Golda (17 page)

Unnerved by the casualties,
yishuv
leaders knew they had to pull back from the precipice. On August 5, convening in Paris, the Jewish Agency Executive formally voted to end armed opposition. Begin announced that he would ignore that decree.

It was a grim time for Zionists. Despite all of the cautious diplomacy and incautious resistance, the building and organizing, the Jews of Pales- tine were still helpless to control their own fate. Europe’s surviving Jews were on the verge of another harsh winter in bleak DP camps and the few who had been smuggled out were crowded into a new British internment camp in Cyprus. Their leaders remained in prison, Ben-Gurion holed up in Paris, and the country under virtual martial law.

Before they could begin to regroup, the British put forth yet another solution to the Palestine problem, the creation of a federalized state under British control with a small Jewish district. The entire Zionist community rejected the plan out of hand. But when Bevin called an Anglo-Jewish- Arab conference in London to discuss his proposal, that unity unraveled, every fissure in the political fabric of Zionism threatening to tear the movement to shreds.

From Latrun, Sharett repeated the advice he had offered for years: we should never miss an opportunity to present our position. Having ab- sorbed that lesson, Ben-Gurion agreed that they should send a delegation to London. Golda, however, was adamantly, almost maniacally, opposed. She’d already retreated from her position on resistance. Unless Bevin agreed to release the
yishuv
’s leadership and allow the discussion to move beyond federalization, she said, she would not countenance Jewish atten- dance.

“Golda is inflexible and is making the party look bad,” wrote Sharett from Latrun. “She won’t admit it, but she’s acting as if Ben-Gurion is a traitor.”

* * *

By the time the train pulled into Basle in early December 1946, Golda was teetering. For months, she’d been caught in the endless spate of de- bates over restraint versus resistance, over negotiation versus defiance, everyone yelling at her for not enforcing their will. Whenever Etzel of the Stern Gang dared British power by bombing railroad tracks, robbing a bank, or attacking a police station, she was called in for a lecture or an

open threat, and she couldn’t exactly admit that she was powerless. When the British weren’t yelling at her to control her people, her people were fussing at her to control the British. After troops fired on a crowd trying to free refugees about to be shipped off to Cyprus or seized weapons settlers had stockpiled for their self-defense, everyone expected Golda to
do
something.

Yet no matter what Golda did or said, she was heaped with an unend- ing wash of complaints—from Latrun, from Weizmann, from Ben-Gur- ion. And she had no one to turn to for comfort. Her son, Menachem, was studying music in New York, and her daughter, Sarah, was on Kibbutz Revivim in the middle of the Negev. (The sight of the barren settlement left Golda aghast. “I thought I would die,” she said. “For miles around, there was nothing, not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a bird, nothing but sand and glaring sun.”)

Remez was available only by letter. And when he was released in No- vember, he offered little support. “You and Ben-Gurion are destroying the last hope of the Jewish people,” he berated her for supporting resis- tance.

“Look, you are afraid and I am afraid,” she pleaded. “But which way is more dangerous, yours or mine? Yours won’t amount to anything, which will really bring us to destruction. My way means people’s lives, but one thing I am sure of—we can’t forfeit things necessary to our existence for the promise that if we’ll be in trouble we can get help from the outside.” The only people who seemed to approve of her were foreign journalists, who hung on her every word. “She had this gift of propaganda, and I use this word unashamedly,” said Gershon Avner, her aide. “In those days, there was a crisis every day and the journalists pulled no punches. . . . But

she could handle them, all of them.”

Even on days when curfews emptied the streets, her phone rang inces- santly and she was forced to sneak out to meetings. Between recurrent attacks of gallstones and migraines, she was surviving on semiregular morphine injections. One afternoon, she fainted dead away and was taken to Beilenson Hospital, where doctors ordered her to rest. “A lot of us

die at around fifty,” she replied flippantly. They secured her promise to stop smoking, but she started again within a week.

Golda had traveled to Basle for the Twenty-second Zionist Congress, dreading the anticipated brawl over the London conference. Weizmann and his supporters thundered both against the resistance and against those urging a boycott of the conference. With the support of a large swath of the American and Palestinian delegations, the revisionists op- posed any negotiations with the British until they ceded all of Palestine as a Jewish homeland.

Ben-Gurion planted the Labor caucus firmly in the middle. “One thing is prohibited under any circumstances—murder,” he announced in a closed meeting of the political committee, clearly leaving other meth- ods of resistance on the table.

But the resistance-negotiation dilemma didn’t turn out to be the major question that wracked the congress. For years, international Zionism had shied away from spelling out the precise size and shape of a Jewish home- land they sought. Faced with a plea from Truman that they clarify their positions, many delegates believed that the time had come to tell the world exactly what the Jews wanted.

Ben-Gurion asked the congress to endorse a demand for all of Palestine as a political position but be willing to accept partition if Britain offered it. After the Holocaust, Golda had resigned herself to partition, but she wor- ried—vocally and repeatedly—that accepting it could lead them down a slippery slope to federalization. “The question is, what is our starting point?” she said in a caucus meeting. “[Eliezer] Kaplan [the Jewish Agency treasurer] really wants a state, but he wants to begin by requesting a prov- ince. This is dangerous. . . . Truman might say, if you agree to a province, then make a start with it, and do you really believe that the British govern- ment, in a couple of years’ time, will change its views in our favor and agree to a state?

“If Truman really is prepared to offer us a State of Israel, then let’s re- quest it
now
!”

Gradually, the notion picked up steam although almost half of the

delegates, including Ben-Gurion, balked at making such a bold declara- tion. While they thought of themselves as the “new Jews” creating their own future, they instinctively shirked directness, as if fearing that they might be seen as insolent.

