Golda (23 page)

With independence, the floodgates had opened, and no one had the slightest idea where to put the patchwork of Polish professionals broken by years in concentration camps and illiterate Yemenites confused by elec- tricity, of Hungarians confused by Libyan Jews who looked suspiciously like Arabs, and of Iraqis appalled at Czech women baring their legs against all the injunctions of the Torah.

The great Ingathering was one of those noble Zionist ideals that brought tears to the eyes of the Israelis. But that idyllic vision left no room

for the messy reality that, unlike the early Zionist pioneers, the tens of thousands of immigrants who landed on the shores of the new country weren’t starry-eyed romantics but refugees who’d survived pogroms, geno- cide, and internment. They needed homes, jobs, medical care, schools, language instruction, and vocational training. It was an emergency of staggering proportions and Israel, a beggar state surviving on the charity of increasingly tight-fisted philanthropists, had a meager national budget of less than $30 million.

A distracted idealist in matters other than defense, Ben-Gurion tossed out fanciful solutions—that every established family should take in some refugees or that they could build mud huts, Arab style. But even before the new state emptied the refugee camps on Cyprus of 24,500 inmates and the European DP camps of 239,000, before 250,000 Yemenite Jews lined up in Aden for Operation Magic Carpet and before Poland agreed to open the doors to allow 80,000 weary Jews to depart, Israel barely had enough housing for its residents.

Enter Golda, suffused with dreams of a Socialist Jewish state, a land of equality, justice, and full employment. The nature of the crisis, the nitty- gritty need for houses and jobs, was a perfect match for her literal style. Taut with pent-up energy after six months of enforced diplomatic ennui and driven by a need to prove that her lengthy isolation from the center of power was ill deserved, she threw herself into building a brand-new min- istry from scratch until it became a domestic powerhouse and a political empire.

Three weeks after her return from Russia, just one month after Jordan signed an armistice agreement with Israel, Golda presented the Knesset, the new parliament, with her plan for building 30,000 new houses before the end of the year. Impossible! snapped Eliezer Kaplan, the minister of fi- nance. The least expensive houses—300-square-foot boxes with out- houses—cost $1,300 to construct. Where was Israel going to get the money? I’ll fly to America, Golda replied, always assuming that with a few weeks of schnorring—begging—she could shake loose the cash.

That promise didn’t move the economists, who worried that spend-

ing on large-scale housing projects would destroy the current standard of living and pull money away from long-range development. “A Jewish state that aims at a high standard of living without unrestricted immi- gration . . . I for one don’t see any need for it,” Golda retorted. “I am always shocked by economists, themselves well fed, who concoct a the- ory according to which human beings cannot live with any dignity in the present.”

Then city planners groused about the need for scientific data on the chosen sites, on soil and topography; mayors chimed in with their own ideas; and the Histadrut expected extensive consultations since they would supply both the labor and the cement.

The day before she was scheduled to leave for the United States to raise the funds she needed, Golda faced her biggest hurdle. The new state promised that Jews would finally have a voice, and the Knesset members were taking that promise literally in a chorus of monologues that routinely kept them in session long after midnight.

Ideologues on the right and the left flailed Golda for not depending more on private enterprise or for not moving more decidedly toward a planned economy. Shouldn’t the houses be bigger and sturdier? others asked. Why are you building in the center of the country, which is al- ready overcrowded? How much garden space will each unit have? What about schools and clinics? Hey, don’t forget synagogues! representatives of religious parties insisted.

Golda had little patience for the endless prattling. There was no time for careful consideration, for negotiations with private companies looking for profits she couldn’t afford, no time to develop mortgage financing programs, to order topographic surveys, to design ideal communities, or train skilled workers.

Would I prefer perfect small villages with shops, kindergartens, clinics, and public halls in ideal locations? she responded. Sure. But time is a luxury we don’t have. For almost a year, the National Housing Department had been studying the problem, looking into alternative building techniques appropriate to a country without any lumber, steel,

or plumbing industries, and the result was that 200,000 immigrants were living in tents or wooden shacks that f looded when it rained, baked in the torrid summer sun, and offered little protection in the damp cold of winter.

