Golda (36 page)

photograph by yaakov saar, courtesy of government press office, state of israel.

Golda berating Henry Kissinger,

U.S. secretary of state, outside her home in Ramat Aviv, 1975.

photography by yaakov saar, courtesy of government press office, state of israel.

Golda with Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, leader of the British Conservative Party, in Tel Aviv, 1976.
photograph by moshe milner,

courtesy of government press

office, state of israel.

Golda with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at a meeting of the Labor alignment Knesset faction, Jerusalem, 1977.
photograph from

yaakov saar, courtesy of

government press office, state of israel.

Portrait of Golda Meir, 1976.

photograph by yaakov saar, courtesy of government press office, state of israel.

Given the era and Golda’s position as the first Western female to head a state, it was inevitable that she would become a feminist icon, and, initially, the lionizing puzzled her. The first time she saw a women’s movement poster with her photograph and a caption reading, “But can she type?” Golda laughed. “You know, I never did learn to type,” she re- marked.

Golda did have her moments of feminist sensibility. Shortly after the first Knesset was formed, journalists asked how members should be ad- dressed, by their first names, last names, or both? David Remez said that he thought the public should call them by their given names followed by their father’s. Why not their mothers’ names? Golda asked.

When one cabinet minister suggested a curfew on women to deal with an outbreak of assaults on women at night, Golda countered, “But it’s the men who are attacking the women. If there’s to be a curfew,” she decreed, “let the men stay at home.”

But special considerations for women rankled her, as they had when she was active in the Women’s Council before the creation of the state. When Israel’s nascent feminist movement asked that 25 percent of the Labor Party’s seats on the Histadrut Executive be reserved for women, Golda agreed only grudgingly. “In a free, egalitarian society, there should be no need for a legal defense of women’s position, which should be achieved on merit only, irrespective of gender,” she said. “But reality not being what it should be, better to be ashamed that we have to pass such a ruling than not to pass it.”

Organized feminism, however, struck no chord with her, and she did nothing to conceal her hostility to the movement. “What do they have to be liberated from?” she asked. “Are they bored?” Queried about handi- caps she might have felt because of her gender, she responded scornfully, “I don’t know—I’ve never tried to be a man.” And when asked about the Women’s Liberation movement, she sneered. “Do you mean those crazy women who burn their bras and go around all disheveled and hate men?” she asked. “They’re crazy. Crazy.”

Golda enjoyed traditional femininity too much to identify with

feminism. Despite her old-fashioned clothes and antipathy to makeup, she was a vain woman. Her nails were always manicured, and she never went to bed without washing and brushing her hair. “I’m a realist and I suppose if I believed that I could go to a beauty parlor and I would re- ally become beautiful, I suppose I would have done it,” she said. “But I knew that it wouldn’t help.”

Flirting with men was a standard part of her repertoire, both person- ally and politically. At parties and receptions, she carefully checked out the clothes of the other women, gossiping cattily about their style and fashionability. And she bragged about her emotionalism, women’s emo- tionalism. “It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head,” she once said. “Well, what if I do? . . . Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.”

Thinking of herself as a Jewish pathbreaker rather than a feminist pio- neer, she conceded only that career women faced a tougher road than men. “After all, it’s the woman who gives birth. It’s the woman who raises the children. . . . When a woman also wants to work, to be somebody . . . well, it’s hard. . . . More difficult, more tiring, more painful.

“But not necessarily through the fault of men—for biological rea- sons.”

* * *

During the struggle against the British, Golda became steeped in a po- litical culture of clandestine planning and tight-lipped discipline, and, like so many other rebels-turned-rulers, she never made a comfortable transition from the essential furtiveness and obedience of the under- ground to the openness necessary in the halls of power of a democracy. The specter of leaks, breaches of discipline, and loss of control haunted her as if she were still coordinating insurrection against the authorities rather than wielding the authority herself. By the time she became prime minister, she had become adept at dealing with challenges from within the political system. But meeting challenges from outside it eluded her. A

dynamic democracy, after all, requires deftness and subtlety; Golda pos- sessed neither.

Israel’s increasingly aggressive press became her bête noire with its constant questions and perennial skepticism, which felt like treason to her. How dare newspapers publish whatever they want? she declaimed, as if the role of the media, like that of the workers, was to serve the state. Faced with leaks, she snippily informed journalists that giving out details of closed meetings was theft and reporters who published such details guilty of “receiving stolen property.”

“If you can’t control the press, run from it” was her motto. “There is one thing they won’t say after my death, that newspapermen were de- lighted with me,” Golda boasted. “I’m prepared to suffer unpopularity.”

