Golda (29 page)

“At the opening of every General Assembly, Golda would be seated at Israel’s table and the African delegates would all line up to shake her hand,” said Yaakov Nitzan, who worked for her in the Foreign Ministry. “It wasn’t politics. It was personal.”

chapter twelve

It is easier to make a revolution than to uphold the values for which it was made.

I

srael wasn’t a decade old before Ben-Gurion began fearing for the health of his progeny. Democracy was running rampant, the system of proportional representation holding the nation captive to the whims of eighteen or more minor political parties. Even with Arab armies menac- ing them on all borders, veteran politicians seemed content to pontificate for hours. And someone—inside his party, outside his party, or in a for- eign government—was always challenging him, whether Eisenhower

griping about the tensions with Egypt or Golda threatening to quit.

Israel’s leadership needed to be infused with new energy from younger men, he concluded, from
sabras,
native-born Israelis, who were, he thought, dazzlingly dauntless, free of ideology and the scars of the ghetto mental- ity. It wasn’t that Ben-Gurion wasn’t fond of the old guard, who’d fol- lowed him loyally for decades. But with the archetypical, or at least clichéd, narcissism of the Great Man in his own revolutionary indispens- ability, Ben-Gurion worried that Israel could not muddle on without him for more than a few days at a time. In his eyes, his old comrades were an

aging clique of bickering weaklings who’d fall apart without his firm guidance. He needed to turn elsewhere to secure the nation’s future.

In the run-up to the 1959 elections, then, Ben-Gurion announced to the party that he was going to bring “new blood” into the government. Golda knew what “new blood” meant. It meant sitting in the cabinet with Dayan and Peres as senior ministers, and she wasn’t going to stand for it. She had worked too long and hard to be sidelined by impudent upstarts dripping with contempt for her and her ideals. Dayan was bad enough, with his puffed-up bluster and undisguised individualism. Peres, who was still undermining her at every opportunity, was unthinkable.

“It’s not a question of age,” she said to those who insinuated that the time had come for a changing of the guard. “A man has to have a birth certificate, but in public life it’s unimportant, and it’s not enough just to wave it about. I believe in certain values that do not change with time. Techniques change, priorities are altered, but underlying principles do not.”

Ben-Gurion tried to reassure her that he wasn’t trying to push her and her old comrades out. But they didn’t believe him. He was acting too much like Jacob preparing to buy coats for his Josephs.

Golda’s pique bled seamlessly between the personal and the political, but the root of her anger went well beyond ambition or a love of power. For Golda, Labor Zionism was Israel, Israel as it had to be if the Jewish homeland was to be more than just another nation. It wasn’t just another ideology among many. It was
the
ideology, the wellspring of the rebirth of the Jewish people. In a near-primal way, then, she rejected any threat to Labor Zionism as a peril to the very soul of Israel, and the youngsters constituted such a menace. In Golda’s eyes, for them, Mapai—the heart of Labor Zionism—was simply another party, Israel just another country, and socialism an inefficient economic system that did not maximize pro- duction.

Golda was not unique in her view, but she added her own personal penchant for inflexibility to the mix—“complete intolerance, complete disdain for any other opinion, a kind of primitiveness which was her

strength,” in the words of Uri Avneri, her greatest nemesis on the left. Levi Eshkol, one of Labor Zionism’s leading figures, actually reduced Golda’s character to three figures. When she was not displeased, he called her, in Yiddish,
de malke,
the queen. When she was annoyed, she turned into
de klafke,
the hag. When she was angry, she became
de mahsheve,
the witch, “mean, spiteful and with a very long memory of anyone who ever crossed her, from the ambassador’s wife who wore a prettier dress than she did, to someone who spoke disparagingly about her, like Eban, to Sharett, who challenged her intellectual capability,” commented Miriam Eshkol, Levi’s widow.

“She was very sure of herself, so full of herself. . . . She was a
shlecte medercha Madonna,
a terrible, hysterical Madonna. She hated everyone but herself.”

