Golda (24 page)

Making room for them, literally and figuratively, was jeopardizing ev- erything Israelis had built. The economy buckled, the trade deficit sky- rocketed, inflation ran out of control, and the government kept demanding more belt-tightening. In August 1950, wartime rationing was extended to textiles and leather goods. By December 1951, the only unrationed prod- ucts were bread, cream cheese, leben, and frozen fish filets.

In a new nation still teetering to find its political center, every elec- tion, national or local, turned into an anguished feud over “the crisis,” both moral and practical. Every problem in the country, from loose cob- bles on the pavement to the intermittence of telephone service, was blamed on the swarms of newcomers, and people began asking whether a tiny country living with a precarious peace could keep absorbing millions without upsetting its economic and social balance.

The answer was no, and Golda minced no words in hammering home that truth in a series of speeches that straddled the often fine line be- tween dazzling leadership and public shaming. After shoes were rationed,

she reduced the choice to the starkest of terms: “More immigrants or more shoes.” When academics and professionals threatened to strike be- cause they were earning the same wages as janitors, she met with them personally—to reprimand them for their greed. Israel had no million- aires and only one person with an income above 100,000 Israel pounds, roughly $275,000. Without any wealth to redistribute from the top, the only way to increase their salaries was to take it from the poor, Golda ex- plained.

“I’m prepared to go not only from meeting to meeting but from door to door so that every single one of us may realize that when he sits at a table, when he puts on a suit, when he makes improvements on his house, does something for his child, he is doing so at the expense of all of us. Let’s see how we’ll enjoy life with this realization.”

And month after month, she harangued workers about increasing pro- ductivity and lengthening the workweek. Disgusted with what she saw as the self-centeredness of trade union leaders, she abolished the trade union department in her ministry. “That is one job we certainly do not need to do,” she sneered. The Histadrut, she insisted, would protect the workers while considering the needs of the state.

The issue before us is simple and cruel. . . . Is there any connection between our talk in support of immigration and our deeds? . . . I am not worried about how soon a building worker will get the means to buy a refrigerator. I want to know by what means a Yemenite immi- grant family will secure a roof.

* * *

When she returned from Moscow, Golda had been caught in the same housing crunch as Romanian and Yemenite refugees. The government hadn’t yet arranged residences for its cabinet members and she was forced to beg for a home in Jerusalem, which Ben-Gurion had decreed the capi- tal. Like many fortunate Jewish Jerusalemites, she wound up in an old Arab house in Talbieh abandoned by its owners in 1948, when Jewish

residents of East Jerusalem fled to the Jewish West, and Arab residents of West Jerusalem took flight in the other direction.

The three-story Villa Harun al-Rashid, its name painted in Arabic on tiles inset above the second-floor balcony, was falling down. But the top floor had an amazing view over the city, and Golda, who was usually content with modest quarters, fixated on having an apartment there. The state engineers grumbled about the condition of the building and secu- rity officers worried about its proximity to the border, but no one balked at a cabinet member taking over an “abandoned” piece of Arab property. The government had already decided to allocate 400 such dwellings to senior officials.

All her life, Golda reminisced about her apartment at Villa Harun al- Rashid, about closing her door, brewing a cup of tea, and “feasting my eyes on Jerusalem’s beauty,” as she put it. But it was little more than the place that she scrubbed and tidied—her lifelong obsession since she ad- mitted she thought best while cleaning—and a way station in her frenetic travels from Eilat to the Lebanese border, from New York and Los Ange- les to London.

Overseeing a vast realm of housing projects, road building, refugee camps, and employment offices, Golda relentlessly visited every work site and development to keep up the tempo of transformation. Helping to scout out deserted Arab villages that could be quickly cleaned up for new immigrants, she then drove there to urge laborers to patch roofs more quickly. She planted the first trees in Eilat on the Red Sea, toured facto- ries and industrial sites, and inspected model homes.

