Golda (39 page)

When the Americans denied what she was seeing in aerial photo- graphs—the movement of battery after battery of Russian SAM-2 and SAM-3 missiles—Golda threatened to cancel all negotiations with Jarring, and some members of her cabinet urged her to take more aggressive action by ordering a preemptive strike against those batteries. For three weeks, the United States resisted admitting what was happening, arguing that it had found “no conclusive evidence of violation.” By the time the CIA ac- knowledged that their evidence, too, showed that the Egyptians had moved fifteen new missile batteries into the truce zone, Nixon knew that it was too late to demand their withdrawal. So he mollified Golda by rush- ing specialized electronic countermeasures equipment and Shrike air-to- ground missiles to Israel, a token contribution that hardly corrected the military balance. But before the end of the month, he promised her an- other eighteen Phantom jets as well as some Skyhawks and M-60 tanks.

It was the beginning of a new cycle in Israeli-American relations. The United States would push too hard, or too clumsily, in its quest to link détente or its relationship with the Arab world to the future of Israel. Golda would freak out and either phone Washington directly or call in the American ambassador and lecture him about pogroms in Russia. (Af- ter the tenth time hearing the same story, Ambassador Walworth Barbour could no longer take it and said, “I didn’t mind the first few times, but every time I want to find out where Israeli troops are in a raid, we have to

start in Russia.”) To pacify her, Nixon would release a few planes or tanks, and Golda would calm down until the next mini-crisis.

* * *

Against the backdrop of a dozen cease-fire violations, the breach of the military standstill was a small matter. For Golda, however, it was a defin- ing moment. Peace initiatives, after all, presuppose a certain level of faith, or at least trust. Hardly a trusting person, Golda was left even more suspicious, particularly of the American efforts and of international guar- antees.

“Everybody tells us that there is no such thing in the world today as secure borders,” she declared at a rally in London. “Yet I haven’t seen any people stepping back from their borders and saying, ‘We don’t care what our borders are.’ . . . They tell us there will be international guarantees. . . . Does any other people depend on international guaran- tees? No. But we should. And if we don’t, we’re stubborn or intransigent or not accommodating or we don’t care about public relations.”

The points of reference Golda brought to the peace process, as to al- most everything else in her life, traced back to her past, and they didn’t encourage optimism or risk taking. When Golda heard Arab threats, she flashed back to her father’s helplessness in the Ukraine, to Poland and Germany, and instinctively became haunted by the specter of a new Ho- locaust, an Arab Holocaust.

Her experience in the Middle East had only reinforced those old phantasms. Golda had lived through three major series of Arab riots, three wars, economic embargoes, boycotts, and the closure of interna- tional waterways. Arab leaders had not renounced the Khartoum NOs, and their radio stations and newspapers printed a steady stream of anti- Jewish and anti-Israeli invective. The Beirut daily
Al Moharrer,
for ex- ample, demanded that Barbra Streisand films be banned, as had been Omar Sharif ’s films after the Egyptian actor kissed Streisand in
Funny Girl,
a clear sign that he had become too close to Jews.

And every time the world’s would-be peacemakers berated her for fail-

ing to produce a peace map, Golda flashed back to the Peel Commission and a dozen other British attempts to extricate themselves from Palestine that ended in an argument over borders instead of wider issues.

When Golda added up what she had seen and experienced, what she was still seeing and experiencing, she saw no reason to believe that the Arabs were interested in peace. “If the Arabs felt that they could have a war and win, we would have had another war a year ago and six months ago and yesterday,” she reasoned. “They aren’t deterred because they don’t like war. . . . If they don’t attack us in an outright war it is because they know exactly what is going to happen.”

So no matter how often her sister Clara, who brought an American leftist’s perspective to Middle East affairs, asked her to try to empathize with the Arabs, and she did so regularly, or how frequently Eban and oth- ers told her not to confuse rhetoric with reality, Golda couldn’t hear the menacing diatribes as bombast. For her, they were the rantings of a new group of anti-Semites plotting to murder Jews.

When the self-styled peacemakers preached to her about Nasser’s warnings that her rigidity would lead to war, she fell back on images straight from the shtetl, especially the tale of the man in a czarist vil- lage who always knew when horses were about to be stolen—because he was the gonif, the thief. “When Nasser warns that there’s going to be a war with Israel, how does he know?” she asked. “Because he’s the gonif.”

