Golda (25 page)

But it will be a social disaster if we don’t do it, she told the Knesset. “The State of Israel will not tolerate within it poverty that shames human life.”

* * *

Only once as minister of labor did Golda’s zeal overstep her political acu- men, but that gaffe dogged her for decades. No issue haunted Israel more than the prospect of
kulturkampf,
an open clash between the most reli- gious of the state’s Jews and its nonreligious majority. For ultra-Orthodox Israelis, the existence of a secular state was anathema, and the behavior of nonreligious Jews—women wearing skimpy bathing suits, men driving cars on Sabbath, kibbutzniks living out of wedlock—an abomination. Foreshadowing what would occur throughout the region in later years, they demanded that Talmudic law govern Israeli life. While the most rigid among them represented less than 10 percent of the population, the

political parties that represented them constituted a vital part of Mapai’s ruling coalition.

The fact of that coalition, of any coalition, was a deep disappointment to Ben-Gurion, who abhorred sharing power with any party, no matter its religiosity. But the first Knesset election had given Mapai only 46 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Despite deep popular misgivings, then, in exchange for their Knesset support, Ben-Gurion ceded moderate religious parties’ control over marriage and divorce, persuading the public that in a time of economic uncertainty and political precariousness, Israel could not af- ford secular-religious confrontation.

But in 1953, Golda sparked precisely that type of conflict when she introduced the Bill for Compulsory Service for Women into the Knesset, an attempt to lift the blanket exemption from universal military service given to religious girls. Golda’s plan would not require Orthodox women to spend time on active duty in the armed forces but to dedicate one year to work in hospitals, schools, or other community institutions under the supervision of the Ministry of Labor.

Golda, who’d been raised without any real religious training, had learned to tread lightly around the Orthodox after the storm over her ap- pointment as head of the
yishuv.
So in drafting her military service bill, she had carefully consulted her moderate Orthodox political allies. But when the bill was announced, ultra-Orthodox rabbis stirred their commu- nity into a furor. Handbills distributed as far away as Brooklyn warned that Golda would send religious girls into brothels. Mobs of men and women marched on the Knesset, shrieking hysterically and attacking the police.

Furious at the reaction and believing that exempting religious girls from national service was an affront to their secular counterparts, Golda ignored the political consequences of open warfare with the Orthodoxy. “You will not force your way of life on us,” she railed. “You will not terror- ize a legislative body with demonstrations of hysterical women or by mob violence.” After invoking the proud role Jewish women had played in the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, she asked, “If army life is degrading, why are they not concerned for the morals of their sons?”

Ultimately, the storm calmed and the bill passed, although it was largely ignored. But Golda’s relationship with the religious community had been severely damaged, and the consequences were not long in coming.

As the 1955 elections approached, Ben-Gurion decided it was time for Mapai to take control over Tel Aviv, and that Golda should be his vehicle. Nothing was ever quite that simple in Israeli politics. Mayors, like prime ministers, were not elected directly, and Mapai did not win a majority of the City Council seats. The leadership turned, then, to their national coalition partners in the religious bloc for the two votes they needed to name a mayor.

Who do you want to install? the Orthodox councillors asked. Golda?

They threw their votes to Chaim Levanon, the sitting mayor, leaving Tel Aviv out of Mapai’s hands.

chapter eleven

Internationalism doesn’t mean the end of individual nations—orchestras don’t mean the end of violins.

T

he torment of Moshe Sharett, Israel’s foreign minister, began in the fall of 1953, when the brash young hawks of the Israel Defense Force stepped up Israel’s response to terrorist attacks by moving beyond an eye for an eye to a tooth for twenty teeth. The armistice of 1949 had stilled the rumble of tanks and mortars belonging to national armies, but hundreds of Arab fedayeen who refused to renounce the struggle made their way across Israel’s borders to blow up watertowers, murder villagers, and remind the Israelis of the high cost of victory. Between 1949 and 1954, more than one thousand incidents each month left Israelis intimi-

dated in their own homeland.

