Golda (33 page)

After all, not even Golda claimed to be the most appropriate choice. “I became prime minister because that was how it was, in the same way that my milkman became an officer in command of an outpost on Mount Hermon,” she later admitted.

* * *

Golda would never have admitted it publicly, but she wasn’t overly fond of the Israel whose mantle she inherited. After two decades, the country hadn’t matured into the Socialist paradise she’d envisioned back in Mil- waukee, a land without thieves or murderers, a gallimaufry of free Jews

with hands calloused from tilling their own soil in a nation that radiated Jewish justice and integrity.

Instead, Israel was a raucous and argumentative country that could make a New Yorker feel mellow. No issue, no matter how mundane, was resolved without lengthy, passionate debate. More than a dozen political parties competed for power, each fractured by a dozen caucuses and egos too large to be contained within a single political organism.

The kibbutzim, the heartland of the Zionist pioneers, were on the wane, the zeal for self-sacrifice supplanted by modern self-indulgence. Female soldiers were shortening their skirts, showing entirely too much knee for Golda’s puritanical tastes. Her beloved “New Jews” were shun- ning the hora and folk songs for the Beatles, whose appearance in the country had been banned by the ministry of education as “a bad influ- ence on the young generation.”

In Tel Aviv’s cafés, disputations about how to turn a fast buck had re- placed debates about the dialectic, and consumption overwhelmed egali- tarianism.

Golda gritted her teeth as she watched her old dreams unravel into the nitty-gritty hallmarks of a class society—expensive shops and eateries, ostentatious homes, fancy clothes, and luxury cars. “They’ve got some chutzpah!” she sniffed with disgust one afternoon when she discovered the price of the fish she’d just eaten at lunch with Zalman Aranne, her minister of education, and his assistant. Cohen’s, where they’d dined, was hardly Jerusalem’s most expensive restaurant, and the bill was not exorbi- tant. But for Golda, anything more than modest was inappropriate. “It was just a piece of fish,” she seethed.

Most painful to a woman inspired by the concept of Jewish labor, a flood of inexpensive Arab workers from the occupied territories was push- ing Jews out of physical work, and unlike in the old days, the displaced workers were applauding since the booming economy created opportuni- ties for them that didn’t demand backbreaking manual labor.

Golda had nurtured her naive girlhood fantasy about the shape of a Jew- ish homeland well into retirement. But like so many aging revolutionaries

who trade idealism for pragmatism, strand by strand, Golda let go of the social justice aspect of her old dream, taking comfort in its other facet, the sight of Jewish policemen keeping the streets safe, of Jewish pilots flying airplanes emblazoned with the Jewish star, and Jewish judges handing down fair treatment.

Israel wasn’t supposed to be just another country, but just another country was better than another 5,000 years of Jewish exile. As prime minister, then, no matter her ambition or her need to prove that Bluma had not been right, after all, everything boiled down to that single reality: it was now her job to maintain a safe harbor for children terrorized by anti-Semites and for adults scarred by some version of a swastika.

It was an ironic historic mission for a woman whose passion had al- ways been for domestic matters and whose political romance was with the Histadrut, not the Israel Defense Forces. But the Egyptians had launched the War of Attrition, one of the deadliest border conflicts in modern history. Almost daily artillery barrages along the Suez Canal turned the Israeli front in the Sinai into an armed camp. And fedayeen newly equipped with Katyusha rockets continued to sneak in from Leba- non and Jordan to wreak havoc in settlements and markets. Defense was consuming 40 percent of the national budget.

Israelis had become accustomed to the violence; it was part of their daily routine. A year earlier, depression had hit with the realization that they had won the war only to lose the peace. But the country had moved on, accept- ing the reality that another clash was inevitable. The struggle was to hold at bay the fumbling efforts of the United States to impose a settlement not to Israel’s liking while appeasing Washington sufficiently to keep arms sup- plies flowing. That battle would define Golda’s premiership.

