Golda (44 page)

The standoff on Jordanian soil was yet another humiliation to King Hussein, whose power was openly threatened by the strongholds— mini-states, in fact—in Amman and northern Jordan established by the PLO and the PFLP. Guerrillas raced through the streets of the capital with loaded weapons, registered their own vehicles, and set up a parallel system of customs checkpoints and taxation. Regular fighting had broken out between Jordanian security forces and the Palestinian groups, which had 50,000 armed fighters. Caught between the terrorists, who had sub- stantial support among the half of his population that was Palestinian,

and his own East Bank Jordanians and Bedouins, disgusted at the grow- ing anarchy, Hussein could do little more than beg. But time and again, he negotiated with guerrilla leaders only to watch them break their agree- ments.

The summer before the triple hijacking, after declaring that before Palestine could be liberated, they would have to liberate Amman, the PFLP attempted to assassinate the king. Civil war had broken out and the Iraqis, with almost 12,000 troops in Jordan, threatened to “take all neces- sary measures” to protect their fedayeen brothers.

Predictably, then, Hussein’s attempts to mediate an end to the hostage crisis at Dawson’s Field were rebuffed by the PFLP, and the king seethed at the challenge to his authority. Although most of the 310 hostages were quickly transferred to Amman and released, the flight crews and Jewish passengers, a total of fifty-six people, were kept as hostages and, on Sep- tember 12, the empty planes were blown up on his soil in front of the world media.

Fed up, Hussein surrounded Amman with loyal troops, replaced his civilian government with military officers, and ordered the guerrillas to remove their weapons from Amman. When they refused, he imposed martial law and sent his army into the city and the northern guerrilla strongholds. The fedayeen, however, proved more determined than Hus- sein had anticipated, and on the third day of the fighting, Syrian tanks crossed the border to reinforce them. If the Syrians committed them- selves to a full-scale attack, Hussein knew he couldn’t survive.

That night, Golda was in the midst of a forty-minute speech at a United Jewish Appeal–Israel Bonds dinner at the New York Hilton when Ambassador Rabin was called off the dais. “King Hussein has approached us, describing the situation of his forces, and asked us to transmit his re- quest that your air force attack the Syrians in northern Jordan,” Henry Kissinger told him. “I need an immediate reply.”

The U.S. government was in a panic, unsure how to keep Hussein in power without inviting a Soviet response. Israel, they knew, could not stand for an overthrow of Hussein. But it was unclear how far Nixon

would go in supporting Israeli military action on Hussein’s behalf given his desire for rapprochement with the Soviets.

With an audience of 3,000 applauding Golda in the background, Rabin turned the tables on Kissinger. “I’m surprised to hear the United States pass- ing on messages of this kind like some sort of mailman,” he said. “I will not even submit the request to Mrs. Meir before I know what your government thinks. Are you recommending that we respond to the Jordanian request?”

Unprepared, Kissinger promised to call Rabin back. Thirty minutes later, after consulting Nixon, who’d been bowling in the White House lanes, he reported, “The request is approved and supported by the United States government.” Still, Rabin wasn’t satisfied.

“Do you advise Israel to do it?” Rabin asked.

“Yes, subject to your own considerations,” replied Kissinger.

An hour later, Rabin transmitted Golda’s answer: At first light, an Is- raeli reconnaissance plane would fly over the area and, if necessary, act. But Golda wanted a firm commitment that the United States would pro- tect Israel from Soviet or Egyptian reprisals, replace any military equip- ment lost in the action, and turn over eighteen promised Phantoms earlier than scheduled.

The Israelis did more than send up a reconnaissance flight. They flew over the Syrian armored brigades, virtually buzzing them, to make their presence felt, and sent ground forces to the border in broad daylight. Rabin informed Kissinger that the IDF believed that air strikes might not be sufficient and that Israel might have to send in troops on the ground. Nixon approved the plan but Kissinger couldn’t bring himself to broach the topic to King Hussein, knowing that being saved by Israel would de- stroy whatever credibility he had left in the Arab world.

