Golda (26 page)

The first hint of the role to which she’d been relegated was Ben-Guri- on’s attempt to appoint Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, as the prime minister’s chief adviser on foreign affairs, a sort of “watchdog over the new foreign minister,” as

Eban described it. Extraordinarily eloquent and fluent in ten languages, Eban was everything Golda hated about diplomats: subtle, patient, and urbane. And Eban was no fan of Golda’s truculence. “This is an infallible prescription for antagonistic explosions,” Eban told Ben-Gurion when the prime minister suggested the new arrangement. At lunch at Golda’s home, the two agreed that Eban should decline Ben-Gurion’s proposition and that “she and I would be happy and creative in proportion to the geo- graphic distance separating us from each other,” Eban wrote.

But such easy accommodation with Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion’s fair- haired boy in the Defense Ministry, eluded her. An odd duck even in that swarm of idiosyncratic drakes, Peres was no Eban. The prime minister’s personal shrewd operator, Peres was an ambitious technocrat, the archi- tect of a dozen bold schemes that Ben-Gurion adored.

Golda’s first collision with Peres, whose title of the deputy director general of the Ministry of Defense belied his importance, was sparked by Peres’ convoluted negotiations with France, the only major power willing to sell Israel weapons. Well before Golda became foreign minis- ter, Peres had become a familiar figure in Paris, sharing aperitifs with the guys at the French defense ministry and reporting back only to Ben- Gurion. Once Golda was appointed, Peres never bothered to introduce Golda to his contacts or bring her into his consultations. He studiously ignored her.

Four days after Golda took office, Peres and his alter ego, Moshe Dayan, flew to France for two days of meetings with Defense Minister Maurice Bourges-Manoury and emerged with a $100 million weapons deal. Neither Golda nor the Israeli ambassador in Paris was informed of the negotiation.

One of the first contacts Golda wanted to make was with Jean Monnet, the architect of the European Common Market, hoping to arrange prefer- ential treatment for Israeli products. “Do you know Mr. Peres?” Monnet asked at their first meeting. She knew him, of course, but she hadn’t been told that Monnet did.

“Who speaks for Israel, me or Peres?” Golda complained to Ben-Gur-

ion, who soothed her bruised ego and promised to have Peres keep her in his loop. He never did.

“I told G[olda] that I am worried and regret her suspicions—which are completely groundless,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary after Golda com- plained that she was being pushed aside by Peres. “I said that my work will be impossible if she goes around with such a feeling.”

Peres was too valuable as the nation’s behind-the-scenes arms wheeler- dealer and Golda as Israel’s front woman for Ben-Gurion to choose be- tween them. And firmly entrenched in a political culture in which dirty laundry was never aired in public, Golda lacked the internal clout to make an end run. All she could do, then, was threaten to resign, as she did regularly. But no one took her threats seriously.

“I want to quit,” she moaned to her friend Amiel Najar, a former Is- raeli ambassador, while the two floated on a boat down the Seine. “I’m fed up.”

Najar laughed. “You will never quit,” he said. Golda looked offended. “Why do you say that?”

Najar knew Golda well. “Because you adore what you are doing,” he said.

* * *

In late July 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, sending France and Britain into a tailspin. His action was yet another blow to their imperial pretensions, and their pique was heightened by concern over Nasser’s growing alliance with the Soviet Union and the potential jeopardy it posed to the two-thirds of Europe’s oil imported through the canal.

During Peres’ next trip to Paris, the French defense minister briefed him on a nascent British-French stratagem to retake the canal by force and asked directly, “Can we work together?” Ben-Gurion was thrilled at the prospect. Not only had Nasser defied international law and United Nations resolutions by closing the canal to Israeli shipping; he was both harboring and encouraging the fedayeen whose forays against Israel had

not let up. The proposed military action offered a perfect opportunity both to regain use of the waterway and to wipe out the terrorist camps.

