Golda (28 page)

But Peres and Dayan didn’t think of Dimona as a bargaining chip.

They were determined not to trade away Israel’s nuclear program.

* * *

Locked out of negotiations with France, sidelined by Ben-Gurion in the development of policy toward the Arab world, and bypassed in dealings with the United States by the prime minister’s penchant for calling Abba Eban directly, Golda devised another outlet for both Israeli foreign policy and her own energies. In a world increasingly organized into blocs and alliances, of Cold War tensions and anticolonialist fervor, Israel was de- tached, invited to join none of the international confederations. Prompted by Socialist idealism, shrewd political calculation, and more than a dash of personal ambition, Golda strategized her own alliance, of Israel and the soon-to-emerge black African states.

In February 1958, during tough days of angry arguments with Egypt and the United Nations, Golda flew to West Africa for the opening gam- bit of her new game plan and was an immediate hit. In Liberia, the old Jewish woman was crowned a paramount chief at a mass rally of twelve hundred women, who decked Golda out in traditional robes. In Lagos, Nigeria’s first president threw a garden party in her honor. In Dakar, she attended the opening of the Grand Council of African leaders of French West Africa and invited, it seemed, everyone she met to visit Israel. And on the eve of her departure from Ghana, at an enormous farewell cock- tail party in her honor hosted by Kojo Botsio, President Kwame Nk- rumah’s closest colleague, she and a small group of Israelis taught 300 Nigerians the hora and then she stumbled through West Africa’s most popular dance, the high life, with the foreign minister.

“Independence came to us, as it was coming to Africa, not served up on a silver platter but after years of struggle,” Golda told quizzical Israeli jour- nalists. “Like them, we had to shake off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together and how to defend ourselves. . . . We have been forced to find solutions to problems that large, wealthy, powerful states had never encountered.”

How can we help? Golda had asked Nkrumah during their first meet- ing. When he mentioned his desire for his own ships to reduce the cost of exporting cacao and importing manufactured goods, Golda arranged for Israel’s Zim Lines to help him start Black Star Lines. For the construction support he needed, she charged Solel Boneh with creating a joint venture with the Ghana Industrial Development Corporation to build Accra’s in- ternational airport, main highways, and main plaza. And she sent Israelis to set up demonstration farms, reorganize the Cooperative Bank, teach management courses, and help design both irrigation and drinking water systems.

To the consternation of her staff at the Foreign Ministry, Golda rarely drew on diplomatic professionals for African assignments, sending in- stead kibbutzniks, builders, union activists, and other hands-on special-

ists with instructions to “tell them about the mistakes we made so they won’t repeat them.”

Hanan Aynor, who Golda chose to run Mashav, the division of inter- national cooperation she established, was awed by how involved the for- eign minister became. “She mobilized top people through her personal appeal,” he recalled. “And she mobilized a lot of money at a time when people in Israel were eating only one or two eggs a week. She was in- volved in everything, meeting with me twice a day or more, meeting with every Israeli who went out. If something didn’t work, she inter- vened. Africans knew that she was sincere, and that broke Israel’s circle of isolation.”

Golda’s early efforts were not without tragicomic relief. After she learned that West African farmers had an annual income below $100, she began promoting the idea of teaching them about poultry, perhaps a ves- tige of her own kibbutz experience. With a low investment, Golda rea- soned, African farmers could raise a few chickens and eggs to supplement their meager incomes. But she didn’t know—none of the Israelis knew— that neither the Hausa nor the Wolof ate white meat or eggs. “When I arrived as ambassador to Senegal, then, I was surprised to find an over- production of eggs in the country,” said Aynor. “The consumption was urban and europeanized and there was never much of a market.”

In December 1958, Golda made her way into the heart of the African liberation struggle, courtesy of an invitation from George Padmore, the father of the pan-African movement, to meet in a special session with the 500 delegates to the first All-African People’s Conference, including many of Africa’s most prominent rebels, statesmen, and union leaders.

Through Padmore, Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and dozens of other anticolonial activists befriended by Israelis on the ground, Israel became intimately involved with liberation movements across the continent, es- tablishing many of their intelligence schools; training men like General China, one of Kenya’s most notorious Mau-Mau rebels; and financing the Accra office of Robert Mugabe after he was jailed for his opposition activities in Rhodesia.