The bane of architects and builders alike, she examined every detail of construction, eviscerating them when their designs came up short. In Tiberias, she noticed that the kitchen windows above the sinks in a new development were well above eye level. “What, are you crazy?” she screamed at the foreman. “Are you idiots? A woman stands in the kitchen five hours cooking and you are forcing her to see the wall and not the Kinneret?” In Kiryat Shmona, the foundations were too high. “How would you like your wife to jump forty centimeters to the ground

every time she wanted to empty the garbage pail?” she berated the engi- neers.

Invoking her mantra that “a progressive country cannot have islands of poverty,” Golda established public works projects to increase Arab em- ployment as well as Jewish. Knowing nothing about Arab society, but in- fused with her vision of an egalitarian nation, she reached out with particular concern to Arab women. “Arab women have to learn to work outside the home if they want to take their rightful place in Arab or Israeli society,” she exhorted them at the opening of a handicraft center at the Jaffa sewing school, expressing the hope that an Arab woman would soon find a place in the Knesset.

When she attended the dedication of a new road into an Arab commu- nity, a local woman stopped her to offer a soft complaint. “To make us a road is very kind of you,” the woman said. “But roads and cars are for men. We women still have to carry water pails on our heads from the floor of the valley up to the mountains.” So Golda ordered new public works proj- ects to link Arab villages up to main water lines.

Everywhere, she cracked the whip. Faster. Cheaper. Better. More gar- dens. More industry in the south. More productivity. More farms. More water in the Negev.

Scores of domestic problems wound up on her desk because no one else was willing to tackle them. When the Yemenites in the Misr refugee camp accused the brusque young Israeli workers there of treating them with disrespect by forcibly cutting off men’s side locks and sending male physicians to treat women, it was Golda who had to find a way to deal with head lice and gynecology without offending religious sensibilities. After Yemenite Jews began wandering out of overcrowded refugee camps and offering to work at subminimum wage, Golda was called in. And when torrential rains turned the Sha’ar Ha’aliyah camp near Haifa into a swamp, Golda had to figure out where to move thousands of soggy refugees.

In between internal crises, she flew back and forth to the United States—to raise funds for the airlift of the Iraqi Jews, to sell Israel Bonds,

for the Purim Victory Festival at Madison Square Garden, for meetings with U.S. government officials, and to lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Golda doesn’t think in terms of hours of work or, ‘I’ve finished my day’s work,’ ” said Zvi Bar-Niv, her legal adviser. “She never closes the circle. . . . Working with her, we were all suicidal self-slave drivers.”

Getting by on five hours of sleep a night, Golda was on a tear. There were too many fires to put out, too much cash to raise, too many people who didn’t agree with her and needed to be pounded into submission. If the Ministry of Finance denied her money, she threatened to resign, and they always found a way to mollify her. At Passover in 1950, she grew ob- sessed with how little immigrants had for the holiday and demanded that Finance Minister Kaplan give the families what they needed for the seder. When he refused, she made herself comfortable and said, “I’m not leaving my office until I get the money. I won’t prepare for the holiday as long as I know others can’t.”

Fighting with Golda, Kaplan knew, was an exercise in futility. Word around the Ministry of Finance was, “You better settle things with Zvi Bar-Niv (her legal adviser). If you don’t, he’ll go to the
balabusta
and she’ll go to Ben-Gurion. Then it will cost more money.”

There was a manic quality to Golda’s tempo, beyond devotion to her cause or distress over the plight of the refugees, even beyond anxiety that she’d fail and be consigned to a trivial position as deputy prime minister or the head of what she called a “ministry of the superfluousness.” Golda had no real life outside work to moor her, and she was battered by private blows that she bore with a phlegmatic stoicism widely seen as glacial detachment rather than as steely determination never to be seen as weak or vulnerable.

Although Golda always seemed strong, as she edged closer to the age of sixty, she was sick a great deal, a reality she studiously hid her from the public. Migraines continued to dog her, her gallbladder flared up repeat- edly, and on a trip to St. Louis, she broke her shoulder. Finally, exhausted and overweight, in July 1954, she checked into Dr. Schlegel’s clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, where she spent a week on a diet of juice and raw vegetables.

