Golda (50 page)

“For the first time in a quarter of a century there is direct, simple, per- sonal contact between Israelis and Egyptians,” Golda told the Knesset, unable to conceal her excitement. “They sat in tents together, hammered out details . . . and shook hands.”

It quickly became clear that Sadat cared less about an Israeli with- drawal to the first armistice line than he did about a supply corridor to his trapped Third Army, a subtlety Kissinger had either missed or ignored. After his ebullient rhetoric during the first days of victory, Sadat had not admitted to his people that Israel had captured more than 500 square miles of Egyptian territory and 8,372 of its soldiers. “The story of the en- circlement was used according to the methods of Goebbels,” he an- nounced at a press conference. “They have put me in a dilemma: Should I wipe out their force, which is squeezed between the two parts of the army? Or should I obey the cease-fire?”

The destruction of the Third Army, then, posed the risk to his presi- dency.

It took al-Gamasy and Yariv just two hours to settle on a resupply and prisoner exchange agreement, so they moved on to the more fundamen-

tal question of the disengagement of forces. After a bit of posturing by both sides, al-Gamasy suggested that Israel withdraw about thirty-five kilometers from the canal and be replaced by United Nations peace- keepers. Once that withdrawal began, he said, Egypt would lift its block- ade of the Bab el Mandab Strait that choked Israeli shipping and thin out its forces on the west bank.

It was a startlingly generous offer, not quite good enough, perhaps, but it held out the possibility of a wide neutral zone along the canal that would prevent further conflict. Building on that momentum, during eighteen meetings the two men moved their countries toward peace. Be- fore Kissinger even reached Egypt, Yariv and al-Gamasy were already discussing a phased disengagement and the reopening of the canal and were well on their way to the very agreement for which Kissinger would take credit a week later.

But Middle East peace was being staged as the Henry Kissinger show, so all attention was focused on his first meeting with Sadat, who had al- ready decided to make the United States the center of the struggle for peace in the Middle East. Kissinger arrived with a six-point agreement in his briefcase providing for the scrupulous observation of the cease-fire; daily deliveries of food, water, and medicine to the encircled areas; im- mediate negotiations for Israel’s return to the earlier armistice lines within the framework of separation of forces talks; the replacement of Israeli checkpoints along the Cairo-Suez road with UN personnel; and the ex- change of prisoners.

Fully expecting that Sadat would oppose his proposal, Kissinger was shocked when the Egyptian president agreed to everything in less than two hours. “I wanted to show him that I am a very, very reasonable man— unlike Mrs. Meir,” Sadat later told friends. “She will haggle over every point.”

With Sadat’s agreement in his pocket, Kissinger took off on a trip to the pyramids, sending Joe Sisco to Israel. I’ll have an announcement as soon as he returns, Kissinger told the press, adding, “that is, if we ever see Joe again,” reflecting his fear of what would happen in Jerusalem.

Kissinger had a fondness for the sort of vague language that allowed all sides to claim diplomatic victory. Having been burned more than once by such locutions, Golda worked through the document Sisco brought with a fine-tooth comb and demanded greater linguistic rigor. The agreement, after all, didn’t spell out the number of checkpoints along the supply cor- ridor or explicitly bar the transport of military supplies along it. The time- table for the release of the prisoners of war was hopelessly ambiguous, and there was no mention of Israel’s formal control over the corridor, which Kissinger had already promised. Her cabinet and opposition leaders had more complaints, most important that the agreement didn’t mention the lifting of the Egyptian blockade of the Bab el Mandeb Strait.

When Kissinger heard from Sisco about what he considered to be “quibbling,” he fired off two messages, one to Golda warning that any changes would sabotage the entire accord, and another to Nixon, seeking help.

Kissinger saved his agreement by resorting to what would become his favorite tactic, American guarantees on points omitted from agreements. Golda loathed such guarantees. To a woman who’d embraced Zionism in large measure because she believed in Jewish self-reliance, trading it for American promises seemed a poor bargain since it left Washington free to interpret the guarantees and to decide when or if to take violations seriously. She remembered all too well what happened in 1970, when Egypt broke Rogers’ temporary cease-fire agreement by moving SAM missiles, and the United States let the matter pass.