Fueled, then, by an overlapping blend of ideology, ambition, and spite, Golda launched her bid to undercut Ben-Gurion. As foreign minister, she might have been sidelined, but in domestic politics she was a power- house. Two other political heavyweights joined her crusade against the new generation: Zalman Aranne, the minister of education, and Pinhas Sapir, minister of trade and Mapai’s kingmaker and wheeler-dealer. The troika, Israelis called them.

The opening shot in the public battle of the generations was fired by Dayan, who’d just resigned from the army, a clear prelude to his entry into the political arena. At the Mapai convention in May 1958, he let loose at the Histadrut, demanding that the labor confederation’s power be curtailed, wages be frozen, and massive layoffs ordered to streamline the ailing economy. And why do we need to mobilize the youth move- ment to build the new Ein Gedi–Sodom road? he asked. Bulldozers are more efficient. A shiver ran through the room at the clear implication that Dayan had no commitment to pioneering values.

But Dayan wasn’t done. At a meeting of the students’ club in Tel Aviv, he tore into almost every institution in Israeli society, from the kibbutzim and the economists to the politicians and the bureaucrats. “These men of the last generation have reached an age where they can no longer carry

out revolutions,” he said. “These men look back proudly on their achieve- ments of 1902. . . . But we are interested in 1962.”

Irate, Golda dropped a warning shot across Ben-Gurion’s bow: she would not serve in the cabinet, the Knesset, or any other body of the new government. Knowing that he had little hope of forming a coalition with- out his old comrades, he tried to pacify her by openly lecturing Dayan about his inappropriate behavior. She was not mollified. A week before the elections, he finally bowed to Golda’s political clout by announcing that Dayan would serve in the minor position of minister of agriculture and Peres in the noncabinet position of deputy minister of defense in his new government.

But before the tension could ease, five years of buried resentment over a secret intrigue popularly called the Mishap erupted, tearing at the fab- ric of Israel’s political establishment. The seeds of the scandal were sown in 1954, when senior officials of the Defense Ministry, worried that the pending evacuation of British troops from the Suez Canal might signal a buildup to war, began batting around ideas for forestalling the British departure, including a plan to commit some minor sabotage that could be blamed on nonexistent Egyptian hotheads in order to provoke serious misgivings about Nasser’s responsibility in Washington and London.

In July, two groups of young Egyptian Jews did just that, planting in- cendiary devices at a mailbox in Alexandria’s central post office, in the reading room of the American libraries in Cairo and Alexandria, in movie theaters in both cities, and at Cairo’s train station. The explosions caused no harm, to passing Egyptians or to Egyptian relations with the West. But the Egyptian government managed to capture the culprits, ex- ecuted two of them, and sentenced the others to lengthy jail sentences. A new cloud of suspicion descended over Egypt’s Jews.

Before the Israeli government could mount an official investigation into who was responsible for the Mishap, Peres began spreading rumors that Pinhas Lavon, the defense minister, had given the order. Peres’ alle- gations fell under immediate suspicion since everyone knew how much he despised his superior. A charismatic labor leader and well-known dove

who’d been handpicked by Ben-Gurion to run the Defense Ministry, Lavon was an odd choice since he had no military experience and was notoriously emotionally volatile. Golda and other old colleagues had cau- tioned Ben-Gurion against him, but both Peres and Dayan had supported Lavon’s appointment. It was an appointment the two men quickly re- gretted when Lavon refused to share power with them. Soon they were openly complaining that Lavon was too rash, too disrespectful, and too ambitious.

Peres’ rumors about Lavon’s responsibility for the Egyptian fiasco weren’t easily dispelled because the two-man commission convened to quietly sort out what had happened in Egypt found the mess impossible to unravel. The director of military intelligence had clearly ordered the action, but he insisted that he had acted on direct instructions from Lavon, who protested his innocence equally vociferously.

