Golda (49 page)

Clutching her handbag, she spoke softly despite the din of war. “If it is just for us, for three million Jews in this country, then your question is legitimate,” she answered. “But if it is for the thirteen or fourteen million Jews, for the whole Jewish people, for the very existence of the Jewish people in history, it has to be worthwhile.”

This time, as she steeled herself for her trip to Washington, the troops were more encouraging. “Golda, be strong,” shouted soldiers along the canal, awed by the sight of the old woman who’d flown ten hours on he- licopters to visit them. Having survived on coffee and cigarettes for al- most three weeks, Golda was beyond exhaustion. “I don’t even have strength to be strong,” she responded.

Golda wasn’t in Washington for an hour before she began feeling worse. Opening the newspaper, she saw a huge photograph of Nixon embracing Ismail Fahmy, an envoy from Sadat, who’d preceded her to America.

Golda was well aware of what Kissinger hoped to achieve in their ne- gotiations: an Israeli withdrawal that would free Sadat’s Third Army. “It’s ridiculous,” she fumed at her their first meeting. “They start a war and lose. And they want [victory] handed to them.”

But Kissinger held a devastating club to use against her, the return of Israel’s prisoners of war. Egypt had acknowledged holding 231 Israelis captive and Syria held several dozen more about whom they would re- lease no information. The televised images of the captives, gaunt and shackled, had paralyzed the entire nation, and Golda had been besieged by their families, to whom she could offer no concrete words of hope.

Kissinger didn’t hesitate to wield that weapon and maintained that the Arabs would not release the prisoners—or even provide their names— until Israel agreed to return to the first cease-fire lines, where Israel had been before the IDF surrounded the Egyptian army.

“I won’t do it,” vowed Golda. “I won’t go to my people and tell them I accept this plan. . . . I faced a woman the other day. She had lived through Hitler and came here with one son. . . . She is dying of cancer. . . . She appeals to me, ‘Release my son. . . .’ What can I say to her?”

Golda suggested an entirely different strategy. Rather than talk about Israeli withdrawal, Israel and Egypt should exchange prisoners and then straighten out their hopelessly entangled cease-fire lines by moving all the Egyptian forces back to the west side of the canal, where they’d started, and all the Israeli troops to the Sinai side. In the process, the Third Army would be freed from its encirclement.

Kissinger saw right through her. Since Golda’s approach would force Sadat to give up the pretense of victory he’d gained when his troops crossed the canal, the secretary of state refused to discuss it.

One hour into their first bargaining session, they were at an impasse.

Like most Western diplomats, Kissinger paid little attention to the public declarations of Arab leaders, assuming that they were posturing for domestic and pan-Arab audiences. He accepted, then, Sadat’s protesta- tions that he wanted peace, considering the only serious stumbling blocks to be Israel’s reluctance to return land captured during the 1967 war.

Having listened to Arab public statements for fifty years, Golda be- lieved that Arab rhetoric was sincere, that they considered Israel an ille- gitimate entity forced on the Middle East by Europeans wracked with guilt over the Holocaust. She wasn’t unaware of the shift away from the

old “drive the Jews into the sea” oratory. But knowing that President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia had suggested to Arab leaders that a more reason- able public tone would force Israel onto the defensive, she saw the change as a tactic, not a retreat from Arab designs to destroy the Jewish state.

“There can be no greater mistake in assessing the current situation in the Middle East than to assume that the conflict continues because of a specific political Arab grievance—the plight of the Arab refugees, the Is- raeli presence on the West Bank or in the Sinai, the reunification of Jeru- salem,” she asserted. “The heart of the problem is what caused the Six-Day War. . . . Simply put, the root issue is the Arab attitude to Israel’s very existence. . . .

“They don’t want us here. That’s what it’s about. It isn’t true that they don’t want us in Nablus or Jenin. They don’t want us, period.”

Golda hadn’t flown to America to fight with Kissinger but to see Nixon, who she instinctively trusted. And the president greeted her with the reassuring warmth of an old friend. “Now we have something else in common,” he told her, falling into the banter that characterized their re- lationship. “We both have Jewish foreign secretaries. Yes, Golda acknowl- edged, “but mine speaks English without an accent.”

