Golda (27 page)

Golda called Ben-Gurion and begged for a delay, but the deal had been sealed. The next morning she delivered the prepared remarks. The Americans, however, did not live up to their end of the bargain. As prom- ised, Lodge guaranteed Israel’s right to free passage through the Straits of Tiran. But he made no mention of Israel’s right to retaliate or protecting Israel from the fedayeen in Gaza, saying only that the future of Gaza would have to be worked out.

When Golda left the UN that day, “she looked like someone who had

had the wind completely knocked out of her sails,” said Meron Medzini, the son of Golda’s old friend Regina. “She appeared to be completely los- ing it.”

The next morning, a friend asked her what she’d done the night be- fore. “I washed my underwear the entire night,” Golda replied. “At least something should be clean around me.”

* * *

Golda felt almost as sullied by Ben-Gurion’s dealings with Germany. Al- though the prime minister offered up high-minded rhetoric about es- chewing racism to justify his attempts at rapprochement with Bonn, his motivation was practical: reparations and arms from the New Germany, as he called it, could help keep Israel strong. Golda, however, was con- vinced that Germany was not all that “new,” or that it could not be so long as the government and bureaucracy were laced with former Nazis.

The two had faced off over Germany while Golda was still minister of labor, when Ben-Gurion negotiated reparations to indemnify Israel for the cost of resettling Holocaust survivors. Israel exploded in an emotional gale the minute the $824 million deal was made public. Blood money! survi- vors protested. When the Knesset met to discuss the agreement, thousands of people gathered outside screaming “Treason!” They burned cars and threw rocks through the windows of the Knesset building. Inside, the tense debate was interrupted repeatedly by the wail of police cars and the explosion of gas grenades.

The next day, with calm restored but emotions still running high, the Knesset reconvened to vote. The chamber was packed, one Knesset mem- ber carried in on a stretcher from the hospital, where he was recovering from a heart attack. But Golda did not appear. Party discipline required that she vote with Ben-Gurion. Rather than do so, she stayed home sick. As foreign minister, however, Golda couldn’t easily evade the Ger- many question since Ben-Gurion was hell-bent on wringing everything he could out of German chancellor Konrad Adenauer while the guilt was still fresh. First, it was a few trade deals. Then, Shimon Peres took time

out from seducing the French to play on German shame to secure weap- ons and technical assistance in missile development. Finally, Ben-Gurion himself met with Adenauer to negotiate a $500 million deal for military equipment and development aid.

Golda tried to ignore the relationship, the rumors that Germany had given Israel $1.5 million for an atom smasher, the deals for helicopters, torpedo boats, and antitank missiles. Then, her old friend Isser Harel, Is- rael’s master spy, discovered that German scientists were helping the Egyptians build weapons. Nasser had long offered a comfortable asylum to Nazis on the run—propagandists, Gestapo officers, and concentration camp doctors. But in 1958, he went a step further, engaging the services of more than two dozen German rocket scientists to help develop his ar- maments industry.

German complicity with Egyptian military development was too much for Golda to swallow, so she and Harel confronted Ben-Gurion with evidence of the shape of his New Germany. Refusing to believe that the Bonn government was involved or to allow Golda to handle the mat- ter herself, he sent Peres to ask the German defense minister to find a way to end the collaboration.

When the German explained that his government was powerless to control the employment of German citizens, Ben-Gurion and Peres were mollified. Golda was not, dubbing the German response “evasive and complicit.” Desperate to avoid jeopardizing the weapons deals, Ben-Gu- rion began scheming to keep the news from going public. But Golda urged Harel to leak his evidence to newspaper editors in Israel and in Germany.

“There is no doubt that the motives of this evil crew are, on the one hand, the lust for gold and on the other, a Nazi inclination to hatred of Israel and the destruction of Jews,” Golda told the Knesset in a direct slap in Ben-Gurion’s face. Flinging around words like “weapons of mass de- struction,” she broke with party discipline and demanded—to no avail— that the German government stop the scientists.

