reached Golda, the crowd froze. Before he left Egypt, Sa- dat’s wife, Jihan, had warned him, “Mind your manners, especially with Golda Meir.”

Sadat smiled, clearly tickled. Taking Golda’s hand, he said softly, “Madam, for many, many years I wanted to meet you.”

Golda returned his graciousness. “Mr. President, so have I waited a long time to meet you. Why didn’t you come earlier?”

Sadat paused for a moment and replied, “The time was not yet ripe.”

As Egypt and Israel moved toward the formal peace that had eluded her, Golda was haunted by that comment, angry and hurt that she was blamed for the continuing hostility when Sadat himself acknowledged that the season of peace had only just arrived. That it had come during the prime ministership of Begin, who had thrown up so many roadblocks to her peace efforts, stung so deeply that she never seemed to grasp that only a Begin could have been the architect of settlement with Egypt, just as only a Richard Nixon could have made the long journey to China. The announcement that he and Sadat had won the Nobel Peace Prize, then, was a devastating blow. “I don’t know about the Nobel Prize, but they cer- tainly deserve an Oscar,” she remarked caustically, by then too tired and too demoralized to hide her chagrin.

By the time Begin and Sadat flew to Oslo for the prize ceremony, Golda had already been in and out of the hospital for almost four months with what doctors called a “viral illness.” She could no longer see, and her liver was failing. On Friday afternoon, December 8, less than twelve hours before her two old adversaries were to receive perhaps the highest honor on the planet, Golda died, grabbing the headlines from them both.

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Golda had a dying wish, a plan to clear her name that she’d pursued dur- ing the long months of Begin’s rise as the great peacemaker, a grand ges- ture she tried to make even from her deathbed. Initially, she thought her old confidant Yisrael Galili would be her agent and that he would author

an article that would vindicate her. Then she decided that calling a press conference to answer her critics directly would have more impact. Real- izing that reason needed to be backed up by facts, she delayed inviting journalists in for that chat so that Eli Mizrachi, who’d worked in her of- fice, could gather all the documents necessary to prove her case. But Be- gin dithered in approving her request for access to classified materials until Golda’s health overtook her efforts.

It fell to Mordechai Gazit, director general of the prime minister’s of- fice, to disabuse Israelis of their tendency to confuse Golda’s obduracy with Sadat’s flexibility. A prominent dove, Gazit was an ironic agent of her defense. When Golda had first welcomed him into her office, she’d joked, “We do not always agree.” Gazit interrupted her. “We never agree,” he’d interjected.

But while Gazit churned out a meticulously researched and argued spate of pamphlets and articles about Golda’s efforts as a peacemaker, no one in Israel was interested in facts. Dayan’s disastrous prewar overconfi- dence and subsequent histrionics were conveniently rewritten out of the public mythos when he joined Begin’s government as foreign minister, and Shimon Peres’ adventurism, whether in French Guiana, France, or Dimona, largely forgotten. But Golda remained firmly engraved on the public consciousness as the standard-bearer of what Doron Rosenblum of
Ha’aretz
calls “the horrific Golda Syndrome.” The symptoms he de- scribes as: “arrogance toward and patronization of the Middle Eastern environment; an uncontrollable urge to be didactic; a blind spot that makes a Palestinian political presence completely invisible; and primarily endless self-righteousness, which sees everything in black and white—we are always right, the evil is entirely our enemy’s, and everything is a justi- fication for maintaining the status quo.”

That simplistic portrait is a convenient and comfortable exercise in historical revisionism even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of historical accuracy. Fond of “what ifs” and “if onlys,” Israelis conjure up imaginary scenarios of the peace that might have been—or the war that might not have—“if only” Golda hadn’t been too stubborn or too blind to breach

the wall of Arab hostility. But it rests on a few key moments—peace op- portunities, they call them—and the belief that the Anwar Sadat who ex- tended his hand to her in Jerusalem in 1977 was as ready for that historic gesture in 1972 or 1973.

