Golda (32 page)

to read a book without feeling guilty for taking time from other matters and to go to a concert when I like. . . . At seventy, one is entitled to some of the pleasures of life.”

Israelis were stunned by the pending disappearance of the last public face of the old
yishuv,
a woman who one newspaper called “something more than a political leader: a symbol of the new Israel, of its courage, its strength and its boundless devotion.”

With a modesty that was, at once, both genuine and formulaic, Golda dismissed the Sturm und Drang. “No one is indispensable anywhere,” she professed. “You will manage without me.”

But it wasn’t clear how they would. No one else seemed to have the fortitude or moral authority to keep Labor’s warring factions and monu- mental egos in check. No one else seemed to have what journalists called her “granite-like strength.”

It seemed the end of Israel’s first era. Breaking from Rafi after party reunification, Ben-Gurion had formed a new mini-party, but he dwelled in a political wilderness. Sharett had died not long after the Night of the Long Knives. Israel’s first two presidents were gone, as were half of the sign- ers of Israel’s declaration of independence. On August 1, 1968, the woman who had loomed over
yishuv
and Israeli politics for more than three de- cades, who’d raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build the nation, spoken as Israel’s international voice, and maintained a perennial politi- cal open house (after which she stayed up half the night to wash up the cups and mop the floors), left her office on the third floor of Labor Party headquarters on Rehov Hayarkon in Tel Aviv and went home.

With Menachem and Aya studying in Connecticut, and Sarah and her family still at Kibbutz Revivim, Golda said she expected to travel, perhaps take a holiday in Switzerland, and indulge her favorite pastime, cleaning. For once, Golda wasn’t being disingenuous. One part of her had always longed for a “normal” life.

But she never denied the other part of her character. “I am not going into a political wilderness,” she promised. “I do not intend to retire to a political nunnery.”

chapter thirteen

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

A

t the time, the Six-Day War victory seemed the dawn of a new era of blessed serenity, of life without the tension of military call-ups, air-

raid sirens, and the agonizing din of Nasser’s incessant threats. But with the Eshkol government mired in indecision about what to do with its new bargaining chips, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, Israel could find no way to translate its military triumph into peace.

The cabinet quickly came to something approaching unanimity on the question of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; the former was too emotionally and historically momentous to be returned to Jordan, which, in any event, had no more legal claim to the city than did Israel, and the latter too vital to the safety of the settlers who lived on the plains below. But they were hopelessly divided about what to do with the remaining real estate.

To Dayan, the solution was obvious: the West Bank should be eco- nomically integrated into Israel while leaving the citizenry vassals of Jor-

dan. Cabinet doves, like Golda’s close comrade Pinhas Sapir, objected vehemently to any de facto annexation, certain it would prove an insur- mountable stumbling block to any resolution of the conflict. Trapped between his two ministers, Eshkol vacillated.

The future of the territories wasn’t the only issue about which Sapir and Dayan, Eshkol and Dayan, Allon and Dayan bickered. Israeli politics was a bacchanalia of squabbling, quibbling, and open brawling, egged on by a scrappy press regularly fed juicy leaks by all sides. Behind the weighty issues dogging the country loomed the ever-present jockeying for power, and as Israel moved toward elections scheduled for November 1969, the volume and the vitriol grew deafening.

Eshkol tried to protect his flanks against both Allon and Dayan, the leading pretenders to the throne. But the more he rebuked Dayan for his cowboy approach to government, the more popular the general became. Meanwhile, Allon griped incessantly at being excluded from key meet- ings and crucial decision making. And Israelis followed every tiff, battle, and complaint with the fascination of viewers of a gripping soap opera.

Toward the end of 1968, Eshkol collapsed. The government an- nounced that the prime minister had fainted from a high fever brought on by bronchitis, but, in truth, at the age of seventy-three, he had suffered a heart attack. Fearing that Allon, the deputy prime minister forced on him by Golda, would push him out of office, Eshkol refused admission to the hospital. For months, oxygen tanks were delivered to his residence stealthily to conceal how ill he really was. Finally, on February 26, Esh- kol suffered four more heart attacks within a few hours and died at home in bed.

Israelis anxiously awaited the resolution of the long Mexican standoff between Dayan and Allon, and no one expected either to cede graciously. While Dayan’s bravado had earned him the affection of thousands of Is- raelis who saw their own increasingly macho élan reflected in his swag- ger, his party leaders alternately despised and feared him.

Although he evoked little popular enthusiasm, Allon was the party’s chosen one. But the choice was a political nightmare. If Allon were se-

lected, Dayan would likely bolt, and perhaps create a new party. If Dayan was tapped, Labor’s popular support might soar, but the party itself would be imperiled by Dayan’s indifference to its health, and, many believed, the state too would suffer from a maverick prime minister who disdained the sort of consultation essential in a democracy.

Well before Eshkol’s death, Sapir, who’d replaced Golda as secretary- general of the new Labor alignment, set out to forestall such an interne- cine struggle. Two months earlier, at an early morning meeting at the barbershop at the Essex House Hotel in New York, he had informed his protégé Yossi Sarid that Eshkol was dying. “Golda is going to replace him,” Sapir announced. “It’s final and decided. Only she can hold the party together.”

From New York, Sapir had flown to Switzerland to sound out Golda, who was resting at the Hotel Dolder, an elegant old spa in Hottingen, on the edge of Zurich. “You realize you’ll be next in line,” he told her after disclosing that Eshkol was failing. “You have to step in to avoid a suicidal clash between Allon and Dayan.” Golda dismissed him snippily. “As long as Eshkol lives, what do you want from me?” But she didn’t refuse.

A masterful political strategist, Sapir then went home to get his ducks in a row, playing the Allon supporters against the Dayan fanatics, empha- sizing that Golda would serve for only six months, until the November election.

