Golda (40 page)

Golda’s outline of Israel’s future borders sparked a revolt in the Knes- set, the “not one inch” crowd led by Menachem Begin introducing a vote of no confidence. She squeaked through with 62 of 120 votes, but the message was clear: not a centimeter more.

Ten days later, however, she pushed the Israeli government further by raising the issue of a pullback from the canal in a cabinet meeting. In a critical shift, her ministers effectively renounced the long-held principle, established during the government of Eshkol, of no withdrawal except in the context of a contractual peace settlement.

It might have been the beginning of a new era, but the National Unity cabinet deadlocked when they tried to define how much land they were willing to give up for a partial peace. Still, they might have found a way to break the stalemate had William Rogers not, again, bumbled onto the scene to push for a partial settlement. At Sadat’s invitation, Rogers flew to Cairo, the first trip there by any U.S. secretary of state since 1953. Rogers smelled a diplomatic coup in the offing, and by the time he reached Jeru- salem, he couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for Sadat’s sincerity and the prospect of Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories.

Golda, whose memory was long and grudge-carrying legendary, re- fused to share Rogers’ optimism, and their exchanges grew bitter. When she asked Rogers to fly over the Golan Heights to see, firsthand, the dan-

ger that Israeli settlements faced, the secretary refused. Astonishingly ill- informed about Israeli politics, he made matters worse by trying an end run around Golda, asking to meet with the Knesset Foreign Affairs Com- mittee, a request Golda could hardly deny given the frequency with which she met with members of the U.S. Congress. There the discus- sions were even more acrimonious than they had been with the prime minister, since the committee included her opposition on the right, espe- cially Begin, only hardening resolve against any partial settlement agree- ment.

Ultimately, all the talk about such an agreement was probably irrele- vant since Sadat, by his own admission, was engaged in a more compli- cated dance than peacemaking. His invitation to Rogers had sparked the harsh response he’d expected from the Soviets, and, in turn, he arrested or ousted the members of his government most firmly allied with Mos- cow. As Sadat expected they would, the Soviets panicked and sent Rus- sian president Nikolai Podgorny to Cairo to smooth things over with a treaty of friendship and the promise of “all the weapons you have asked for,” in Sadat’s words. Between September 1970 and July 1971, he re- ceived 100 MiG-21 jet fighters and 80 Mi-8 troop-carrying helicopters.

But having promised that 1971 would be the “year of decision,” Sadat wanted more, especially more aircraft. So when the promised weapons did not arrive promptly, he called the Soviet bluff and ordered the ex- pulsion of all 15,000 Soviet troops in Egypt. Washington celebrated what it considered to be Sadat’s decision to scale back his military activities. “That interpretation made me happy,” Sadat later wrote. “It was precisely what I wanted them to think.” The West’s leading diplomats never con- sidered Sadat’s real reason: “No war could be fought while Soviet experts worked in Egypt.”

Sadat’s expulsion of the Soviets reinvigorated American attempts to arrange an Israeli pullback from the canal. But this time, Washington’s messenger was Joseph Sisco, one of Rogers’ assistants. His first meeting with Golda, at her home, was a disaster. Sisco tried to break the ice by talking about his long friendship with a Jewish family, the Goodmans,

who served him chicken soup when he was a boy. “Sisco was trying to trade Mrs. Goodman’s chicken soup for a pullback from Suez,” Golda told her colleagues contemptuously. She wasn’t so easily bought.

The American attempts to broker a peace were already doomed by U.S. domestic politics and Cold War rivalries. Nixon was under mounting pres- sure to be more supportive of Israel from a senatorial who’s who that in- cluded Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole, Jacob Javits, Scoop Jackson, Edward Brooke, Stuart Symington, and Abe Ribicoff. And in January 1972, Nixon finally admitted what had hardly been a secret, that the Soviet Union was sending arms to the Middle East and that the United States needed to help Israel maintain the military balance in the region. In fact, Arab arms procurement had increased 300 percent since 1969, with thirteen Arab countries spending $2.43 billion and Israel just $790 million, according to the Swedish International Peace Research Institute.

