Golda (16 page)

comes senseless.

I don’t know, gentlemen, whether you who are fortunate enough to belong to the two great democratic nations . . . can . . . realize what it

means to be a people that is forever being questioned . . . in regard to its very existence. . . . To be forever questioned whether we have a right to be Jews as we are, not better, but not worse than others. . . . We only want that which is given naturally to all peoples of the world, to be masters of our own fate, only of
our
fate, not of others . . . to live as of right and not on sufferance, to have a possibility to bring up Jewish children—of whom not so many are left now in the world—as our youngsters that were born here, free of fear.

The commissioners were openly moved, but they were just as clearly wor- ried. In a Jewish state, wouldn’t Jews dominate or exploit their Arab neighbors? several delegates asked. “It would be foolish to expect that we could live here in comfort and peace with the Arabs in our midst ne- glected,” Golda responded confidently.

But doesn’t your use of Hebrew undercut your ability to forge the type of harmony you say you are seeking? asked Sir Frederick Leggett, former deputy secretary of the Ministry of Labour and National Service. “But Hebrew is our language, as English is yours,” Golda answered, patiently. “This is what I’ve been trying to make you understand. Would anyone question the use of French, or Chinese?”

As if to underline the seriousness of what Golda said about
yishuv
commitment to immigration, fifteen hours later the Jewish resistance landed a refugee ship, boldly sailing a vessel into Tel Aviv under a screen of armed attacks on police stations and the waterfront. Gangs of young people blocked the streets of the city to allow the illegal immigrants to escape detection.

While the commissioners debated the future of Palestine, the British made a serious miscalculation that shifted international sentiment more drastically against them. In La Spezia, a small port on Italy’s Ligurian coast, the British occupying forces blocked the harbor to prevent the sailing of the ship
Fede
, carrying 1,014 Jewish refugees. The plight of the concentration camp survivors quickly became an international cause célèbre.

“2000 Jews in a Ship that Cannot Leave,” trumpeted
Corriere della Sera,
one of Italy’s largest newspapers. “The Daughters of Israel marked by the fire of Teutonic barbarians invoke the Promised Land.”

The passengers began a hunger strike, and the Aliya Bet organizer on board sent a cable to Prime Minister Attlee holding him personally ac- countable for any loss of life.

Sharett was caught in a quandary. The Jewish Agency, the diplomats of Zionism, never associated itself openly with “illegal” activity. And Ben-Gurion thought the entire affair was nonsense, a distraction from the important work of moving Jewish refugees out of the camps. But sens- ing that something important was happening, not only to the passengers on the boat, but in world opinion, Golda convinced her colleagues that the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine should mount a hunger strike in solidarity with the La Spezia refugees to further publicize their plight.

In the Jewish National Council Building, cots were set up for thirteen strikers, who vowed to eat no solid food, nothing more than tea without sugar twice a day. (“Fortunately,” said Golda, “cigarettes were permit- ted.”) Crowds gathered outside to cheer on their leaders by singing Ha- sidic songs, and the international press flocked to the spectacle.

Still, the authorities in London dithered, and the refugees in Italy an- nounced that if their ship were not permitted to sail, ten refugees would commit suicide on deck in public every day until the British were left with a coffin ship. With the international spotlight broadcasting British obduracy, Prime Minister Attlee finally bowed to international pressure, and after 104 hours without food, the strikers, both in Italy and in Pales- tine, agreed to call off their action. On May 20, the passengers from the
Fede
were welcomed into Palestine.

By then, however, Golda was too distracted to celebrate. On May 1, the findings of the Anglo-American Commission were published and the commissioners unanimously called for a binational state under a contin- ued British mandate, although they also issued a unanimous recommen- dation that Britain immediately grant one hundred thousand visas for

Jewish immigration. No one, on any side, paid much attention to the former recommendation since it amounted to maintenance of a failed status quo. But latching onto the visa proposal,
yishuv
leaders demanded that Bevin live up to his earlier pledge. When he refused, they carefully began preparing their rejoinder, maximizing British tension over what the Jewish resistance would do.

