Golda (11 page)

To make matters worse, Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists were fending off constant power plays by other Zionist groups. It wasn’t just the Jewish capitalists tying all of Ben-Gurion’s plans in a knot. Kibbutzniks accused their old comrades of selling out their pioneering spirit for urban decadence. Religious Jews demonstrated against the desecration of the Sabbath. And Zionist revisionists, the
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’s right, declared war on la- bor’s hegemony.

The problems were messy and contentious, and Golda couldn’t have been happier debating them from inside the Histadrut’s Va’ad HaPoel, its executive committee, a sort of shadow legislature in the government-in-

the-making, to which she’d been appointed after her return from Amer- ica. By 1934, Histadrut members traveled to work each morning in buses run by a Histadrut company along roads built by Solel Boneh; toiled for Histadrut-owned stores, offices, or factories; and bought food produced by Histadrut members at Histadrut cooperative stores. Their children studied at Histadrut-run schools, where they learned the fundamentals of Labor Zionism. When they fell ill, they looked for care at a Kupat Holim clinic, also run by Histadrut. If they had money to save or wanted loans, they made their deposits or applications to the Histadrut bank.

What the Histadrut couldn’t provide, another arm of a Zionist struc- ture dominated by Labor Zionists did. Immigrants arrived on visas ar- ranged by the Jewish Agency, the administrative body of the
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which Ben-Gurion also ran. They looked to Mapai, the Labor Zionist political party, for both political direction and patronage.

Decked out in shorts or austere dresses with no hint of makeup, Labor Zionist leaders wore and lived their power lightly. But with little tolerance for disloyalty or public shows of disagreement, they knew how to wield it. Their closed circle controlled virtually every significant institution in the country.

Golda had earned her seat at the table with her perfect English, her way with foreign Jews and non-Jews alike, and her natural gift for oratory. But she was the junior-most member, given the most insignificant of jobs, the establishment of a tourism department to guide Protestant missionar- ies, quizzical overseas Zionists, and a rotating cast of British Labour Party activists around kibbutzim and cooperative marketing ventures.

Golda hated every minute of it. But membership in the Va’ad allowed her to involve herself in every corner of
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life. She helped set up a program to send recruiters to Eastern Europe to train future immigrants in Hebrew and farming. When Ben-Gurion tried to abolish the tradition of Histadrut employees receiving salaries based on need, she stood him down, horrified at the prospect of replacing a Socialist pay scale with Ben-Gurion’s more “flexible” one. And as immigrants began streaming out of a Germany where Jewish civil rights were being eroded by Nazi

militants, she threw herself into the problem of figuring out how to care for the children who’d arrived from Berlin without their parents, or what to do with the famous research chemist who didn’t want to lay bricks.

A font of energy, Golda happily raced off to Haifa for the morning to calm the charged air between employers and workers, inspected new Histadrut housing in the afternoon, and then spent the evening with her comrades figuring out how to finance their latest brainstorm. Within a year, she was elected to the secretariat, the inner cabinet.

In 1936, the Arab Higher Committee called a general strike, urging Arabs to cease work until the British prohibited Jewish immigration and land purchases. With construction, transportation, and food delivery at a standstill, the Histadrut vowed to replace every Arab worker with a Jewish one.

Faced with the resulting paralysis of the port of Jaffa, Remez asked, “Why not build a Jewish port and a Jewish shipping company?” It was another starry-eyed Histadrut idea, more the romance of seeing a Jewish star on a steamship than a practical necessity. Nachshon, Remez called his imaginary shipping line, borrowing the name of the first Israelite to throw himself into the Red Sea when others hesitated to obey Moses’ command.

Golda picked up the Nachshon banner and went on an American tour to raise the money. “The sea is an organic, economic, and political part of Palestine, and it is yet almost unpossessed,” she told audiences in the usual two dozen cities. “The force which drew us from the city to the farm is now driving us from the land to the sea.

“This is one more step toward the independence of a nation.”

On her way home, she rendezvoused with Remez in London to shop for vessels, although theirs was as much an intimate interlude as a buying trip. “We stayed quite a while in London,” she wrote of that trip. “We didn’t have very much to do, and we would sit up all night at the Lyons Corner House in Oxford Circus. . . . We used to walk for hours in the night.”

