Golda (48 page)

Even then, Kissinger tried to keep the supplies to a minimum by sug- gesting that they use only three planes for the airlift. “Look, Henry,” Nixon responded, “we’re going to get just as much blame for sending three as if we send thirty or a hundred, or whatever we’ve got, so send ev- erything that flies.”

It was an awesome sight, wave after wave of gargantuan C-5A Galaxy transport planes rumbling into Tel Aviv. Thousands of Israelis gathered on the beach to watch the aircraft that Golda called “prehistoric flying monsters” ferrying smart bombs, missiles, and ammunition. When Golda heard the news, she wept.

The Russian airlift, begun five days earlier, had already delivered 3,000 tons of war supplies to Arab countries.

With its supply stream guaranteed, Israel was ready for its final push in the Sinai, and the Egyptians provided the perfect opportunity when they attempted an advance toward the Mitla Pass. What began with a ninety- minute artillery barrage became one of history’s fiercest tank battles, on the order of General Bernard Montgomery’s clash with the Afrika Corps at El Alamein.

That evening, Bar-Lev called Golda to report, “We are back to being ourselves and they are back to being themselves.” She gave the order for Israeli troops to cross the canal the next night.

By the following morning, in the middle of Sukkoth, the holiday cel- ebrating the Jewish passage through the Sinai desert after their escape from captivity in Egypt, the Israelis were behind Egyptians lines, racing toward the roads to Cairo and destroying the ground-to-air missiles that had turned Egyptian skies into a death trap for the Israeli air force.

That same afternoon, Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, arrived in Cairo to urge Sadat to agree to a cease-fire. He refused. Smelling victory, so did Golda.

But after rejecting all of Kissinger’s early suggestions for a cease-fire, the Soviets had concluded that the price of the war was escalating too quickly and invited Kissinger to Moscow to develop a joint cease-fire strategy. There was little that Golda feared more than a peace imposed by outside powers. “They compromise, Israel loses,” she always said. “Sa- dat must, I think, be given time to enjoy his defeat and not to immedi- ately, by political manipulations, turn it into a victory. . . . For God’s sake, he started a war, our people are killed, his in the many thousands are killed, and he has been defeated.”

No matter Golda’s sentiments, Kissinger was not about to lose an op- portunity to woo the Russians.

As the IDF raced to retake their old position on Mount Hermon from the Syrians and solidify their lines in Sinai, Golda bit her nails, waiting to see what Kissinger and the Soviets would cook up. Dinitz checked in with the White House regularly only to be told that there was no word from Kissinger.

Then, on Sunday evening—Israel time—the American ambassador brought Golda two messages, one from Kissinger laying out the cease-fire document, the other from Nixon urging her to announce Israel’s imme- diate acceptance. Almost simultaneously, Dinitz was informed that the UN Security Council would vote on the truce terms six hours later, that it would begin in less than twenty-four hours, and that not a single word could be changed.

By then, Israeli troops controlled a swath of Egypt twenty-five miles long and twenty miles deep. While some Egyptian forces were still en- trenched on the Sinai side of the canal, the Israelis had almost completed the encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army.

Golda was livid that the United States was trying to impose an immu- table piece of text on her without any consultation. Why twenty-four hours rather than thirty-six or forty-eight hours, all Israel needed to finish what Egypt and Syria had started? Kissinger, she concluded, was trying to snatch victory from her.

Deciding whether to accept the terms was a painful dilemma. Israel had already suffered twenty-five hundred casualties and could get no news about dozens of prisoners of war captured by the Egyptians and Syrians. Begin was breathing down her neck in violent opposition to any truce, and she would face him in elections postponed from Octo- ber 31 to the end of the year. And military leaders were intent on fin- ishing off the Egyptians by demolishing their armies to recoup their honor.

But the Soviet-American cease-fire, which Sadat had readily accepted, called for direct negotiations between Egypt and Israel to establish a just

and durable peace. Since no Arab country had ever before agreed to di- rect negotiations, it was a staggering diplomatic victory.