Unable to prevent the incursions, Ben-Gurion had ordered deterrence through retaliation. Still the fedayeen wreaked nightly havoc on Israeli towns. Finally, Moshe Dayan, the new chief of operations of the Israel Defense Forces, urged ever more vicious retribution. On October 14, in reprisal for a fedayeen foray that killed a mother and two children, a spe- cial unit led by Ariel Sharon snuck across the Jordanian border to the

town of Kibya, a fedayeen stronghold. When it left, sixty-nine civilians, half women and children, lay dead.

Horrified by the carnage, Sharett expected that Israel would issue a statement of regret. But ever protective of his military, Ben-Gurion re- fused and instead denied that any IDF unit was in the area that night.

Sharett and Ben-Gurion had been a tag team for two decades, the British-educated, multilingual diplomat the voice of prudent restraint against Ben-Gurion’s daring. But the mercurial Ben-Gurion had fallen under the spell of the new generation of Israelis like Dayan, Sharon, and Shimon Peres, whose self-confidence bled unabashedly into arrogance. Teach the Arab governments a lesson so that they’ll stop the fedayeen, they agitated. Ben-Gurion was enthralled.

Ben-Gurion began preparing for war, but Sharett kept finding ways to thwart his schemes to capture the Gaza Strip to clean out fedayeen camps, to help the Maronite Christians form their own state in southern Lebanon, even to scrap the 1949 armistice accords entirely. Livid, Ben- Gurion took to treating Sharett like a leper. When Sharett spoke, Ben- Gurion studiously read a newspaper or cut him off in mid-sentence. He stopped addressing or referring to Sharett by name. Finally, he stopped talking to him at all, reducing their communication to notes.

Sharett wasn’t some minor politician who could be summarily dis- missed. Having led the successful drive for partition at the United Na- tions, he was enormously well respected. But Ben-Gurion, who could be ruthless when thwarted, finally asked Golda what she thought of transfer- ring Sharett from his cabinet post as foreign minister to the position of secretary-general of the party.

“But who will be foreign minister?” she replied. “You,” he responded.

No fan of diplomacy, Golda had long disparaged Sharett’s job. “All a foreign minister does is talk and talk more,” she told friends. But Golda was the most loyal of the Ben-Gurionists, admitting that if he asked her to jump out of a fifth-floor window, she would do so.

When rumors of Ben-Gurion’s plan reached Sharett, the foreign min-

ister was mortified. Golda had no education, no understanding of Arabs, no patience, and no appreciation of process, a sine qua non of diplomacy. “Does she know what it means to be a foreign minister?” he asked a col- league. “Does she think it’s a cocktail party?”

But Ben-Gurion sent Sharett an ultimatum: Resign by 5 p.m. or I will. Ten days later, Golda Meir—having finally given in to Ben-Gurion’s pressure to Hebraicize her name—was named Israel’s second foreign minister.

Despite his mortification, for three days Sharett patiently briefed her, trying to impart decades of experience. “Golda didn’t take a single note,” said Sharett’s son, Chaim. In fact, she dismissed her predecessor with a curt, “If I need something, I’ll phone you.” She never did.

The Foreign Ministry staff was horrified by this new mistress. Under Sharett, the ministry had been like a family; he trusted his employees and listened carefully to their arguments. Golda, however, had nothing but contempt for the Oxford/Cambridge crowd who saw three sides to every coin, and she did nothing to disguise it. She was a “hard woman,” said Anne Marie Lambert, one of the deputy directors. “She had strong likes and dislikes and was not open to being convinced.”

Everything about her style grated: her talent for simplification, her impatience with careful parsing of language, and, especially, her brusque style. “She liked to be the queen bee,” recalled Esther Herlitz, a former Foreign Ministry official. “She didn’t consult with foreign ministry people but with her political friends. . . . When people clocked in in the morn- ing, she would stand there and watch to see if you were late.”

