Golda (30 page)

The denouement was precipitated by the public outcry over the issue of the German scientists working in Egypt. Harel, Israel’s security chief, resigned over Ben-Gurion’s lackadaisical attitude, with Golda threaten- ing to follow him. Ben-Gurion tried his own ploy and resigned himself. “There are personal needs,” he said. “I propose to keep them to myself.” It was the fourth time Ben-Gurion had quit as prime minister, a post he had held for all but fourteen months of Israel’s fifteen-year existence, and few believed he was serious. “If there is a crisis everything can change,” he told the media, prompting deep skepticism as to his intentions.

He was not out of office two weeks before he made the shape of his “personal needs” clear by delivering a speech about the importance of re- opening the Lavon investigation. Arranging with a newspaper reporter to delve into Defense Ministry files for new evidence, he immersed himself in the hundreds of documents and transcripts already gathered. The troika implored him to desist, to consider the consequences for his chosen

replacement, Eshkol. But Ben-Gurion was beyond caring what others thought and started firing off scathing salvos against Eshkol and the troika, calling them liars, incompetents, and menaces.

A man given naturally to moderation, Eshkol was in agony and repeat- edly implored Ben-Gurion to give up his crusade to reopen the Mishap investigation. But fixated on proving that he was correct and hurt that the nation, finding him too strident and authoritarian, had moved on, Ben- Gurion proved unyielding. He might have resigned voluntarily, but he blamed Eshkol for his political demise.

With Eshkol constitutionally incapable of waging the final battle to dethrone Ben-Gurion permanently, it fell to Golda to play Ben-Gurion’s nemesis. She was an unlikely combatant. In 1964, at the age of sixty-six, she’d applied for old age benefits, and she was constantly ill. After de- cades of heart problems, circulatory difficulties, phlebitis, herpes zoster, kidney stones, and migraines, she’d been diagnosed with lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system, and was undergoing debilitating weekly treatments while still smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking doz- ens of cups of coffee each day.

But weary of what she called Ben-Gurion’s “erratic” behavior, Golda moved into the breach and orchestrated his political demise. Her first step was to bolster Mapai’s strength in the Knesset through an alliance with Ahdut HaAvoda, another Labor Zionist Party, which had split from Mapai in 1944. Led by activists of the middle generation, between Golda and Dayan, Ahdut was marginally to the left of the Mapai mainstream and thus had few members pushing to turn Israel’s back on socialism. Golda’s strategy was obvious: the added Knesset seats and clout of Ahdut’s leaders would diminish the prospects of the Dayan-Peres crowd.

Sensing that his own power was also in jeopardy, Ben-Gurion pre- pared himself carefully for the tenth Mapai convention in February 1965, scheming to regain control. But Golda had already decided that he’d thrown down the gauntlet one time too many, telling friends that he was “daft” and a “wild man.”

“I don’t know what the people want,” Ben-Gurion cried out after rising

to the podium to a thunderous ovation. “But I know what it SHOULD want—that truth and justice shall reign in our land!” To achieve both, he called on the party to disavow the findings of the ministerial committee that investigated the Mishap and endorse the creation of a judicial panel. “A judicial committee?” cried Eshkol in exasperation. “God in Heaven, what are we doing here trying to restore the Roman forum? I say to Ben-

Gurion: Give me a chance, give me room.”

From a wheelchair, Sharett, five months from death, released almost a decade of pent-up indignation over his ouster from the Foreign Ministry. In a feeble voice, he excoriated his old partner for making decisions with- out considering the consequences for the party or the country. “A leader cannot subjugate the movement, stop it from thinking, merely by some aristocratic right,” he proclaimed. “I hope and believe that the party will close ranks on this point, and once and for all shake off this nightmare, exorcise this dybbuk.”

When he finished, Golda, who’d never shown an ounce of guilt at having allowed herself to be used in Sharett’s removal, leaned over and kissed the dying man. The Ben-Gurionites were stunned. For years, they mentioned that kiss in conversation, in articles, in their memoirs as the evening’s coup de grâce.

But having orchestrated the Night of the Long Knives, as that evening has gone down in Israeli history, Golda wasn’t finished. How dare Ben- Gurion humiliate Eshkol by calling him a liar unfit to lead the country! she cried out. If Eshkol is “a liar, we are all liars.” The hall sank into utter silence as Golda mocked the “hypocrite” who speaks of justice yet “ac- cuses and . . . judges from the outset.”