But Golda couldn’t turn her full attention to the security challenge, or any other quandary, until she established firm control over her ob- streperous and pugnacious government. Eshkol’s wall-to-wall coalition of leftist idealists and militant rightists, a holdover from the run-up to the war, was a nightmare of quarrels and power struggles. No matter the issue—the place of religion in Israeli society, taxation, investment policy,

or security—the cabinet could never achieve consensus. The public might have been enthralled with the National Unity coalition, giving it 90 percent approval ratings, but Golda found herself running a govern- ment by gridlock.

While Eshkol was prime minister, no conundrum had consumed more days of discussion while yielding fewer decisions than the occupied territories, a much-heralded bargaining chip and security perimeter that had become a millstone around Israel’s neck. Golda saw no way to re- solve the problem, so she simply decreed an end to squabbling. “I don’t see why we have to quarrel among ourselves,” she said. “As long as the Arabs are still at war with us, I am opposed to a Jewish war.”

She brought that same authoritarian hand to every decision and to ev- ery meeting. The international media painted Golda as a doting grand- mother “past the biblical threescore and ten,” but she was more the prophet Deborah than the gentle matriarch in the fashion of Rebekah, wife of Isaac. Strong, decisive, overbearing, and intolerant, she ran rough- shod over her ministers and unified the government in short order. How did she do it? pundits and journalists asked in awe. “Golda told them all to shut up, so they shut up,” one government official explained.

Ever inclined toward the puritanical, Golda kept firm control on spending, even demanding that her ministers seek her permission before traveling abroad. When Yigal Allon served as minister of education, he always hesitated before making any such request, fearing the humiliation of rejection. “She held them on a short leash,” recalled Eliezer Shmueli, former director-general of that ministry.

Like a schoolmarm with a classroom of incorrigible pupils, if a cabinet member began leafing through a newspaper during a meeting, she barked, “This is not a reading room.” When Dayan continued to waver in his commitment to the party, she pointedly admonished him, “Condi- tional party membership is not acceptable.” Frustrated that her cabinet of warring egos could get nothing done at their Sunday meetings, she con- vened her own mini-cabinet—the kitchen cabinet—on Saturday nights to make the serious decisions.

“If you could only watch her come into the cabinet chamber, I swear she grows an inch every time she walks through the door,” one govern- ment minister told
Newsweek.

Her imperiousness made Golda less than universally popular among other party officials. Like Ben-Gurion, she frequently bypassed the cabi- net in making decisions, and her ministers cowered in fear of annoying her. Eban thought so little of her that he regularly quipped that she chose to use only 200 words although her vocabulary extended to 500. Peres called her a member of “a self-perpetuating oligarchy with a powerful sense of self-pity.”

But no matter how much they denigrated Golda, they bent to her for- midable will, not merely because she wielded prime ministerial and party power but also because she manipulated them with aplomb. At one time or another, almost all of Israel’s leaders, including Ben-Gurion, remarked that she reminded them of their own mothers. When Ben-Gurion did so, Golda rebuked him. But with the younger men, she used her resem- blance to their mothers to her own ends. Being berated by one’s prime minister was difficult enough, after all. Being berated by a prime minister who felt like your mother was intolerable.

“There was never a mother who reproached a son in a sterner man- ner,” said Simcha Dinitz, who became her ambassador to Washington.

Even with her closest advisers, she could be incredibly sharp, yelling and throwing ashtrays across the room. Lou Kaddar, who’d served with her in Moscow and became her confidante, scheduler, and purchaser of appropriate clothing, long remembered with uncharacteristic bitterness the afternoon Golda went to airport to pick up her sister Clara, who was arriving from the United States, and realized how much else she had to accomplish that day. “What are you doing to me?” she screamed at Lou and Dinitz, her steely gray eyes blazing. “I’ve never seen a more stupid schedule than the one you’ve organized!”

Although she radiated age, becoming prime minister was a tonic that infused new life into Golda. An average day plucked from her ap- pointment calendar began with hard-boiled eggs, toast, and coffee at

seven a.m., when she’d peruse the press with her longtime aide Lou Kad- dar, always homing in on the articles that annoyed her. At the office, Golda looked through the incoming cables and doled them out to her aides and ministers. The long reports that stacked up on her desk were rarely touched. Never much of a reader, she preferred briefings to slough- ing through written documents.