“We need cheap housing quickly” became her mantra, and Golda was willing to step on any toe that got in the way of her image of twelve or fifteen houses rising every day.

On May Day, she marched with 10,000 workers through the streets of Tel Aviv and from the podium expressed her hope that the following May Day would be celebrated in a Socialist state. Then she flew to the United States to ask Jewish capitalists to help her out of a bind. “I went to our Par- liament two weeks ago . . . and presented a project for 30,000 housing units by the end of the year,” she confessed, one of scores of guilt-inducing faux confessions she would make over the years. “Parliament approved it, and there was great joy in the country. But actually I did a strange thing: presented a project for which I don’t have the money. It was an awful thing to do—to forge a signature to a check—but I have done it. . . . It is up to you either to keep these people in camps . . . or to . . . restore their dignity.”

Leading Jewish fund-raisers were annoyed. Ben-Gurion was asking for contributions to the defense budget, the minister of social welfare was stumping for funds, and there was Golda claiming that her projects de- served the highest priority, in a year when giving was markedly down. But Golda’s brand of candor, guilt inducement, and coquettishness never failed with American Jews. With the help of David Dubinsky, the presi- dent of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, she kick-started a new approach to financing Israel’s development, investment rather than charity, and created the Amun-Israeli Housing Corporation, which is- sued interest-bearing bonds backed by the Israeli government. “We pray for the day when we will no longer need philanthropic campaigns; we want to free ourselves of these kind and generous shackles,” Golda de- clared, immediately selling $1 million of her new bonds to the ILGWU. Back home, she moved on to her next drive, for employment. More

than 5,000 people were registered for work at local employment ex- changes, and most weeks half of them found nothing. Those numbers, she was quick to point out, didn’t include elderly people who needed a bit of work to help make ends meet, women with children who would feel better if they were contributing to the social welfare, or those who’d simply given up. There was no shortage of work for the skilled. But most refugees, especially those from Arab countries, had neither trades nor professions, and their numbers doubled and tripled every month.

Golda’s solution was a massive public works program of road and hous- ing building, hospital construction, and tree planting that would guaran- tee every worker at least fifteen days of paid employment a month. For a tiny, impecunious state, the scope was staggering: a network of roads in the Galilee, the repair and broadening of roads in coastal areas, the re- building of the highway to Jerusalem, the opening of arteries to mines and remote kibbutzim in the Negev and to border settlements in the Judean Hills.

Again, the economists fought her, whipping out charts and graphs to show how much more economically productive it would be to channel the money into long-term economic development. “If we have to choose be- tween making a road or vegetable growing, I’m for vegetables,” she argued. “If we have to choose between a road and planning new orange groves, I’m for new orange groves. But the upshot is that we haven’t one or the other, not because anyone has ulterior motives, heaven forbid, and not because anyone is trying to hide away from the difficulties.” There just wasn’t the money for both.

In the Knesset, the debate on Golda’s programs turned into a vote of confidence on the government’s record on the absorption of immigrants, and, predictably, Golda was heaped with ideological scorn from the left and the right and needled for every detail.

As usual, Golda prevailed, but, just as predictably, she had to find the money to finance her domestic revolution.

Returning to the American trough was becoming perilous. After more than a decade of raising enormous sums for Israel, Golda was equally

weary—of the incessant begging and of Israel’s dependence. She hit the wall when a man at a fund-raising event asked if some arrangement could be made to send care packages to Israel. Startled, she stopped cold on the stage. “Now this maybe seems funny to you, but it is not funny to me,” she answered. “I am a citizen of Israel and I absolutely refuse to be classi- fied as someone belonging to a people whose needs can be answered by packages.”

