Golda (53 page)

When Kissinger arrived in Israel to begin his Syrian shuttle on May 2, he made it clear that he expected Israel to return not only all the land captured in October, but also at least a symbolic slice of the Golan Heights, which Israel had held since 1967.

“Two wars in seven years, with the price we paid for it,” Golda spit back. “Then Assad says he must get his territory back. I mean, that is chutzpah of the nth degree.” His chutzpah was greater than Golda knew since Kissinger had shaved a considerable amount off the Syrian de- mand.

Kissinger chided Golda with a reminder that the Golan Heights had always belonged to Syria. “I didn’t just get up one day in 1967 after all the shelling from the heights and decide to take Golan away from them,” she reminded him angrily. “They say this is their territory. Eight hundred boys gave their lives for an attack the Syrians started. Assad lost the war, and now we have to pay for it because Assad says it’s his territory.”

The Israelis had no intention of holding on to their recent gains, which had brought them within twenty-five miles of Damascus, and Golda had already decided that Israel could afford to give up a slice of the Golan, the town of Kuneitra, the old provincial capital. An inveter- ate bargainer, however, she began by offering to split the town with the Syrians.

Even that concession provoked a spate of demonstrations. Prominent writers and university professors staged a hunger strike outside her home, declaring, “Our settlements on the Golan are the ramparts of Israel.” Her office was flooded with petitions, with protests from Begin and some veteran kibbutzniks, all acting as if giving up some dusty fields on the northern border was tantamount to ceding Jerusalem.

Kissinger understood that Syria was intractable, so with little leverage over Syria, he vented all of his well-staged frustration on Golda, who he’d already discerned was more pliant than she seemed. “I am wandering around here like a rug merchant in order to bargain over one hundred to

two hundred meters,” he yelled. “Like a peddler in the market! I am try- ing to save you, and you think you are doing me a favor when you are kind enough to give me a few extra meters!”

Golda knew that Kissinger didn’t scream at Assad like that. But there was a limit to how angry she was willing to get at him. Her penchant for never changing her mind about anyone was the stuff of legend in Israeli political circles. “She didn’t forgive easily,” said Ari Rath, former editor of the
Jerusalem Post.
“Once she had a grudge against someone, that person had to bear that cross for many years.”

But Kissinger had become the rare exception. For decades, really since Morris refused to remain in a marriage over which he had no con- trol, no man had stood up to her with such fervor. Kissinger frustrated her. And she knew that he mocked her to Assad, calling her “Miss Israel” and “the beauty of Jerusalem.” But vulnerable and brokenhearted, Golda needed someone to help her end the agony, and Kissinger was her only option.

The day he brought her the list of Israeli prisoners of war in Damascus, she melted. After that, she still blew up every time he sought more conces- sions, but she cooled off more quickly. By the end of the process, when she’d already agreed to cede all the territory gained during the war, as well as the city of Kuneitra, and they were down to details about the number of Syrian troops who would be permitted in the limited-forces zone, Golda actually stopped haggling entirely. “Go get the best numbers you can,” she told him, a leap of faith no one had ever imagined Golda was capable of making.

Nonetheless, the final agreement with Syria was almost derailed at the last minute when Palestinian terrorists snuck into the town of Ma’alot in northern Israel, captured four teachers and ninety schoolchildren, and threatened to blow them all up if Israel didn’t release dozens of impris- oned guerrillas. When French and Romanian mediation attempts broke down, Israeli troops had little choice but to storm the building where the captives were held. They succeeded in killing three of the kidnappers, but, by then, twenty Israeli teenagers, mostly girls, were already dead.

Everyone knew that the terrorists received Assad’s support. So thou- sands of Israelis, including a hefty swath of the government, encouraged Golda to break off all discussions with Damascus. Rejecting such intran- sigence, Golda suspended the talks for a single day. Terrorism, she said, was a symptom of peacelessness.