Ben-Gurion decided to send a team to Paris to discuss the matter with Prime Minister Guy Mollet, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, and De- fense Minister Bourges-Manoury. Peres tried to exclude Golda from the negotiations but, for once, Ben-Gurion overruled him. So in late Septem- ber, Golda, Peres, and Dayan boarded an old French Lancaster bomber sent secretly to fetch them. Few issues worried Golda more than Nasser’s refusal to allow Israeli ships to navigate the canal and the nests of fedayeen he harbored in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. They were, she believed, the harbingers of war. But she was skeptical about Peres’ rosy re- ports about French devotion to Israel and anxious to hear personally from the French prime minister.

But Prime Minister Mollet didn’t show up as promised. And the French foreign minister suddenly complained that the British had cooled to the idea, or at least were seeking a postponement in deference to the opposition of the United States. Nonetheless, he said, France was ready to move in a joint Franco-Israeli action within two weeks. Golda concluded that Peres, who had a tendency to share only the most positive details of plans he advocated, had advertised French intentions dishonestly, al- though Ben-Gurion remained seduced by what he saw as a historic op- portunity.

After a few weeks, the British came around, and final plans for the French-British-Israeli action were hatched at a meeting in Paris between Ben-Gurion, Mollet, and British foreign minister Anthony Eden, with Dayan and Peres as consultants. The scenario they developed was a delu- sionally eccentric plot to seize the canal while providing the British and French with diplomatic “cover.” Israel would drop paratroopers behind Egyptian lines in the Sinai Desert and advance toward the canal in a cooked-up “reprisal” raid for fedayeen attacks. Feigning shock and dis- may at the threat to the waterway, Britain and France would issue an ulti- matum that both sides retire from the canal and allow an international force to secure it. When Egypt refused, the Anglo-French force would

bomb Nasser’s military airfields. Israel, in other words, would play the ag- gressor, leaving France and Britain in the role of the angels of peace.

In the late afternoon on October 29, 400 Israeli paratroopers dropped into the Sinai, as planned, and by the following morning were speeding across the desert toward the canal. The ultimatum was announced on schedule. Israel accepted; Egypt did not. Then the elaborate scheme fell apart.

The British and French delayed bombing for twelve hours, leaving the world convinced that Israel was acting alone. Before the Europeans could land any troops in Egypt, the international pressure for a cease-fire crashed down on Israel, including a chilling communiqué from Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin threatening that his government was “at this moment taking steps to put an end to the war and to restrain the aggressors.”

Nonetheless, the British pressured Israel to resist the outcry for a truce so that European forces could land on the Egyptian coast. But by the time the British and French airborne troops began scrambling for a foot- hold there, the war was over. In one hundred hours, Israel had captured the entire Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, and Sharm el-Sheikh, the promontory controlling the Straits of Tiran.

Ben-Gurion, Peres, and Dayan, however, had seriously overestimated the backbone of their French and British allies and the international fury they would provoke. When the wrath of the United States and the United Nations swept over them, Britain and France buckled, leaving Israel with none of the promised political cover. The General Assembly voted 95–1, Israel being the lone opposing vote, to order Israel to leave the Sinai and the Gaza Strip immediately. And President Dwight D. Eisenhower cau- tioned that failure to do so would “impair the friendly collaboration be- tween our two countries.”

Golda was dispatched to persuade world leaders that Israel had acted in self-defense and that retreat with no resolution of Egypt’s defiance of international laws on the free movement of ships and encouragement of the fedayeen would do nothing more than sow the seed for the next conflict. In meetings with U.S. officials, in the UN delegates’ lounge

and from the rostrum at the Security Council, Golda pointed out that the aggressor was being confused for the aggressee.

Israel’s people went into the desert or struck roots in stony hillsides to establish new villages, to build roads, houses, schools and hospitals, while Arab terrorists, entering from Egypt and Jordan, were sent in to kill and destroy. Israel dug wells, brought water in pipes from great distances; Egypt sent in fedayeen to blow up the wells and the pipes. . . . A comfortable division has been made. The Arab states were arbitrarily granted the right to make war; Israel was arbitrarily given the responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one-way street.

Over and over again the Israeli government has held out its hand in peace to its neighbors. But to no avail. . . . What ought to be done now? Are we to go back to an armistice regime which has brought anything but peace and which Egypt has derisively flouted? Shall the Sinai Desert again breed nests of fedayeen . . . ?

