Golda (42 page)

Again and again, no matter where she traveled, Golda returned to that same theme. “Why did the West Bank Palestinians accept . . . annexation [by Jordan] . . . without an uprising of explosives and mines?” she asked. “Why did they awaken as a Palestinian entity only after the Six-Day War?” The answer, she was convinced, was that the entire fracas about Palestin- ian nationalism was a political ploy, yet another club to bash Israel.

Heavily invested in her self-image as a progressive person, Golda was stung by international derision of her position on the Palestinians. “There is no such thing as Palestinians,” she was widely quoted as saying. What she really said made a more subtle distinction, “There is no Palestinian people. There are Palestinian refugees. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was not as though there was

a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

Golda was angry and frustrated by what she saw as a double standard. Why are Israelis condemned as imperialists for holding on to the West Bank, the Golan, and the Gaza when no one raised any criticism of Jor- dan or Egypt, who held the same land for much longer? she asked. “Where was the holy principle against the acquisition of territory by force when they seized the Old City? . . . How was the Old City . . . acquired by Abdullah? By serenading?”

The Palestinian leadership’s goal of creating an Arab state comprising both the West Bank and Israel itself—and their use of terrorism to achieve it—made it even more difficult for Golda to muster up much sympathy for the Palestinians. “We don’t want peace,” Arafat declared repeatedly. “We want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.”

His sympathizers might not have taken Arafat literally, but Golda, the most literal of women, did. “When Arafat speaks for the Palestinians, he doesn’t say he wants to have a small Palestinian state on the West Bank,” she explained. “He says that Israel is Palestine. . . . Arafat has made only one great concession. He said he would permit those Jews who were in the country prior to 1917 to remain. . . . So we others should have to break up and again become refugees in the world.”

For Golda, the Palestinian problem wasn’t a matter of statehood or what to call the Arabs of the West Bank but of the refugees languishing in miserable camps in Gaza and on the West Bank. While still foreign min- ister, she’d pleaded at the United Nations for a comprehensive strategy for the resettlement of the half million Arabs who had fled Israel at its found- ing, offering to compensate them for the property they’d left behind. But the fate of the refugees had become hopelessly entangled in wider poli- tics, and she found no takers. When asked in 1956 why Iraq didn’t bring in refugees to deal with its manpower shortage, an Iraq cabinet minister said candidly, “Oh, we couldn’t do that. That would solve the refugee problem.”

Reminding the delegates that Israel had absorbed 500,000 Jewish refu- gees from Arab countries, “practically the same number as that of Arabs who left the area which is Israel,” Golda railed annually against such ma- nipulation of the refugees for political ends. “How can you reconcile the outcry over the fate of the refugees living on international charity with the fierce opposition to any plan of constructive development, of resettle- ment, and of integration designed to rehabilitate these unfortunate peo- ple?” she asked.

“The Arab leaders exploit the Arab refugees in their countries for the purposes of their political war against us.”

By the time she became prime minister, however, Golda’s views were hopelessly out of synch with the reality that years of struggle against Israel and the nationalist fervor sweeping the Third World had awakened a new self-identity among the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza.

No single voice was better placed to convey that message to Golda than that of Arye—Lyova—Eliav, one of Golda’s fair-haired boys. For someone of Golda’s ilk, Eliav had all the right stuff. He’d fought in the Haganah and in the Jewish Brigade during World War II, and after the war, he smuggled 2,000 Holocaust survivors past British blockades on an old banana boat. In the early years of the state, he’d been Eshkol’s right-hand man in the nightmare of resettling tens of thousands of im- migrants, rescued Jews from Egypt, and worked undercover in the So- viet Union.

After the 1967 war, Eliav had told Eshkol that he wanted to resign in order to conduct a one-man survey of the West Bank and Gaza. “I am not a Middle East expert,” he explained. “I have so far only gotten to know the Arabs through the barrel of a gun.” But he sensed that Israel’s future would be decided in the occupied—what the Israelis called the administered— territories.

“There’s a people there, a national movement with its own institu- tions, its own heroes,” he reported back to Eshkol after visiting refugee camps and villages, interviewing mayors and meeting with residents, na- ively assuming that the prime minister would be pleased to have an ac-

curate firsthand report. Let me set up a new national authority to build housing and industry for the refugees and “show what Israel can do,” he proposed.

