Golda (51 page)

Toward evening, Dayan requested the floor. As if nothing had changed, he reasserted his commitment to building an Israeli port in the Gaza Strip and to Jewish land purchases on the West Bank. Ignoring the anger on the streets and in the hall, he laid down the gauntlet against party policies with which he disagreed. “I will turn in my party card and walk out,” he declared, seemingly unaware that Labor was no longer inclined to bend to his desires.

Having declined to open the proceedings, Golda listened, stoically, to forty speeches. It was after midnight when she finally rose to the po- dium:

I could offer excuses for myself and say that the information we had was not so clear . . . that it would have been illogical to be stubborn and demand a call-up of the entire military when military leaders were saying otherwise. . . . Maybe I should have listened to my own intuition. . . . It will be with me my entire life that I did not.

Earlier, I said that someone has to take responsibility, and I put myself first. I received much criticism that I don’t appear good on tele- vision, and this is not good for the morale. They say that I look sad. At my age, should I begin wearing make-up? I would do so if I thought it would help. But I am realistic about these things. Like everyone else, I am sad, even more so because I am the Prime Minister. I cannot say

that I didn’t have the information. . . . It was a fatal mistake to rely on the information that I received. . . . I am not in the mood to make ex- cuses.

After rambling for almost an hour, Golda issued her coup de grâce: If you don’t want me to lead the party into the election, that’s fine. Say the word. In fact, let’s have a vote, a secret ballot so that no one can raise charges of intimidation.

Numbed by fifteen hours of debate and terrified, as always, of a split in the party, no other candidate was offered. It came down to a straight vote of confidence in Golda’s leadership. Meekly, the delegates trudged downstairs to the voting booths. When the ballots were counted, 281 Labor leaders affirmed their support for Golda, with 33 against and 17 abstaining.

Normally, Israeli election campaigns were boisterous affairs, but the ongoing diplomatic tensions and the mood of the country quelled the usual fracas. Campaigning on television for the first time, Labor portrayed itself as the party with the experience and vision to achieve a postwar peace through reasonable compromise and attacked Likud as retrogrades bent on holding on to every inch of occupied lands. Likud, in turn, de- clared that Golda and Labor had forfeited their right to govern and raised the specter of a Munich-style capitulation should they be given a mandate to remain in power.

The danger they conjured up was all the more acute in some eyes be- cause Golda had agreed to send Eban, a notorious dove, to a Middle East peace conference in Geneva. Using his Vietnam peace talks as a model, Kissinger wanted a meeting of all the warring parties not only to nail down final disengagement agreements but also to negotiate a compre- hensive peace agreement. Golda had long dreamed of peace negotiations with the Arabs, although in her fantasy they involved only Israel and the leaders of the Arab states. Kissinger intended the gathering to be held under the auspices of the United Nations with the Palestinians in atten- dance.

Assuming from long experience that anything run by the UN would turn into an orgy of anti-Israel vitriol, Golda suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union convene the conference, and she rejected any PLO presence out of hand. Furthermore, while she happily agreed to sit with the Egyptians and the Jordanians, she refused to have any truck with the Syrians until they provided her with the names of prisoners of war held in Damascus and allowed the Red Cross to visit them.

After weeks of trading history lectures and apocalyptic scenarios, Kiss- inger cajoled Golda into accepting the UN mantle as symbolic, with the secretary-general disappearing after the opening ceremony. Syria became a nonissue when its president announced that he would not attend. And a compromise was struck that excluded the PLO and Yasir Arafat from the initial talks while leaving the door open for them to join at some future date.

The opposition railed against participation, certain that the deck was stacked against Israel. The United States, they were convinced, was con- niving to protect its oil supply and the Soviet Union inextricably allied to hard-line Arab states. Even when Israel acted moderately—by not launch- ing a preemptive strike, for example—the whole world still condemned Jerusalem, they trumpeted. What was the point, then, of moderate be- havior?

Golda was skeptical about the chances that the meeting would yield anything substantive. “One must not expect that we will sit down around a table and have lunch together and after lunch we will sign a peace agreement,” she cautioned. But she couldn’t resist the opportunity to send Jews to sit at the negotiating table with Arabs for the first time in more than half a century.