By his own clear admission, however, all of Sadat’s alleged peace ges- tures were contingent on the same precondition: that Israel commit itself in advance to yield every centimeter of land taken from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the 1967 war, including Jerusalem—and virtually no Israeli back then, and few today, was willing to concede all that territory.

“No Arab government offered to sign a partial agreement with us . . . without a commitment with a time table for full withdrawal nei- ther she [Golda] nor the government nor any government ’til today was ready to make,” explained Simcha Dinitz, former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “This is the basic mistake that all the supposed learned ar- biters make.”

Still, judging Sadat by his behavior in the late 1970s, the revisionists refuse to accept that he would not have budged from that absolute posi- tion before the Yom Kippur War. But every bit of evidence, including the testimony of all three of his foreign ministers and his wife, supports Sa- dat’s own contention that the “time was not ripe.”

“I do not agree with those among us and among you who assert today that Sadat tried to achieve a real peace before 1973,” said his wife, Jihan. “Sadat needed one more war in order to win and enter into negotiations from a position of equality.”

For most Israelis, however, Jihan Sadat’s view is irrelevant, as is Sadat’s clearest statement, that he was “convinced that she [Golda] could have done better and gone farther than Menahem Begin.” Golda didn’t know how to promote peace, they insist. Golda was an inflexible old lady inca- pable of compromise. All she offered the Arabs was an impossible choice between maintaining the status quo and humiliating capitulation.

Golda was rarely as intransigent as the mythologists have portrayed her, of course. She might have talked tough, but in the end, she was a

pragmatist. So while she long railed against rapprochement with the Ger- mans, she was the prime minister who accepted the appointment of Am- bassador Pauls and invited Willy Brandt to Jerusalem, the first sitting German chancellor to receive such an invitation. Despite her dislike for Begin, she bowed to political necessity and included him in her National Unity government. And she was the architect of dozens of compromises that kept the Labor Party from splintering into dozens of fragments of ego and ideology.

In her quest for peace, she repeatedly met with King Hussein to forge a de facto peace. Time and again, she reached out to Nasser, and she agreed to every request from Marek Halter, the Romanians, and the Rus- sians when they tried to bring her together with Sadat. As an opening to Sadat, she turned her back on the decades-old Israeli principle that they would never give up land for a partial peace. And by early 1973, she dropped her demand for direct negotiations with her enemies.

Golda was certainly not without her blind spots. Along with all the other early Zionists, she was cavalier about the seeds of anger and frustra- tion that would spring up when they planted a Jewish homeland on some- one else’s soil, about the colliding nationalisms that inevitably poisoned the soil, and the difficulty of removing the toxins from such a harvest.

Her vision of the Palestinians was hopelessly clouded, although during her time in office, she shared that myopia with much of the planet. On the world stage, Israel’s conflict was then seen as a struggle between Is- rael and the Arab states, between the Jews and the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanian, and Iraqis. At the United Nations and at multilateral meetings, the Palestinians were still bit players.

Inevitably, perhaps, Golda measured the treatment of Israel against the backdrop of the history she had lived and witnessed. Scores of countries fought wars that created refugees, so why was Israel alone singled out as the oppressor when it didn’t even fire the first shot? she asked. What about all the land taken from Jews in Arab countries and Germany? Shouldn’t it be returned, or the descendants of the former owners be given a country

of their own? So what if they had never constituted a nation before? Nei- ther had the Palestinians.

But forging logic on the anvil of history rather than hammering it out by the flow of change trapped Golda in the past, in the terror to which she’d been raised, in nightmares and forebodings, and, ironically given her commitment to building a future in which Jews need no pity, in Jew- ish victimhood. Shortly after the 1967 war, on the floor of the Knesset, Shulamit Aloni argued that the Arabs on the West Bank considered the Israelis to be conquerors. Golda “stood up and said, ‘How dare you say Jews are conquerors! We Jews are always the underdog,’ ” recalled Aloni. “She never went through a metamorphosis that today we are no longer a minority in a ghetto needing to build safeguards around us. . . . From her point of view, Jews were refugees, underdogs. . . . She lived with the fear of our being a minority and needing safeguards. The feeling of being an underdog that she brought from Russia and the Holocaust, this was her approach to everything.”