“It would be illogical to renounce the cure and allow the fever to pur- sue its deadly course,” she announced. “We had all better get back to peacemaking.”

conclusion

You ought to thank us, your elders, that we’ve left you still something to do.

B

y Thursday, November 17, 1977, the Israeli government was in a tizzy.

Local flag manufacturers couldn’t churn out Egyptian flags in time for Anwar Sadat’s arrival. The military band had no sheet music to re- hearse “By God of Old, Who Is My Weapon,” the Egyptian national an- them. Protocol officers were unsure whether it was appropriate to offer a twenty-one-gun salute to the leader of a nation with which Israel was tech- nically at war. And it still wasn’t clear whether U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who’d been trying to prevent an Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement lest it undermine his comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, would scuttle the entire trip.

Golda watched the ruckus from New York, where she’d flown for the gala opening of
Golda
on Broadway, oozing skepticism. Despite her cor- dial exchange of letters with Sadat after the war, she remained heavily invested in the cynicism she’d brought to every hint of progress with the Egyptians, and nothing that had occurred in the four intervening years had dented her incredulity.

It had been a rough time for a woman who’d thrived on self-confi- dence and could no longer conjure it up after the Yom Kippur War. Rabin, who’d followed her as prime minister, had concluded the negotia- tions with the Egyptians that she had begun. But in May 1977, for the first time in Israel’s history, the Labor Party that she’d help build and nurture went down in defeat, sweeping her old adversary Menachem Begin into power.

Until he withdrew from the National Unity government she’d in- herited from Levi Eshkol over her decision to cooperate with William Rogers, Golda and Begin had overcome many of the enmities of the old
yishuv
days. Begin openly called her “a proud Jewess,” and, behind his back, at least, Golda admitted that he was a gentleman. Still, the elec- tion of the man she’d long considered an irresponsible demagogue and whose assassination she’d advocated four decades earlier was a bitter pill to swallow. While she’d grown to admire Begin’s integrity, she still abhorred his politics. Even closing in on the age of eighty, Golda still clung to her belief in socialism and in Labor Zionism as the soul of Israel.

Golda wasn’t reeling merely from the political change in Israel. She remained Israel’s most prolific overseas fund-raiser and a political heavy- weight within Labor. But a woman who’d thrived on self-confidence, she no longer could conjure it up. Not only had she been rejected by a nation that blamed its long-beloved grandmother/prime minister for its lost in- nocence, but she was also battered by an eruption of criticism and scan- dalmongering from dozens of ministers, ex-ministers, and ministerial wannabes, backed up by much of the local press corps.

One former Knesset member breathlessly revealed that Golda had personally ordered him to slow down the immigration of the Iraqi Jews in the 1950s, an excruciating bit of libel against a woman who’d staved off those who had advocated that she do just that. Teddy Kolleck, the mayor of Jerusalem, accused her of putting her political party before the welfare of the nation.

“Doctrinaire and obsessed with the trappings of power, she believed

that only she was right about any subject under discussion,” wrote Chaim Herzog, who went on to become president of Israel.

The target of everyone’s discontent, for the first several years after her retirement Golda had found relief from the barrage of negativity in the embrace of foreigners and in trips overseas, where she was still lion- ized.

“So you’re tired,” columnist Mary McGrory had written after Golda’s resignation. “And believe me, you’re entitled. But that’s a reason to quit? We goyim had understood that Jewish mothers never resign. . . . But if you really mean it this time . . . had you thought of what you might do after? What I’m getting at is this: Have you consid- ered coming back here? I’m not talking Minneapolis. I’m talking Wash- ington, D.C.”

William S. White, a nationally syndicated American columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, had compared her to Winston Churchill, although he admitted that she is “the most earthy of commoners and he was the most aristocratic of aristocrats. But in the things that matter you don’t lie down when your country is under attack, you don’t go about begging for votes on your knees and you don’t cry out for the chaplain and the medic. Golda and Churchill—these two formed a pair of aces indeed.”