Golda became a familiar figure across Africa, logging thousands of miles on annual, sometimes biannual, trips. During Liberian president William V. S. Tubman’s fourth inauguration, she marched on the arm of the Liberian foreign minister. In 1960, she spent New Year’s Eve celebrat- ing the independence of Cameroon and was asked to head the jury for the selection of Miss Independence.

Every year, Israel’s aid—although Golda banned the word, preferring “cooperation”—to Africa broadened and deepened. In Nigeria, Israelis built the house of parliament, hotels, roads, and bridges. In the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, they developed potable water projects, and in Uganda they paved the road to the Rwandan border and established a citrus industry. The Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School trained hundreds of African health care professionals, while the Tech- nion, Israel’s institute of technology, prepared the first generation of engi- neers.

When famine struck Dahomey in 1962, Golda sent in a massive ship- ment of goods, and after the Belgians abruptly pulled out of the Congo, leaving the country with no physicians, it was to Golda that Dag Ham- merskjöld and Patrice Lumumba turned for help. Her staff reported that there simply weren’t enough Israeli doctors and nurses available to ship out at short notice, so Golda mobilized the Israeli army medical corps, which sent a team of forty-eight doctors and nurses on a special B-28 within three days.

“Back then, if you told a taxi driver in Conakry or Lagos that you were Israeli, he got excited,” recalled Shlomo Hillel, former Israeli ambassador to Conakry and Abidjan. “We weren’t just politically involved. It was a moral issue for us, and people knew it.”

Africans became a common sight in Israel, and Golda’s calendar was jammed with visits from a who’s who of the continent. In June 1961 alone, she hosted Milton Obote, chairman of the Ugandan People’s Con- gress; the consul general of Ethiopia; and the director of cultural rela- tions of the Foreign Ministry of Mali. She sat for an interview with the editor of the
Accra Daily Graphic,
hosted a luncheon for the minister of

natural resources of Sierra Leone, and gave the Tanganyikan minister of transport a tour of Jerusalem.

Golda never pretended that Israel was acting in a purely humanitarian vein. “We don’t want to hide the fact that with Africa becoming indepen- dent and the countries taking their place in what is called the family of nations, naturally Israel was interested that all these peoples and coun- tries should be friends of Israel and not enemies. . . . But . . . there is something much more basic about this, something instinctive. . . . A Jew- ish state that is not sensitive to discrimination and to the suffering of people on that basis would not be true to itself.”

Israel was an almost ideal partner for African leaders anxious for help. Europe was hopelessly tainted by its colonial past and too obviously hun- gry to find new means of exploiting Third World wealth and strategic posi- tions to be trusted. And the lessons taught by both Europe and the United States seemed too distant from the African experience to be irrelevant. Having just ousted Britain from Palestine and assimilated almost a million refugees, even while creating world-class universities, advanced agricul- ture, and an industrial infrastructure, Israel had a certain panache that offered hope, a glimmer of what Africa might accomplish.

“You have not tried to create us in your image,” said President David Dacko of the Central African Republic during his 1962 visit to Israel. “Instead, Israel has contented itself with showing the new African nations its achievements, in helping them overcome their weaknesses, in assist- ing them in learning. In so doing, you have conquered Black Africa.”

Ben-Gurion remained unconvinced by the growing involvement with Africa. Why spend so much money sending our people to Africa and bringing African dignitaries here? he asked. Golda responded impa- tiently. “Imagine that instead of coming to see us, all these presidents went to see Nasser.”

Undaunted by Ben-Gurion’s skepticism, Golda continued her African peregrinations. By the time Zambia achieved independence in the fall of 1964, she was an expected member of the gathering of the African clan among the likes of Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, and

Léopold Senghor. On that trip, her stock skyrocketed during a group visit to Victoria Falls. Rhodesian border guards attempted to separate the dig- nitaries crossing over from Zambia into separate lines for blacks and whites. “No, thank you,” Golda said, turning back toward the Zambia border post. “I can do without the Falls.”