Gradually, Germany became the third-largest consumer of Israeli ex- ports, its second most generous supplier of weapons, and a major purchaser of Uzi submachine guns. Still, Golda steered clear of any involvement, leaving those negotiations to Peres and a small office in Cologne. But at every turn, she derided Ben-Gurion’s depiction of the “new” Germany, where one-third of Adenauer’s cabinet, one-quarter of the Bundestag mem- bers, and a huge percentage of civil servants, including eight ambassadors, were former members of the Nazi Party.

But over time, consumed with the economic and political challenges rocking Israel, Golda was worn down and swung into the camp of realpo- litik and became an advocate of direct ties with Germany. Her new think- ing was tested, however, when the first German ambassador to Israel was named. Dr. Rolf Friedmann Pauls was an experienced diplomat who had been central to the negotiation of reparations with Israel. But he was a former officer of the Wehrmacht, the Nazi armed forces, which the Nuremberg tribunal had nearly proscribed as a criminal organization. Why not someone younger, an intellectual, or a former member of the resistance? she asked.

Knesset members exhorted Golda to reject Pauls’ appointment, accus- ing Bonn of attempting to use it to clear the name of the Wehrmacht. Rumors swirled around the country that Golda would not appear when Pauls presented his credentials to President Zalman Shazar.

But Golda saw Pauls’ appointment as an opportunity. Unlike the intel- lectuals or resistance fighters with whom she’d be more comfortable, he had clout back home. Four days after his arrival in August 1965, Golda accompanied Pauls as he presented his credentials to Shazar. When the Israeli police band played “Deutschland über Alles,” the German na- tional anthem, an anguished roar erupted from the crowd of demonstra- tors, many elderly survivors and ghetto fighters carrying placards reading, zkor, zkor, remember, remember.

Demonstrating her customary indifference to popular sentiment, Golda was not fazed. “If we’re serious about a special relationship with

Germany, we have to come to terms with Pauls’ generation,” she said flatly, sounding suspiciously like one of the diplomats she’d long derided.

* * *

Golda’s distance from the center of foreign policy making continued to dog her. In early 1958, her ambassador in Paris was asked to explain why an Israeli plane that made an emergency landing at a French military airfield in Algeria was filled with arms destined for Latin America. She could honestly report that she knew nothing about it. Providing weapons to Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s dictator, was a Peres connivance to which she wasn’t privy.

Peres was a wellspring of wild machinations that Golda was regularly forced to clean up. In early 1959, he asked the French if Israel might lease French Guiana, an underpopulated colony rich in natural resources, “a catastrophe, colonialism, imperialism,” one of Golda’s closest allies called the notion. “Golda will let it pass over her dead body.”

While Golda did manage to keep Ben-Gurion from embracing some of Peres’ more absurd ploys, including French Guiana, she never gained the status that she craved. And shortly before the 1959 Knesset elections, Ben-Gurion again urged Abba Eban to return home. This time, the young diplomat, who’d long served as the Israeli ambassador both to the United Nations and to Washington, didn’t resist because Ben-Gurion of- fered him a position in his next cabinet. Eban assumed Golda was about to step down and that he would be named foreign minister.

After Mapai scored its greatest electoral victory, Eban waited for Golda to announce her resignation and make room for him at the top. Instead she checked into a rest home outside Jerusalem, allowing rumors to fes- ter, forcing her veteran comrades to make pilgrimages to her covered porch to plead for her to remain in office. When she finally agreed, Eban was appointed to serve as minister without portfolio, which gave him rank without function.

“Wait your turn,” Golda told him. “It will come soon enough.”

Inside the Foreign Ministry, the disappointment was palpable. The

staff ’s distaste for Golda had only grown keener as she ignored and iso- lated them, routinely bringing in her own people as ambassadors and mission heads. The staff union had even lodged a formal complaint about her habit of reserving political plums for her cronies, but Golda had quickly slapped down their leaders. “She was extremely vindictive,” said Benny Morris, whose father, Ya’akov, was head of the union. “He’d been ambassador to New Zealand but she froze his career.”

Having assumed that Golda would show special interest in their ca- reers, the female members of the ministry were particularly frustrated since Golda was never known for offering particular support to women. “Many people thought that she hated women,” said Herlitz. “I don’t know whether that was true, but she certainly wasn’t a friend to us.”

