Golda (18 page)

“But I want this area for myself,” he huffed. “I want to ride, not to be ridden.”

Dismissive of the intrigues of both the mufti and the other Arab rul- ers, Abdullah announced that he could make no concrete promises until after the United Nations decision. But with all the rhetoric stripped away, Golda’s translators believed that Abdullah had pledged that he would not allow his army to “collide with” the Jews, as they put it.

Golda was taken with the king, “a small, very poised man with great charm,” in her words. But it was impossible to know how far to trust him. Not far, Ezra Danin, one of Golda’s two translators, suggested, caution- ing her that Abdullah was notoriously unreliable and that Bedouins had their own concept of the truth.

* * *

Despite their request that the United Nations consider its future, Britain was not done with Palestine. Bevin refused to commit to turning over a mandate that had effectively expired with the demise of the League of Nations. And he told the House of Lords that Britain retained the right— by what legal authority was not specified—to reject any UN recommen- dations.

And while the UN debated, the British colonial authorities set out to prove that they were still the masters of the moment. In February, shortly after Etzel kidnapped a judge, they’d evacuated all nonessential person- nel and launched another all-out effort to suppress political violence. Declaring martial law, they put more than a third of the Jewish popula- tion and 90 percent of the economy under emergency regulations.

In June, Britain even rejected the UN’s call for a truce during the pro- ceedings of UNSCOP. And just when that committee was beginning its work in Palestine, the Mandatory authorities demonstrated how much respect they had for the new world body by announcing a death sen- tence—death by hanging—for three Irgun members who’d raided a po- lice station and emptied its armory several months earlier.

Britain’s last days as overlords in the Middle East were bitter times, and as the leader of the
yishuv
and its intermediary with the high commis- sioner, Golda was caught between the British rock and a Jewish hard

place. Every seizure of an immigrant ship, every deportation to Cyprus, every image of the internment camp there, so reminiscent of Nazi concen- tration camps, further embittered the
yishuv.
When Etzel blew up the British Officers’ Club in Jerusalem, thousands cheered. And when guerril- las dressed as British soldiers and blasted a breach into the walls of the old Acre fortress, where 163 Jews were imprisoned, they became folk heroes.

“The struggle against terrorism cannot be divorced from the political circumstances which have given rise to this terrible aberration,” Golda wrote the British in one seven-point letter. “Terrorism has its roots in the despair and bitterness engendered by the White Paper policy.”

Rejecting that argument, the government demanded that the Jewish Agency turn Etzel’s leaders over to them. “We will not become a nation of informers . . . with each one watching a neighbor or friend and report- ing on what appears to be wrong with the person under suspicion,” Golda decreed.

All she would promise the British was that the Jewish Agency would do everything possible to stem the violence. But the organization cannot “be called upon to place itself at the disposal of the Government for fight- ing the evil consequences of a policy which is that of the Government’s own making.”

Golda did try. In political discussions and at public meetings, she railed openly against the Etzel, especially when they robbed Jewish jew- elry stores to raise money for their exploits, hijacked Jewish trucks or taxis for transportation, or sent children to put up illegal posters, a crime pun- ished by flogging. “Even if it means armed struggle, we’ll stop them,” she told the leadership, knowing full well that no one had the heart to plunge the
yishuv
into a civil war with Etzel when they were already fighting the British.

“Terrorism is assisting Palestine’s British administration,” she pleaded at a mass rally in Tel Aviv. “It has put Palestine Jewry on the defensive, whereas but for terrorism the Zionists could have pursued a more vigor- ous line in their political efforts.”

Those exhortations drew the wrath of some terrorists, who lashed out

at the Jewish Agency, planting explosives in its press office and tourist information center in the heart of Jerusalem. When they openly declared Golda a traitor, Golda’s colleagues tried to dissuade her from walking alone, especially at night. One evening, she and Sheyna went to the the- ater only to have their evening’s relaxation interrupted by a shower of leaflets denouncing Golda thrown from the balcony.

But Golda had won the admiration of most of the
yishuv.
“On the whole she had the right measure of independence and the ability to listen to people,” said a man who worked closely with her. “And the community admired her ability to speak simply and directly to their hearts.”