Eshkol shunted him off on Golda. “What Palestinian people?” Golda asked churlishly. “What are you talking about? Lyova, charity begins at home.”

When no one else in the government showed much more interest, Eliav began to write. “The Palestinian people today have all the attri- butes of nationhood,” he argued in a three-part series published in
Davar,
the Labor Party paper. “They have national consciousness. . . . They have a Palestinian history of decades, marked by struggles and wars. They have a Diaspora with a strong affinity to their birthplace. They have national awareness of a common disaster, common victims, suffer- ings, and heroes. . . . The Arab Palestinian nation is perhaps the nation with the most obvious signs of identity and the strongest national unity, among the Arab nations.

“The problem of our ties with the Palestinian Arabs now takes prece- dence in the complex of our ties with the Arab world.”

The articles fell into a black hole of governmental myopia, so Eliav had them printed up in a pamphlet called “New Targets for Israel” and mailed to the entire party leadership. Unlike the other critics of emerging government policy, he was an insider and assumed that his ideas would have currency with his comrades.

Still, his ideas were ignored until he threw his hat in the ring to be- come the new secretary-general of the party. By then, Golda had become prime minister and she happily supported Eliav’s rise. Lyova and his wife, one of the Holocaust survivors he snuck into Palestine, were close to Golda. When she needed a secret emissary to the king of Morocco or to the Kurdish rebels in Iraq, he was the person she sent.

“I was a man in his forties who’d done all the right things,” Eliav ex- plained. “She thought I might be the right person to become a prime minister.”

But once Eliav became a party heavyweight, Marlin Levin of
Time

magazine noticed what Golda had ignored, that he disagreed with the government’s position on the Palestinians, and decided that the rise of a dissident to party leadership might be a good story.

The day that the issue of
Time
carrying Levin’s article, “The Lion’s Roar,” arrived in Israel, Golda invited her protégé to her home. While she made tea, Eliav couldn’t help noticing a copy of
Time
on her kitchen table, open to Levin’s article, with several sentences underlined. “The first thing we have to do is to recognize that the Palestinian Arabs exist as an infant nation,” Levin had quoted him as saying. “We have to recognize them. The sooner we do it, the better it will be for us, for them, for eventual peace.”

Over tea and cake, Golda confronted her protégé. “I assume you will deny several sentences in it?” she said. No, Eliav responded. Those are my views. “Why didn’t I know?” Golda asked. Eliav shook his head. “I really couldn’t say,” he answered, reminding her that he’d laid out the same arguments in
Davar
and in a pamphlet he’d sent her.

Eliav understood that the overheated rhetoric of Arafat and Palestin- ian attacks on civilians pricked at all of Golda’s worst fears of an Arab pogrom. But he hoped that he’d be able to persuade her to think about the Palestinians in a new way. Instead, Golda asked him to call a meeting of the party Central Committee. “I intend to say to them that they have a young and clever secretary-general but that they also have an old and foolish prime minister, and that they’ll have to decide,” she told him. “I’ll ask if they want to stay with the old stupid prime minister or the young, clever secretary-general.”

Stunned by the reaction, Eliav didn’t argue, but he did suggest that forcing the issue could divide the party, knowing full well that the party was Golda’s last redoubt. “Let us agree to disagree and work together as long as we can,” he offered. Dragging on a cigarette for a few moments, Golda concurred.

“That was the end of the love affair in her kitchen,” Eliav recalls, chuckling. “That day I turned from white to black.” Within weeks, he

was hearing the rumor that Golda was worried about his mental health.

* * *

No matter Golda’s personal views on the Palestinians, Israel still needed a policy for dealing with the occupied territories, what writer Gershom Gorenberg called Israel’s “accidental empire.” At the end of the 1967 war, Israel had awoken master of a new domain, twenty-six thousand square miles of territory—three times the size of Israel itself—with a population of 1.1 million Arabs, and no plan for what to do with it or them.