Nasser wasn’t Golda’s only target. Knowing that Nixon was meeting with oil company executives and Kissinger was dreaming of détente, Golda lashed out at American pressure for Israel to withdraw to its pre- 1967 boundaries. “This is not the border of the USA but of the Jewish people,” she preached. “Why should we be the ones to serve as guinea pigs for borders? . . . Why should we be the only country in the world that agrees to become a protectorate surrounded by a framework people by Americans, Russians, Yugoslavs, and Indians? . . . Some say it is bad for our image if we stand firm. What did Czechoslovakia lack in the way of a good image, yet Soviet tanks rode into Prague?”

In the halls of diplomacy, Golda was being asked to trade land for vaguely worded Egyptian promises of nonbelligerency, and she was in- tent on forcing the Americans and Europeans to understand that the land in question protected Israeli settlers in the north from the potshots of Syrian gunners, the nation’s commerce from the strangulation of trade through the Straits of Tiran, and the center of the country from Egyptian columns massing on a border within hours of downtown Tel Aviv.

It wasn’t just the substance of the proposals that dismayed her but the idea of having an agreement foisted upon Israel by outsiders. She had an almost religious belief in the value of direct negotiations, of enemies sit- ting together to bury their swords. “It would be a fatal error to try to ex- plain Israel’s stand in psychological terms such as stubbornness, suspicion, and the like while disregarding our balanced attitude,” she cautioned several months after taking office. “In principle, we do not hold a situa- tion whereby powers arrogate to themselves the right to discuss the desti- nies of nations and countries without the participation of those concerned, and in lieu of immediate colloquy between the nations themselves.”

As Golda entrenched herself in a sort of one-woman siege mentality, a mythology took root, Golda “the intransigent,” as her opponents called her, and her sharp tongue and caustic rhetoric left them plenty of ammu- nition. In response to entreaties that she take the Arab mentality more seriously and leave Nasser room to pluck honor from his shame, she said, “We’re told over and over again that Nasser is humiliated. Humiliation as a result of what? He wanted to destroy us, and, poor man, he failed. . . . What can we do for him except to say that despite the fact that you attacked us, you wanted to destroy us, we won the war, now we want peace.”

Golda wasn’t taking her cues only from her own instincts but from the Israeli military leadership. Shortly before she assumed office, a reporter asked her to comment on a military exercise they had recently witnessed. “Do you think that an old lady like myself would have anything to say about things like this?” she responded.

Thus while she kept a tight rein on Dayan politically, understanding that she was dangerously out of her depth on military affairs, she deferred to the minister of defense she’d inherited from Eshkol, just as he began deferring to her. It was the beginning of an odd relationship, the younger man intimidated by the older woman of extraordinary strength, the older woman almost enamored of her swashbuckling general, the two engaged in a strange dance of flirting that was a sort of political courtship. If they had a fight, Dayan inevitably was the first to concede, asking, “Do you still love me, Golda?”

But it was anything but a relationship among equals. Dayan’s biogra- phers characterized Golda’s treatment of Dayan as “slavish dependence,” an absurd allegation since she frequently put Dayan in his place and he did nothing to stop her. Golda knew that caught up in his public image as the brave military hero, Dayan was too inconsistent in his own thinking to be an entirely reliable adviser. In the early days after the 1967 war, he had been Israel’s leading empire builder. The 1949 armistice agreements, he remarked offhandedly, were no longer “sacred law. . . . If the Arabs want a change, they should phone up.” Obsessed with Israeli access to the Red Sea, he exhorted, “Better Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh.”

Yet Dayan regularly advocated opposing positions within hours, and then changed his mind once more. He was the first to advocate a swift response to Egypt’s violation of the standstill agreement, threatening to resign if Israel did not force the issue, and the first to change his mind once he had calmed down. Golda, then, routinely included the chief of staff and senior IDF officers in her kitchen cabinet to broaden her view.

The job of the military, of course, was defense, not translating victory into peace; that was the task of the diplomats, and Golda never learned to trust diplomats. As Ben-Gurion did to her when she was foreign minister, Golda regularly cut Eban out of the loop, dealing directly with the White House and with Yitzhak Rabin or Simcha Dinitz, her ambassadors in Washington. But diplomacy was never her strong suit. She kept her eyes

clearly focused on how to defend Israel, then, with little consideration given to what was needed to make peace.