The combination of American protests to the Soviets, the Jordanian military resistance, and Israel’s threatening moves, however, cooled Syrian ardor for battle, buying Hussein a respite in his civil war with the Palestin- ian resistance. But that moment left both Golda and the Jordanian king with a keen awareness of their mutual dependence and the commonality of their enemy.

Several months later, then, Golda invited Hussein to visit her in Tel Aviv, the first of at least seven more get-togethers. The king flew his own helicopter to a rendezvous point on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea and was picked up by an Israeli helicopter, whose pilot surrendered the stick to allow the king to make a pass over his beloved Jerusalem. No agreement was struck that day. Hussein had already rejected the Allon plan, and Golda was not inclined to accept either of his ideas for the future of the West Bank—an independent state or a federated Jordan—without some change in the pre-1967 border.

While Hussein knew that a “separate peace” was not yet realistic for him politically, he continued meeting with the Israelis—in an air-conditioned limousine in the desert, on a missile boat in the Gulf of Eilat, on Coral Island near Israeli-occupied Sinai, and in the Midrasha, a concrete fortress north of Tel Aviv run by Israel’s intelligence agency. He and Israeli officials hammered out joint strategies to fight terrorism. They cooperated on irri- gation systems, pest control, and bridge building. And in a meeting on the Red Sea in early 1970, Hussein and Dayan negotiated the withdrawal of Israeli troops from seventy-five square kilometers of the As-Safi area in the Arava in exchange for Hussein’s promise to station a unit of his own army in the area to prevent terrorists from firing onto Israel’s Dead Sea Works.

Over time Golda and Hussein established a telex “hot line.” When the king heard that Golda’s sister Sheyna had died, he graciously conveyed his condolences. And the ever courteous and gallant Hussein always brought gifts—gold pens embossed with the symbol of the Hashemite crown for Eban and a German-made G-3 assault rifle for Allon. On Golda’s seventy-fifth birthday, he sent her an exquisite strand of perfectly matched pearls, the stones of paradise, according to the Koran.

Gradually, Israel and Jordan had settled into a de facto peace. Any- thing more was impossible, and not only because Golda and Hussein could find no way to overcome the hurdles of distrust and pride. The pro- Western king recalled all too keenly what had happened to his grandfa- ther Abdullah after he moved toward an agreement with the Jews. In

1951, at the age of sixteen, Hussein had entered Al-Aqsa Mosque with Abdullah and watched him murdered by a Palestinian terrorist, a fate he escaped only because of a medal pinned to his chest that deflected the bullet aimed for his heart.

* * *

Given that history, Hussein’s 1972 proposal for a federated state was a calculated risk, dependent on the support of West Bank residents, and he didn’t get it. Too little, too late, Palestinians said. “Jordan should have done this back in 1948,” Mohammed Abu Shilbaya, an influential writer for the East Jerusalem newspaper
Al Quds,
told the
New York Times.
“Now everything is damaged and ruined.”

The PLO rejected the federated state “categorically and conclusively,” and the West Bank suddenly became rife with rumors that Hussein and Golda had hatched it during one of their regular late-night phone conver- sations. Hussein is an “agent of Zionism and imperialism who will share the same fate as Wasfi Tal,” said Arafat, referring to the Jordanian pre- mier who’d been assassinated four months earlier by a group of Palestin- ians.

Golda had long assumed that some version of Hussein’s proposal would be the West Bank’s future since a third country in the old British Mandate of Palestine seemed utterly unrealistic to her. “It’s not a viable state by any means,” she reminded everyone who would listen, pointing to its small size and lack of access to the sea. “The only purpose that this state can serve is to be a bridgehead against Israel.”

Reuniting the peoples of the two banks of the Jordan, on the other hand, seemed entirely logical. “In Jordan . . . the majority of the people are Palestinian,” she explained. “What is the difference between some- body who lives in Nablus and went over to Jordan and the one who re- mained in Nablus?”

