Golda (34 page)

Each time a problem grew into a crisis, then, her first reaction was to stick an old Band-Aid onto a newly gaping wound.

Golda’s inability to consider new ways of coping with changing realities was demonstrated in no arena more clearly than in stormy Israel’s labor relations, which hit a new low point during her tenure. Israel looked fat and happy. A postwar euphoria had swept the Diaspora, and overseas Jews contributed an astonishing $1.2 billion to Israel Bonds and the United Jewish Appeal, to Israeli hospitals, schools, and universities. And the new trade between the West Bank and Jordan and the new pool of cheap labor within Israel sparked a massive surge in the economy, which grew by 35 percent from 1969 to 1973, with a concomitant rise in inflation.

Bound by contracts—with little protection against the soaring cost of living—workers rebelled, and the country was plagued by a rolling series of labor disputes by postal workers and hospital administrators, port work- ers, physicians, and stevedores. Service workers and administrators shut down hospitals and clinics, leaving them without clean linens, food, or sterile equipment. Electrical workers walked off the job, shutting down both power and water. Civil aviation workers closed Israel’s air link to the

rest of the world. Every day a new group—from the assembly line at the Elite chocolate factory, from canneries and mines—joined the rising na- tional chorus complaining about wages.

Although covered by union contracts, Israel’s workers had little say about what was bargained on their behalf since their unions were all part of the Histadrut, which alone had the power to negotiate. A multinational conglomerate of banks and building companies, factories, financial insti- tutions, and other businesses, as well as a labor federation, the Histadrut even bargained on behalf of workers employed in its own companies, just as it represented public employees, although its leadership overlapped with the management of the government.

Golda saw no contradictions or conflict of interest in this system. Is- raeli workers, in her view, didn’t need much protection since theirs was a Socialist state led by men and women committed to justice. But in an era of rising expectations and revolts against paternalism of all sorts, that ap- proach was anachronistic, at best. So workers began clamoring for wage increases in the middle of contracts. Inured to appeals to egalitarianism, skilled workers, like physicians, insisted on being paid in accordance with their level of education, the demand for their talents, or, Golda’s horror, their “importance” to society.

As impatient with what she saw as blatant self-interest as she’d been when she faced down Jewish workers in the
yishuv,
and still clinging to her utopian concept of “from each according to his ability, to each ac- cording to his need,” Golda haughtily dismissed them. “These aren’t the lowest-paid workers who are striking, but the highest-paid,” she com- plained angrily. “Organized labor has not only rights but obligations.

“I will not spend my last days at the head of a government that only considers how to make some people millionaires.”

When lectures and entreaties failed to stem the tide of strikes, Golda didn’t look for a new approach to socialism; she borrowed a page out of the handbooks written by strikebreaking governments all across the capitalist world. After physicians at public hospitals began a slowdown, she threat- ened to send in volunteers—scabs, in fact. That threat fell on deaf ears, so

she instructed her minister of health to issue an emergency order forcing them back to work. When he refused to take such a drastic measure, a vir- tual declaration of war on organized labor, Golda signed the order herself. Three months later, she introduced legislation criminalizing strikes “in defiance of proper union authority.” To the squall of outrage, she said only, “I simply cannot stand by and watch everything deteriorate into a political and moral catastrophe.” No new raises during contract periods,

she decreed. No slowdowns. No walkouts.

As she turned on labor, Golda ran into the formidable figure of Yit- zhak Ben-Aharon, the secretary-general of the Histadrut, an iconic figure in Socialist Zionist circles. Refusing to be subservient to the Labor Party, he encouraged strikes instead of helping to stop them and accused Golda of acting like a corporate boss.

Golda struggled to isolate Ben-Aharon politically, but a man of fierce determination and immense moral authority, he was immune to intimi- dation. Finally, Golda denounced Ben-Aharon for ignoring the skyrock- eting cost of defense, implying that he was jeopardizing national security. Nonsense! blared Ben-Aharon, declaring that there was plenty of fat in the public coffers. “From where will the money be taken?” asked Golda sardonically. “By reducing tea drinking, perhaps?” When Ben-Aharon pointed to the rising salaries of public administrators, Golda scoffed, un- willing to entertain any discussion of corruption within her own ranks.

Golda won her battle against Ben-Aharon, but in the process helped to undermine the very institution she was attempting to save. The His- tadrut was paralyzed not just by strikes and the changing face of the country but by the Labor Party’s refusal to allow it any semblance of inde- pendence. The labor federation she had long thought of as the heart of Israeli socialism collapsed entirely within a decade, victim, in large mea- sure, of her inflexibility.

Golda proved equally rigid and clumsy in confronting the growing rift between secular and religious Israel, the legacy of Ben-Gurion’s curious coalition between old socialists and Orthodox Jews. For twenty years, secular Israelis, the overwhelming majority of the population, had lived

in the limbo of quasi theocracy, with public transportation, movies, and restaurants closed on Sabbath and no civil marriage or divorce, the price of the National Religious Party’s alliance with Labor.

