Golda (20 page)

* * *

Golda and Abdullah had been passing messages back and forth for months, and in her last note, she’d admitted that she was worried. I’m hurt, Abdullah had responded. Remember three things: I am a Bedouin

and therefore a man of honor. I am a king and therefore doubly bound to behave honorably. And I would never break a promise to a woman.

Golda remained skeptical, but the
yishuv
’s military situation was so desperate that she was willing to grab at any straw. “If there is any chance, even a very minor one, that I could save the life of even one Jew, I’m go- ing to do that,” she said, setting off to cross a frontier lined with Jordanian and Iraqi troops.

Abdullah devised a complicated stratagem for sneaking Golda into the country to ensure that no hint of the meeting would leak out. So Golda and her interpreter, Ezra Danin, changed cars repeatedly on the road to Naharayim. Once there, Golda donned an embroidered black dress and veil, was picked up by the king’s driver, and crossed the Arab Legion checkpoints to Amman disguised as an Arab woman.

She was impatient by the time she was ushered into a stone house in the hills above the road to the Amman airport. “Have you broken your promise to me after all?” she asked King Abdullah abruptly, eschewing traditional Arab politesse.

The king sighed. “Then I was one,” he said. “Now I am one of five.

Why are the Jews in such a hurry to have a state?”

Already exasperated Golda snapped. “We’ve waited two thousand years. That’s not my definition of in a hurry.”

Again Abdullah broached the idea of the Jews joining Transjordan, promising them full representation in his parliament. Dismissing that notion out of hand, Golda warned, “You must know that if war is forced upon us, we will fight and we will win.”

Abdullah seemed resigned. “It is your duty to fight. But why don’t you wait a few years?”

Golda knew there was little she could say, but she reminded the king of their common enemy, the Mufti, and of how much the
yishuv
had al- ready done to weaken him militarily, clearing Abdullah’s path through Arab Palestine. “We’re your only friends,” she added.

When Abdullah didn’t budge, Golda prepared to leave. But Danin and Abdullah lingered, chatting. You’re embarking on a dangerous

course, Danin warned the king. “You worship at the mosque and permit your subjects to kiss the hem of your garments.”

Abdullah seemed unconcerned about the possibility of being assassi- nated as he escorted his Jewish visitors to the door.

When Golda reached Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion interrupted a security briefing to hear about the encounter. “We met in friendship,” she re- ported. “He is very worried and looks terrible. He didn’t deny that we had spoken and had reached an understanding on a favorable settlement in which he will rule the Arab section. . . . This is the plan he proposed, a united country with local autonomy in Jewish areas, followed a year later by the country’s unification under his rule.”

Never known for her fluency in subtlety, Golda interpreted the meet- ing as a failure, a negation of all the optimistic signals Abdullah had been sending. And over the years, Moshe Dayan, who met with the king six months later, alleged that Golda herself had destroyed any opportunity for peace with her curt manner.

Most others read the encounter differently. “His Majesty has not en- tirely betrayed the agreement, nor is he entirely loyal to it, but something in the middle,” Yaacov Shimoni told a meeting of the Arab Section of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency. After all, while Abdullah indi- cated that he would send the Arab Legion across the River Jordan, he said nothing about attacking Jewish forces or crossing into Jewish territory.

* * *

The British Mandate was due to expire at midnight on May 14, but the
yishuv
leadership was still feuding about whether they should delay their declaration of independence. U.S. secretary of state George Marshall had warned that if they proceeded, the Americans wouldn’t rescue them from an Arab invasion. When that prospect failed to chill Zionist ardor, he threatened to stop the transfer of funds from U.S. Jews and ask the United Nations to withdraw the partition resolution.

It’s suicide not to agree to Marshall’s terms, cautioned Remez, backed by a full third of the Mapai bloc in the new cabinet. Yigal Yadin, the

chief of operations of the Haganah, estimated their chances of surviving an all-out Arab assault at 50–50.

“We need to go all the way,” insisted Golda, who had no vote but never allowed herself to be deprived of a voice. “We can’t do a zigzag. . . . The world is waiting for our announcement. It we don’t make it now, we never will.”

With sixty hours until the scheduled declaration, six of the ten cabinet members present swung in Golda’s direction.

Golda was equally unwavering on the other major issue confronting the government-in-the-making, Jerusalem. The UN had dragged its feet on internationalizing the city, and the Arabs had begun their attempt to seize it militarily. When the British high commissioner tried to arrange a cease-fire, Golda laid down firm conditions—free access to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the holy places, unimpeded transit on the road from Tel Aviv, and Jewish control over property abandoned by Arabs in West Jerusalem. Ignoring her, the British announced an unconditional truce and, for the moment, the Haganah had respected it.

Despite the British heavy-handedness, Golda supported the cease-fire, fearing that the Christian world would blame the Jews if fresh blood stained the Stations of the Cross. But she clung to the conditions she’d set down.

“Golda is too inflexible,” Remez argued. “If she wants an armistice, she should forgo the condition which states that we will not restore the Arab quarters to the Arabs. . . . How can we refuse to allow them to re- turn there? Will those houses become Jewish property?”

No final decision was made, nor were final decisions made on dozens of urgent issues. The leaders of the
yishuv
had been preparing for state- hood for decades, but they still hadn’t agreed what the new state should be called—Zion, Judea, or Yehuda. Ben-Gurion wanted the capital to be built in the desert; others were intent on Jerusalem; and Golda was press- ing hard for Mount Carmel in Haifa. Scores of details—about stamps and passports, stationary and state symbols—were yet to be worked out, and the British Mandate expired on May 15.