Golda didn’t shy away from foreign journalists, assuming she could manipulate them. Her favorite tactic when they confronted her about the peace process was to shut them down by pulling out the
Gvilei Eish (Parchment of Fire),
four volumes filled with the names and photographs of every Israeli who had fallen in battle. She’d read pieces of poetry left behind by Israel’s heroes, leaving most foreign reporters too emotionally battered to question her with much vigor.

But Israeli journalists learned to steer clear of her, knowing that she would object to virtually anything they wrote. “She was very thin-skinned,” remarked Naftali Lavi, a journalist who later became Dayan’s spokesman. “She could be really sarcastic with journalists. If you wrote something she didn’t like, you knew it from her infamous nasty look.”

Rolf Kneller, who photographed her often, still recalls how small she made him feel. “In front of Golda, you felt yourself put in your place. She could be charming as hell with a coquettish smile. But many, many peo- ple were afraid of her.”

Challenges from the media were hard enough for Golda to handle, but when they spread to the public, she was lost, confounded by citizens’ growing penchant for questioning government actions and for refusing to accept them. In the summer of 1972, she confronted her first open act of civil disobedience when the villagers of Bir’im and Ikrit, Israeli Arabs

who’d been forcibly evacuated in 1948 “until the security situation allows their return,” returned home although the government had denied them permission to do so.

For Golda, the matter was simple: the IDF had concluded that the vil- lagers’ presence almost on the Lebanese border was a security hazard, so the Arab peasants should be removed. But their plight became a cause célèbre in intellectual circles, and twenty writers called on Golda to jus- tify the government’s behavior. “Security concerns,” she explained, ex- pecting that the matter would end there. After all, what respectable Israeli would dare question security? The writers did, however, and de- manded a meeting with the prime minister. Never one to shrink from such gatherings, Golda agreed.

For nearly seven hours, with her daughter, Sarah, serving tea, Golda haggled with the writers, citing the dangerous precedent the return of the villagers might establish with Palestinian refugees. “They’re Israeli na- tionals whose sons have served in the IDF,” countered Haim Hefer, one of Israel’s most prominent songwriters and filmmakers. “A grave injustice has been done.”

But Golda wouldn’t talk about justice, even when the writers threat- ened to form a permanent opposition bloc. “She couldn’t see justice in any position but her own,” recalled Hefer. “She liked people who kissed her shoes, and she didn’t know how to deal with people who didn’t.”

Golda was uniquely unprepared, then, when Israel’s first popular up- rising erupted on her doorstep in March 1971. The first sign of trouble was a flood of leaflets and crudely drawn posters announcing a demon- stration at the square by Jerusalem’s City Hall. enough, they read in bold letters. “Enough of unemployment. Enough of watching apart- ments being built for new immigrants while we have to sleep ten per- sons in one room. Enough of government promises that are never kept. Enough of police brutality. Enough of exploitation. Enough of discrimi- nation.” They were signed by the Panthereim Shechorim, the Black Panthers.

A politically astute group of North African youth had seized on the

name of the bad boys of the American civil rights movement to force the government to address the widespread discrimination against the
miz- rachim,
Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent. Charges of inequality were a touchy issue in Israel, especially with Golda, but the distance between poverty and wealth in Israel was more often than not measured in ethnicity. For every dollar an Eastern European Jewish fam- ily earned, a
mizrachi
family brought in just 69 cents. Although more than two-thirds of Israel’s elementary school children were
mizrachi,
that percentage plummeted to 18 percent in high schools and 5 percent at the university. And in the halls of power, the dominance of Eastern Euro- pean Jews was overwhelming.

“One percent in the Knesset, 96 percent in jails,” a Black Panther pamphlet proclaimed.

The Panthers reserved particular contempt for Golda because of her long commitment to Soviet Jews. No matter her official position, after her stay in Moscow, Golda kept the international spotlight on Soviet Jewry at rallies and meetings. Moved by the courage of men and women who were fired from their jobs, expelled from school, or arrested simply for asking for permission to emigrate, Golda never had a conversation with an American president or senator, with her comrades at the Socialist International, or with Diaspora leaders in which she failed to make a plea for world pressure on the Soviets to allow Russia’s Jews to leave.

By the time Golda became prime minister, the gates had begun to crack open. And unlike the North African and Middle Eastern Jews, who’d been offered tents or tiny houses when they’d arrived, the Soviet Jews were being welcomed with spacious garden-style apartments. Car- ried away by the liberation of
her
people—and there was no doubt that Golda felt that special historical bond—at one meeting she’d waxed nos- talgically that any Jew who didn’t speak Yiddish wasn’t a real Jew.

“Imagine how we felt as we watched all this,” said Kochavi Shemesh, one of the original Panthers and now an attorney in Jerusalem. “Our families were still living ten people crammed into miserable old houses, and Golda was busy talking about us as if we weren’t ‘real Jews.’