Golda (45 page)

With no viable candidate save Dayan, whom Golda had begun calling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, however, her party colleagues begged her to re- main in office. Although she waffled, ever the party loyalist and a sucker for that sort of flattery, she finally bowed to the inevitable a month after her birthday. When she announced that decision, the party Central Com- mittee broke out in cheers, if not from open enthusiasm then from sheer relief that a split had been averted yet again.

Public affection for the anachronistic old lady still longing for the days of self-sacrifice was a strange quirk in a fast-paced, hypercompetitive con- sumer society. But despite soaring inflation and ugly social divisions, the Israeli economy was booming, the GNP growing between 8 and 14 per- cent per year, and private consumption rising steadily. Israel’s foreign currency reserves, long precariously low, had hit $1.2 billion, three times what they had been four years earlier.

Peace negotiations through Jarring and the Americans had been nearly forgotten when Rogers was replaced by Henry Kissinger, who proved more amenable to Golda’s manipulation if not her reasoning. Her annual American shopping trip in March had been a reassuring triumph. The House Foreign Affairs Committee applauded her entrance into their chamber, and she’d been greeted with a standing ovation at the National Press Club.

She and Nixon had collided briefly over a bill introduced by Senator Henry Jackson to deny Most Favored Nation trade status to the Soviets if Moscow didn’t lift the ransom tax imposed on Jews trying to leave the

Soviet Union, a bill strongly opposed by the White House. “Don’t let the Jewish leadership here put pressure on Congress,” Kissinger had exhorted her sternly amid press reports that the administration would punish Israel if the bill were enacted. But Russian Jewish immigrants were trying to persuade Golda to do the opposite, to support the bill openly.

“I cannot tell the American Jews not to concern themselves with their brethren in the Soviet Union,” she told the White House, appeasing them by informing the Russian Jews that she would not interfere in the internal affairs of the United States with any public gesture on either side.

So to the delight of the Israelis, Nixon filled all of her orders for mili- tary equipment. In addition to the 42 F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers and 80 A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft he’d promised her in December 1971, he topped off Israel’s arsenal with another four squadrons of combat jets— 24 Phantoms and another two dozen Skyhawks—and pledged that the United States would assist Israel in building Super Mirages, advanced jet fighters of its own design.

From time to time, a ripple of sobriety tempered the saucy aplomb of the country that existed with “one foot in war, one foot in peace, the body suspended in bedlam,” as Amos Elon, Israel’s leading journalist, described it. But having held off massive Arab armies three times, Israelis were blithely confident.

“What does the Israeli army need in order to occupy Damascus, Mos- cow, or Vladivostok?” began one common joke. The punch line: “To re- ceive an order.”

In another popular bit of mordant humor, Dayan and David “Dado” Elazar, the chief of staff of the IDF, were drinking coffee, bored with the absence of military action. “There is nothing to do,” Dayan said. “How about invading another Arab country,” Dado suggested.

“What would we do in the afternoon?” Dayan asked.

With security concerns requiring less of her attention, Golda imag- ined devoting her next term—surely her last—to domestic issues, espe- cially to the problems of poverty. “I want to get things moving on the inside of the country,” she told the Teachers’ Union as she outlined a se-

ries of new initiatives drawn up by her Committee on Disadvantaged Youth. The final budget of her term was the first in Israel’s history to de- vote more money to domestic problems than to defense. Her legacy, she was certain, would be one of social justice.

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The landing of the Bell 206 helicopter at the Mossad safe house in Her- zliya, just north of Tel Aviv, on September 25, 1973, should have burst Golda’s bubble. After all, it wasn’t every day that King Hussein snuck across the border for an emergency meeting. And the news he brought had an ominous ring: a sensitive Syrian source had informed the Jordani- ans that Syria was positioning for war.

Bellicose and entrenched in their negation of Israel’s existence, the Syrians had long kept three divisions of troops opposite the Golan Heights. Until August, their presence had not been particularly troublesome since Israel ruled the skies. But that month, the Soviets installed SAM-6 batter- ies that turned routine flights into hazardous missions.