At the very moment when the population was beginning to chafe under the religious bit, the growing clout of the ultra-Orthodox parties pushed the NRP toward greater and greater rabbinical control over daily life. The most secular of Jews, Golda blithely smoked and drove on Sab- bath, and ate frequently at the Mandarin, her favorite nonkosher Chi- nese restaurant. But having learned her political lessons about the dangers of offending the Orthodoxy, she would do nothing that might anger the NRP.

Her first attempt to balance the power of the religious establishment against the desires of the populace was sparked by one of those absurd brouhahas that make no sense except as part of a wider cultural war. After years of deferring to religious sentiment against televising on Sabbath, the Israel Broadcasting Authority decided to extend its programming to seven nights a week. But five days before the first Friday-night broadcast, the head of one of the religious parties prevailed upon Golda to stop the sacrilege and, deferring, Golda asked the IBA to change its decision.

Rather than acquiesce, the director of the IBA threatened to resign, and Golda invoked an obscure clause in the regulations of the public body governing broadcasting to countermand his decision. But a single viewer in Tel Aviv appealed to the courts and found a judge willing to order Golda to show cause why the IBA should not go on the air, and she could find no grounds.

“It was the day the majority rebelled and succeeded, for a fleeing mo- ment, in imposing its will on the minority,” Ephraim Kishon, Israel’s most biting satirist, wrote in his regular column, suggesting that the an- niversary of the first Friday-night television broadcast should be made a national holiday.

Nonsense, said Golda dismissively, who’d watched the Friday-night chapter of
The Forsyte Saga
from Kibbutz Revivim. “For this they had to make a lot of noise?”

The secular majority, however, won few such victories while Golda was prime minister, and the conflict reached its breaking point in an eso- teric squabble over the minutiae of Jewish religious law as embodied in the halacha. The case involved a brother and sister barred by the religious courts from marrying other Jews because their mother had left her first husband, a convert, and remarried without a religious divorce. Under the halacha, Miriam and Hanoch Langer were thus
mamzerim,
bastards, and ineligible to marry Jews who were not also
mamzerim
or converts.

The specter of two young Israelis, one a burly army sergeant-major, the other recently mustered out of the military, blocked from true love by elderly rabbis citing abstruse religious injunctions, inflamed the Israeli media. And the resulting explosion of frustration with clerical control threatened to topple Golda’s government when some Knesset members, partners in her coalition, introduced bills to permit civil marriage.

With her limited repertoire of political responses, Golda tried to solve the dilemma by bullying the religious court. “If God has to be compas- sionate, then rabbis also have to be compassionate! she barked angrily against the backdrop of a demonstration outside the Knesset by support- ers of civil marriage.

“I cannot accept the statement that’s the way it’s written in the hala- cha,” she told a gathering of students. “That’s not the answer to every- thing.”

But alarmed at the threat to her alliance with the NRP, she then turned around and used all of her political skills to block any legislation that would open the door to civil marriage, even rejecting a compro- mise that would allow civil marriage only for those barred from religious ceremonies under the halacha. “Such a law will create discrimination against the children of those married in such a way,” she declared, an odd bit of logic under the circumstances.

“I am not religious, but we must honor the religious,” she coaxed, re- flecting both political exigency and the sympathy she had developed for religion as she aged. Falling back on her oldest rhetorical device, she dredged up a bit of her personal history to make her point, recalling how

she had tried to avoid the use of a chuppah when she married. “Then I realized, ‘You idiot!’ ” she exclaimed. “ ‘You are making your mother mis- erable. It’s not as if you won’t be able to live happily ever after if you stand under a chuppah.’ ”

Religion kept the Jewish people unified in exile, she argued. “If I had remained in the Soviet Union, I might have become Orthodox because synagogue was the only place Soviet Jews could express their Jewish- ness.”

Ultimately, Golda resolved the Langer issue with a masterful stroke of backroom politics around the selection of new chief rabbis that led to the appointment of a religious leader willing to find a way to allow the Langers to marry. But, as in her dealings with the Histadrut, she missed the point. Product of a paternalistic collectivist political culture, Golda was blind to concerns for individual autonomy, individual identity, individual liberty. But caught up in the international fervor for individual rights, a growing number of Israelis were sick of being controlled by a theocracy.

The fundamental shift from a collective social model to individual- ism continued to elude her, alienating a growing bloc of liberal support in the process. “In Golda, you had a combination of ignorance and self- righteousness, which means that she didn’t understand the other side and didn’t even try,” said Shulamit Aloni, the godmother of Israel’s civil rights movement. “When I started talking about human rights, she ac- cused me of advocating bourgeois, egoistic values, and those were bad words in those days. But what I remember most was how she responded when I stood up at a meeting and started to talk about something and began by saying, ‘I think.’ Golda interrupted and chastised me. ‘There is no I think,’ she said. ‘There is only WE think.’ ”

* * *

“We” was the most powerful word in Golda’s personal vocabulary—if the “We” referred to Labor Zionists or to Zionists, Jews, or Socialists. She gave short shrift to almost every other group identity, and the one she dismissed with the greatest disdain was women.

First known photograph of Golda Golda in Poale Zion pageant in

Meyerson, circa 1904. Milwaukee, 1919.
photograph courtesy of the jewish museum milwaukee
.