The conference itself turned out to be one of those events that were of enormous importance symbolically but utterly irrelevant in practical terms. Eban arrived with a proposed peace treaty in his briefcase only to discover that the Egyptians wanted to put an empty table between him and their delegates. Then he was forced to listen to the Egyptian foreign minister denounce Israel for “exploitation and racist practices.”

Finally, he was permitted to deliver one of his typically eloquent speeches, in which he invoked Abraham, “our common ancestor,” and ended by quoting from the Koran in perfect Arabic, “If they incline to peace, then turn toward it and put your trust in God.”

Then the conference adjourned for the day, reconvened the following for twenty minutes, and adjourned indefinitely.

Beyond Geneva, the domestic backdrop lent the entire election a nightmarish quality. Relatives of the prisoners of war trapped in Syria went on the rampage and smashed the windows of the Knesset building in their demand for stronger action to bring their men home. More than 150,000 reservists—15 percent of the labor force—were still on the bor- ders. And the population still hadn’t figured out what moral to derive from the war. Almost 85 percent believed that the Arabs remained com- mitted to destroying them, but more than half nonetheless expressed a willingness to return at least some of Egypt’s territory, seemingly in the hope that at least the Egyptians would change their minds and leave them in peace. A week before the election, one-quarter of the voters were still undecided, the proportional representation system leaving them with no attractive choice.

The final tally wasn’t very different from what pollsters believed it would have been if there had been no war: Labor won 40 percent of the vote and Likud 28.9 percent, leaving Golda with a rebuke rather than a rebuff, tarnished but not decimated. It was unclear whether such senti- ment would survive the peace process.

* * *

While Golda struggled to turn that shaky mandate into a majority gov- ernment, she simultaneously moved Israel inexorably toward a final dis- engagement with Egypt, and Henry Kissinger gave new meaning to the word “shuttle,” dashing back and forth between Cairo and Jerusalem with a dozen aides and his own personal news crew. His goal was an agreement with no political content—no mention of peace treaties or diplomatic relations. Golda, on the other hand, was determined to get

something in exchange for Israeli withdrawal, and that something was what she’d been seeking for years: direct negotiations and a peace treaty. Golda was willing to play word games with Kissinger, to call their agree- ment a pledge of nonbelligerency, for example. She was willing to cede territory. But she was not willing to pull Israel’s troops back without some- thing resembling peace.

At its most basic, Kissinger’s first shuttle was a gloriously baroque diplo- matic extravaganza staged to force Golda to change her mind. Despite the Kissingerian face put on negotiations—the romance of a shuttle that turned the paunchy secretary of state into a diplomatic cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Superman—the outlines of the military disengagement had al- ready been worked out by Golda and Sadat through Yariv and Gamasy at Kilometer 101. Largely ignored by an international media obsessed with Kissinger, the two men not only had hammered out the rules of the supply road to the Third Army but had begun exchanging maps of proposed Is- raeli withdrawals and buffer zones and dickering about the number of UN personnel needed and the thinning out of Egyptian forces.

But on November 28, Yariv abruptly cut off all discussion. Sadat an- nounced that the agreements being crafted were “not to his liking, led nowhere, and were characterized by Israeli schemes and intrigues.” The international media informed the world that a serious breakdown had oc- curred, raising the specter of new hostilities.

In reality, the breakdown had been orchestrated by Kissinger, who ex- pected to be the star player in the peace drama. “For God’s sake, stop the Yariv–al-Gamasy thing,” he’d instructed Eban, miffed at the prospect of being upstaged.

That was strike two against Kissinger in Golda’s book since the Kilo- meter 101 talks, Israelis and Egyptian negotiating directly rather than by proxy, was her vision of how peace would be forged. Peaceful relations weren’t a matter of a piece of paper but a process of living and talking to- gether, she often said. Kissinger’s strategy of interposing himself as the intermediary—forcing both sides to go running to Mommy America— undermined that possibility.

Sadat, however, was obsessed with Kissinger and American mediation. “The United States holds most of the trump cards, since Israel entirely depends on it,” he told to a reporter from
Le Monde.