For Golda, Middle East peace had to hinge on Israeli-Arab relations, not Israeli-American relations or Arab-American relations. By imposing himself between the two sides, she believed, Kissinger would only delay a final resolution to the conflict.

Guarantees are diplomatic Band-Aids, she told Kissinger, a poor sub- stitute for directly negotiated agreements.

They’re only “icing on the cake,” Kissinger countered.

If there was a cake, Golda said, Israel wouldn’t need any icing. And what good was the icing without the cake?

Ultimately, Israel had no choice but to accept the terms. The pressure from Washington was relentless, and the families of Israel’s prisoners of war were demonstrating outside the Knesset and the American embassy. where is my father, one placard asked. Another read, nixon, you gave the egyptians a cease-fire, now give us back our sons.

Golda understood that by caving in to the Americans, she had not so much signed an agreement with the Egyptians as turned herself over to Kissinger, and few others missed that distinction. “My dear General, what does the phrase ‘disengagement agreement’ mean?” Yariv asked al-Gamasy when the two men signed the document at Kilometer 101. Puzzled, the Egyptian responded, “It means to place the troops away from one another.” Yariv shook his head. “No. . . . It is a Harvard expres- sion and it is Kissinger who will work out the explanation for it, and you and I will not be able to do anything about it until Kissinger says what he means.”

The agreement might have been a bitter pill for Golda to swallow, but it went down easier as Golda watched a DC-6 leased by the International Red Cross touch down at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport with the first planeload of Israeli prisoners of war. Among those released were nine soldiers who’d been held captive for years, after being grabbed during the War of Attri- tion. In their 20 x 20 cell, they’d taught themselves to knit and had brought Golda what they’d produced: an off-kilter Star of David that they told their jailers was a religious symbol rather than the flag of Israel.

The day after the disengagement agreement was signed, Golda inter- rupted the never-ending series of meetings for a personal errand, an er- rand of anger and conscience. For years, she had been the Socialist International’s biggest star. When she arrived at their annual meetings, Pietro Nenni, the patriarch of Italian socialism, kissed and hugged her, and Willy Brandt pulled her aside for confidential discussions. One year earlier, she’d been elected deputy chairman of the international organi- zation of Socialist, Social Democratic, and Labour parties.

But during the war, the Socialists in power had refused to sell her weapons or parts, or allow the U.S. planes ferrying in war matériel to

refuel at their airfields. Golda understood why they had betrayed her. But she wanted to force them to speak the words out loud.

So she flew to London for a special meeting of the Socialist Interna- tional called at her behest. Twenty-one Socialist political leaders, includ- ing nine prime ministers, gathered, as Golda demanded an explanation.

I just want to understand . . . what socialism is really about today. Here you are, all of you. Not one inch of your territory was put at our disposal for refueling the planes that saved us from destruction. Now suppose Richard Nixon had said, “I am sorry, but since we have no- where to refuel in Europe, we just can’t do anything for you after all.” What would all of you have done then? You know us and who we are. We are all old comrades, long-standing friends. . . . Believe me, I am the last person to belittle the fact that we are only one tiny Jewish state and that there are over twenty Arab states with vast territories, endless oil, and billions of dollars. But what I want to know from you today is whether these things are decisive factors in Socialist thinking too?

When Golda was finished, Bruno Pitterman, the Austrian who chaired the gathering, asked if anyone wanted to speak. Not a single hand was raised. Not a word was uttered. The silence turned deafeningly tense. In the back of the room—from somewhere behind the prime ministers of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Malta, Mauritius, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—someone whispered not so quietly, “Of course they can’t talk. Their throats are choked with oil.”

* * *

Scheduled for October 31, the elections for the eighth Knesset had been postponed to December 31, and in the midst of her negotiations with Kissinger, Golda also fought for her political life. Although exhausted and nearly broken, she could not allow Begin and Likud to take over the country, certain they would destroy any possibility of wringing peace out of the conflict. Already hard-liners were rejecting every overture made at

the Kilometer 101 talks, every proposal from Kissinger. Israel had won a magnificent victory, Begin declared, and shouldn’t have to pay for another Arab defeat because of Western greed for oil.