In London, she still played Albert Hall to an overflow crowd, had tea with Prime Minister Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street, and was hon- ored by members of Parliament. In Washington, Kissinger threw her a black-tie “family dinner,” as he called it, with nine justices of the Supreme Court, a host of congressional heavyweights, and a smattering of Holly- wood in attendance.

President Gerald Ford set aside time to chat with her at the White House. And when Jimmy Carter was running for the Democratic nomi- nation for president, he asked to meet with her in New York, hoping that being seen with her would help him woo Jewish voters. (She agreed to the meeting. But suspicious of Carter from the first, she declined to make a public statement about the encounter or to permit photographs to be taken that might be used for his campaign.)

When she was at home, foreign dignitaries regularly stopped by to visit, as if she were a queen in exile. Walter Mondale came to call, and Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands dropped in on her seventy-ninth birthday. “I can say to this audience here gathered in the Knesset in Israel that no leader I have met, no president, no king, no prime minister, or any other leader has demonstrated in the meetings that I have had with that leader greater courage, greater intelligence, and greater stamina, greater determination, and greater dedication to her country than Prime Minister Meir,” declared Richard Nixon when he flew in to meet with Prime Minister Rabin.

Even Sadat jumped on the Golda bandwagon, suggesting that Israel’s new prime ministers paled by comparison. “I prefer dealing with a strong leader like Golda,” he opined.

No matter where Golda traveled, the press besieged her, eager to snatch another pithy or sarcastic quote, and she was rarely shy about offering one. “I wouldn’t want the West Bank even if were given to me as a present,” she remarked on her eightieth birthday. When Moshe Dayan proposed that six new Jewish towns be built in the occupied ter- ritories, she told journalists, “I don’t want another million Arabs who don’t want us.”

Her autobiography, ghost written by a publicist at the Weizmann Insti- tute of Science, was a runaway best seller around the globe, producing a flood of adulatory fan mail. After years of refusing to authorize the pro- duction of any dramatic work based on her life, she finally succumbed to the pleas of the Theatre Guild of New York for permission to adapt her book to the stage—disappointing British songwriter Lionel Bart, of
Oliver
fame, who had hoped to turn her life into a musical. Instead, Bill Gibson, who wrote
The Miracle Worker
, a play that Golda admired, was tapped to write the script, Arthur Penn to direct it, and Anne Bancroft to star as Golda herself.

That agreement was yet another decision Golda came to regret. At the age of eighty, she’d begun slowing down and hadn’t traveled abroad for more than a year. But with an Israel Bonds gala arranged for the play’s

opening at the Morosco Theatre on November 14, she invited a large group of family and friends to fly with her to New York, only to sit through the convoluted and confusing production in mounting horror. If I’d looked and sounded like Bancroft, I would never have been elected prime minister, she summarily informed the cast.

In the midst of that humiliation, Sadat announced to his parliament that he was willing to go “to the ends of the world” in his quest for peace. “Israel will be astonished when it hears me saying now, before you, that I am ready to go to their house, to the Knesset itself, and talk to them,” he declared.

Golda had made similar offers on dozens of occasions and been thor- oughly ignored. When Sadat suddenly stepped up to the plate, however, the world breathlessly lauded his audaciousness.

You must fly home immediately, Golda’s friends urged her. But worried that she couldn’t meet Sadat graciously, and hurt that she had not received a formal invitation from the government, she refused to pack her bags. “I’m not going to have people say, ‘Look who’s here!’ ” she exclaimed. “If I’m invited to meet Sadat, fine. If not, not.”

The invitation finally came, and Golda flew through the night to ar- rive home in time to greet her old enemy. She landed in an Israel caught in the thrall of a global political drama that would culminate with the meeting between Begin, the old Jewish terrorist who’d finally become prime minister, and the Egyptian leader who’d sent his army across the Suez Canal. Taxi drivers had attached Egyptian flags to their antennas, and vendors sold T-shirts emblazoned with photographs of Sadat and Begin, reading, all you need is love.