Golda had no such inhibition. “Why are we NOW pressing our de- mand for a Jewish state?” she asked in eloquent Yiddish. “When did it become clear that we must have total control over our lives and over im- migration, that these matters must be in the hands of Jews, not as a dis- tant aim, but as a desperate, immediate need? . . . When we, the 600,000 Jews of Palestine, despite everything we had created in the country and endured during the long years of war, found ourselves powerless to rescue millions of Jews from certain death. . . . The White Paper was like an iron wall erected between us and Hitler’s victims. It was then, when our helplessness was so tragically revealed, that the argument among us as to the goals of Zionism came to an end. Zionism, redemption, and rescue became a single concept . . . and we knew that there was only one way of fulfilling Zionism now—and that was by creating a Jewish state.”

Ironically, all the angst at Basle over the London conference and the shape of Palestine’s future turned out to be irrelevant. With Labour back- benchers revolting against a policy that seemed to go nowhere, unrelent- ing pressure from Truman, and a public wearying of the daily media diet of floggings and executions in Palestine, Prime Minister Attlee abruptly reversed British policy.

In February 1947, his cabinet announced that it would submit the question of Palestine to the newly formed United Nations.

chapter eight

We refuse to disappear, no matter how strong and brutal and ruthless the forces against us may be.

T

hey made an odd pair, the sixty-five-year-old Hashemite king born in Saudi Arabia and the forty-nine-year-old Jewish woman from Pinsk meeting secretly to negotiate the future of a country to which nei- ther held a birthright. But the labyrinthine diplomatic wrangling sparked by the British decision to refer the Palestine question to the United Na- tions had generated dozens of bizarre alliances and odd bedfellows as it degenerated into a series of petty public squabbles and backroom deals over the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, charged with issuing recommendations for the fifty-five-nation General

Assembly to consider in the fall of 1947.

By the time Golda snuck across the border into Naharayim, Transjor- dan, to meet King Abdullah, the General Assembly was ready to consider the committee’s proposal for political partition, with Jerusalem as an in- ternational city. At a press conference, Golda had been asked if she thought blood would be spilled if that recommendation were adopted. “We don’t anticipate spilled blood, but we are ready if it happens,” she

said, knowing full well that the tiny
yishuv
could not hold off a concerted attack by the armies of all the Arab countries threatening invasion. The only hope was that Abdullah would not send his Arab Legion—15,000 men trained and led by British officers—across his borders and that he would deny other Arab armies easy access to them.

The pressure on Abdullah to join the Arab front against a Jewish state was fierce, but the king was the most unpredictable of the Arab leaders. Granted his kingdom by British fiat in 1921, he had set his sights on ruling more than that desolate stretch of territory with no outlet to the sea, no oil, and no historical grandeur. He dreamed of presiding over an empire, Greater Syria, the union of Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.

Such brazen designs didn’t win him much affection or trust among Arab leaders, but Abdullah understood patience. For the moment, he was ignoring Syria and Lebanon while he figured out how to swallow up the rest of Palestine, which he could see from the window of his palace by the Dead Sea. His greatest threat was not his fellow Arab leaders but Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former mufti of Jerusalem, who envisioned Pales- tine as the base for spreading his own influence across the Arab world. Since the Jews hated al-Husseini even more than Abdullah did, accord- ing to the idiosyncratic king’s impeccable logic, the Zionists were his natural allies.

“There are already enough Jews in Palestine,” Abdullah trumpeted in public. But he had been negotiating with Zionists since 1922, and had privately agreed to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in exchange for Jewish support of his annexation of the Arab part of Palestine.

Golda had almost no experience dealing with Arabs and none whatso- ever negotiating with monarchs. But Sharett, Zionism’s leading diplomat, was stuck in New York leading the lobbying effort at the United Nations, and one of the
yishuv
’s leaders needed to meet with the king. So at the end of November 1947, she slipped across the border and waited for the king to arrive, as planned, at the compound of the Palestine Electric Cor- poration.

King Abdullah had been told that he would be meeting with the sec-

ond most important Zionist diplomat, but the last person he expected was Golda, or any other woman. “Although he respected the opposite sex, King Abdullah was a conservative,” wrote Sir Alex Kirkbride, the British high commissioner in Transjordan, who’d caught wind of the meeting. “In his eyes, women could not be the equal of men, particularly in poli- tics.”

But Abdullah was a natural charmer, a raconteur of desert lore who dabbled in poetry. Recovering quickly, he shared thick Arab coffee with his guest and invited her to visit him at his palace in Amman—at some unspecified time in the future, of course. Then he launched into a solilo- quy about partition and his recent discussions with the Arab League Council, reporting that he had told them that he would not collaborate in the destruction of a Jewish state.

“Over the past thirty years you have grown and strengthened your- selves and your achievements are many,” he told Golda. “It is impossible to ignore you, and it is a duty to compromise with you. . . . Any clash be- tween us will be to our own disadvantage. . . . I agree to partition that will not shame me before the Arab world.”

That was sweet music to Golda’s ears, although Abdullah then re- turned to a suggestion he’d been making for decades, that he annex all of Palestine and allow the Jews their own republic within it. Brushing off that notion, Golda tried to lead the conversation around to the partition resolution about to go to the United Nations.

But Abdullah wouldn’t let her do much talking. How would the Jewish community in Palestine feel if I captured the land set aside for the Arabs? he asked, radiating confidence.

Favorably, Golda responded, if his moves didn’t interfere with the es- tablishment of a Jewish state. “But you should declare that your sole pur- pose is to maintain law and order until the United Nations can establish a government,” she advised, an odd recommendation, at once naive and patronizing.