Golda (12 page)

Her dismissiveness colored every relationship Golda ever had, whether personal or political. Knowing that there was no going back once you crossed her invisible line, people hesitated to disagree with her. Is it worth risking her wrath over
this
issue, they’d ask. Nomi Zuck- erman still recalls the day she dared disagree with Golda about some- thing trivial, the quality of an opera singer. “She looked at me as if I were a piece of paper flying around on the floor,” says Zuckerman. “She could give you a look when she wanted to. It froze you. It almost got colder next to me.”

All of Golda’s personal relations were problematic. The men she was involved with were inevitably married, and she had issues with her children as well: much to her chagrin, her son, Menachem, dropped out of both the Labor Zionist youth group and high school. Sarah, too, left school without finishing. And her mother, Bluma, on whom she depended for child care,

criticized her constantly, about her smoking, about the children, about her clothes.

But it was Sheyna who remained Golda’s greatest challenge. Proud enough of her sister to keep a scrapbook of her press clippings, Sheyna was too envious of the woman for whose success she claimed credit to of- fer any of the approval Golda had craved since childhood.

“Golda’s mother was impossible, and Sheyna took after the mother,” says Zuckerman.

chapter six

To be or not to be is not a question for compromise.

Either you be or you don’t be.

I

n retrospect, the implications should have sent a more tremulous shud- der through the
yishuv,
the boycotts of Jewish businesses, the prohibi- tions against land ownership, and the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their German citizenship. But products of Eastern, not Western Eu- rope,
yishuv
leaders had the ingrained anti-Semitism of Polish peasants and the blood libel of the Ukrainian petty bourgeoisie as their points of reference. Adolf Hitler’s rantings about the Jewish peril sounded too fa- miliar to panic men and women born in Minsk or Plonsk or Bobrinsk during the era when the Russian secret police began circulating
The Pro- tocols of the Elders of Zion
. To them, even
Kristallnacht,
that three-day spate of coordinated attacks on Germany’s Jews, looked like a German

version of Kishinev, or a dozen other pogroms.

Unlike the Jews of Germany, Golda, Ben-Gurion, and the rest of the
yishuv
political elite were inured to anti-Semitism’s most violent manifes- tations. They expected Diaspora Jews to be murdered, to lose their rights,

to be humiliated simply because they were Jews. That certainty, after all, was the Zionist raison d’être.

Coming to grips with the reality that this outbreak of anti-Semitic hor- ror was of a more lethal order was a gradual process, made all the more painful by the realization that it would mean an end to all their steady progress, to cautious diplomacy, tree planting, and road building. The shift from decades of single-minded focus on the gradual rebuilding of Palestine to turning it into an immediate safe haven was wrenching. But too many Jews were in peril. They needed a Jewish homeland. Immedi- ately.

* * *

Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for three years when the British sent Lord Earl Peel to the Middle East to investigate what had become its intractable Palestine dilemma. No matter how high London set the an- nual Jewish immigration quota, Zionist partisans denounced them as anti-Semites; no matter how far they lowered the bar, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem vilified them as Jew-loving Arab haters. Although no prior in- vestigatory commission had found any way out of the impasse, the Foreign Office seemed to believe that Peel, an experienced colonial administrator, and the five members of the team might pull a rabbit from his diplomatic headgear.

During the commissioners’ sixty-six meetings, held in late 1936 and early 1937, the Peel Commission heard nothing that hadn’t been said a dozen times before. Speaking for the Zionists, Ben-Gurion and Weiz- mann, the British scientist who’d become the leader of the World Zionist Organization, pleaded for an increase in Jewish immigration quotas, assur- ing the investigators that a modus vivendi with the Arabs would develop if neither Arab nor Jew felt dominated. And the Grand Mufti demanded an immediate end to the “experiment of a Jewish national home” in favor of an independent Arab state.

Professor Reginald Coupland, an Oxford don, listened closely to the Grand Mufti’s response when he was asked what would become of the

400,000 Jews already in the country if Palestine became an Arab state. The Arab new nation couldn’t possibly absorb them, the Mufti responded. They would have to be expelled.

Coexistence wasn’t an option, Coupland concluded. “Surgery” was imperative. What he meant became clear when the commission issued its final report in July 1937. “The problem cannot be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all they want. The answer to the question which of them in the end will govern Palestine must be neither. . . . Partition offers a chance of ultimate peace. No other plan does.”

* * *

Ben-Gurion could hardly contain his excitement at the Peel proposal for a Jewish homeland in a piece of Palestine. “We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings,” he en- thused at a Mapai Central Committee meeting. Golda, who rarely dis- agreed with him, was horrified. The proposed Jewish homeland was less than a quarter of historical Palestine, just the Galilee, the Jezreel Valley, and the central coastal plain. And that small piece of territory would be cut in half by a strip, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, that the British proposed assigning to themselves. The rest would be attached to Trans- jordan, which the British had severed from Palestine in 1921.

“Some day my son will ask me by what right I gave up most of the country and I won’t know how to answer him,” Golda complained.

Three weeks later, she and Ben-Gurion battled it out over partition at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich. By then, the British Parlia- ment had accepted the principle of partition as laid out in the Peel re- port, and many of the Zionist delegates assumed that the division of Palestine was imminent. Ben-Gurion painted the choice as stark and clear: a Jewish majority in a small Jewish state or a Jewish minority in an Arab Palestine.

Golda dismissed that formulation out of hand, calling the partition plan a “grotesque proposal.” It wasn’t just that she could not let go of her vision of an
Eretz Yisrael
large enough to welcome millions of Jews. More

attuned to the nuances of the British, she suspected that if the Arabs re- jected the plan, the British would forget about partition but use the Zion- ist agreement to it as a wedge against them in future negotiations.