The matter should have ended there since it was the type of security scandal that could have disappeared in an easy cover-up in the days be- fore the media became hungry. But it became entangled in generational rivalries, intraparty feuding, personal vendettas, and Ben-Gurion’s unique brand of quixotism.

Convinced that Peres had tried to set him up, Lavon tried to fire him. When Dayan threatened to quit if his closest ally was ousted, Lavon him- self was forced out, left to lick his wounds and wait for an opportunity to clear his name. That opportunity arose in the midst of Golda’s fight with Ben-Gurion over his promotion of Dayan and Peres. Discovering that a key witness against him in the investigation into the Mishap had admit- ted that he’d committed perjury, in 1960, Lavon petitioned for public exoneration.

Ben-Gurion refused and attempted to prevent the opening of a new inquiry, but Lavon appealed to the Knesset, and the battle was joined, the younger generation lining up behind Ben-Gurion, the troika and most of the veterans behind Lavon. Journalists had a field day as the two sides leaked classified information, old rumors, details of Golda’s ill health, anything and everything to tarnish the reputations of their opponents.

Levi Eshkol, the minister of finance and the most even-tempered of the political elite, tried to mediate. But Ben-Gurion suddenly demanded a full judicial inquiry into the Mishap, raising the specter of a long, drawn-out process that would inevitably divide and undermine Mapai. Golda tried to reason with the Old Man, but he thundered about the sanctity of democracy and the separation of powers, although, curiously, he never used his authority to establish such an inquiry himself. Ben- Gurion’s motivations were never clear: his acolytes insisted that he was standing on principle, while his detractors suggested, alternately, that he was protecting Peres, that he was using the affair to reexert control over his increasingly rebellious party, and, even, that he was losing his grip on reality.

After days of consultation and table pounding, Eshkol offered a com- promise, a committee of inquiry led by the justice minister instead of a full, public investigation. The cabinet acquiesced despite Ben-Gurion’s opposition, the first time in Israeli history that his entire senior cabinet lined up against him. But Ben-Gurion never accepted defeat graciously. Before the committee’s findings could be presented to the cabinet, Ben- Gurion demanded that its report be rejected and that a judicial inquiry be launched. When the cabinet ignored him and voted to accept the committee’s conclusion that Lavon had not issued the fatal order, Ben- Gurion gathered up his papers and stormed out.

* * *

Angry and hurt at Ben-Gurion’s indifference to the political chaos he was creating, Golda informed the prime minister’s aide that if Ben-Gurion continued to press for an inquiry, she’d quit the government. It never oc- curred to him to take his loyal warhorse seriously.

But Golda had gamed out every move. She assumed that Ben-Gurion would resign over the cabinet’s disobedience, which would bring down the entire cabinet. Free to form a new and more pliant one, he could then disown the ministerial committee’s findings. To forestall such a power play, she handed in her own letter of resignation. The ultimatum was

clear: if you want to re-form the government, you’ll have to do so without me or the troika. Ben-Gurion understood that the Knesset would not ap- prove such a government.

Misjudging Golda’s fire, Ben-Gurion’s followers tried to trump her by proposing a series of resolutions, all of which boiled down to the same theme: there can be no government without Ben-Gurion. “Stating that no party member [but Ben-Gurion] shall be prime minister had a discor- dant ring,” she said in what became the opening cry of a palace coup. “Is it permissible to surmise that a man—even the most revered amongst us—is capable of error, or is it sacrilegious to think it? If it is permissible to think it, our colleagues are permitted to think that Ben-Gurion is pro- posing something on which he errs, and they differ.”

Like any good divorce, the final act was messy and drawn out, with reconciliation achieved and shattered repeatedly and not an ounce of poignancy. By 1962, power in the party had begun to shift from the prime minister to the Gush, the bloc of party functionaries Ben-Gurion himself had created in the 1940s to preserve the veteran leadership. It was a bloc that Golda dominated utterly.