While Nixon was a great admirer of Golda, whose moxie had won his heart, he had decided that the time had come to end the conflict in the Middle East, which was interfering with his plans for détente. “We have to squeeze the Israelis when this is over,” he’d told Kissinger the day the first wave of the American weapons landed in Tel Aviv. “And the Russians have got to know it.”

Sensing that change in the president’s thinking, Golda nonetheless hoped to maneuver Nixon into backing away from what was, essentially, Kissinger’s strategy. Nixon, however, was distracted by his sinking presi- dency. While Golda was battling Kissinger for the airlift of weapons, Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned and pleaded no contest to criminal charges of tax evasion and money laundering. During Kiss- inger’s cease-fire discussions in Moscow, Nixon had been enmeshed in firing Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor.

“We are aware of the enormous suffering that you have undergone,” said Nixon, oozing empathy. “The problem is now to move on toward the goal. . . . The goal is not to have another war. You have already had four.”

Gently, he reminded her that the Arab use of their oil weapon put Is- rael in a perilous position. “If this cease-fire breaks down and Europe and Japan freeze this winter, Israel will be in a hell of a spot.” Then he issued a not-so-veiled threat. “I could leave you to the UN,” he said.

Golda interrupted. “That court of high injustice?”

Golda tried desperately to convince Nixon that he was being unfair, but the subtext of the discussion was clear: if the United States is going to underwrite Israel’s existence, you’re going to have to pay by giving up ter- ritory and saving the Egyptian Third Army. All roads, then, led back to Kissinger.

The next night at 10 p.m., Kissinger met with Golda at Blair House. He preferred late-night sessions when his own energy was high, assuming he would have a natural advantage. He had not yet learned how little Golda slept or how thoroughly she, too, thrived on arguing at 2 a.m. Kissinger’s short-term goal was to induce Golda to open a relief corridor to the Third Army and then to order a pullback of Israel’s troops to the original armi- stice lines.

“Where is the October 22 line?” she asked sarcastically, knowing that no one was sure. Once Egypt provided the names of the Israeli prisoners of war, allowed the evacuation of the wounded, and permitted the Red Cross to visit the others, she would allow the UN to open a corridor. But the road itself would remain under Israeli control, she insisted, so that her army could ensure that the Egyptians didn’t try to rearm.

Having already promised both Sadat and the Russians that Egypt would have a resupply corridor under its own control—a detail he didn’t share with Golda—Kissinger could not back down.

Neither would Golda. The Third Army will not be released or resup- plied until Israel’s prisoners of war are returned home, she told him. We

are not asking for a favor. This is Israel’s right under international law. “To leave our prisoners there for a . . . length of time, that we can’t live with.”

When browbeating didn’t work, Kissinger switched tactics. “The one thing the Arabs have achieved in this war, regardless of what they lost, is that they’ve globalized the problem,” he warned her. “They have cre- ated the conviction that something must be done, which we’ve arrested only by my prestige, by my trip, by my maneuvers.”

It was classic Kissinger: I, Henry Kissinger, am your only friend. I’m willing to help you, but you have to help me to do so. The strategy had won him a Nobel Peace Prize, announced just two weeks earlier, but Golda was immune to it.

Kissinger then tried reassuring her that the prisoner exchange would begin as soon as Egyptian troops were assured a regular supply of food and water, although he had barely raised the matter in his meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister the day before.

Still, Golda didn’t yield. When he departed at 1 a.m., he left her with an ominous vision. “Think about our other problem, our nightmare, the Russians going in there.”

As Kissinger emerged from the meeting, an Associated Press photogra- pher captured an image of him with Golda that did not hide the tension. “Was it that bad?” a reporter asked him. Kissinger didn’t bother to answer. The atmosphere verged “on the abrasive,” the State Department blandly acknowledged.

The only levity breaking the strain was Kissinger’s response after Golda shrugged and said, “Look, what do you want from me? I was born in the last century.”

Kissinger smiled. “The nineteenth century is my specialty.”

The next night they went at it again. “We didn’t begin the war,” Golda reminded him. While that decision had cost Israel dearly, it didn’t count for very much with Kissinger.

“Madam Prime Minister . . . you didn’t start the war, but you face a

need for wise decisions that will protect the survival of Israel,” he re- sponded. “This is what you face. This is my honest judgment, as a friend.”