Wilted by the onslaught, Ben-Gurion walked out of the hall, mutter- ing, “Everything is finished.” When friends stopped by later, they found him obsessing about Golda, a woman he’d long loved and admired, the woman who was always seated to his left. “He always said that she had a unique quality of getting to the heart of things,” recalled Yitzhak Navon, then Ben-Gurion’s aide, later the president of Israel. “He made excuses for her, saying that she’d had a hard childhood.”

He could talk of nothing but Golda. “What does she want from me?” he asked. “What did I do to her? It was sad to hear her speak like this, spouting venom.” In his diary, he wrote, “I don’t know where all this poi- son comes from.”

Within days, however, Ben-Gurion had recovered and he went on the offensive to oust Eshkol from the leadership of Mapai and regain control over the government. But at a Central Committee meeting in May, Golda summarily submitted that Ben-Gurion’s time had passed. “There is now a personal war, aimed at liquidating certain comrades,” she warned, refer- ring to the rumors being spread by Ben-Gurion’s allies. “What do they mean by raising the question of Ben-Gurion as head of the list and prime minister? . . . What is the present premier supposed to do until then—and will other countries wish to deal with him in the meanwhile?”

Like an aged volcano that defied extinction, as
Newsweek
put it, Ben- Gurion erupted once more. Quitting Mapai, he gathered the new genera- tion around him and announced the formation of a new political party, Rafi.

The election campaign was the ugliest in Israeli history, an open con- test between the Old Man and Golda. Ben-Gurion told reporters that she had visited him ten months earlier and said, “The Party is Tammany Hall, not the Tammany Hall of today but of the 19th century. . . . I will not remain in this party. There is no other party I can join. I will become independent.”

“LIAR!” shouted Golda. “How is it that all of a sudden we have all be- come cheats, as Ben-Gurion claims, while for the first fifteen years of the State we were such upstanding citizens?”

Thinking himself a modern Moses, Ben-Gurion assumed that the Is- raelites would flock to his side. But when the votes were counted in No- vember, Rafi won only ten seats to the forty-five of the new Mapai/Ahdut alignment. Israel’s personality cult had ceded to the political prowess of Golda and the cult of Mapai.

Her work completed, Golda resigned as foreign minister while retain- ing her seat in the Knesset. Donating the statues, books, jewelry, and other

mementos she’d collected to museums, she moved home to the modest duplex house she shared with her son, Menachem, and his second wife, Aya, in suburban Tel Aviv. She wanted time to sew bathrobes for their three sons, to make them pancakes on Saturday morning, to attend con- certs, enjoy weekends with Sarah and her children at Revivim, cook and wash like a normal person, she said. Her sister Sheyna was growing feeble, losing her memory to Alzheimer’s. It was time to retire from public life.

No one was fooled. Everyone knew that the troika and the other mem- bers of the Gush would drop by to share the children’s pancakes and that drinking coffee in Golda’s kitchen would remain an Israeli political insti- tution. Nonetheless, Golda kept up the pretense.

On the afternoon of January 26, 1966, the Knesset chamber filled early for the first session of the new government. Golda walked in smiling and headed for her old chair, the foreign minister’s seat at the long minis- terial table. Suddenly, as if it had just struck her that she’d resigned, she turned toward the backbenches.

“Oy vey,” she said. “It’s hard to teach an old horse the way to a new stall.”

* * *

Golda whipped up a few Saturday breakfasts for her grandsons, arranged a visit to Revivim, called up old friends, and delighted in the public re- action when she was spotted riding the public bus—although the drivers often veered off their routes to drop her at her front door. But her retire- ment didn’t last three weeks before the guys came calling, Sapir and Aranne, Eshkol and Yisrael Galili, the new minister of information and one of Golda’s firmest allies in the Ahdut camp, asking her to give up her relaxation to become secretary-general of Mapai.

It was a position of enormous power without any glory, which fit Golda like a glove. Worried that the divisions within Mapai might lead to an op- position victory, tantamount to a Zionist apocalypse in Golda’s lexicon, she agreed to try her hand at reuniting Rafi, Ahdut, and perhaps Mapam, the more Marxist party, into a single Labor Party and reignite popular

enthusiasm for a labor movement sorely challenged by a deep recession and skyrocketing unemployment. The task, she admitted, was daunting, a “job of bridge building, of reconciling the various points of view and per- sonalities, of dealing with old wounds without making fresh ones,” all po- lite euphemisms for tense negotiations, arm-twisting, and head-bashing.

