Golda (15 page)

its way into the center of the crush outside the Habima building. A few hours earlier, the chief of the operations staff of the Wehrmacht had signed an unconditional surrender on behalf of Germany, and the Jews of Palestine, like the citizens of London, New York, Paris, and Moscow, celebrated May 7, 1945, as the end of the long war.

But the gaiety was undermined by the massive black column erected at the center of the gathering, the burning torch atop it a stark reminder that world Jewry could not yet begin to count its dead.

More than 600,000 Jews remained in the newly liberated concentra- tion camps, and the
yishuv
was intent on bringing them “home.”

“At this solemn hour we fervently trust that in the shaping of the new international order, justice may be done to the Jewish people and that its age-long yearning for national rehabilitation in the land of its origin may

be fulfilled,” wrote Moshe Shertok—who later changed his surname to Sharett—to Lord Gort, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces in Western Europe on behalf of the Jewish Agency.

Although the cynics and skeptics—and after the Nazi obliteration of the Jewish communities of Europe, they were legion—warned that the 600,000 Jews of Palestine could not count on the British to rethink the White Paper of 1939, few really believed that London would remain unmoved by the Holocaust. And when the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, ousted Winston Churchill in elections held two months after the end of the war, even the skeptics began believing that the doors of Palestine were poised to swing open. After all, during ten consecutive party conferences, Labourites had passed resolutions in support of a Jewish homeland.

Six months later, when Golda and eleven other Jewish leaders were called to the Jerusalem office of John Shaw, chief secretary for the Man- datory Government, for a preview of the new government position on Palestine that Ernest Bevin, the recently installed foreign minister, would announce in the House of Commons the following day, they anticipated that a new era was about to begin. But reflecting none of Labour’s long solidarity with Zionism, the new policy bore a striking resemblance to Churchill’s.

Civilization has been appalled by the sufferings which have been in- flicted in recent years on the persecuted Jews of Europe. . . . On the other side of the picture the cause of the Palestinian Arabs has been espoused by the whole Arab world and more lately has become a mat- ter of keen interest to their 90,000,000 co-religionists in India.

We have inherited, in Palestine, a most difficult legacy and our task is greatly complicated by undertakings, given at various times to various parties, which we feel ourselves bound to honor. Any violent departure without adequate consultation would not only afford ground for a charge of breach of faith against His Majesty’s Govern- ment but would probably cause serious reactions throughout the Mid- dle East and would arouse widespread anxiety in India.

When he was finished reading, Shaw grimly informed the twelve Jews before him that any resistance to the government’s policy would be met with “force of arms.”

When news of the British betrayal got out, 50,000 people gathered at the parade grounds in Tel Aviv, jeering at every mention of the Labour Party from the podium. A gang of three hundred young people stormed British government offices, hauled out papers and furniture, and created a pyre. The Histadrut council in Haifa plastered the city with posters reading, “The walls will be destroyed, and there will be immigration, even over our dead bodies.”

Golda stood before the Workers’ Committee of the Histadrut and de- clared war:

Jewish life is precious but we do not want to be slaves to another nation. . . . not only because every man wants to be free in his own country, but because we have learned that for Jews, living as a minor- ity in someone else’s nation is not real life and, in the end, in that posi- tion, we would be killed. . . . We need freedom, to be independent. . . . We understand that in the Land of Israel today we don’t have power equal to that of our enemies. . . . We don’t have a naval fleet. We don’t have an army or airplanes. We don’t have the secret for the atomic bomb. We only have sacrifices, the people who have died, the people who are hungry and sick facing death in DP camps. . . . But we also have millions of Jews who are ready to live and not willing to accept this. We have a yishuv of 600,000 Jews. Yes, we are a little

weak. But we will fight, and we will succeed. . . .

We will not accept their document, and we will not remain silent.

It’s hard to imagine how Bevin convinced himself and the rest of Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s government that Britain could stay the White Paper course. Hitler had infused world Jewry with a new militancy forged on the anvil of “Never Again.” And even without a twenty-four- hour news cycle and crisp video footage of skeletal survivors in striped

camp uniforms, the grainy black-and-white images of concentration camps and mass graves printed in newspapers across the globe had shifted international sentiment toward the Jews.