The one African country she did not visit was South Africa, despite invitations from the local Jewish community, 100,000 strong. And in 1962, she provoked a crisis with them when she directed Israel’s United Nations delegation to support antiapartheid resolutions at the General Assembly. Africans “have the right—and justly so—to expect Israel’s sup- port in their fight for liberty and freedom,” she professed. A year later, she declined to replace Israel’s representative in Pretoria, a move Prime Min- ister Hendrik Verwoerd labeled “a slap in the face of South African Jews.”

Golda’s undertakings did not go unnoticed by her enemies, of course. In the fall of 1960, the Arab League began sending Egyptian economic missions to Africa, and Radio Cairo reported that a special official had been appointed to direct an anti-Israel offensive there.

“The danger lurks under the glittering surface of trade and aid offered by Israel to some emerging African States,” the League warned Africans. “Tel Aviv’s offers have been, in reality, a facade for neo-colonialism.”

The Arab counterattack made some headway. In January 1961, the Casablanca Conference, a meeting of senior government officials from Morocco, Egypt, Ghana, Libya, the Algerian Provisional Government, Guinea, and Mali, denounced Israel as “an instrument in the service of imperialism and neo-colonialism.” Two months later, the All-African People’s Conference, which had once embraced Golda, passed a resolu- tion condemning Israel, along with the United States, West Germany, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa, and France, for neoco- lonialism.

Taking the long view, Golda nonetheless forged ahead, convinced that if she stayed out of the politics of Africa and put no pressure on African leaders to take sides in the Middle East conflict, Egypt’s attempt to isolate

Israel from “the family of African peoples,” as she called them, would fail. For a while, she succeeded. Despite Casablanca, at the 1963 Conference of Independent African States, Nasser didn’t raise the Israel issue, having ascertained that he had little support. On the floor of the General Assem- bly, where Chad’s vote weighed as heavily as England’s, the growing num- ber of African delegations insulated Israel, time and again, from Arab and Soviet hostility.

During a 1964 visit to Nigeria, Golda received a strong show of sup- port against attacks stirred up by local Arab emissaries, who organized their wives to demonstrate against an invitation to Golda from the Na- tional Council of Women’s Societies. “Diplomatic impudence and abuse of Nigerian hospitality,” the Lagos
Sunday Express
branded the Arab ac- tion. The Nigerian government sent a strongly worded diplomatic note informing the Arab missions that they would tolerate no interference in internal affairs.

For Golda personally, the relationship with Africa, what
Newsweek
called “one of the strangest unofficial alliances in the world,” rekindled an idealism that was beginning to flag. Israel had not turned out to be the Socialist country—the country without prisons, cheats, or criminals— that she’d fantasized back in Milwaukee, and Africa reawakened her old- est romantic spark. “You’ll forgive me—but . . . I wouldn’t dare—I admit my cowardice—to preach Socialism to a mother whose children are run- ning around naked and barefoot, with little children, two, three, four years old running around with big bellies as a result of malaria,” she con- fessed. “My Socialist duty is to see, to do everything I possibly can that those children should be fed and clothed and healthy and guaranteed a minimum education.”

At a time when Golda was lonely, often sick, humiliated by Ben-Gur- ion, and treated with hostility at the United Nations, Africa provided her with a lavish dose of kinship, affection, even veneration. In Jerusalem, she tried to keep the elegant foreign minister’s residence filled with friends and their children, but it was too stately for her puritanical tastes, too often empty of anyone other than Yehudit the cook and Esther the

cleaning woman. “A woman so popular, so much appreciated with a fol- lowing worldwide, the center of attraction, was lonely,” recalled Zena Harmon, one of Golda’s friends in that era. “She would call to chat and gossip. She would do nice things, like send flowers because she wanted a phone call to say thank you, someone to talk to.”

But in Africa, she was always surrounded by tribesmen singing and revolutionary leaders paying her tribute. Her office was swamped with letters from ordinary Africans, letters of affection, letters asking for help, announcements that a female child in a village in Ghana had been named for her, or requests for her to serve as a godmother. On a continent where ancestors play a pivotal role in daily life, Golda became a sort of ancestor figure.