The men weren’t much happier since Golda was notoriously quick to ax subordinates whose behavior disappointed her standards. When she discovered that one of her consul generals had been less than exact with his per diem reports, she instructed her director general to demand the offender’s resignation. “If he doesn’t want to leave, report him to the po- lice,” Golda said, allowing the man no opportunity to defend himself.

But her greatest wrath was reserved for womanizers, sexual harassers, and men who had affairs while representing Israel overseas. “I don’t care about people’s behavior at home,” Golda said, after firing both Israel’s ambassador to Mexico and an Israeli embassy staff member in Brazil for such indiscretions. “But abroad, they represent Israel and we cannot toler- ate immoral people.”

Her status within the Foreign Ministry was undermined as well by the universal awareness of Golda’s relative powerlessness. “If there was a problem, she went to Ben-Gurion with her entourage and almost never spoke,” recalled Herlitz. “She simply took instructions. He was the for- eign minister. She was just window dressing.”

But no matter how much Ben-Gurion ignored or humiliated her, Golda retained a passionate belief in his leadership. Their styles, however, clashed violently. Perhaps the clearest example of that disjunction was their long feud over Dimona, Israel’s allegedly secret nuclear development program,

another intrigue cooked up by Peres. For Ben-Gurion, the nuclear pro- gram was part and parcel of his romance with science, his belief that nu- clear energy could compensate for Israel’s lack of oil, scarcity of water, dearth of minerals, and nightmarish defense situation. He was willing to spend almost any amount of money and risk any diplomatic brouhaha to build a nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. And Peres had convinced the French to help.

Israel’s scientific establishment opposed the plan, calling it dangerous and irresponsible. And party leaders like Levi Eshkol and Pinhas Sapir worried about the expense, fearing that Ben-Gurion would sink millions down what they suspected would become a black hole. Golda didn’t op- pose the project on financial or ethical grounds, but she sensed that Israel would run into trouble over the elaborate web of lies Ben-Gurion and Peres wove to hide the project from view.

The first sign of danger occurred while excavators were digging the first massive holes in the desert for the complex of buildings. Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, Israel’s external spy agency, learned that a Soviet satellite had overflown and photographed the site and that Foreign Min- ister Gromyko had gone to Washington shortly thereafter. For Harel and Golda, to whom he routinely reported such information, the conclusion was obvious: the Israelis had been caught and would pay in the most ex- pensive of currencies, the goodwill of the United States.

Ben-Gurion was sufficiently alarmed by their report to call Peres home from Dakar, where he was attending the installation of Léopold Senghor as the first president of Senegal. “The situation is grave,” Harel told him when his plane landed, intimating that Ben-Gurion himself, or at least Golda, would have to fly to the United States to preempt disaster. “So what?” asked Peres, sanguine as ever. “They have photographs of holes in the ground that could be for anything.” Even if Harel was right, Peres urged Ben-Gurion to wait until the United States asked about the excavations.

His optimism about keeping such a massive secret was not, of course, warranted. The Americans quickly discovered that Israel was building a

nuclear plant and sought a prompt explanation. Ben-Gurion stalled for time and then lied, writing, “The new Israeli reactor, now in the early stages of construction, is for peaceful purposes only.” President John F. Kennedy didn’t accept that story and insisted on sending American scien- tists on an inspection tour. Ben-Gurion agreed but delayed the visit for five months. When the scientists finally arrived, they were carefully guided around the facility and briefed on Israel’s attempt to use nuclear power to bring its desert to bloom and desalinize water.

The inspectors swallowed that tale, which bought Ben-Gurion another two years. But no matter how far Ben-Gurion and Peres were willing to go in shading the truth, they could not keep the lid on what Eban called “an enormous alligator stranded on dry land.” By June 1963, JFK was again pressuring Israel, and Golda was fed up with the deceptions. “Regarding Dimona, there is no need to stop the work . . . but . . . the issue is whether we should tell them the truth or not,” she said in a policy meeting. “On this issue I had reservations from the very outset. . . . I was always of the opinion that we should tell them the truth and explain why. . . . If we deny that Dimona exists then it cannot be used as a source for bargaining be- cause you cannot bargain over something that does not exist.”