Although Eshkol was prime minister, Golda became the leading po- litical figure in the country, one part kingmaker, another conscience, and, mostly, an old-fashioned party boss. The locus of power shifted from the cabinet to the party, from the prime minister’s office to Golda’s kitchen. In meetings, she openly berated Eshkol as if he were a dunce. When he wanted to see Golda, he didn’t summon her to Jerusalem; he made the trip to her office or house in Tel Aviv.

“She was such an Amazon, though without the swords or spears,” said Miriam Eshkol. “She dwarfed them, like Snow White with the seven dwarfs.”

* * *

Nasser disrupted Golda’s plans for party reunification. On the morning of May 16, 1967, the chief of staff of the Egyptian army instructed the commander of the United Nations Emergency Force to remove his troops immediately. The presence of the UN contingent in the Sinai Peninsula had been the price Egypt paid for Israel’s withdrawal after the 1956 war, and Dag Hammarskjöld had pledged that those troops would never be pulled out without the consent of the General Assembly.

While Israel was still absorbing the implications of that request, Egypt began massing troops in the Sinai and Gaza, thousands of men with tanks, armored personnel carriers, Soviet howitzers, and Katyusha rock- ets, backed up by Soviet MiG fighters. “The existence of Israel has con- tinued too long,” declaimed Radio Cairo. “The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.”

The Soviets had informed the Egyptians that Israel was preparing to invade Syria, which was also moving troops within sight of Israeli settle- ments. There was no truth to the allegation, as the Israelis offered to prove

to the Soviet ambassador with a quick trip to the border. He declined, leav- ing many to suspect that the Russians were trying to provoke war.

Israeli diplomats around the world scurried to reassure both the Egyp- tians and the Syrians that Israel was not about to invade either nation, sending messages through the British, the Americans, and the United Nations to correct what they hoped was a misunderstanding. They in- vited the chief UN observer in the region, General Odd Bull, to tour northern Israel to verify the absence of Israeli troop concentrations.

At 7 a.m. on the morning of May 18, Golda was woken up by a phone call from one of Eshkol’s aides asking her to attend a meeting. The news was grim: U Thant, who’d succeeded Hammarskjöld as UN general sec- retary, had ignored his predecessor’s pledge. Without consulting the Gen- eral Assembly, Israel, or the great powers, he had agreed to remove the UN Emergency Force, arguing that the UN force would not legitimately remain in Egypt without the consent of the government in Cairo.

During the decade that those units—4,500 troops scattered in forty- one observation posts—had been stationed in Egypt, shipping had passed peacefully through the Straits of Tiran, no fedayeen had infiltrated Israel from Gaza, and the Egyptians and Israelis had not faced off in a single clash. Their exodus from Egypt, Israel feared, would lead to another war, the very war Golda had predicted before she gave her fateful Israeli with- drawal speech to the United Nations in 1957.

Even Golda, who was boundlessly cynical about the UN, was shocked by what she called “U Thant’s ludicrous surrender to Nasser. It was against all rhyme or reason for a force that had come into existence for the sole purpose of supervising the cease fire between Egypt and Israel to be removed at the request of one of the combatants the very moment that the cease fire was seriously threatened,” she wrote of that day.

Eban, who’d replaced Golda as foreign minister, offered to make the rounds of the international capitals, but the cabinet preferred to send Golda. “She’ll be tougher,” Eshkol said. Humiliated, Eban fought for his right to represent Israel, and Golda, who had the “flu,” her euphemism for a tough bout of cancer treatment, wasn’t fit to travel in any case. So

the foreign minister caught the first flight to Europe, hoping to find someone to mobilize the international community to save the Middle East from another war.

Israeli military intelligence couldn’t decide whether Nasser was trying to lure the Israeli army into the Sinai Desert or hoping to seize part of the Negev. But Eshkol suspected that he was looking for prestige more than conflict. So while he waited to see how the major powers reacted, he kept quiet to avoid escalating the rhetoric, provoking speculation that he was wallowing in indecision.