That respect soared when she launched an initiative to bring all the Jewish children living in British detention centers in Cyprus into Pales- tine immediately. By the middle of 1947, refugees were languishing there, in steamy tents behind barbed wire, for more than a year while they waited their turns for one of the 750 visas granted Cyprus detainees each month.

Since the British refused to increase that quota, Golda went to Cyprus to convince refugees high on the waiting list to step aside to allow fami- lies with children to leave first. It was an agonizing request to make of men and women who’d spent years in German death camps and British DP camps before being confined on the bleak island. But for three days, Golda trekked from tent to tent, asking elderly couples to give up their places on the departure list for families with babies and berating unmar- ried men for their indifference to the plight of children growing up with- out much hope.

The refugees bowed to Golda’s request, and the British commandant knew better than to intervene. Before Golda arrived, he’d received a cable from Jerusalem, warning, “Mrs. Meyerson is a very formidable person. Watch out!”

By the time the United Nations was ready to vote on the partition of Palestine, Golda was the mistress of the
yishuv,
often dominating the contentious community single-handedly while her colleagues were in New York.

Those were days of boundless apprehension. The partition plan had engendered a tangle of mixed feelings, excitement, almost disbelief, that the Jews might finally be permitted to create their own country, and de- spair at how much of that country was being assigned to the Arabs. After Golda saw the map proposed by UNSCOP, which excluded the western Galilee from the Jewish state, internationalized Jerusalem, and was rife with enclaves and passageways between the two countries, she could barely speak to the press, muttering, “We can hardly imagine a Jewish state with- out Jerusalem.” But, on balance, she fell back on her stock phrase, “We have no alternative.”

That alternative was anything but solid. With the winds shifting daily in Lake Success, where the General Assembly was meeting, no one was confident that the Jews could garner the necessary two-thirds majority, and no one was convinced that the British would actually leave if they did. Even if they did, the Arabs weren’t just threatening war should the UN vote for partition; they were massing troops on the borders.

“The Messiah hasn’t come,” Golda warned at a Histadrut meeting in Tel Aviv. “The Day of Redemption isn’t here yet. . . . Let us . . . prepare for the worst. Then there is hope that it won’t come to the worst.”

It was well past midnight in Jerusalem by the time the General Assem- bly voted on November 29, 1947. Golda had spent the evening at a recep- tion for Yugoslavia’s Independence Day. But she needed to listen to the news from New York alone. Smoking endless cigarettes, she planted herself on her couch at home and listened to the session on the radio, checking off each nation on a piece of paper. Afghanistan was against, no surprise. But when Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussia, Canada, and Costa Rica voted yes, she began to smile. The final tally was thirty-three nations for and thirteen against with ten abstentions, including Great Britain.

The next evening, she stood next to Ben-Gurion on the balcony of the Jewish Agency building. All day, Jerusalem had rejoiced. Flags with the Star of David fluttered, trucks filled with young people from settlements honked their horns, and thousands of people danced, quite literally, in the streets. As night fell, they gathered to cheer their leaders.

“For two thousand years we have waited,” Golda told the crowd. “We always believed it would come. . . . Now we shall have a free Jewish state.”

The following morning, eight Jews were murdered on the Haifa-Jeru- salem road and along the nebulous boundary between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, following a plan designed by the Arab Higher Committee, Arabs trashed Jewish shops and murdered random citizens. In Haifa, armed mobs attacked workers at the oil refinery. And in the countryside, funeral processions became a target. Hundreds of Arab irregulars were sneaking into the country from Egypt and Syria, Iraq and Lebanon to join the Army of Salvation led by Fawzi El Kaukji, who’d spent World War II at the mufti’s side in Berlin. And Abdul Khader, the leader of the Palestinian resistance movement who’d been fighting the British pres- ence in the Middle East for more than a decade, snuck back home from Iraq to take charge of the local resistance. “We shall keep our honor and our country with our swords,” he pledged. And his first order: “We will strangle Jerusalem.”

By the two-week anniversary of the partition vote, eighty-four Jews had been buried.