Outsiders called it paranoia and cast Golda’s as a Masada complex, such a powerful siege mentality that she saw Israelis on the brink of the impossible choice faced by the first-century Jewish rebels. “It is true we do have a Masada complex,” she admitted, never ashamed of falling back on the lessons of the past. “We also have a pogrom complex. We have a Hitler complex.”

She omitted perhaps her deepest complex, her Czech complex, rein- forced daily by Arab rhetoric about driving Jews into the sea and Yasir Arafat’s pronunciamentos that Arab Palestine must occupy the whole area from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. “We are not Czechoslo- vakia and we do not want a Munich played on us,” she declared, recalling the fatal meeting when Czechoslovakia was dismembered by European powers appeasing Hitler. “Before Czechoslovakia there was Spain. I re- member as if it were yesterday a congress . . . which took place in London in March 1937. A representative of the Spanish Republic, after having in vain asked for aid, pointed his finger towards the Czech delegation, then at the Austrian delegation and said, ‘It will soon be your turn and yours

and yours.’ It is exactly the same message that I am holding today at the disposal of the governments of Europe.”

* * *

If Israelis were willing to admit to any tragedy in Golda’s story, they would limn hers as a tale of Grecian proportions in which Golda’s overarching hubris engulfed both her and them, to catastrophic effect. In that story line, a Golda deeply scarred by the powerlessness of Jews in Russia had all the right stuff—grit, doggedness, principle—to help dream a country into being and, as the shrewdest fish in a sea of political sharks, to domi- nate it. But with limited creativity and almost no tolerance for dissent, she glossed over deep social and ideological divides by force of personality. Her political repertoire was limited to bossing, charming, and cajoling, bereft of an ounce of finesse. Confusing party with state, she put the for- tunes of the Labor Party above those of the nation. And allergic to leaving anyone with so much as a smidgen of honor, she lacked the subtlety es- sential to a peacemaker, to devastating effect.

It’s easy to point to the page on that script where the heroine began to look like an intractable old lady rather than a gutsy grandmother shield- ing her young. But that wasn’t a moment in real time. The viewer sees it now because history, with its niggling tendency to edit reality and to shift moral values and perspective, unfolds in such perfect cinematic dissolve that it’s all too simple to forget that we are no longer who we were or what really was.

Golda’s life story doesn’t turn on the essential elements by which Sophocles or Euripides turned their screws; she was as much poisoned by her environment as it was by her. The loyalist of party apparatchiks, she was trained to a political system that was anachronistic even before the establishment of the State, and she rose in that rigid hierarchy as its most persuasive international voice and its most prodigious fund-raiser. When she was already an old woman—too old, too thin-skinned, and too steeped in an outdated view of Israel, Jews, and Arabs—she was tapped to serve as prime minister, not because she was the most talented leader, the wisest,

or the most in tune with the Israeli zeitgeist, but because Labor was para- lyzed by out-of-control egos, and Israel by crippling indecision.

Her people adored her for all the wrong reasons—for how safe her towering strength made them feel and for the aplomb her edgy wit lent them—rather than because they heard their own hopes and dreams re- flected in her exhortations about socialism, equality, and self-sacrifice. While she was celebrated across the planet as the first personification of strong female political leadership, on the most pressing international issue—the alarming rise of terrorism—she was cast aside as Cassandra despite what history has shown to be her prescience. In her every attempt to move Israel toward peace, she was hemmed in—by the great game be- tween the United States and the Soviet Union and by Israel’s political landscape as much as by her own obduracy.

And despite the reality that her nation’s political paralysis constrained her from accomplishing much of what she longed to do, she was none- theless forced to stay in office well beyond her time because there seemed no other way for her to protect a nation at risk, from its neigh- bors, its refugees, its economic precariousness, and its own contentious divisions.