Golda (46 page)

than an artillery barrage? she asked. And Arab press reports of alleged Is- raeli troops massing on Arab borders sounded ominously like the equally fallacious stories from 1967. “Maybe this should tell us something,” she mused.

Haunted by the evacuation of the families, she called an emergency cabinet meeting, a mini-cabinet meeting, really, since Eban was in the United States and most of the other ministers were en route home for Yom Kippur, which would begin at sundown. With no inkling of the con- tents of the full reports from the field, which Zeira was not disclosing, and Zeira still predicting that war was unlikely, the nine cabinet mem- bers had to decide whether to call up the reserves.

Dayan opposed any mobilization unless the Arabs made a hostile move. Galili, who’d commanded the Haganah, agreed, concerned that a mass call-up could alarm the Arabs and precipitate the very scenario they were attempting to avoid. Dado was divided, anxious to avoid a repetition of the embarrassment of May, yet apprehensive at the signs of a full-scale invasion.

The ministers concluded that they should delay mobilization until the picture became clearer, although the cabinet gave Golda the authority to call up the reserves on Yom Kippur if she saw fit. That afternoon, she in- structed Simcha Dinitz, her ambassador to Washington—in Israel after the death of his father—to return to America. “Get the first flight out,” she told him. And filled with foreboding, she canceled her holiday trip to Kibbutz Revivim so that she could stay close to her office.

As Israel turned still and silent for Yom Kippur, fewer than 450 Israeli infantrymen backed by 300 tanks and 50 artillery pieces were strung out along a chain of outposts known as the Bar-Lev Line on the eastern shore of the Suez Canal, facing more than 100,000 Egyptian soldiers with 1,350 tanks and 2,000 artillery pieces deployed on the west bank. On the Golan front, the Syrians had three infantry divisions, a total of 45,000 troops with 540 tanks, behind a line of armored brigades with another 960 tanks and 942 artillery pieces poised to attack Israel’s two infantry regiments and 177 tanks.

Two-thirds of Israel’s army, its reserves, were on vacation or at home for the holiday, their stripped-down tanks, ammunition, and guns scat- tered in bases and ammunition depots across the country.

That night, Golda sat down for dinner with her son and daughter-in- law, but she didn’t talk or eat much, and then left early. Uneasy, she clung to the message her friend Haim Bar-Lev, the former chief of staff and her current minister of commerce, had left when he’d stopped by a day or two earlier. “Golda, I will sleep well tonight.”

But Golda tossed and turned in the stifling heat. Then, at 3:30 a.m., her telephone rang with news from the Egyptian source the In-Law: Egypt and Syria would attack at sundown.

* * *

By 8 a.m., Golda was in her office, caught in an open fight between her chief of staff and her minister of defense. Since mobilizing Israel’s re- serves in thirteen hours was impossible, Dado wanted to launch a pre- emptive air strike. Dayan, still uncertain that war was imminent, rejected that option lest the Americans punish Israel for any precipitous move. He was even refusing Dado’s request for full mobilization of Israel’s reserves, more than 200,000 troops, declaring them superfluous.

To defend two fronts he’d need 50,000 to 60,000 troops immediately, Dado insisted. “And what about tomorrow?” he asked.

Dayan wouldn’t budge. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said.

You mobilize for the counteroffensive “only after the first shot.”

Again, they’d taken their argument to Golda, a woman who acknowl- edged that she didn’t know how many troops were in a division. Golda agreed with Dayan about the dangers of a preemptive strike. “None of us knows now what the future has in store for us, but there is always a possi- bility that we’ll need someone’s help and if we’ll strike first, no one is go- ing to help,” she concluded. “I wish I could say yes because I know the meaning of it, but, with a heavy heart, I say no.”

But she sided with Dado about the mobilization of the reserves. “If war breaks out, better to be in proper shape to deal with it, even if the world

gets angry at us,” she decided. Petulant as ever, Dayan didn’t even try to conceal his pique. “If you want to accept the chief of staff ’s proposal, I will not prostrate myself on the road,” he snapped.

Dayan was livid. “What will you do with all those reservists if no war?” he asked Dado after they left Golda’s office. “You’ll have one hundred thousand men hanging around.” Dado was shocked that Dayan still doubted what was coming. “They won’t hang around,” he responded. “They’ll go down to the front.”