Between consultations with department heads, discussions with party leaders, and appointments with foreign ambassadors, she tried to slip home for lunch, but she rarely managed it. There was always another speech to give, another helicopter flight to a remote corner of the coun- try, another foreign donor to woo. Her door was perpetually open, to So- viet Jews, to the mothers of dead soldiers, to friends of friends from America, to the beseeching and the carping.

Her day never seemed to end because Golda still hated being alone. If she had no evening commitments, she heated up whatever her maid had left her to eat and then called a friend to stop by to chat, took cake and coffee to her security guards, or made tea for her old friend Zalman Sha- zar, sipping her brew through imported sugar cubes in her cheeks. Only when she was desperate did she sit alone to watch her favorite television programs, detective stories like
Ironside.

Her pace was so grueling that her aides lost all semblance of per- sonal life. Although Lou had agreed to join her when Golda pledged that she would serve only six months, Golda couldn’t get along without her. Simcha Dinitz, who had a family, took on the job of political ad- viser, thinking that he would be able to leave the office with her in the late afternoon. But Dinitz was excellent company, and Golda always wanted him to stop by in the evening or on Sabbath, and he found it impossible to escape.

In a country like England, where the role of head of state requires more formal mien, Golda could not have survived politically. But she was an ideal fit for Israel. She wore her office easily, more naturally than as a right. Although she was suddenly flying around the world in private planes and staying in fancy hotel suites, she still assumed everyone

would call her Golda and that no one would bow or scrape, and her modesty allowed Israelis to indulge their illusions about their own fading idealism.

Everyone knew that Golda’s maid and driver ate lunch at her table, that she abolished the tradition of official pomp when she arrived at the airport, and that she hated her inevitable body guards. Greeting Kather- ine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post,
on a visit to Israel, Golda began by asking, as she so often did, “So, how’s your mother?”

When Senator Frank Church came to town, Golda invited him for breakfast, then promptly disappeared into the kitchen. Unsure what was happening, Church followed and found her cooking. “You came to help?” Golda asked. Church shrugged his shoulders. “Okay, why not?” he re- plied. No, no, go into the living room and I’ll bring you breakfast, she urged, then added, “But there are a few things you can help me with— Phantoms, land-to-air missiles, and help Russian Jews to emigrate.”

The Israeli public became enthralled with the colorful Old Lady who clumped around the country in her heavy lace-up shoes—
na’alei Golda
, Golda shoes, as they’re called in Hebrew—smoking incessantly, quipping acidly. How’s your health, journalists asked. “Nothing serious,” she’d re- spond. “A touch of cancer here, a little tuberculosis there.” Her
shtick
was legendary, not just her sarcasm and bluntness, but her regular boasting about her cooking—which anyone who sampled it knew was likely to in- clude an unappetizing selection of overbaked cakes, peppered gefilte fish, and odd creamed mushroom casseroles—her selection of dowdy clothes, and her ubiquitous outmoded handbag. (At one point, Miriam and Levi Eshkol could no longer abide her purses and bought her a styl- ish Hermès bag in Paris. Golda never once carried it.)

In less than a month after her selection, Golda’s approval ratings had reached 61 percent and there was little doubt that the interim prime min- ister would stand as the Labor candidate for prime minister. “I have never had any political ambitions, but I’ll bow to the will of my comrades,” she declared, as usual. By July, her approval rating was 89.9 percent of Israelis.

Only .33 of the populace expressed dissatisfaction with their new prime minister.

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Golda took Israel’s helm at a moment of sweeping change. The tide of Arab labor that poured in from the occupied territories fed an orgy of building, and the economy began a dramatic transition to high technol- ogy. The ultra-Orthodox found their political footing, the gap between rich and poor widened at a frightening pace, and a new vocabulary of in- dividual rights began edging out old rhetoric about the collective good.

Golda had risen in the labor movement because of her political skills, her loyalty, and her prowess as a fund-raiser, not because she was inven- tive or imaginative. “She wasn’t there to be a revolutionary,” said Yossi Beilin, a longtime Labor activist, but to continue the policies of the past.