Golda thrived on the nitty-gritty of translating her vision of a Jewish

Socialist state into the fabric of daily life. She began running Histadrut’s complex of mutual aid programs and chaired the board of Kupat Holim, a medical system that covered 40 percent of the Jewish population. When the British began building army camps across Palestine, she ne- gotiated the wages and working conditions of Jewish laborers—and made sure that the British lived up to their agreements.

And, still, she traveled, her Mandate passports filling up with stamps from Switzerland and England, the United States and Czechoslovakia, as the representative of the Histadrut at international meetings and the Ac- tions Committee of the World Zionist Organization.

It was the ideal life for a woman who couldn’t abide voids, who needed constant motion and constant company. Golda could never stand to be alone. If she was in town, her house was always filled with people. If it wasn’t, she called someone to come over to talk or wandered by a friend’s house.

Still, Golda’s schedule was brutal, frequently sending her to bed with a migraine or sheer exhaustion. “What I need is a wife,” she told Men- achem one day. In fact, she had a series of proxy wives, children of friends who needed a place to stay in Tel Aviv, Americans who’d recently arrived in Palestine, all of whom were sucked into the vortex that was Golda.

* * *

Casting off her role as overseas emissary and fund-raiser, Golda took on a new life as an organizer and a serious political player with her trade- mark style, an inimitable fusion of idealism, moralizing, and arm twist- ing that would define her for decades. Golda pursued what she wanted or believed was right—and for Golda there was usually little distinc- tion—with molten single-mindedness. Shrewd and dogged, she always denied that she was motivated by any trace of personal ambition, as did every other Labor Zionist leader. The movement ethic demanded that they pretend to be called to service rather than aspire to power. So after each call, Golda ritually protested that she wasn’t worthy. But she never flinched from saying yes.

The trappings of power held no interest for her. She lived simply in a two-bedroom apartment in a workers’ cooperative building and owned just two dresses, one drying while the other was worn. Nor was she driven by conventional political egomania. Golda was a Zealot, in the original sense of the word, a spirit kindred to the Jewish underground of the first century AD that opposed the Roman occupation. She sought power for its uses, not its perquisites, absolutely confident that she knew precisely how it should be applied.

Curiously, in light of the near adoration she evoked abroad, Golda nei- ther sought nor received similar popularity at home. “She did not court her public,” observed her friend Marie Syrkin, dramatically understating Golda’s indifference to the approval of the masses. Given the
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politi- cal system—and the Israeli governmental political system that grew out of it—Golda had little incentive to buff off her hard edges, play the populist, or pretend patience with a recalcitrant public. If Golda wanted to serve on the Zionist executive, on the Histadrut secretariat, or a party ruling body, she didn’t need to woo voters. What counted was the backing of a party hierarchy since they chose candidates for office. In a system carefully de- signed to centralize power in the hands of party bosses, she needed only to make sure that she was one of them.

Her lack of concern for her own popularity served her well since Golda was always willing to risk public anger by delivering bad news and pounding the populace into submission, and Ben-Gurion regularly sent her into that fray.

Her most brutal fight in those years was for a new unemployment tax for all Histadrut members, who were already paying their regular union dues as well as contributing to pension and sick funds. The proposed Mifdeh B, designed to raise money to ease the burden of the unem- ployed, met a storm of opposition from workers already barely feeding their own families, and Golda went on the stump to stave off rebellion. Plodding from factory to factory, she idealistically appealed to a people’s pride in sharing and caring for its own. “We have among us not only grown-ups who go hungry, but also children who are hungry, hungry for

bread,” she said, mixing high-minded rhetoric with a hefty dose of guilt. “It is absolutely necessary that one of the first and main things we do will be to wipe out this shame, this blot on the community and chiefly on the Labor Federation.”

But when she invoked the workers’ “debt of honor” with their com- rades or the redemptive power of social responsibility, rank-and-file mem- bers jeered and shouted that she should go back to America “where she belonged.” Why can’t overseas Jews pitch in the money, workers asked. Golda wouldn’t hear of it. “We shall not go to the Jews of the Diaspora to seek relief. Our topic of discussion with them cannot be the matter of unemployment, the matter of hunger. . . . We go to the Jews of the Dias- pora to ask them to do their utmost to enable us to build, to create new things.”