To stop Ben-Gurion’s pro-Peel steamroller, Golda made common cause with an odd alliance of religious Zionists appalled by the notion of giving up what God had set aside for the Jews, left-wing Zionists dream- ing of Arabs and Jews living harmoniously in a binational state, and real- ists frightened that a tiny state could neither assimilate all the Jews who needed a new home nor resist the inevitable hostility of the Arab state to be created next door. Let’s accept the concept of partition, she argued, but we must reject the Peel specifics.

Ben-Gurion, however, was in the thrall of his vision of a homeland, no matter now minuscule. For him, the only question remaining was how the Jewish homeland should deal with the 250,000 Arabs who would be left inside its borders. The Peel Commission had suggested transferring them to the Arab state, and Ben-Gurion concurred.

Golda had no problem with transfer in
concept.
“I would agree that the Arabs leave
Eretz Yisrael
and my conscience would be clear,” she said. After all, she continued, the Arabs don’t need Palestine; there were plenty of other countries the Arabs could call home. But she knew that the Ar- abs would never accept transfer. Wishful thinking, she called Ben-Guri- on’s plan. Dangerously wishful thinking that would inflame the Arabs.

After two weeks of stormy debate, nearly two-thirds of the Congress delegates accepted Golda’s formulation, rejecting the specifics of the Peel proposal without repudiating the principle of partition. But as Golda had predicted, all the angst was for naught. The Grand Mufti had already flown to Berlin and the leaders of the surrounding Arab countries were declaring the preservation of Palestine as an Arab country as “sacred duty.” Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain formed another commission, which concluded that partition was “impracticable.”

* * *

Night after night, from the small balcony of her apartment overlooking the sea, Golda watched and worried. Had the boat been stopped by the British before its passengers could glimpse the shore of their Promised Land? Had the rickety vessel been caught in a storm and torn apart by an angry sea? So much could go wrong. Too much already had.

In the year since the fruitless partition debate, the Nazis had entered Austria, home to 200,000 Jews. Hundreds of shops had been looted, Jew- ish leaders arrested, old women impelled to clean streets with raw acid. All over the expanding Grand Reich, the official noose had tightened; poised to add Czechoslovakia, with 180,000 Jews, to the Nazi empire, Hitler stood virtually unopposed.

Day after day, Golda sat with her colleagues from the Histadrut and Mapai trying to figure out how to reach out to the Jews of central Eu- rope. But what could they tell them? Come to Palestine? The Nazis were more than willing to get rid of Jews, but the British had virtually slammed the door on their entry into Palestine. Every year, the immigration quo- tas dropped, from 61,800 in 1935 to 29,700 in 1936 and a meager 10,500

in 1937.

Every afternoon, she donned a proper dress and played the perfect lady in her negotiations with the British as the intermediary between the
yishuv
and the Mandate authorities, beginning with the colonial officials to help save European Jewry. “Who else did we have?” explained Ger- shon Avner, who later worked for Golda in the Foreign Ministry. “Golda was one of the few who could speak fluent English, who could cope with British officials, who had the confidence of our leadership. . . . And she had the added capacity to explain Jews and Jewish Palestine to non-Jews, most of whom knew nothing about us.”

But at night, knowing how lightly the British took her treaties, Golda watched from her balcony, not as a party or Histadrut official, but as a member of a secret network, the Mossad, set up to smuggle Jews out of Europe. From an office on Marc Aurel Street in Vienna across the street from Gestapo headquarters, organizers searched for seaworthy ships, cap- tains and crews and ports from which they could embark without raising

British suspicions. They became masters of bribery, of forging consular stamps, of locating what one of them called “honest” crooks.

On Golda’s end, members of the network traveled up and down the coast scouting out the least obvious places to land. They forged identity cards and arranged housing at kibbutzim from which the new arrivals could disappear into the population. Then Golda watched, for dilapidated cargo ships, ramshackle riverboats, and barely seaworthy fishing vessels that had snuck out of inlets on the Greek coast, or Yugoslavian ports crammed with sixty or one hundred, or as many as four hundred Jews from Germany or Poland, Austria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

On good nights, the nights when the ships slipped in past the British, the heaviness in her heart lifted as she radioed the central Mossad office, and then raced down to the beach, forged papers in hand, to welcome the desperate immigrants.

Ben-Gurion was staunchly opposed to the Mossad’s activities. The numbers they could rescue were too small to offset the harm to the Zion- ist relationship with the British, and he believed that without the British, the Arabs would wipe out all they had built. “We shall never be able to fight both the Arabs and the British,” he declared.

Ben-Gurion was thinking strategically. Golda followed her gut. For her, the numbers weren’t important. It was the doing, her only relief from the grim realization that the world was willing to let Europe’s Jews die, her only respite from the image of her father’s helplessness in the face of a pending pogrom.

“We know, we mothers, that there are Jewish children scattered every- where in the world, and that Jewish mothers in many different countries are asking for only one thing,” she wrote in the newspaper of the Wom- en’s Labour Council. “ ‘Take our children away, take them to any place you choose, only save them from this hell!’ ”

* * *

The Hotel Royal at Evian-les-Bains, the gayest resort on Lake Geneva, was a bizarre setting for Golda to broadcast that plea to the world. But in

the arcane world of international affairs, diplomatic gatherings devoted to massacres and other human disasters rarely occur on the mean streets or near the killing fields under discussion. The elegant old spa on the French south shore of the lake across from Lausanne, then, was the site chosen for delegates from thirty-two countries—the Western European powers, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and twenty Latin American nations—to gather in the summer of 1938 in response to Presi- dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s call for an international solution to the growing catastrophe of Hitler’s expulsion and oppression of the Jews of the Reich.