But Bevin was clinging to the last gasps of the British Empire. And in his determination to keep it alive in Palestine, the Zionists would have been nothing more than a pesky inconvenience dismissed with dispatch but for the support they received from President Harry S. Truman.

“The American people, as a whole, firmly believe that immigration into Palestine should not be closed,” Truman wrote to Prime Minister Attlee.

Bevin assumed that the Arabists in the U.S. State Department would bring Truman around, and they tried, churning out report after report arguing that giving in to Zionist demands would undermine Arab confi- dence in the United States. Truman’s concession was agreeing to Bevin’s request that an Anglo-American commission be formed and sent to Pal- estine and Europe to investigate the situation.

The Jews of Palestine understood that the commission was Bevin’s stalling tactic. So while politely promising to meet with its members, they didn’t wait for their arrival before launching a full-scale rebellion. Stage one was Aliyah Bet, a coordinated effort to sneak thousands of Jews out of displaced persons camps in Europe and into Palestine. Let the British try to stop us,
yishuv
leaders said, unable to imagine the Royal Navy shooting men and women still wearing the ragged remnants of concentration camp garb. Stage two was an uprising of civil disobedi- ence, noncompliance, and the sabotage of Britain’s colonial infrastruc- ture by the newly formed Jewish Resistance Movement, a coalition of the Haganah, Irgun Zvi Leumi (Etzel), and Lehi (the Stern Gang), the latter revisionist guerrilla groups, Etzel led by Menachem Begin.

The Haganah’s alliance with right-wing terrorist groups was a bitter pill for Golda to swallow because she’d been urging their obliteration for almost a decade. Although hardly a pacifist, she had long supported the Labor Party policy of
havlaga,
self-restraint, worried that shedding British blood would backfire.

Etzel, which had seceded from the Haganah in 1931, had long advo- cated offensive actions to shatter British power, and in 1944, after they defied the
yishuv
ruling bodies by moving from advocacy to action, the Mapai political committee had convened to discuss “liquidating the pos- sibility of another such attack in the future,” in Golda’s words. “I have no moral restraint as to that group,” she said.

Nonetheless, the Stern Gang stepped up the violence by assassinating Lord Moyne, the British resident minister in the Middle East. Again, the Histadrut Executive considered what measures they should take, worried both about the
yishuv
’s relationship with the British and about the growing popularity of the Stern Gang and Etzel. As Labor’s leaders wrestled with their dilemma, Golda was the hardest liner in the room. “We have to liquidate by killing a few boys,” she insisted. Seemingly taken aback, Ben-Gurion asked, “They won’t retaliate?” Golda was un- moved. “They bring catastrophe on us, not only on the British officers,” she argued. “Therefore, everything is permissible when it comes to them.”

Rejecting Golda’s drastic recommendation, the Histadrut and Mapai had settled instead on a milder two-pronged approach. Using the full power of their institutions, they launched a propaganda campaign against the Jewish terrorists. And they sent the Haganah to capture as many Etzel and Stern Gang commanders as they could locate, detaining some, turning others over to the British. During that period, dubbed the
Saison,
the hunting season, 20 members of those groups were abducted and held, some for months; 91 were kidnapped and released after interroga- tion; and the names of 700 other individuals and groups were given to the police.

Bevin’s new policy, however, changed everything, especially for Golda. While the alliance with the terrorist groups provoked a storm of controversy, she vigorously defended the marriage of convenience:

We have no alternative but to follow a new path. . . . I believe that in a war for Jewish existence, every road must be an option. No road is

unethical because there is nothing more ethical than helping those who survived the Holocaust to remain alive.

I have always opposed the policies of Stern and Etzel because I thought their way would damage and destroy Zionism. But now I am saying that with common sense and by thinking cautiously before we act, we should go their way—we have no choice.

So it began, a cycle of attacks and reprisals that edged Palestine toward civil war. On November 23, 1945, the British seized the refugee ship
Berl Katznelson
upon its arrival at Sharon beach. Two days later, the Haganah blew up coast guard radar stations used to detect illegal vessels. During December, the united resistance attacked airfields, police stations, and armories. On Christmas, they fired mortars at the Jaffa headquarters of the Central Intelligence Division and killed ten people. Two days later, they hit the police headquarters in Jerusalem, police stations in Tel Aviv, and a military depot in Tel Aviv, leaving nine British soldiers dead

The British responded by turning Palestine into an armed camp, sending Bren gun carriers, armored cars with manned machine guns, and mobile artillery to patrol mountain roads. Bevingrad, as the Jews called the neighborhood around colonial headquarters, was ringed with barbed wire. The 60,000 British troops already in Palestine were rein- forced by members of the Sixth Airborne unit, paratroopers in distinctive red berets.