In the middle of September, four Israeli Phantoms braving the missile grid on a photoreconnaissance operation touched off a dogfight that downed twelve Syrian planes. In the wake of that battle, the Syrians moved their artillery closer to the border and boosted their armor until they had 800 tanks facing 77 Israeli ones. That movement had worried the general leading Israel’s Northern Command, but no one on the Gen- eral Staff of the IDF or in the Ministry of Defense believed that the Syrians would dare strike at Israel alone.

Golda’s first question to Hussein, then, was automatic. “Without Egypt?” she asked.

Hussein paused and replied quietly, “I think they would cooperate.”

It was midnight by the time the king departed and Golda had a chance to call Dayan to dissect Hussein’s warning. Lou Kaddar, who’d served coffee and tea at the meeting, didn’t understand the need for discussion. “My feeling . . . was that, although King Hussein didn’t know all the de- tails, he knew enough to understand that war would break out,” she later

explained. Zusia Kniazer, the head of the Jordan desk of Israel’s military intelligence group, who had listened on closed-circuit television, agreed. “War!” he told the head of the Northern Command after Hussein de- parted. “Syria and Egypt are poised to attack Israel.”

But after consulting with the other intelligence officers who’d heard the conversation, Dayan showed no alarm. The Jordanian king’s relation- ship with Egypt wasn’t good enough for him to be in the loop, he told Golda. Don’t worry. We’re watching the Syrian buildup carefully. There’s no cause for panic.

Reassured, the following morning Golda flew to Strasbourg to deliver a speech to the twenty-fifth consultative assembly of the Council of Eu- rope. Shortly after she arrived, two Palestinians seized three Soviet Jews and an Austrian customs official on board the
Chopin Express,
a special train that transported Soviet Jewish emigrants to Vienna, where they were processed in a transit camp for immigration to Israel. The kidnap- pers demanded that Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky shut down that camp as the price for release of the hostages. Declaring that he would not permit Austria to be turned into a “secondary theater of the Middle East conflict,” Kreisky agreed.

Kreisky’s decision outraged Golda, all the more because the Austrian chancellor was Jewish. She scrapped her planned speech to the council for a two-and-a-half-hour jeremiad against terrorists and their appeasers. “There are those who threaten with a gun and those who try to defend themselves so that the gun does not go off,” she declared. “To say ‘a plague on both your houses’ is the greatest injustice. If there is a family of nations, everyone has the right to move around the world. These terrorists, at the point of a gun, have raised the question whether anyone should be al- lowed to use Austria’s soil for transit.”

While Golda was lobbying her European colleagues, Galili called to report that the security situation on the borders was looking dire and that she should return home promptly. But Golda was too angry with Kreisky to pay him much heed. Despite a council resolution proclaiming that no government should be bound by a promise extorted by violence, Kreisky,

who later bragged that he was “the only politician in Europe that Golda Meir can’t blackmail,” refused to reconsider his decision. So rather than rush home, Golda flew to Vienna, hoping to change the Austrian chan- cellor’s mind.

The signs that had provoked Galili’s phone call weren’t the move- ments on the Syrian border. Israeli intelligence had discovered that a di- vision of Egyptian troops was heading toward the Suez Canal and that 120,000 Egyptian reservists had been called up. Still Dayan and the lead- ers of Israel’s military intelligence scoffed at the danger, concluding that Egypt was engaging in routine fall military exercises. They similarly dis- missed a report from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that elite Egyptian commando units were being deployed to new bases. Even the sudden silence of Egyptian radio traffic did nothing to dent Dayan’s con- fidence enough for him to notify Golda or bring Allon, the acting prime minister, into the loop.

Those in charge—particularly Dayan and Eli Zeira, the head of Military Intelligence—were blinded not only by deep contempt for Arab military ability but by Israel’s long-held belief that the Syrians would never risk war without the Egyptians and that the Egyptians would not take on Israel without long-range bombers, planes they had not yet ac- quired. The first assumption was little more than an exercise in logic, but the second was based on solid information from Israel’s best and most reliable Egyptian intelligence source, code-named In-Law, who was, in fact, Nasser’s son-in-law and a confidant of President Anwar Sadat.