So long as Eshkol remained functioning, Sapir didn’t meet much re- sistance. But the moment the prime minister died, all hell broke loose. Sapir arrived at the prime minister’s residence just hours after Eshkol’s demise and found Allon and Dayan there, quarreling about where to bury him. Eshkol had expressed a desire to be interred at his kibbutz. But Jordan had been shelling that area, and Dayan, worried that a large gath- ering would attract more fire, insisted he be laid to rest on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

Later in the morning, Golda showed up to offer her condolences to Eshkol’s wife, although Miriam Eshkol so despised Golda that in 2006, she still kept a crudely made effigy of her nemesis hanging over her

kitchen stove so that she could fantasize burning it. Once Golda was seated in the center of a large sofa in the living room, all debate stopped. “He will be buried in Jerusalem,” Golda decreed, and no one dared chal- lenge her. Sapir smiled in satisfaction. That decisiveness, and the defer- ence it evoked, was precisely why he had decided that Golda should be named prime minister.

At a meeting in the Knesset dining room several hours later, Sapir, Dayan, Allon, Galili, Golda, and the minister of justice planned Eshkol’s funeral and agreed that during the period of mourning, Allon, as deputy prime minister, would head the interim government. Only then would a prime minister be chosen.

But the political wrangling didn’t wait for the mourning to end. Galili tried to enlist Sapir to rally support for Allon. Sapir agreed, but he also began planting doubt, conjuring up visions of Rafi’s defection. Painting the same scenario to Allon, Sapir extracted a muttered agreement that the interim appointment of Golda would be wise. Then he returned to Galili to report that Golda was Allon’s choice.

Allon and Dayan were both too ambitious to acquiesce meekly to any postponement of a final decision. Their attempts to thwart Sapir were conducted through surrogates, a group of veteran politicians lobbying for Allon, most of the old Rafi members campaigning for Dayan. But neither man had the savvy to stop Golda, with her aura of folksy motherliness and cold political skills. On March 3, with the mourning period about to expire, the party ministers voted to ask her to step into the breach, Dayan alone abstaining. Later that day, the party leadership confirmed that deci- sion, although Golda coolly encouraged Allon and Dayan to submit their names to the Central Committee for consideration, knowing full well that neither would dare do so.

Dayan quickly proved Golda correct, announcing that he had no in- terest “in being a Don Quixote.” And lacking the killer instinct necessary to face down the party bosses, Allon, too, stepped aside.

Golda had been dreaming of becoming prime minister since Ben-Gu- rion first resigned in 1953 and had been keenly disappointed when both

Sharett and Eshkol were chosen instead. In July 1968, the Israeli press speculated that she was angling to replace Eshkol. And in his final days, the prime minister muttered in Yiddish about the “shrew who sits and waits for me to die.”

Golda might have pretended that she harbored no ambitions, but her comrades knew better. “She couldn’t wait,” said David HaCohen, a long- time member of the Knesset. “It was clear that she’d kick anyone who got in her way.”

But with the prize finally before her, Golda couldn’t ignore either her age or her health. “Seventy is not a sin,” she quipped in public. But to Senta Josephtal, a leader of the kibbutz movement, she expressed trepida- tion that she’d grow senile in office and that everyone would sense her disability except her. “Don’t worry,” Senta told her. “I will tell you when you are senile.”

When she asked her physician, the head of the Oncology Department at the Hadassah Hospital, what he thought her life expectancy was, he told her, “Ten years.” In ten years, Golda would be eighty-one years old. More than enough time, she concluded

The final vote by the party Central Committee was scheduled for the morning of March 7, and despite his public withdrawal, Dayan still had not given up. “I am so divided against the party leadership, the proce- dures, that psychologically speaking I would not have much difficulty in leaving it,” Dayan had told a group of students a few days earlier, a clear hint of the price Labor might pay for selecting Golda.

The latest poll showed that only 3 percent of Israelis favored Golda as prime minister—to Dayan’s 45 percent and Allon’s 32 percent. Nonethe- less, when the four hundred members of the party Central Committee voted, not a single ballot was cast against Golda, although forty-five Rafi diehards abstained.

When the results were announced, Golda, sitting in the front row of Tel Aviv’s Ohel Auditorium in a simple dark suit, froze. At Eshkol’s fu- neral, she’d tearily told her colleagues, “I have always carried out the missions the state placed on me, but they have always been accompanied

by a feeling of terror. The terror exists now.” No one had believed her because Golda’s toughness so thoroughly masked her lingering insecu- rity. But her mother’s voice still echoed inside her, reminding her that she wasn’t good enough or wasn’t smart enough.

Finally, Golda rose and walked slowly to the platform, tears streaming down her face. As she reached the podium, she was greeted by a thunder- ous ovation and cries of “Golda, Golda, Golda shelanu, our Golda.”

The response outside the party was less enthusiastic. “The people of Israel have the right to expect that the helm will be given to a younger person whose power of action will not be restricted by age or health,” opined
Ha’aretz.
And while the Sephardic chief rabbi ruled that a female prime minister, unlike a female president, was acceptable given the his- torical precedent of Deborah the prophet, many ultra-Orthodox Israelis believed her appointment to be a clear violation of Jewish law.

Ordinary Israelis celebrated their progressiveness in having the first modern female chief of state who owed nothing to the “appendage syn- drome” that had brought Sirimavo Bandaranaike to the premiership of Ceylon in the wake her husband’s assassination and Indira Gandhi to of- fice not long after her father’s death. But they weren’t sure what to think about their new prime minister, a woman whose
New York Times
obituary had already been written. With none of the maverick panache of Dayan, or military aplomb of Allon, had the country just inherited an aging political hack as its leader?