By the time Golda finished with her generals, U.S. ambassador Ken- neth Keating was waiting to deliver a messenger from Kissinger, who’d spent the early morning on the phone with Nixon, who was at his home in Key Biscayne, with U.S. intelligence officials, the Egyptian ambassador, the Israeli embassy, the Soviet ambassador, and the UN secretary-general. Despite those wide-ranging consultations, Kissinger wasn’t sure what to think. The Egyptian ambassador charged that the Israeli navy had attacked Egypt, which didn’t make much sense since the Israelis had never been known for their reliance on their navy. And he was equally skeptical about intelligence estimates hinting that Israel was about to launch a preemptive strike. Golda’s coalition partners from the religious bloc would not have agreed to such a violation of the holiest of Jewish days, he reasoned.

Nonetheless, he instructed Keating to advise Golda against a preemp- tive strike. “I will not open fire,” she told Keating. “Moreover, Israel is not mobilizing fully to prevent such an act being interpreted as provocation.” Keating didn’t try hard to hide his skepticism, but Golda was adamant. “This time it has to be crystal clear who began the war, so we won’t have to go around the world convincing people our cause is just.” But she minced no words in conveying her expectation that the United States would reward Israel with much-needed weaponry in return for disregard- ing the advice of her chief of staff.

By noon, Israel’s cabinet ministers had been pulled out of their syna- gogues, kibbutzim, and homes to face a pale and disheveled prime minis- ter delivering the worst possible news. Dayan was upbeat about the situation in the south, predicting that Israeli troops would handily destroy

the Egyptians if they attempted to cross the canal. But he was anxious about the Golan, which was close to Israeli settlements. Just as he was starting to air that concern, Golda’s military aide knocked on the door: the invasion had begun.

Within minutes, air raid sirens abruptly shattered the quiescence of Yom Kippur afternoon. That whine might have terrified the political leaders of a country that had not fought three wars with great success in twenty-five years. But few at the table doubted the IDF’s ability to dispose of the threat with dispatch. Only the troops on the ground understood that Israel was facing an entirely new type of warfare, and entirely new enemy.

For those in the south, the war began when 222 Egyptian jets flying over the canal struck at command posts, radar stations, air defense instal- lations, gun emplacements, and antiaircraft missile batteries. Then, 2,000 Egyptian guns rained more than 10,000 shells on Israeli positions in the first minute. Before the Israelis could lift their heads out of their bunkers, Egyptian tanks moved to the top of ramps along the canal and began fir- ing, demolishing all the lookout towers in Israel’s widely spaced string of primitive forts. Fifteen minutes later, in almost perfect coordination, 4,000 Egyptian infantrymen and commandos slid down ramps to the water and loaded into 720 rubber and wooden dinghies.

As the astonished Israelis watched the perfectly executed maneuvers, they waited for their tanks to pulverize the Egyptians troops before they could blast through Israel’s sand embankments and build bridges to bring their tanks across the canal. But the Egyptian infantrymen unleashed not only shoulder-fire rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but weapons Israe- lis had never faced: Sagger antitank missiles, which could be guided di- rectly to their targets, turning foot soldiers into tank-killing machines. By 10:30, the Egyptians were moving heavy tanks across the waterway on pontoon bridges. Every long-held Israeli battlefield doctrine was quashed before the war was twenty-four hours old.

On the Golan, things were no better. The Syrians wanted to regain the heights in a single day—before Israel could move in its reserves—and

they planned to do so by overwhelming the Israelis with sheer numbers. Led by engineering tanks with bulldozers, they moved in assault tanks, followed by hundreds of gun tanks and armored personnel carriers, all moving under a SAM-2 and SAM-3 missile umbrella that paralyzed Israel’s air force. By late afternoon, Israeli’s armored battalions were run- ning out of ammunition and fuel, and Syria’s tanks were still coming.

Goliath had become David, but Golda showed no sign of panic when she appeared on television that evening. “We have no doubt that we shall be victorious,” she said, her affect grave but firm. “We are also convinced, however, that this renewal of Egyptian-Syrian aggression is an act of madness. . . . Citizens of Israel, ordeal by battle has been forced upon us again. . . . We are fully confident that the IDF has the spirit and the power to overwhelm the enemy.”

Later, Dayan offered a more sobering estimate, although he added, his voice almost cracking, “The people of Tel Aviv will be able to sleep well tonight.”