As was his wont, Eshkol had dithered, passionately, one minute swept up in the romance of presiding as master of Gaza, site of denouement of the ancient Samson and Delilah tale, the next panicking at the realiza- tion that Gaza was “a rose with a lot of thorns,” as he put it, 280,000 Arabs primed by years of overcrowding and misery to jab Israel in the side. Esh- kol vacillated similarly over every other acre of the new territories except the Sinai, which everyone expected to trade for peace with Egypt, and East Jerusalem, which less than 10 percent of the Israeli population was willing to give up.

For almost two years before Golda came into office, the entire Israeli government was caught in a labyrinth of “yes but,” “no way,” and “not now” on the dilemma of the territories. Mapam feared that annexation of any land would block the path to peace; Menachem Begin’s minions or- dained Greater Israel to be a single nation, indivisible; religious Zionists saw Messianic design in the new Jewish hegemony over the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron; Ahdut HaAvoda, also on the left, split between ju- diciousness and an ancient nationalism; and the military couldn’t decide precisely what would best serve Israel’s strategic interests.

The squabble was endless, ugly, often bitter. The day after the end of the war, Dayan announced on American television that Israel would keep both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, although Eban was telling the world that Israel would annex neither. A dozen generals waxed lyrical

about the virtues of strategic depth while the justice minister spoke out in horror against Israel’s becoming a colonial power in an age of decoloniza- tion. And when she took office, Golda told everyone to shut up since there was no need to decide anything until the Arabs were ready to talk.

Although she had been a reluctant supporter of partition, neither the West Bank nor Gaza found a place on Golda’s personal map of Israel. Her Judaism was too secular and too light on ancient history to entangle her in Old Testament nostalgia, and her nature was too practical to blind her to the daunting demographics. Who could think about Ra- chel’s Tomb when retaining it meant keeping another 1.1 million Arabs inside Israel’s borders? Preserving Israel as a Jewish state, not a biblical one, was her only priority.

“I want a Jewish state with a decisive Jewish majority which cannot change overnight,” she pronounced shortly after becoming prime minis- ter. “If the Arabs agree to sit down with us around a negotiating table, many of us would be prepared to give back these territories.” Three years later, she still had not changed her view. “I think we should be prepared to return the populated areas as the price of peace—and at the same time avoid gaining tens of thousands of Arabs as part of our population.”

So in her early years as prime minister, Golda resisted the annexation- ists, even in her own ranks. When Aranne, her minister of education, and Teddy Kolleck, the mayor of Jerusalem, suggested that the Israelis main- tain the Jordanian curriculum in the city’s schools, she supported them, even allowing Jordanian inspectors to cross the border into the city so that accreditation could be maintained. In June 1969, when the military government of the West Bank requisitioned 300 acres of land on which twenty-five Arab families farmed, Golda intervened at the request of the mayors of Hebron, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahar to stop the expro- priation.

For similar reasons, she threw her weight against allowing Arab resi- dents of the West Bank and Gaza to work inside Israel, although 50,000 were already doing so. “It is better for the Arabs of Judea and Samaria to work close to home and we should help them do so,” she said. “Besides,

the Zionist ideal has been to accept happily the challenge of manual la- bor—to build this land of ours. What is happening now is that too much of that building is being done for us by Arab labor.

“All the Jews will be getting PhDs, and the Arabs will be doing the dirty work.”

But Israel was a raucous democracy, and Golda’s personal sentiments could not easily hold sway, although she had the firm—and politically weighty—support of the other two members of the troika that had de- posed Ben-Gurion, Sapir and Aranne, both committed doves. If she tried to give up too much, her National Unity government would fall apart. But she was also aware that if she opted for Begin’s maximalist position, she would lose both the Americans and many of her closest colleagues on the left.

To make matters worse, scores of Israelis at both ends of the political spectrum were boxing her in by creating new realities on the ground. By the time she became prime minister, settlers had already established themselves in the Etzion Bloc, the key area between Jerusalem and He- bron. Small kibbutzim had been established on the Golan Heights and the ultra-Orthodox had reestablished a Jewish presence in Hebron itself. The spectacle of Israelis taking the law into their own hands to con- strain government action was the sort of open challenge Golda could never abide. More than once, she ordered the military to physically re- move Jews from would-be settlements on the West Bank, but she knew that every move she took was politically dangerous. So while the fruits of victory had become overripe, Golda, like Eshkol before her, opted for blind expediency and postponed a decision that was, in fact, too pressing