Without a vote, without a portfolio, without any title beyond member of the National Council, Golda sat in on every meeting, assuming by ac- tion the status she hadn’t been granted by Ben-Gurion.

The declaration of statehood ceremony was organized as a secret event lest the British try to prevent the creation of a Jewish government before their Mandate expired the following day. Only on the morning of the fourteenth, the day scheduled for the declaration, were the invitations delivered, by hand, urging the guests to arrive promptly at 3:30 and dress in “dark festive attire.”

Just after noon, Golda carefully washed her hair, put on her best black dress, and waited alone for a driver to pick her up. Menachem was still in New York, her parents and sister in Holon, and Sarah digging trenches at her kibbutz, directly in the path the Egyptian army would undoubtedly take in a drive toward the heartland of the state.

Despite the attempt at secrecy, the
yishuv
was too small, too inbred for word not to leak out. As Golda made her way up Rothschild Boulevard into the Tel Aviv Art Museum, hundreds of people were already gathered outside, thousands more tuned in to Kol Yisrael for the station’s first live broadcast. The hall was packed with men and women from the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, the leaders of political par- ties, cultural and religious institutions, and the international press.

Golda took her seat with the other members of the National Council beneath a massive portrait of Theodor Herzl. At 4 p.m., Ben-Gurion, dressed for once in a suit and tie, rapped his gavel. The Philharmonic Orchestra, hidden on an upper floor since there was no room for them below, poised to play “Hatikvah,” the new national anthem. But the crowd beat them to the punch, spontaneously bursting into song.

“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” Ben-Gu- rion read from the preamble to the declaration. “By virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish People and the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called
Medinat Yisrael,
the State of Israel.”

The members of the audience surged to their feet in a single, unbri- dled wave, disbelief and excitement erupting as tears and applause.

Ben-Gurion laid down the principles of freedom, justice, peace, and equal social and political rights that were to guide the new state, conclud- ing, “With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hand to this declaration, at this session of the Provisional State Council, on the soil of the home- land, in the city of Tel Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the fifth of Iyar, 5708, the 14th of May, 1948.”

One by one, the signers of the declaration solemnly walked to the desk where Sharett held out the temporary parchment. Ben-Gurion had pleaded with the thirty-seven signers to adopt Hebrew names before the ceremony, and many had complied. Golda had not. Her hands shaking, tears streaming down her face, Golda signed Golda Meyerson.

“From my childhood in America, I learned about the Declaration of Independence and the geniuses who signed it,” she said. “I couldn’t imag- ine these were real people doing something real. And here I am signing it, actually signing a Declaration of Independence. I didn’t think it was due me, that I, Goldie Mabovitch Meyerson, deserved it, that I had lived to see the day. My hands shook. We had done it. We had brought the Jew- ish people into existence.”

chapter nine

If only political leaders would allow themselves to feel as well as to think, the world might be a happier place.

T

he order for Golda to leave was issued by Ben-Gurion, who knew that the infant state’s only hope of survival depended on the acquisi-

tion of serious weapons. The armies of five nations had invaded, and they were equipped with artillery, tanks, armored cars, and personnel carriers, and supported by the air forces of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Israel had fewer than 50,000 fighters, some who’d been trained in displaced persons’ camps with wooden rifles and dummy bullets. Since the
yishuv
could not openly buy arms until the state was declared, Israeli troops were going into battle without cannons or tanks.

“We now need much larger sums to finance the armaments, so it is necessary to send Golda to America to raise the funds we need,” he wrote in his diary. “Now we need planes and tanks.”

The last place Golda wanted to be was in New York. The Egyptian advance toward Tel Aviv was bringing its troops close to Kibbutz Revivim and she knew that her daughter, Sarah, and Revivim’s twenty-nine other poorly armed pioneers couldn’t possibly defend it. Jerusalemites needed

water, food, and medical supplies. Overwhelmed by refugees suddenly free to flood the country, the Histadrut had to organize housing and food. And almost 30,000 Jews were penned up in Cyprus waiting to be brought to Israel.

But on May 16, two days after independence was declared, Henry Montor cabled to say that American Jewry had been moved by the dra- matic ceremony in Tel Aviv. If Golda came personally, he thought she’d be able to coax another $50 million from the community. So she threw a hairbrush, toothbrush, and clean blouse into her bag, received a laissez- passer, the first travel document issued to a citizen of the State of Israel, and caught a plane to America.

This time, Golda didn’t arrive in New York as a beggar for a band of starry-eyed Jewish optimists but as the official emissary of a Jewish gov- ernment. Based out of a suite at the Sulgrave Hotel, her first luxury ac- commodation, she plotted a one-month tour to hammer home the stakes to America’s Jews.

“We cannot go on without your help,” she begged until she was hoarse, in St. Louis and Dallas, in Tulsa, Denver, Kansas City, and Philadelphia, at United Jewish Appeal dinners and at hastily arranged meetings with bankers and industrialists whose Jewish pride had been stirred for the first time. “What we ask of you is that you share in our responsibility, with everything that this implies—difficulties, problems, hardships and joys. Make up your minds and give me your answers.”

They responded with $75 million.

Her mission complete, Golda returned to New York to find a way back to Israel. The day before she was due to fly home, she made a quick ride out to Brooklyn to say good-bye to old friends. En route, she stretched out her tired legs in the backseat of a taxi, worrying about what would come next. Sharett, the new foreign minister, had asked her to go to Moscow as Israel’s first ambassador and she still hadn’t figured out how to change his mind.

Her trip to the United States had been agony enough, especially with the news that the Jordanians had pushed the Jews out of the Old City of