That night, the cabinet debated for five hours and, at three a.m., au- thorized Golda to send Nixon a message of acceptance on one condition, that Kissinger come to Israel to discuss the terms fully.

On the morning of the twenty-second, Kissinger, who’d just won the Nobel Peace Prize, arrived from Moscow, dreading his meeting with Golda. He’d never negotiated directly with the woman whose relentless ability to pick apart every word and dig in her heels was legendary in State Department circles.

“I presume she is wild with anger at me,” he remarked to Eban, who picked him up at the airport.

Golda’s greeting was even chillier than Kissinger expected. Why didn’t you contact us during negotiations? she quizzed. When Kissinger ear- nestly explained that the Soviets had jammed the communications equip- ment in his plane and from the embassy, she guffawed. “How did you stay in touch with your president, then?”

Although Kissinger had pronounced the cease-fire to be a package deal, Golda demanded changes, most important an immediate exchange of prisoners. Unwilling to fiddle with the document, Kissinger told Golda that Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet head of state, had promised that the exchange of prisoners would take place immediately after the cease-fire. That was precisely the wrong thing to say to Golda, who’d learned from William Rogers the danger of verbal commitments.

What else did you agree to that’s not written down? she asked, badger- ing him relentlessly. The truce called for “negotiations toward peace,” the kind of vague language Kissinger favored. What kind of negotiations? When? In what forum? Nixon had mentioned direct negotiations. Why wasn’t that language included? If Golda was going to be robbed of vic- tory, she was determined to understand the price.

Golda suspected that Kissinger was seeking to buy an end to Arab oil embargo threats with Israeli currency, so she was not an easy sell, and Kissinger understood why after Dado and the other military com-

manders described how close Israel was to smashing the Egyptian armies.

“Well, in Vietnam, the cease-fire didn’t go into effect at the exact time that we agreed upon,” Kissinger told them. Hearing that statement as tacit permission, after Kissinger left, the cabinet decreed, “If the Egyptians fail to live up to the cease-fire, the IDF will repel the enemy at the gate.”

The truce was scheduled to begin at 6:53 p.m., and by the time Kiss- inger returned to Washington, the Russians were complaining that Israel had violated its terms by tightening its noose around Egypt’s Third Army. “I won’t stand for the destruction of the Third Army,” Kissinger screamed at Dinitz. When Dinitz protested that Israel had not initiated any action, Kissinger responded with flat disbelief.

Golda usually communicated with Kissinger in writing, but after hear- ing from Dinitz, she picked up the telephone. “You can say anything you want about us and do anything you want,” she said, barely controlling herself, “but we are not liars.”

It turned out that a commander in the Egyptian Third Army had tried to break out of his encirclement. In response, Israel did precisely what Golda had promised she would order when she agreed to the cease-fire. Kissinger, however, wasn’t interested in the facts. They were not “rele- vant,” he told the Israelis after American intelligence confirmed Israel’s account.

The situation grew tenser when, moments before a second cease-fire could begin, Israel announced that its troops had surrounded the Third Army, sealing it off from the rest of Egypt. Stop them even if you have to send American troops, Sadat fumed. To reinforce that message, the Sovi- ets put seven divisions of their own forces on the alert and threatened to send them in.

Israel had stopped, but Kissinger was in a panic, facing the collapse of both détente and a Middle East peace. To preserve his bargaining power, he demanded that Israel open a supply corridor to the Third Army. “You want the Third Army?” Kissinger yelled at Dinitz. “We don’t go to a third world war for you.”

On the night of October 25, Golda’s cabinet deliberated until four a.m. about their response to what had become an ultimatum. Finally, Golda calmed down enough to cut through the rhetoric, including her own. Is- raeli troops were on the verge of capturing a 40,000-man army and forc- ing Sadat to admit his defeat, but the price of that victory would be painfully high. Do we stand pat and risk both Soviet intervention and American wrath? Golda asked. Which is more important, capturing the entire Third Army or good relations with the United States?