The ability of Dayan and Chief of Staff Dado Elazar to read the tea leaves was further clouded by Zeira’s habit of sharing only his own con- clusions with his superiors without mentioning contradictory data or the disagreement of his subordinates. His self-assurance about his ability to anticipate Sadat’s calculations had been reinforced five months earlier, when Dado grew alarmed about Egyptian troop movements. Golda had mobilized Israel’s reserves despite Zeira’s opinion that nothing was afoot. That alert and call-up had cost Israel an estimated $35 million. No one,

least of all Dado, who’d been made to feel like the boy who cried wolf, wanted to repeat the same mistake.

The May call-up offered a glimpse into the enormous difficulty Israel faced in divining Arab intentions. Most countries rely on “tactical warn- ings,” watching an enemy’s troop movements and paying close attention to their threats. But if Israel, which maintained a standing army of only 135,000, had called up its reservists every time the Egyptians or Syrians let loose a barrage of artillery fire, moved tanks close to the border, or threatened invasion, the country would have been in a perpetual state of alert. Dayan, then, had developed his own approach, “strategic warning,” which depended on analyzing political thinking and objectives—and on the Arabs’ doing nothing to try to deceive him.

In planning the recapture of the Sinai, Sadat had counted on that sort of Israeli arrogance, what General Ahmad Ismail Ali, the Egyptian de- fense minister, called Israel’s “wanton conceit.”

Despite Dayan’s conviction that nothing alarming was happening, he briefed Golda and her inner cabinet during her first afternoon back from her fruitless trip to Austria. Oddly, however, he seemed less interested in bringing Golda up-to-date than on seeking her counsel, the first in a se- ries of strangely passive interactions between the brash general and the elderly prime minister.

Hearing the new reports, Golda worried. Might the Egyptians be poised to stage a diversion to allow the Syrians to attack? she asked. “Is there anything, any weapons system that we don’t have that we could ask for right away from the United States?” Shouldn’t we consider sending up more reinforcements? Her military leaders were nearly unanimous that nothing threatening was afoot. Still, Golda was troubled. “There’s a con- tradiction between the signs on the ground and what the experts are say- ing,” she told Galili.

Unbeknownst to Golda, the Israeli troops on the front lines shared her concern. In the north, another Syrian armored brigade had taken up a position along the border, and in the Sinai, the Israeli soldiers could see a steady stream of convoys coming in.

Privy to none of that information because of Zeira’s hubris, Golda didn’t grow seriously anxious until the following afternoon, when mili- tary intelligence intercepted a KGB radio transmission about the evacua- tion of the families of Soviet troops and experts from both Egypt and Syria. For Golda, news of the arrival of enormous Antonov 22s to ferry the Russians home was the first serious alarm bell. But finding no sympa- thy among her generals, she was left to worry alone.

By the morning, the morning of Yom Kippur eve, however, Dado was growing apprehensive. Reconnaissance photographs taken the previous afternoon along the canal showed not just a growing mass of armor and artillery but bridge-laying and water-crossing equipment. To hedge his bets, he ordered a C alert, just shy of Israel’s highest, shifted more ar- mored units to the Golan Heights, canceled all leaves for the holiday, and instructed his logistics team to prepare for a general call-up. The head of the air force had already discreetly called up his reserves.

Maybe we should keep the army radio broadcasting during Yom Kip- pur in case we need to call up reserves? Dado suggested to Dayan. Exas- perated, Dayan dismissed the notion, worried about provoking national panic.

Dado had been Golda’s personal choice for chief of staff, and Dayan had agreed to his appointment only reluctantly. The tension between the two men was palpable at the best of times, and the eve of war was not one of those moments. The two generals couldn’t agree on what they were facing, a limited Egyptian raid backing up a Syrian artillery barrage or a full-scale offensive. So they trudged over to Golda’s Tel Aviv office, where she routinely worked on Thursday and Fridays.

Dayan clung to the evaluation given by Zeira, who remained con- vinced that there was a “low probability” of war. And while Dado dis- agreed, he believed that the measures he’d taken would be sufficient to hold off any possible hostile Arab attack until the arrival of the reserves, standard doctrine in the IDF.

Golda, however, was less sanguine. “There is something,” she said. Why would the Syrians deploy so massively if they planned nothing more