At a 10 p.m. cabinet meeting, Dado laid out his strategy: The next day, with the arrival of 450 reservists, they would stop the Syrians. Then they would turn their attention to the Sinai and mount an offensive two days later. But at one point, in the early hours of the morning, he admitted that he was unsure of how to proceed because the Israeli military simply didn’t know how to operate on the defense. “We know how to do it from the books, but we’ve never actually done it,” he said wistfully.

* * *

If the people of Tel Aviv had known how dire the situation really was, few would have slept at all. By the following morning, chaos reigned among Israeli troops in the south, and the central command structure was close to collapse. But with miles of desert between the canal and Israeli popu- lation centers, Dado couldn’t concentrate on the Egyptian front. It was in the north, where the distance between the Syrian troops and Israeli set- tlements was less than ten miles, that the danger was pressing.

When Israeli pilots flew over the Golan front at dawn, they saw un-

ending lines of tanks all pointed south, toward the Galilee. They tried to launch waves of ground support sorties, coming in low and fast to force the Syrians to run for cover. But Syrian troops brought out highly mobile SAM-6s, missiles the West never believed the Soviets would ship over- seas. Suddenly, the sky was painted with streaks of black smoke from ex- ploding Israeli aircraft.

Faced with a weapon more accurate and sophisticated than anything the Americans had developed, by late afternoon the Israeli forces were falling back in confusion, the troops near panic. Israel had already lost thirty-five planes and 10 percent of its combat force, and it had no armor between the invaders and the Jordan River bridges leading into the Galilee.

A master of self-control, Dado exuded a calm he did not feel. He and his staff had prepared Israel for the wrong war. He needed to scrap every assumption, every plan the Israeli military had ever made, and figure out a way to hold off destruction until his reserves were in place.

Dayan didn’t believe it could be done. We can’t stop them, he told the commander of the northern front. We must abandon the Golan, blow the bridges over the Jordan River, and hold the Syrians off from the other side. More than any other figure, Dayan had long assured the nation that Israel’s borders were secure after the 1967 war. He’d been wrong, wrong about Israel’s borders, wrong about Arab fighting ability, wrong about Egyptian intent, and his own fallibility threw him into a panic.

By the time he returned to Tel Aviv, Dado had countermanded his order to blow the Jordan River bridges. Dayan believed that the chief of staff was being unrealistic, but he had no energy for fighting. He needed to move and suddenly flew south. There, the situation was equally alarm- ing. The Egyptian infantry held the water line along the canal, and Israel’s allegedly invincible strongholds, the Bar-Lev Line, had become traps for the men defending them. If the Egyptians managed to take the Mitla and Gidi passes, two of the three routes over the mountains at the northern edge of the Sinai, all Israel had to keep them from stream- ing into Tel Aviv was two depleted divisions.

When Dayan returned to the Pit, the nickname for Israel’s military headquarters, the staff looked to him expectantly for a daringly bold plan for victory. Instead, their old hero had transmogrified into Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet of doom.

“The destruction of the Third Temple is at hand,” he prophesized. The First Temple, Solomon’s, had been razed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the Second, Herod’s, by the Romans in AD 70. The only road open to them, he admonished, was to pull back and fight to the last man, as had the Jews at Masada.

Leaving the entire war room rattled and aghast, Dayan raced to Gol- da’s office and confessed, “Golda, I was wrong about everything. We are headed to catastrophe.” He offered to resign. Golda wouldn’t hear of it. The last thing a shaken Israel needed at that moment was the disappear- ance of its mythic hero.

When Dayan left, Golda wandered out into the hall. Concerned, Lou followed and found her “dissolving. She was wearing an outfit I detested, a sort of grayish khaki,” Lou later recalled. “She was almost the same color.”

Golda broke down in tears. “Dayan is talking about surrender,” she whispered. “You must arrange for me, tonight . . . you must go to the house of friends. . . . He’s a doctor. I’ll make them give you some pills so that I can kill myself so I won’t have to fall into the hands of the Arabs.”

Golda lingered in the hall and regained her composure. Then she took charge. All of the characteristics her critics had long considered to be weaknesses—her inflexibility, her overbearing nature, her iron grip—be- came her greatest assets as she faced war without the man she’d depended on in security matters. She became not only the national morale booster and weapons procurer, but also Israel’s “generalissimo,” wrote Zeev Schiff, defense editor of the Israeli daily
Ha’aretz
. “It was strange to see a warrior of seven campaigns and brilliant past chief of staff of the IDF [Dayan] bringing clearly operational subjects to a Jewish grandmother for deci- sion.”