As he flitted back and forth between Israel and Egypt, Kissinger was forced to conduct two sets of negotiations with Israelis, first with her ne- gotiating team of Allon, Eban, and Dayan, the second with Golda her- self, who’d been felled by a nasty case of herpes.

“I guess I make her nervous,” Kissinger, quipped, almost hopefully. Even without the stress of dual bargaining sessions, for Kissinger, deal-

ing with the Israelis was a form of torture. “All our sympathies for Israel’s historic plight and affection for Golda was soon needed to endure the teeth-grinding, exhausting ordeal by exegesis that confronted us when we met with the Israel negotiating team,” he said.

The Israeli negotiators had plenty of their own complaints about the diplomatic steamroller Kissinger had launched to flatten them, endless late-night meetings, about Germanic histrionics and carefully shaded duplicity. “It’s not that he lied,” said one diplomat. “He had a unique abil- ity of explaining every situation in the manner most pleasing to the one who heard it.”

When Kissinger conjured up the same apocalyptic images he’d painted for Golda in Washington, he overplayed his hand so egregiously and so repeatedly that the Israelis developed their own Kissingerian lexi- con. A course described as “suicidal” meant that it would be difficult. A proposal branded as “impossible” was one that Sadat was unlikely to ac- cept. Anything called “difficult” was clearly attainable. And “I’ll see what I can get” meant that he had already secured that concession from the Egyptians.

The Israeli public found Kissinger even harder to take. While most told pollsters that they were willing to make concessions in return for life without the threat of conflagration, they felt poised on the edge of an abyss and blamed Kissinger for pushing them ever closer to the brink. in egypt, it is KISSINGer, in israel, it is KILLINGer, read signs that began cropping up at demonstrations.
Ma’ariv
ran a cartoon of an Is-

raeli soldier racing for an air raid shelter. The caption read, “Kissinger’s coming.”

With the negotiating team, Kissinger “played the role of an extremely talented teacher put in charge of a class of disturbed children,” as one Is- raeli put it. But with Golda, he was more deferential, unable to resist her craggy face, seeing in it, he told others, centuries of Jewish suffering. From time to time, he showed her some of the hurt he seemed to feel at the public reaction to him. “When I reach Cairo, Sadat hugs and kisses me,” he said. “But when I come here, everyone attacks me.”

Not known for indulging self-pity, Golda quipped, “If I were an Egyp- tian, I would kiss you too.”

Their encounters turned into a near-mythic clash of the Titans as Golda held out for some semblance of peace while Sadat offered nothing more than a continuing cease-fire. In discussing the use of deviousness in foreign policy, Kissinger once wrote, “I tended to share Metternich’s view that in a negotiation the perfectly straightforward person was the most difficult to deal with.” No one was more direct than Golda.

Yet Kissinger seemed to crave Golda’s approval. “It struck me as strange that this university professor and secretary of state was unable to conceal such a furious affection,” commented Syrian president Hafez Assad. Some of that affection stemmed from his appreciation of Golda’s sardonic wit. He was particularly fond of recounting the probably mythic State Depart- ment story about Golda’s first encounter with Robert Kennedy. America is becoming more tolerant, Kennedy allegedly told her. “Maybe in twenty years we’ll even have a Jewish president.” Golda paused for a moment then quipped, “We already have one. It doesn’t help.”

In later years, Kissinger admitted that Golda handled him superbly, playing the “benevolent aunt toward an especially favored nephew. So that even to admit the possibility of disagreement was a challenge to fam- ily hierarchy producing emotional outrage. It was usually calculated.”

Usually the most cynical of skeptics, over time Golda mellowed and grew convinced that Kissinger would protect Israel, although not by al- lowing Israel to protect itself, as she would have preferred. Longing to

wring peace out of the Yom Kippur disaster, she finally took a leap of faith. Defying all expectations, she put aside her demand for a peace treaty or pledge of nonbelligerency and accepted Sadat’s offer of a con- tinuing cease-fire.

When Kissinger returned from Egypt the following night at midnight, he brought Golda a clear sign that her faith had been justified. Sadat had agreed to a heavy thinning out of his troops on the west bank of the canal and sent Golda a personal note. “You must take my word seriously,” he wrote. “When I made my initiative in 1971, I meant it. When I threat- ened war, I meant it. When I talk of peace now, I mean it.”