Six weeks later, on the night of June 17, the Palmach blew every road and rail bridge connecting Palestine to its neighbors. “In place of every hundred or thousand who will be arrested or who will fall, there will rise other hundreds and thousands,” the Jewish leadership vowed in a declara- tion read on Kol Yisrael. “We are the military Jewish people. We will confront the British government with a choice: accept our vital demands or destroy us. We will not surrender.”

Neither would Bevin. Shortly before dawn on June 29, 17,000 British troops backed by tanks and armor sealed off Palestine’s borders, blocked internal roads, cut telephone service, and imposed a curfew. Then, more than 100,000 soldiers and policemen fanned out across the coun- try. Troops stormed the Jewish Agency building, ransacked the offices, loaded all the documents onto three trucks, and drove them to the King David Hotel, which housed the government secretariat and military command.

Emergency regulations suspended virtually all civil rights. Those found harboring illegal immigrants could be jailed for up to eight years. The penalty for carrying arms without a license or membership in a group whose other members had committed crimes was set as death. The high commissioner was given the authority to order the detention of any- one for an indefinite period. Organizations could be banned, civilians tried before military courts, and property confiscated if the owner was suspected of having broken the regulations.

Military units swept into more than two dozen settlements to search for weapons. At Kibbutz Yagur, members were dispersed with tear gas and incarcerated inside barbed-wire enclosures set up by the soldiers. Those who resisted were sprayed with hot oil. Day after day, the British

tore the kibbutz apart. When they discovered 300 rifles, 100 two-inch mortars, 5,000 grenades, and 78 revolvers, they arrested all the male members.

Simultaneously British troops broke into homes, stopped cars, and grabbed men at random off the streets in their search for community leaders. At 4:15 a.m., a policeman accompanied by an army officer and two military vehicles filled with troops surrounded the home of Rabbi Judah Fishman-Maimon, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, and arrested him. Explaining that religious law prohibited him from riding in a car on Sabbath, Rabbi Fishman offered to walk to prison. Rather, they picked him up and shoved him into a vehicle.

By the end of the day of what came to be called Black Sabbath, Fish- man, Sharett, Remez, and most of the rest of the
yishuv
leaders were in custody at a special detention center—the VIJ camp, the Very Important Jews camp—at Latrun, a fort near Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion escaped cap- ture because he happened to be in Paris. Moshe Sneh, the head of the Haganah, eluded the dragnet, as did the commanders of the Irgun and Lehi.

Golda was the only leading figure spared the round-up, much to her chagrin. The first morning, she had waited expectantly for the roar of a car or military jeep coming to get her. After a while, every time the telephone rang, she flinched, as if her freedom were a sign that the British didn’t con- sider her sufficiently dangerous or significant. When she finally realized that she was being ignored, she showed up at Bevingrad and confronted Sir Alan Cunningham, the high commissioner. “If Shertok [Sharett] is guilty, then I am guilty too,” she screamed. Cunningham looked at Golda with amusement. “Perhaps you should be arrested too,” he responded. But he did not call in his guards.

Golda’s freedom was clearly intentional, but the British never revealed their reasoning. Other women were taken, so her gender was an unlikely motivation. Had they misjudged her, assuming that she was a moderating force, an appellation more appropriate to Sharett, the diplomat, than to Golda?

“Maybe I wasn’t important enough,” she later admitted. “I was very annoyed.”

* * *

Even as a young woman, Golda exuded self-confidence, an air of utter certainty about her own ability, about her right to lead and the correct- ness of her positions. But after Black Sabbath, she fell apart. Running a section of the Histadrut, negotiating with the British, and manipulating workers were the tasks of a lieutenant. Golda had been a superb aide-de- camp, but accustomed to collective political decision making among a close-knit group of comrades that occurred, as often as not, over endless cups of coffee at her house. She’d always been able to turn to Remez for counsel, to rely on Ben-Gurion to adjust her thinking, and on Sharett for guidance in diplomacy.

But by the evening of June 29, the silence was deafening, as was the isolation. With Ben-Gurion in Paris, Weizmann old and sick, and the other key leaders locked away in Latrun, however, it fell to Golda to lead the
yishuv
through the crisis by taking over the political department of the Jewish Agency, essentially to become president of Jewish Palestine.

“As long as Golda’s outside, the only man in the Jewish Agency is still free,” people joked.