* * *

Golda’s old adversary Nasser was as intransigent as she was, if not more so, and equally boxed in by political pressures. But in September 1970, he suffered a massive heart attack and was replaced by his vice president, Anwar Sadat. In world capitals, new hope became epidemic. Maybe without Nasser . . .

While lacking in Nasserian braggadocio, Sadat’s first statements were anything but reassuring. “We shall liberate our land,” he vowed to a meeting of top officials. “It is more honorable to die while defending our land than to live on our knees in surrender.” In an interview with the
New York Times,
he declared that negotiations were impossible until Israel withdrew from “every inch” of the occupied territories. And under no circumstances would he establish diplomatic relations with Israel. “Never, never, never.”

So prospects for peace looked dim, and international efforts did noth- ing to brighten them. Golda returned to the bargaining table with Jar- ring. But despite a flurry of diplomatic shuttles and optimistic verbiage emanating from UN headquarters, that mission was abortive. So too was another attempt for a comprehensive peace by the indefatigable Rogers, who couldn’t get past his belief that international peacekeepers and Egyp- tian promises would sway Golda.

The only glimmer of hope was an idea first broached by Dayan, who urged Israel to launch its own peace initiative by offering a partial settle- ment in exchange for partial peace. The partial settlement he had in mind was a twenty-mile Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal and the partial peace, an Egyptian promise of nonbelligerency. It was a shocking suggestion since Israel’s slogan had long been “no territorial concessions without a final peace treaty.” But the logic was compelling. If Israeli troops moved back from the canal, Sadat would gain some breathing room. The canal could be reopened, bringing Sadat much-needed reve-

nue, and the Egyptians who lived on the west side of the waterway could return to their normal lives. If all went well, Sadat might feel calm enough to negotiate a peace treaty. Even if he did not, he’d have an enor- mous incentive not to resume hostilities.

Golda worried that any withdrawal would become a slippery slope of retreat, and she knew that her government would pay a high political price for relinquishing any territory, especially if Israel received nothing concrete in return. Nonetheless, she began to consider more limited withdrawal, of six miles instead of twenty, although assuming that Sadat would reject it.

Then, shortly after Dayan outlined his plan on
60 Minutes,
Sadat an- nounced his own New Initiative: if Israel agrees to withdraw to the Sinai passes, and allows Egypt to reopen the Suez Canal and post its troops on the east bank, Egypt would extend the temporary cease-fire by six months and move toward a full peace with Israel.

The mention of peace electrified the Western diplomatic community. But the passes to which Sadat referred weren’t six or twenty miles from the canal but halfway across the Sinai, 115 miles from the canal. Sadat’s insistence on placing Egyptian troops on the side of the canal abandoned by the Israelis would leave no physical obstacle between the Egyptian army and the Israeli heartland. And Sadat was quick to add that he saw the pullback as the first step toward Israel’s total withdrawal from all oc- cupied territories.

In retrospect, it is clear that Sadat wasn’t trying to forge a settlement so much as to manipulate the Russians into providing him with more mili- tary equipment. Certain that Golda could order up Phantoms, Skyhawks, and other advanced military equipment from the United States as easily as a New Yorker could order pizza, he was frustrated that the Soviets wouldn’t simply open their warehouses to him and angry at a new condition they’d attached to their military largesse: that Egypt consult them before using Soviet weapons against Israel. Chafing at such control, Sadat had plotted a shrewdly intricate ploy to play the United States off against the Soviets as he prepared for war.

Golda rejected Sadat’s initiative, but she made some tentative moves of her own. Most important, for the first time, she drew a sketchy map of the future borders she envisioned. Israel must keep the Golan Heights and Sharm el-Sheikh to protect Israeli settlements in the north and Is- raeli transit through the Straits of Tiran and would continue to rule over a united Jerusalem, she announced. Although she left her view of Israel’s future borders with Jordan fuzzy, she made it clear that no Arab troops would be allowed to cross the Jordan River. Finally, she expressed the hope that Israel could withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, which would then be demilitarized. But she vowed that the Gaza Strip, which was never Egyptian in the first place, would not be returned to Cairo but be- come, perhaps, part of Jordan with an access corridor across Israel.