Golda feared that Kissinger’s advice was tantamount to an order. “You’re saying we have to accept the judgment of the United States?” she asked. “I’ll call the cabinet and tell them we have to accept the U.S. posi- tion or see the destruction of Israel.”

“We all have to face the judgment of other nations,” Kissinger re- plied.

But Golda had a response for everything. To Kissinger’s lecture about the importance of maintaining the cease-fire, she responded with a com- plaint about the Arab blockade of the Bab el Mandeb Strait, which had cut Israel off from her supply of Iranian oil. After he broached the issue of a continuing supply of food and water to the Third Army, she turned the discussion to Arab violations of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. When he played his favorite tune, conjuring up an apocalyptic vi- sion of the dire consequences of not making peace, she interrupted with a lecture of her own about all the dire consequences Jews had suffered in their long history.

Golda and Kissinger were oil and water. She never had much patience with intellectuals and she worried, too, that the American secretary of state was a bit of a self-hating Jew. While he’d been raised in an observant home, Kissinger had been sworn into office on a Saturday, thus forcing his Orthodox parents to walk to the White House, and used Nixon’s per- sonal copy of the King James version of the Bible rather than the Old Testament published in his hometown in Germany that his parents had brought with them.

Beyond the personal, how could she trust Kissinger knowing that his priority was to protect America’s oil supply and détente with the Soviets rather than the security of Israel? At times, his arrogance overwhelmed her. “There’s no greater expert on American policy than Kissinger,” she once retorted after he’d issued yet another treatise on how Israel should conduct itself. “But on Israeli policy, I have my PhD.”

Kissinger didn’t trust Golda either—and she was frustrating his care- fully laid plans. Never one to begin negotiations until he felt the field was ripe, Kissinger believed that the Middle East was perfectly configured for a major peace initiative. Sadat, he had decided, was serious about ending the conflict and willing to work through the United States. If Golda gave him some leverage, he could well emerge as the American middleman and sideline the Soviets.

But Golda remained adamant that she would allow no resupply of the Egyptian army until prisoners of war were exchanged. “You are not giving me anything to go to Cairo with,” objected Kissinger, who was scheduled to fly to Egypt that week. “Do you want justice or the prison- ers?” Stubborn but rarely impractical, Golda cared about the prisoners of war above any other issue and finally agreed to allow the opening of the corridor—but only if Egypt did not control it. Again, Kissinger could not bring himself to admit that he’d boxed himself in with a promise to Sadat.

All night, they fought, and it was never pleasant. “You know, all we have, really, is our spirit,” she told Kissinger toward the end of the meet- ing. “What you are asking me to do is to go home and help destroy that spirit, and then no aid will be necessary at all.”

Golda had planned to rest the next morning before her return to Is- rael. Instead, she got a taste of Kissinger’s wrath. Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff, called to say, “The president is furious.” Then Nelson Rock- efeller stopped by and pleaded, “Please don’t be stubborn.”

But Kissinger didn’t fully appreciate that Golda was not a run-of-the- mill foreign leader. Earlier in the week, she’d had breakfast with fourteen senatorial heavyweights—including Jacob Javits, Abe Ribicoff, Hubert Humphrey, and Ted Kennedy—and had met with eighteen leading mem- bers of the House of Representatives. Her friends George Meany of the AFL-CIO and Arthur Goldberg, former Supreme Court justice and U.S. ambassador to the UN, were urging her to stand fast. And she hadn’t even mobilized the American Jewish community.

“The Almighty placed massive oil deposits under Arab soil,” an Israeli

diplomat commented to a colleague at the U.S. State Department. “It is our good fortune that God placed five million Jews in America.”

* * *

Despite Kissinger’s warnings Golda’s obstinacy would hold back progress toward a semblance of peace between Israel and Egypt, tellingly, per- haps, the Egyptians and the Israelis were already succeeding in their ne- gotiations. In exchange for Israel’s initial resupply of the Third Army, Sadat had agreed to hold direct talks about military disengagement with the Israelis at a military level. So in the bitter cold on Sunday, October 29, Major General Aharon Yariv, a veteran military intelligence officer, and General Muhammad al-Ghani al-Gamasy, the chief of operations of the Egyptian armed forces, saluted each other awkwardly under a hastily erected tent stretched between four Israel tanks at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez Road.