Golda (37 page)

“She was our special target. We came up with the name Black Pan- thers to frighten her.”

Golda had the Black Panther leaders thrown into preventive detention to forestall their first demonstration, but she showed little sign of such fear. The young protesters were nothing but a gang of school dropouts and military rejects who lived on the margins of society, after all. When they threatened to go on a hunger strike at the Western Wall unless Golda agreed to meet with them, she didn’t hesitate to schedule time for them—although she offered them little satisfaction.

“We felt like we were meeting with a social worker, not a prime minis- ter,” recalled Shemesh. “We demanded slum clearance, more money for education, youth rehabilitation and housing. She offered us historical ra- tionales, pages from Zionist history, and a lecture about the expense of security.

“All we got out of the meeting was cigarettes. We’d forgotten to bring ours, so we helped ourselves to the box on her table.”

But the following week, Golda felt the first stirrings of foreboding. On the Night of the Panthers, as Israelis came to call it, what began as a rou- tine public meeting about the plight of the
mizrachim
turned into a rau- cous march up Jaffa Street in downtown Jerusalem, hundreds of people chanting, “Golda, teach us Yiddish” and “Either the cake will be shared by all or there won’t be any cake!”

As the demonstrators converged on Zion Square, their numbers swelled to more than 5,000, and hundreds of helmeted police backed up by water cannons ordered them to disperse. When they refused, the po- lice attacked and the young men fought back, breaking shop windows and beating up policemen. All night, the battle raged. By the morning, 150 panthers had been arrested and their families were demonstrating outside of Golda’s house.

The violence enraged Golda, and when the president of the Moroc- can Immigrants Association called the Panthers our “sometimes nice friends” a few days later, she exploded. “They are not nice boys,” she ex- claimed. “How can a Jew throw a Molotov cocktail at another Jew or at a

Jewish building. Are these nice people? Perhaps they were good once and I hope they will be good in the future, but they certainly are not good now.”

Her comment inflamed not only
mizrachim
but also many Eastern European Jews. And every time Golda opened her mouth, she made things worse. At one point, she offered her explanation for why the Eastern Jews were lagging behind their European counterparts. They “brought deprivation and discrimination with them in their baggage from their countries of origin. . . . Fate caused them to live in countries that did not develop—in terms of education, industry, culture, etc.—and therefore they lack intellectual capabilities. They have it inside, but it was suppressed so that they haven’t developed it as did Jews from Europe or America.”

What, to Golda, sounded like a reasonable statement touched off an- other wave of fury at what was heard by Iraqi lawyers, Iranian intellectu- als, and Algerian businessmen as not-so-subtle racism. And she kept digging herself deeper into that same hole. “What has happened to us?” she asked on the floor of the Knesset, her deep voice rising in frustration. “What has happened to our understanding? To our self-discipline? We are behaving as if there were no danger ahead of us, as if we had already achieved the peace we long for.”

Insulted at the implication that they did not care about Israel, the Pan- thers tacked up wanted posters with Golda’s visage: “Wanted for violence against the panthers . . . for robbing poor families . . . for character assas- sination.”

At that point, Golda began having trouble sleeping, and with good reason. Panther groups had sprung up all across the country asking why the government was spending millions of dollars on marble floors for Jerusalem theaters rather than on playgrounds for poor children. In July, they streamed into Jerusalem for the Quiet Demonstration, a well-con- trolled protest of more than three thousand Israelis denouncing racism, seeking strong government action against poverty, and calling for Gol- da’s resignation. A month later, they returned to Zion Square and burned Golda in effigy. “A state in which half the population are kings and the

other half are treated as exploited slaves—we will burn it down!” they shouted.

Responding like the well-schooled bureaucrat, Golda appointed a spe- cial commission, the Prime Minister’s Committee Concerning Children and Youth in Distress, to make recommendations for streamlining Israel’s response to poverty and called for volunteers to help underprivileged children with their homework. Although she began using her bully pulpit to acknowledge the problems of poverty, she always gave the government a bit of an out. “A nation at war cannot be better off during the war than before it,” she propounded patiently, although few took her seriously.

Predictably, her rhetoric did nothing to cool the Panthers’ ardor. Al- though the ragtag group splintered, they kept up the pressure. A year after they first surfaced, they began nightly Robin Hood forays into Golda’s neighborhood, which was largely European, stealing bottles of milk and leaving tags reading, “The children in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods do not find the milk that they need at their doorstep each morning. In con- trast, there are cats and dogs in rich neighborhoods that get plenty of milk, day in–day out.” And they invaded a Histadrut convention, silently raising placards reading Golda, go home and 300,000 children are hungry.

For the
mizrachim,
it was a defining moment, especially in their rela- tionship with the Labor Party. Month after month, they listened as Golda explained, in utter sincerity, how defense spending left little money for slum clearance and why charges of discrimination were baseless. They listened. But they never once heard her admit to the racism that everyone knew existed or watched her treat their plight as an emergency.

It fact, it never was to Golda. Not that she was indifferent to poverty. Nor was she blind to
mizrachim
and their problems. But the charge of discrimination cut too deep in a woman whose vision was clouded by her own progressive self-image and by her utopian fantasy of a Jewish home- land in which all the scars and ruptures left by 2,000 years of exile would vanish in a paroxysm of brotherhood. Ultimately, the
mizrachim
were not part of Golda’s Israel, which, like her old neighborhood in Milwaukee, was a modernized shtetl of Yiddish-speakers and secular Jews.