But with the United States taking out its ire at France and Britain on Is- rael, the Western powers squabbling, and the Soviet bloc enjoying the show, Golda’s folksy simplicity struck no chord.

Unlike Dayan and Peres, Golda had no coherent strategy for dealing with Arab hostility. Although she was a champion hater, both globally and personally, she didn’t hate the Arabs or consider them to be impla- cable enemies. Her oft-repeated criticism of Nasser for what she saw as his indifference to the plight of his own people wasn’t mere platitudes. She was keenly aware that her fate was bound up with that of her neighbors.

But Golda had a limited repertoire of response to problems and ap- proached peacemaking as she did the lack of housing and jobs: devise a solution and bludgeon anyone who opposed it into submission. Lacking any understanding of Arabs or any appreciation for the subtleties of di- plomacy, in the wake of the international outrage, she reduced Israel’s dilemma to the most simplistic of formulae: if Israel withdraws, the

Egyptians will send the fedayeen back across Israel’s borders and again deny Israel an economically vital outlet to the Red Sea. The UN will say nothing about Egypt’s behavior, reserving its condemnations for Israel should the nation act to defend itself. The only solution she could imag- ine was: don’t withdraw unless Egypt agrees to behave itself.

“It wasn’t just arrogance on Golda’s part,” said Herlitz. “All she could think of was to make us more secure, and she really thought that we could hold on to everything we’d captured, that it would endanger Israel not to do so. After all, she thought, other countries have conquered terri- tory and kept it. Why should Israel be any different?”

Golda hadn’t expected to make much headway at the United Nations; its demographic makeup was tilted heavily toward Arab nations and the Soviet bloc. But she still looked to the United States as the paragon of justice that would not turn its back on the Jewish people. Worried about open confrontation with the Soviet Union, however, Eisenhower showed no sympathy for Israel’s predicament.

Those were terrible days for Golda and the Israelis at the United Na- tions as they worked to make their case to an impatient world. A night owl, Golda couldn’t stand to be alone. When staff members showed up at the Essex House Hotel with the evening cables, they found her drinking coffee, and they couldn’t escape her need to talk until 1 or 2 a.m. Golda was her own doctor, they joked, making her own medicine of Chester- fields and caffeine. “We finally established a rotation,” recalled Herlitz. “Everyone would take a turn at a long night with Golda so that someone would be awake the next day at the UN.”

In between negotiations, Golda went on the stump, convinced she could move Americans, especially American Jews, to pressure Eisen- hower. “Had we waited for our Pearl Harbor, we wouldn’t be here to tell the tale,” she told an audience in Baltimore. Can you imagine what it’s like to live with editorials in Arab newspapers saying that only Israel’s disappearance can bring peace? What it’s like to be a citizen of a small country without a single alliance when Soviet dignitaries regularly visit Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut?

Initially, Golda was articulating Ben-Gurion’s position as well as her own. But when the French foreign minister mooted a compromise, Ben- Gurion backed down for fear of jeopardizing Israel’s partnership with France. The scenario he and Eban devised in negotiation with the Amer- icans was that Golda would deliver a speech to the UN announcing that Israel would withdraw from the Egyptian territories on three conditions:

(a) that Israeli ships be allowed to pass through the Straits of Tiran, (b) that United Nations troops would monitor the cease-fire at Sharm el- Sheikh and administer the Gaza strip, and (c) that Israel would have the right to strike back if Egypt tried to prevent Israeli navigation or allowed fedayeen to cross its borders. As soon as she did so, Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, would rise and pledge U.S. support for those understandings.

Eban hammered out the text of Golda’s speech, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles checking every syllable and comma. When Golda received it, she balked. She understood the dangers of defying world opinion. But withdrawal with no solution to the underlying prob- lems, she believed, would lay the groundwork for another war, and she certainly saw no reason to trust Eisenhower or the United Nations.

“Let’s just have it printed and distributed to all the delegates,” she sug- gested to her staff—many of whom shared her sentiments—at a late meet- ing the night before she was to deliver the speech. “If you give that statement, you will be a traitor,” warned her friend Amiel Najar. Eban, who’d patiently cut the deal and organized delegates to support it, walked out, slamming the door behind him.