Golda was no happier than her staff. When she interviewed Simcha Dinitz, then a junior ministry official, for a position on her staff, she asked him why he wanted the job. “Honestly, I really don’t,” he replied.

“That makes two of us because I don’t like my job either,” Golda said.

* * *

At the age of fifty-eight, Golda became the public face of Israel at the United Nations, in world capitals, and at international meetings. After

spending time with her, Eleanor Roosevelt gushed, “She is a woman one cannot help but deeply respect and deeply love.” She so charmed the no- toriously diffident Charles de Gaulle that he deigned to cross the room to greet her, rather than forcing her to go to his side, as was his habit with other heads of state. During a tour of ten Latin American countries, she was awarded the National Order of the Southern Cross, Brazil’s highest distinction for foreigners; the Order of the Great Liberator, Venezuela’s greatest honor; and an honorary doctorate from the state university of Uruguay.

After Argentina appealed to the Security Council to condemn Israel for infringing on its sovereignty by kidnapping Adolf Eichmann, she brushed aside those who counseled her to pretend that Israel had not been involved and boldly admitted that Israel had violated the law, in the process deliver- ing a lesson in the Holocaust that left delegates cringing in silence. “This is not a matter of revenge,” she expounded. “As the Hebrew poet Bialik says, ‘Revenge for a small child—the devil has not yet devised.’

“Will Eichmann’s trial by the people to whose destruction he had dedicated all his energies constitute a threat to peace, even if the method of his apprehension in some way contravened Argentinean laws? Or didn’t the threat to peace lie in the fact that Eichmann enjoyed freedom, Eich- mann was not punished for his crimes. Eichmann was free to disseminate the position of his warped soul among the young generation.”

The visitors in the gallery rose to their feet, applauding wildly. Convinced that personal relationships trumped formal diplomacy,

Golda spent months on the road, traveling across the United States and Canada, the Far East, Europe, Latin America, and Africa, one day dining with Emperor Hirohito, the next touring resettlement projects in north- ern Burma. Everywhere she went, Golda garnered a special measure of celebrity as the world’s only female foreign minister. “Former Milwaukee Schoolteacher Is Israel’s Iron-Willed Mother,” trumpeted a headline in the
Montreal Gazette.
Before her arrival on a trip to Massachusetts, the
Boston Globe
announced, “Israeli FM ‘Thinks Like a Man.’ ” The
New York Times
dubbed her the “Grandmother-Diplomat.”

The arc of Golda’s personal story—the impoverished Russian refugee who grew up in Milwaukee but gave up the comforts of America to build a Jewish homeland—captivated journalists. “A 20-Hour Workday,” the
New York Tribune
declared, devoting more words to Golda’s dark knitted dress and jacket, double strand of pearls, and silver brooch than to the politics of the Middle East.

Every fall, Golda appeared at the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, alternately playing Cassandra, the Trojan seeress who was never believed, and Poine, the goddess of vengeance. “What is the use or realism or justice of policies and attitudes based on the fiction that Israel is not there or will somehow disappear?” she asked after a Saudi delegate requested UN assistance in returning the 1.2 million Jews of Israel to their “countries of origin.”

Little by little, with the simplest of rhetoric and the power of personal- ity, Golda garnered enormous sympathy, for herself and thus for the country she represented.

“Like the Biblical Rachel sorrowing over her children, Israel’s foreign minister Golda Meir stood in the rostrum of the United Nations this week calling for disarmament and direct negotiations with the Arab States for a treaty of peace,” opined the
Telegram,
Toronto’s afternoon newspaper.

* * *

Outside of Israel, Golda radiated power, but that image camouflaged the reality that in the formulation of the major thrusts of Israeli foreign pol- icy, she was a bit player. Ben-Gurion thought of the Foreign Ministry as little more than the PR wing of the Defense Ministry. So while Golda might have been the face of the nation globally, in all substantive mat- ters, she was a marionette, with Ben-Gurion playing the puppet master.