In June 1973, more than two years after the first Black Panthers were thrown into preventive detention, the Prime Minister’s Commission pre- sented the government of Israel with its final report, a 750-page docu- ment laying out a broad program of reform—a negative income tax, recalculation of children’s allowances and old age pensions, the revamp- ing of the educational system, the funding of informal educational facili- ties, and new initiatives in housing.

The next government, Golda promised, the one that would be elected in October 1973, would deal vigorously with the committee’s recommen- dations.

chapter fourteen

Moses dragged us for forty years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.

G

olda hadn’t been prime minister for a month before the telephone by her bed started ringing in the middle of the night with the news

that another soldier had been killed in the Egyptian shelling of Israeli positions in the Sinai. Some nights, the reports weren’t quite so awful, two troops lightly wounded or a bunker exploded. Once, an operator called at three a.m. to inform her that twenty-six sheep had been killed in an attack, and then a few minutes later to correct the information: the number was really twenty-five.

Golda had left orders that she be informed about every skirmish, no matter how minor, and it was fortunate that she didn’t need much sleep. In May, June, and July 1969, after Nasser launched the War of Attrition, the Egyptian bombardment came nightly, killing 47 Israeli soldiers, wound- ing another 157. The fedayeen in Jordan lobbed mortar shells onto Israeli settlements an average of every third day. During one ten-hour period of intense night fighting, Israel Lior, her military attaché, phoned eight separate times.

On off nights, when the phone didn’t ring, Golda still heard the jar- ring tones in her recurring nightmares. “Suddenly all the telephones in my home start ringing,” she told her friend Yaakov Hazan. “There are a lot of phones, located in every corner of the house, and they don’t stop. I know what the ringing means, and I’m afraid to pick up all the receivers. I wake up covered in a cold sweat. It’s quiet in the house. I breathe a sigh of relief, but I can’t get back to sleep. I know that if I fall back to sleep, the dream will return.”

Even when the dream did not, the stark reality haunted Golda’s days, magnified by the din of hostile rhetoric emanating from Cairo and Da- mascus, Beirut and Baghdad. In November 1969, Nasser decreed that Egypt would forge “a road toward our objective, violently and by force, over a sea of blood and a horizon of fire.” Six months later, Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, fulminated, “We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed. . . . We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.” All the leading Arab figures weighed in, with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia declaiming, “All countries should wage war against the Zionists, who are there to destroy all human organizations and to de- stroy civilization and the work which good people are trying to do.”

* * *

While Israelis cocooned themselves in an illusory euphoria over the depth of their borders and their military prowess, Golda lived in terror that twenty years of existence could be wiped out in an instant if she made the wrong decision or took the wrong bargaining stance. Apprehen- sive about her own security savvy, she compensated with steely determi- nation not to swerve from the formula she believed was the key to peace: Israel and her neighbors needed to negotiate directly and sign a peace treaty. Then Israel would withdraw to the “secure borders” agreed upon. Golda did everything she could to instigate such talks, although there wasn’t much she could do beyond announcing repeatedly that she was ready to go to Cairo, “on an hour’s notice—in the time it takes to pack a

suitcase.” But the Arabs had a different formula for peace: the Israelis had to withdraw to their pre-1967 lines before the warring parties could begin to negotiate, indirectly, for a nonbelligerency pact or some other sort of agreement short of a treaty.

Since Golda showed no inclination to accept that blueprint, Nasser, without whom no other Arab leader would dare make a move, ignored her and the Arab world mocked her offer. “Mrs. Meir is prepared to go to Cairo to hold discussions with President Nasser but, to her sorrow, has not been invited,” opined one Jordanian newspaper. “She believes that one fine day a world without guns will emerge in the Middle East. Golda Meir is behaving like a grandmother telling bedtime stories to her grand- children.”

Stymied by the fundamental difference in approach, and convinced that the Arabs weren’t serious in any case, Golda concluded that Israel could do nothing but sit tight on the occupied territories, Israel’s bargain- ing chip. “Why should we talk about giving back these territories? There is no one to give them to, even if we wanted. . . . We can’t send them to Nasser by parcel post.”

The rest of the world wasn’t inclined to wait for Golda to receive an invitation to Cairo and dozens of diplomats, thinkers, and diplomatic wannabes offered up peace plans, although few planned Israel’s peace without some wider agenda. Since the United Nations had proven embar- rassingly inept in dealing with the Middle East, the Big Two—the United States and the Soviet Union—held their own Middle East peace talks, as did the Big Four, the wider circle including France and Great Britain.

None of those countries could lay claim to being a neutral arbiter. The military quartermasters of the Arabs, the Soviets had designs on military expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, and the French were desperate to repair their relationship with oil-rich countries still suspicious of Alge- ria’s colonial master. Britain’s history in the region was too fraught with resentment to give London any moral authority with either side.

And the United States was torn by so many competing, often conflict- ing, agendas that it was often difficult to tell whose side Washington

really was on. Hungry to build a solid foreign policy legacy, Richard Nixon threw the United States full bore into resolving the long Middle East conflict, but his primary goal was to use the regional conflict as a wedge toward détente with the Soviet Union. Less optimistic about Nix- on’s grand design for linking regional wars to the East-West contest, the State Department struggled to shore up U.S.-Arab relations and protect American oil interests.

While American Jewish leaders used their political clout to enlist scores of senators and congressmen to a pro-Israel foreign policy, business and industry leaders pushed in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, the bumbling but genial William Rogers, the U.S. secretary of state, who had not a whit of foreign experience, took pains to prove that he could outne- gotiate Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, who knew as little about the Middle East as he did.