Things were strained with her daughter-in-law, Hannah, the daughter of old friends from America. Golda’s delight at Hannah’s marriage to Me- nachem had soured shortly after the couple moved to Zagreb, where Menachem was studying cello. Hannah got pregnant and returned to Je- rusalem, where she believed the medical care would be more reliable. Furious that Hannah was ruining her son’s career by forcing him to leave his studies, Golda pitched a fit. Hannah’s estrangement from Menachem deepened, and she finally left him, turning Golda more bitterly against her. The birth of Meira Meyerson did nothing to calm the acrimony. Golda refused to have contact with her granddaughter, who was born with mild Down’s syndrome, and insisted that the child be sent away to an in- stitution. When Hannah decided to raise her daughter at home, Golda stopped talking to her and never so much as acknowledged the existence of Menachem’s firstborn. “It was a terrible situation,” recalled Ari Rath, the former editor of the
Jerusalem Post.
“Friends tried to mediate, but Golda was like a stone.”

She saw Sarah and her grandchildren infrequently since visiting Re- vivim involved a long and difficult trip. And Golda was not the sort of mother who seemed to feel much need to spend intimate moments with her daughter or cuddle her children. “She was never the grandmother the kids ran up to hug or the grandmother with kids on her knees,” said Rolf Kneller, a photojournalist who traveled with her regularly. “She was the grandmother who sat in an easy chair answering the questions of the children sitting on the floor.”

Then, in May 1951, while she was in New York for a fund-raiser, Golda received a telegram that Morris, who had returned from Persia to be nearer his children and was living in her apartment while she was abroad, had had a fatal heart attack. Within weeks, David Remez, too, passed away. Although she and Morris had been separated for years and her rela- tionship with Remez had grown more distant, for the first time in decades Golda was truly alone, detached even from distant intimacy.

Her father had died without seeing the foundation of the state, and her mother had languished, her memory gone, her eyesight fading. Clara was

married and still living in Bridgeport, Connecticut. And Sheyna lived nearby, but she had never been known to offer much solace. Golda’s su- perego, Sheyna nagged her incessantly—about her smoking, her chil- dren, her politics, and her soup.

Work—turning decades of dreams into the houses and jobs that would be the foundations of a Socialist state—became her life. Around her neck, Golda wore a brooch with an evil eye inscribed in Aramaic, “Let her own works praise her.”

During her seven-year tenure as minister of labor, 120,000 refugee families moved into permanent homes, 80,000 received vocational train- ing, and 400,000 began to work.

* * *

In January 1952, Golda stood before the second Knesset and made her bid for posterity. For two years, she’d put out fires. It was time to demon- strate how serious she was about socialism.

It is a momentous occasion for any state when its legislative body opens its debate on a social insurance bill. May I be allowed to say that for our young country such an event is of seven-fold magnitude. . . . The aspiration for a just human society has characterized the Jewish people from its first appearance on the stage of history and inspired its prophets to fight for the cause of the poor and the widowed. These visions have left their imprint on the cultural development of man- kind.

She then laid out the first stage of a comprehensive national insurance plan for old-age pensions, widows’ and orphans’ benefits, maternity grants, and industrial accident insurance, deferring health, disability, and unem- ployment insurance until the nation had a functioning economy.

Half a century later, the program hardly sounds groundbreaking. But in 1952, few small countries—and not that many major ones—offered their citizenry the type of security that Golda sought to provide, or had

already codified in her labor legislation. Israelis already had, by law, fixed hours of work with prescribed breaks, guaranteed overtime, a mandatory day off, and annual leave. Pregnant women received paid maternity leave from the state and could not be fired from their jobs

With the social security act, she moved on to address the problem of high infant mortality, especially among new immigrants and Arab women, with free medical care and hospitalization for pregnant women and direct subsidies to parents after the birth of a child. Men over the age of sixty-five and women over the age of sixty would receive full pensions. And provisions were made for the support of widows, widowers, orphans, and workers injured on the job.

It was Golda’s bid to establish Israel as the sort of progressive social democracy she’d long envisioned, and she proved enough of a political shark to ram it through the Knesset despite the country’s precarious economy. The Treasury department, under Finance Minister Levi Esh- kol, predicted that the program, which would eat up more than 1 percent of the gross national product from day one, would foment economic di- saster.