Yet, like Hussein, Golda knew that the international political climate was not yet ripe for such discussions. Speaking to the Knesset about the king’s proposal, then, she lashed out at Hussein angrily. “The king is

treating as his own property territories which are not his and are not un- der his control. He crowns himself king of Jerusalem and envisions him- self as the ruler of larger territories than were under his control prior to the rout of June 1967. In all this detailed plan the term peace is not even mentioned.”

But whether on the floor of the Knesset, where the rhetoric against Hussein was overheated in the extreme, or in speeches and press confer- ences, Golda carefully—studiously, given how meticulously she parsed her words—never rejected his federation plan.

chapter sixteen

I’m not cynical at all. I’ve just lost my illusions.

O

n May 3, 1973, Israel celebrated Golda’s seventy-fifth birthday with all the hoopla she’d disingenuously asked the nation to forgo. Kib-

butz Revivim put on a version of
This Is Your Life
for her, complete with skits, songs, and secret guests. A group of high school students presented her with seventy-six pink roses and her cabinet ministers gave her a paint- ing by Mordechai Levanon, one of Israel’s most famous artists. German chancellor Willy Brandt cabled her warm congratulations, and King Hussein sent along that perfectly matched set of pearls.

Falling just three days before Israel’s twenty-fifth Independence Day, it was the perfect moment for Golda to announce her retirement. The “caretaker” prime minister, who’d been in office for four years, was at the peak of her popularity. Polls indicated that 73 percent of the Israeli popu- lation was anxious for her to remain at the helm.

Year after year, she’d been voted the most admired woman in America and Britain, beating out indigenous queens and heroines. After her verbal

run-in with the pope, Italians denounced the pontiff for his rudeness to Israel’s grande dame. Her political clout was so formidable that when she announced that she would attend the Socialist International meetings in Paris in January 1973, the French practically begged her to stay away, fearing that her mere presence would spotlight the Gaullist arms em- bargo against Israel and sway votes away from Prime Minister Georges Pompidou in the March elections.

And while senior officials at the U.S. State and Defense Departments complained bitterly that she was impossibly intransigent, Richard Nixon loved her, as he later confessed quite publicly, an odd admission for an American president she lectured relentlessly, odder still for a man as reti- cent as Nixon.

Although Golda would never feel quite as secure with anyone else guiding the country, she knew it was time to leave. She wasn’t merely tired; she was sick. During her first six months as prime minister, she suf- fered a few migraines, although the ones that felled her seemed to occur on Saturdays. But gradually Lou Kaddar began receiving more phone calls from Golda, her voice barely recognizable, asking that she send over a doctor to give her a shot. Years of kidney stones and gallbladder attacks, phlebitis, and the white leatherette cigarette case she always kept close at hand were catching up with her, and her lymphoma had recurred, forcing her to set aside time every Monday for treatment. Still, Golda brushed aside all concerns for her health. When an aide suggested that she take a vacation, she asked, “Why do I look tired?” No, he said, but I am. “So you take a vacation,” she insisted.

Those closest to her couldn’t imagine how she kept going. “The woman radiated force,” said Eli Mizrachi. “She radiated authority and strength and conviction. . . . Golda was undoubtedly an example of supe- riority of the spirit, of the mind over the body. Otherwise, there’s no ex- planation for how she carried on.”

Yet after declaring in 1971 that she would retire, Golda coyly—and that occasional and incongruent coyness was one of her preeminent qualities—refused to commit herself. When the
Jerusalem Post,
Israel’s

English-language daily, asked her who she wanted to succeed her, she quipped, “What? So you’re sacking me?”

But by October 1972, she seemed to have made up her mind. “I am old,” she told a reporter. “I am feeble. . . . My heart is functioning, but I am not able to continue at this insane pace forever. Lou only knows how many times I have said to myself, ‘To hell with it all, to hell with every- one. I did my part. Now others should do theirs.’ . . . Many do not believe that I will leave. But they should start to believe. I’ll even give you a date: October 1973.”