But the religious Zionists, a key part of the coalition that enabled the Labor Party to govern, balked. “Kudos to a smart and energetic woman,” read an editorial in
Hatzofeh,
an Orthodox newspaper. “But it is impossi- ble to put Golda at the head of the most important thing of the Jewish people. This is not a position for a woman.”

The Orthodox weren’t alone in their concern about Golda’s ability to lead the community. When the question of who would stand up to the British arose at a meeting of American Jewish leaders, Golda’s name came up. “Golda?” one man sniggered. “A lovely lady, a good speaker, but are you kidding?”

While men like Sharett and Ben-Gurion were educated, scholarly, experienced in diplomacy, and accustomed to navigating subtleties,

Golda was like a blunt force—emotional, caustic, and almost allergic to any shades but black and white. Within hours of her appointment by the Jewish Agency Executive, she was bickering with everyone left unjailed. At the first meeting of the Va’ad, her imperious demeanor so infuriated leaders of the Palmach that one of them, Miriam the Red, accused her of setting up a
Judenrat.
The Palmachniks decided to ignore her and open a direct channel of communication with Latrun.

From behind the walls of the fort, Shertok tried to calm the victims of Golda’s sharp tongue and to nudge her into a modicum of tact. But the challenges were overwhelming. The year’s crop was about to rot in the fields because hundreds of kibbutz members had been locked up. The prisoners in the detention camp were threatening to go on hunger strike, Weizmann was appealing for an immediate end to all resistance, and the resistance movement was strategizing an escalation in the violence.

Before any decisions could be made, the
yishuv
needed reassurance that someone was in charge and, back on the familiar turf of a podium, Golda offered it. “What we want is complete independence,” she pro- claimed. “British policy has put us in an impossible position. With the detention of our leaders and thousands of other Jews accused of no crime, we have reached the limit.”

Golda’s oratory stirred the populace, but she lacked the clout to im- pose her view of what that limit was or how far the
yishuv
should go once it was reached. Early in the struggle against the British, the lines had been easy to draw. If British soldiers searched a kibbutz or neighborhood for illegal immigrants, of course people would block their way or refuse to help them; no one had any moral qualms about passive resistance. Even blowing up the patrol boats that hounded refugee ships or sabotag- ing rail lines to interfere with troops movement found easy ethical back- ing in a community willing to risk virtually anything to help Europe’s surviving Jews. But with every action, they’d crept closer to the terrorism of Etzel.

Weizmann and many other overseas Zionist leaders were horrified. We need to pull back, they clamored. Stop the resistance and return to

the bargaining table. Golda wouldn’t hear of it. I never lived through a pogrom in Russia, she said, but “what happened on June 29 was what I imagined a pogrom to be. . . . Something happened. The
yishuv
just can’t pass this over as if nothing did.”

At the funeral of a settler killed during the searches, she reiterated that position. “We have hated death,” she said. “We are for life. But we have no choice.”

Every day, the dispute was replayed at Histadrut meetings, Mapai cau- cuses, over coffee, and by telephone with Ben-Gurion, who couldn’t re- turn from Paris without risking arrest, Golda battling for an activist stance. Isn’t it wiser to preserve what we’ve built than to court destruc- tion? others asked her. Are we getting drunk on our own rhetoric?

Golda mounted all of her powers of persuasion, pointedly reminding her colleagues of the dangers of losing touch with the public mood. “If we don’t do something active, Lehi and the Irgun will,” she insisted.

But gradually, Golda was worn down, above all by notes from Remez, who was reading Mahatma Gandhi. Under his influence, widespread civil disobedience became her new mantra, a middle ground between the violence of the
Ma’avak
and the inaction advocated by Weizmann.

Reflecting the mood of the populace, however, the Haganah ignored her directive to pull back from violence, and Golda had neither the politi- cal savvy nor the moral authority to sway them. Then, on July 22, 1946, Etzel crossed the
yishuv
’s ethical line with the bombing of the King David Hotel, which housed the British secretariat, the British military com- mand, and a branch of the Criminal Investigation Division of the man- datory police. The warning, which Etzel said they delivered by phone minutes before the explosion, was either not received or never reached the right people. And the explosion, seemingly much more powerful than in- tended, killed ninety-one people and left hundreds more wounded.