Regaining her mandate tested all of Golda’s political skills. Angry and confused by the massive losses and shocked at the surprise of the war, the Israeli public demanded an explanation, and, reluctantly, given her aver- sion to scrutiny of the operations of the government, Golda appointed a commission to inquire into the reasons for the intelligence and military failures before and during the early days of the war to be chaired by Shi- mon Agranat, chief justice of the Supreme Court. Until the commission issued its findings, she argued, the government should remain intact.

Her more immediate challenge was to hold the Labor Party together, and it wouldn’t be easy. Having learned little from the war, Rafi still clung to all its old assumptions, that Israel had to remain on the Golan Heights and in the Jordan Valley and needed a deepwater port by Gaza, perhaps more than ever. Like Begin, Rafi dismissed Sadat out of hand, certain that the Egyptian leader’s bargaining position had been hope- lessly weakened by the siege of the Third Army.

But chastened by the body count and refusing, at last, to be held captive to Dayan, the doves argued that all of the old assumptions had become obsolete on Yom Kippur and that the party platform had to be redrawn. Allying herself with the moderate doves, Golda agreed.

On the surface, the new platform they wrote didn’t seem drastically different from the old one. It still called for a strong military; defensible borders rather than those of 1967; a peace agreement with Jordan as the Palestinian state; and continued settlement in the occupied territories. But in the new iteration, those defensible borders were to be based on “territo- rial compromise,” a revolutionary phrase. Settlements would be built “giv- ing priority to national security considerations,” a clear rejection of Dayan’s maximalism. And the word “peace” appeared a record fourteen times, a triumph for those ready to take Israel in a new direction.

But the anger and anxiety unleashed by the Earthquake, as Israelis called the political and psychic tremor set off by the war, couldn’t be

quenched by linguistic tricks. For six years, Israelis had taken it as a given that the Arabs could not mount an effective attack against them and thus would eventually be forced to accept peace on Israel’s terms. When that framework of belief collapsed, Israelis inside and outside the Labor Party needed someone to blame. The national target became Moshe Dayan.

Grieving relatives shouted “Murderer!” in front of his house, the old adoration turned to venom by the national angst. When Dayan entered one party meeting, he was greeted with a cacophony of boos. “Moshe, you created the feeling in Israel that we were not going to be attacked,” said Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli writer and political figure close to Dayan, who counseled him to resign.

Golda did not join in that chorus. Her critics charged that she feared that Dayan’s departure would become a slippery slope that would wash her away as well. But at that moment, axing Dayan might well have bol- stered her authority.

Indeed, when the minister of justice screamed at Golda that she had to oust Dayan, she spat back, “Why don’t you demand MY resignation?”

But that wasn’t his point. “You are not responsible,” he replied. “You are not the minister of defense.”

That sentiment was widely shared by those who had watched Golda take over after Dayan’s collapse. “She revealed the strength of a warrior without fear,” Galili said. “She gave us a sense of hope and the opportu- nity to do what was necessary to turn things around.”

Still, public confidence in Golda had been severely eroded. Shortly after the signing of the first disengagement agreement, a
Ha’aretz
poll found that only 45 percent of the voters supported her, a drop of 20 per- cent in six weeks. Golda might have been a political colossus, but in the new light of postwar Israel, she began to look like an aging dinosaur who ran the country like her mother had run her delicatessen in Milwaukee, rather than as a modern leader guiding a complex bureaucracy.

Those same doubts wracked the party as well, and Golda abruptly summoned the 615-member Central Committee to figure out, once and for all, “who is for whom and what is for what.” Allon, spokesman for the

moderates, opened the proceedings by calling for all the cabinet mem- bers but Golda to step down.

For hours, Labor’s leaders slung mud at one another and issued pas- sionate harangues against the new platform, against Dayan, and against how demoralizingly sad Golda appeared on television. The occasional speaker reminded members that Israeli troops were still in danger. But weeks of pent-up fear and anger, years of pent-up frustration, could not be easily contained. For too long, Labor had compromised itself into na- tional leadership with fuzzy language that obscured the reality that it was less a coherent political party than a conglomeration of factions and spe- cial interests driven as much by ego as by a common ideology.