But they could not stop the onslaught of Jewish fury. When the British became adept at capturing illegal immigrants on the beaches, Aliyah Bet began unloading them offshore—until the British moved their patrols out to sea. The government brought in radar to spot the vessels and un- load their passengers at refugee camps. But the Jewish resistance didn’t give up. One night, the Palmach infiltrated the refugee center in Athlit, bound and gagged the guards, and released 208 prisoners. “Jews will no longer tolerate the deportation of their brothers from this country, what- ever measures of force are used by Government,” announced Kol Yisrael, the
yishuv
radio station.

Meanwhile, veterans of the Jewish Brigade Group, the Jewish unit of the British army finally formed only months before the end of the war, remained in Europe to organize the
Briha,
the escape, and the Histadrut and Jewish Agency sent dozens more young Jews from Tel Aviv and Jeru- salem into detention centers and DP camps to stir up a clamor for immi- gration and help arrange escape.

Despite their successes, the
yishuv
leadership knew that at any minute they could fall off the tightrope they were walking. Even as they blew up British military bases and faced down the Royal Navy, in London, Weiz- mann and Sharett, the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, were trying to negotiate a new policy with the British and, at home, Golda still spent her days haggling with colonial authorities.

But Golda no longer had enough faith in the British to waste time cajoling them. At one point, she heard a rumor that the mandatory au- thorities were going to use German prisoners of war to work in a military camp and approached John Shaw, the colonial chief secretary, to com- plain. We don’t have enough British workers for the job, he explained. “What’s wrong with workers from the Histadrut?” she asked, not hiding the venom she felt. “We have workers.” Shaw laughed bitterly. “We can’t count on Jewish workers. Whatever they build, they turn around and blow up.”

Golda stormed out. “So go depend on your Nazi workers,” she said, wondering for the thousandth time how the British could be so insensi- tive to Jewish sentiment.

* * *

On Monday morning, March 25, 1946, Golda donned her usual simple, dark dress and took a seat before the mahogany table in the lecture hall at the YMCA in Jerusalem to testify before the Anglo-American Commis- sion. Ben-Gurion had opposed cooperation with the investigation Bevin had forced on Truman, but Golda had prevailed, arguing that the
yishuv
could ill afford to offend the Americans.

The committee’s charge was to investigate how conditions in Palestine

might impact on Jewish settlement and to gauge whether the Jews re- maining in Europe really wanted to immigrate to Palestine. Before they left London, bluff as ever, Bevin had pledged, “If you come back with a unanimous report, I’ll grant a hundred thousand visas.”

The Zionists planned their lineup carefully, offering both diplomacy and defiance. Weizmann testified with succinct diplomacy that the only guarantee of Jewish survival was a homeland. Ben-Gurion angrily as- serted that the time had come for World Jewry to create an international commission to investigate why anti-Semitism ran so rampant among gen- tiles. But after three more presentations, about the economic potential of Palestine, the commission members were clearly growing bored.

Then Golda spoke on behalf of the Histadrut, without a single note in front of her:

The people . . . who . . . laid the foundation for what we call the labor commonwealth in this country . . . grew up in an environment of perse- cution, massacres, lack of security, helplessness. . . . It was this genera- tion that decided that there must be an end to senseless living and senseless death among Jews. . . . They came to Palestine because they believed then, as we believe now, as many millions of Jews believe now, that the only solution for the senselessness of Jewish life and Jewish death lay in creating an independent Jewish life in a Jewish homeland. The question has been brought up at these hearings several times about . . . whether the Jewish labor movement was prepared to sacri- fice something in order to have large Jewish immigration. Gentlemen, I am authorized on behalf of the close to 160,000 members of our federation to say here in the clearest terms, there is nothing that Jew- ish labor is not prepared to do in this country in order to meet and accept large masses of Jewish immigration, with no limitation and with no condition whatsoever. . . . Otherwise, our life here, too, be-