“There is only one country to which we can turn and sometimes we have to give in to it—even when we know we shouldn’t,” Golda lectured the ministers who were balking. “But it is the only real friend we have and a very powerful one. We don’t have to say yes to everything. But there is nothing to be ashamed of when a small country like Israel, in this situa- tion, has to give in sometimes to the United States.”

chapter seventeen

Whoever wants to be prime minister deserves what he gets.

M

otti Ashkenazi took up a solitary vigil across the road from Golda’s office two days after his discharge from reserve duty in the Sinai.

It was raining, one of those damp and gray February days that keeps Jeru- salemites off the streets and leaves drivers defogging their windshields every three minutes. But the placard the slight thirty-three-year-old car- ried was too poignantly provocative to be ignored:

grandma, your defense minister is a failure and 3,000 of your grandchildren are dead.

For Ashkenazi, a doctoral student in philosophy at the Hebrew Univer- sity, the demonstration wasn’t so much a political act as a cri de coeur he’d been fantasizing since the afternoon when a deluge of mortar shells and rockets had turned the small outpost he’d commanded into an in- ferno. His reserve unit, an odd collection of ill-trained immigrants and older men, had held out for five days after the Egyptian invasion. When they were rescued, Ashkenazi began dreaming of asking the question that was on the minds of most Israelis: How did this happen?

His protest didn’t remain solitary for long. Other reservists arrived in ones and two, and then a mother joined them. One afternoon, Golda looked out of the window and spotted a middle-aged man holding a sign reading, my son didn’t fall in battle. he was murdered and the murderers sit in the defense ministry.

After the catastrophic first days of the war, Israel had won a stunning victory, but the price was too high for celebration. More than 2,600 Israe- lis had died in less than three weeks—per capita, three times America’s losses during ten years of fighting in Vietnam. Although Israeli troops were dug in twenty-six miles from Damascus and sixty-five miles from Cairo, the myth of the Israeli superman had been shattered. Their aura of invincibility gone, Israelis felt naked and exposed.

Golda was barely hanging on, haunted by her knowledge that she had let Israel down. “It doesn’t matter what logic dictated,” she explained. “It matters only that I, who was so accustomed to making decisions . . . failed to make that one decision. It isn’t a question of feeling guilty. I, too, can rationalize and tell myself that in the face of such total certainty on the part of our military intelligence . . . it would have been unreasonable of me to have insisted on a call-up. But I know that I should have done so, and I shall live with that terrible knowledge for the rest of my life.”

To one journalist, she added candidly, “I will never be the same Golda I was prior to the war. Yes, I smile and laugh and listen to music, I tell stories, I listen to stories. . . . But in my heart, it is not the same Golda, and until eternity I will never be.”

But faced with the marathon challenges of grabbing diplomatic vic- tory out of the ambiguous end to the war, preparing for national elec- tions, resolving the economic crisis caused by a conflict that cost more than Israel’s annual budget, and calming the increasingly ugly mood of a country coming to grips with a new self-image, Golda couldn’t indulge her own frailties.

Winning the peace, Golda knew, would not be easy. Israel was a near pariah, deserted even by her oldest friends in Africa. Terrified of an oil embargo, the Europeans wouldn’t so much as evince sympathy over the

two-front invasion. And the Soviet Union seemed committed to unend- ing Arab adventurism. No matter how much the admission damaged Is- raelis’ haughty sense of independence, Golda knew that the country had become perhaps dangerously dependent on the United States. And the United States had its own priorities, which diverged from Israel’s in an age of oil embargoes and détente.

Within a week of the second cease-fire, then, Golda packed her suitcase with baggy suits and sensible shoes, grabbed her trademark black handbag, and flew to Washington, stopping en route only for a visit to the troops along the canal. Three weeks earlier, she’d visited the northern front, and in the midst of a scene of destruction and carnage had come upon a group of soldiers half asleep as they worked on a crippled tank. “Golda, is this all worth it?” one of the young men, gray with dust from three straight days of battle, had asked her, looking his prime minister straight in the eye.