The long-term solution, devised at a meeting of fifty American Jewish and Israeli leaders, was to expand on the approach Golda had developed for housing and convert Israel from a charity into an investment by issu- ing State of Israel Bonds. We “do not ask for any free ride to economic or political security,” announced Golda, abruptly shifting her rhetoric. “Is- rael now stands on the threshold of an industrial revolution which must force the world to revise its concept of Israel as a poor country.” All we need, she intoned, in another twenty cities, is $1.5 billion for a massive development program that will lead to Israel’s “industrial revolution.”

The major American Jewish fund-raisers grumbled that the new pro- gram would bleed money from their own campaigns and incur the wrath of the U.S. government. After Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Trea- sury under Franklin Roosevelt, secured the approval of the Truman ad- ministration, the real concerns surfaced, that Israeli leaders like Golda didn’t know how to manage money. “You had to be a little crazy, deciding to fund social insurance and free education when the State had no money and was surrounded by hostility,” said Ralph Goldman, who worked in Ben-Gurion’s office. “And the businessmen don’t like crazy.”

* * *

With the birth of Israel, the relationship between American Jewry and old Palestine had to change. “Every once in a while the Prime Minister of Israel or some other government member gets cables from good Ameri- can friends who urge, ‘For God’s sake, don’t do this!’ ” Golda complained. “You have taken a terrible decision. You are dependent upon the Jewish community of the United States. Now I don’t say that every word of the

Prime Minister or any other cabinet minister is sacred or that there can be no mistakes, but have we no right to express our opinion without being punished immediately in dollars and cents? Is that the whip that is going to be held over the head of Israel forever? How much longer do you think can a community that has bought and bled in order to regain its dignity bear a situation of this kind?”

Golda had already ruffled some American feathers when she took over from Abba Eban as the chief Israeli delegate to the United Nations for the end of the seventh session of the General Assembly and used her bully pulpit to castigate the Soviet Union for its treatment of Jews. By what right does the State of Israel presume to speak in the name of a Jewish community outside its borders? many asked.

But no disagreement engendered more tension between America’s Zionist leaders and Golda than Israel’s economically risky decision to al- low unfettered mass immigration into the new state. Israel’s Law of Return extended citizenship to every Jew in the world, no matter his or her cir- cumstances, and Golda took that piece of legislation literally. No matter how old, how ill, how crippled or poor, every Jew would be welcomed.

But the flood seemed unending. After the camps in Cyprus and Eu- rope were emptied, almost all the remaining 37,000 Jews of Bulgaria and 8,000 more from Yugoslavia arrived. Another 20,000 made their way across the borders from Iran, 34,000 from Turkey, 32,000 from Libya, and 45,000 from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. When the Yemenite Jews began streaming out of their mountain villages, Israeli planes had to fly eighty-nine trips a month to bring them to Tel Aviv.

Dozens of other Jewish communities were still in peril, and Golda fought tooth and nail to transfer them all to Israel: 110,000 Iraqi Jews, Kurdish Jews, the 106,000 survivors of the once proud Polish commu- nity.

“Mapai does not promise a land of plenty if it wins,” said Golda on the eve of the 1951 Knesset election. “It promises only plenty of Jews and ra- tioning to make that possible.”

By the end of 1951, American Zionist leaders were appealing to the

Israelis to slow the pace or establish national quotas before decades of struggle were washed away in the tsunami. “You have heard that immi- gration will have to be curtailed,” Golda responded at a UJA meeting in Chicago. “I don’t believe it. Don’t ask me how we are going to solve it if you don’t help. But I know that there is not a single man or woman among us who would want the title of Minister or President or Prime Minister, who would want to live in the State of Israel, who would not rue the day the state had been established, if we have to reach the decision that there is a Jew anywhere to whom we have to deny admittance.”

However, a growing of number of Israelis shared the American con- cern over the relentless wave that was, at once, both awe-inspiring and menacing. The face of Israel was changing at a dislocating pace, and European-born Israelis weren’t sure what to make of the horde of dark- skinned, turbaned men and women who had never heard of Theodor Herzl, been inside a hospital, or f lushed a toilet. Their food smelled different, their Hebrew lacked any twinge of
Yiddishkeit,
their prayers sounded foreign.