Hoping either to minimize their own casualties in the last days of their Mandate or to send the Jews a chilling “we told you so,” the British would neither recognize the Haganah’s right to defend the
yishuv
nor provide that defense themselves. Producing photographs of Arabs looting Jewish shops and houses while British police watched with folded arms, Golda repeatedly complained to the chief secretary. He promised an inquiry but did nothing. Authorizing Jews to patrol the roads or towns would be tak- ing sides, he informed her curtly.

Taking advantage of that “malevolent neutrality,” as Golda called it, the Arabs launched a major battle to cut off Jerusalem. Perched in the Judean Hills, an island surrounded by heavily Arab towns, Jerusalem was linked to Tel Aviv by a single approach, the cliffs above it dotted with Arab villages. Arab snipers hid in the pine forests at Bab el Wad and Kastel and took potshots at Jewish vehicles carrying supplies to the 100,000 Jews of

the ancient city. Within days, the skeletons of overturned buses littered the side of the highway.

In charge of Jerusalem at Ben-Gurion’s command, Golda was sud- denly overseeing the city’s defense, the distribution of food, the acquisi- tion of arms, and the protection of the 2,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews living inside the walls of the Old City. When pharmacies ran out of medicine, when scientists needed money to build weapons, when British troops did nothing to protect unarmed civilians, Golda’s office was besieged. She was so exhausted that she met visitors while soaking her feet. Sleeping four hours a night at best, she was in her element.

Golda needed to be in Tel Aviv twice a week for meetings and the only alternative to the Jerusalem Road was to hop into a phosphate truck loaded with illegal weapons heading to the northern shore of the Dead Sea and catch a tiny Primus from there. Most weeks, she ran the gauntlet instead.

One afternoon in December, she sat calmly in her seat while Arabs rained bullets down on her bus, but she covered her eyes. What are you doing? a companion asked. “I’m not really afraid to die, you know. Every- one dies. But how will I live if I’m blinded? How will I work?”

On December 27, her bus was ambushed on a curve six miles from Jerusalem. The man next to her was shot and died in her lap.

Several days later, Golda found herself in a convoy of 170 vehicles stopped by British armored cars. Her fellow passengers scurried to hide their weapons, Golda concealing grenades and pistols under her coat and inside her purse. But a soldier glimpsed the barrel of a Sten gun peeking out from underneath the jacket of a young woman and arrested her. Where are you taking her, Golda challenged him. “Fallujah,” he re- sponded. An Arab village, Golda thought. Impossible. “If you take her, you must take me too,” Golda insisted. The captain didn’t know who the inso- lent woman was, but her presence was menacingly commanding, so he hauled Golda and his captive off to the police station in Jewish Hedera.

“Mrs. Meyerson,” the chief of police there exclaimed when they ar- rived. Apologizing, he offered her a drink in celebration of the New Year

and escorted her to Tel Aviv. The death of Golda, he knew, could provoke serious trouble.

* * *

In mid-January, Eliezer Kaplan, the treasurer of the Jewish Agency, re- turned from the United States with bad news: there’s no way the Jews of Palestine can raise more than seven or eight million dollars for weapons. After years of donating enormous sums for Palestine, for Jewish refugees in Europe and their own communities at home, American Jews were tapped out at the very moment when Arab armies were poised for attack. “I suggest that Kaplan and I leave at once for the United States,” Ben- Gurion announced. Golda flinched. Ben-Gurion was a genius with America’s committed Zionists, but he was too impatient and too old-fash-

ioned for more mainstream Jews.

“What you can do here, I cannot do,” she told him. “But what you can do in the United States, I can also do.”

Ben-Gurion wasn’t convinced, but he was outvoted. Without return- ing to Jerusalem to pack, the next day Golda flew to New York with a shopping list from the Haganah quartermaster—weapons, ammunition, blankets, tents, and sweaters.

This time, Golda needed the support of Jews she’d long disdained, German Jews who owned department stores and factories, non-Zionists who wore fancy clothes, English-speaking Jews who had never had much truck with Yiddish-speaking socialists. At home, she had become “some- one.” But to those Americans, she was hardly a brand name. On earlier trips, she’d been “an impecunious, unimportant representative, a ‘schnorer’ for various little funds,” said Henry Montor, then the director of the United Jewish Appeal. “When she came here she stayed in houses, not in hotels.”