When the revival meeting tone failed, Golda talked tough, conjuring up ominous visions of a curtailment in medical services. Sharp and caus- tic in debate, she was a battering ram and pushed the new tax through.

Next she faced down the nurses, who opposed the prevailing pay scale, based on family size rather than on experience or skill. “We’re pro- fessionals and expect a professional wage,” they insisted. Golda accused them of greed and moral irresponsibility. After all, although she earned less than the charwoman in her office at the Histadrut, she wasn’t com- plaining.

As she did battle on behalf of the Histadrut, Golda was denounced from the right and the left, often brutally. “She was always against the workers,” one critic said. “There is a sadistic streak to her.”

Golda never seemed to care.

She clung to peculiar blind spots, particularly when harsh realities collided with her ideological illusions, and the harshest of those colli- sions occurred when she tried to juggle her Socialist ideals against her commitment to Zionism. Her support for the Hebrew labor campaign and Histadrut’s exclusion of Arab workers from its ranks, for example, left little room for expressions of Socialist solidarity with Arab workers. Nonetheless, Golda loudly proclaimed such camaraderie, bragging

about Histadrut efforts to organize Arab workers, ignoring the fact that they were excluded from Histadrut benefits.

Gradually, Golda won deep respect from the
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’s movers and shak- ers for her drive and dedication. Given that reputation, Golda’s “feminine” side, especially her proclivity for crying, caught both her admirers and her adversaries off guard. “In social questions she has a genius for belligerent opposition,” said one of her colleagues. “In regard to a political or ideo- logical issue, she is strong as iron. But if, in the course of the debate, some- one offends her personally, she can begin to cry like a high school girl or a spoiled child.” Over time, however, except at the movies, those tears rarely flowed without design, just as her girlish flirting was rarely uncalculated.

Despite the respect she garnered, Golda did not elicit a similar level of affection. She could be snappish and dismissive. One afternoon during a Va’ad secretariat meeting, for example, she complained that Shamai, who’d joined Sheyna and the children in Palestine, had been fired from his job because of her position. “I can’t accept the fact that my sister’s fam- ily has to suffer because I am a member of the secretariat,” she barked. Until she received proof that she was wrong, she said, “it isn’t possible to continue on my job.”

Impatient with those who refused to agree with her, she lashed out bit- terly at anyone who expressed an opposing point of view. Her cold streak frightened even her friends. “God forbid if she didn’t like you,” said Nomi Zuckerman, whose family had been close to Golda for more than a de- cade. “She could be intensely vindictive. And she remembered. She never missed anything anybody ever said or did.”

The expert in Golda’s ability to turn to ice was, no doubt, Morris, whom she’d continued to string along despite their physical separation. When she and the children returned from New York, both Menachem and Sarah hoped that Golda and Morris would reunite, but Golda asked for an “unofficial separation.” Morris tried everything to change her mind. But when he arrived on Friday nights to spend weekends with his family, she barely acknowledged his presence, ignoring him for the friends who always crowded her house.

By then, Morris was working in Jerusalem, boarding with Nomi’s fam- ily. “I can still see his room,” Nomi recalls, “a metal bed, a keyhole desk, and Golda’s photograph, which he stared at for hours.”

In 1938, Morris reached his limit and demanded that they either re- unite or separate officially. “I came to Palestine for one reason only—to be with Goldie,” he told Nomi. “But she was never there.” Unaccustomed to Morris’ calling the shots, Golda fled to the house of a friend, where she spent two weeks of crying. Then she went home to her children’s anger and Morris took a job with Solel Boneh in Persia. “What has Tel Aviv to offer except my bare, cheerless room on Maaze Street and the meetings with you?” he wrote the children.

While Morris was the most dramatic example of Golda’s penchant for freezing out people, he wasn’t unique. Golda had a sort of personal black- list, “and once you got on that list, you never got off,” said David Passow, the grandson of one of Golda’s old friends. “But, on the other hand, if you were on her white list, she welcomed you like a real Jewish mother and she’d go to the mat for you every time. If you were on her white list, you could do no wrong. There was no gray list. She was incapable of gray. It was always either black or white.”