By the dawn of 1973, the Middle East was again at a stalemate. But Golda’s military advisers assured her that she need have no concern. Golda “has better boundaries than King David or King Solomon,” pro- nounced Rabin. Standing on Masada, Dayan proclaimed that Israel had circumstances “the likes of which our people has probably never wit- nessed in the past and certainly not since the modern return to Zion.”

If the Egyptians attack, he said, “we’ll step on them. I will crush them.

Let them come.”

* * *

Despite the failure of the major powers to bring Israel and Egypt together, there was no shortage of would-be mediators—individual crusaders and diplomatic wannabes—anxious to step up to the dusty plate of the Middle Eastern conflict.

Small nations anxious to make their mark, or to prove their indepen- dence from the world’s superblocs, entered the fray, the first a group of African leaders—the Four Wise Men, they were called—representing the Organization of African Unity. Theirs was a curious, or at least an origi- nal, conceit, that nations without enormous military might, great wealth,

or the clout those characteristics imply might succeed where the United Nations or the heavyweights failed.

Africa’s self-styled “messengers of peace”—Senegal’s poet-president Léopold Senghor, President Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon, Chief of State Yakubu Gowon of Nigeria, and President Joseph Mobutu of Zaire— descended on Israel in mid-November 1971 to bridge the Arab-Israel gap “by means of a dialogue.” It was a chaotic event, to say the least. Mobutu arrived an hour after the first three presidents, requiring two formal wel- coming ceremonies at Lod Airport. The name of his country had changed from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Zaire Republic one week earlier, forcing the Israelis to revise all their programs and invita- tions. And the specially ordered national flags were delivered late because the flag-maker’s wife had just given birth to Israel’s first quintuplets.

No one in Israel had much confidence that the peace effort launched at the June summit of the OAU would bear much fruit. But Golda re- tained a special affection and respect for Africans, so, for the first time in Israeli history, she ordered her cabinet to eschew Israel’s emblematic in- formality for black ties for the welcome dinner.

Senghor, the leader of the group, approached the mission with high seriousness of purpose, proclaiming that the four leaders had a special opportunity to succeed where so many others had failed because of the unique bond between the Africans, Arabs, and Jews as “a trilogy of suffer- ing peoples.” But during four meetings with Golda, the Africans offered no original proposal or approach. And their subsequent visit to Cairo was no more fruitful. When they returned to the OAU with divided recom- mendations, the notion of African mediation was summarily dropped.

President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and Prime Minister Gheorghe Maurer of Romania, the only Eastern European nation to maintain diplomatic ties with Israel after the 1967 war, were the next to throw their hats into the ring as go-betweens. In April 1972, shortly after a trip by Ceaus¸escu to Egypt, they invited Golda to Bucharest. The announcement of her trip, the first time an Israeli prime minister had visited Eastern Europe, touched off a frenzy of speculation about a possible peace initiative. As

was her habit, Golda stayed mum. “I don’t know whether I’ll bring a peace treaty home in my bag,” was all she would say.

During her three-day visit, Golda spent eight hours with Ceaus¸escu and another four with Prime Minister Maurer discussing how to bridge Israeli and Egyptian differences. Or at least that was the official story. But Maurer and Ceaus¸escu also quietly conveyed a message to Golda, alleg- edly from Sadat, offering a meeting between representatives of the two countries. Golda embraced the proposal enthusiastically and breathlessly awaited word that the Romanians had made the necessary arrangements. Ten days passed, then two weeks, but Golda never heard anything about the meeting again.

According to the Egyptian foreign minister, Mahmoud Riad, the en- tire affair was cooked up by the Romanians despite Egypt’s expressions of disinterest in such a meeting. In his memoirs, Riad recounted numerous such failed diplomatic endeavors, by Ihsan Sabri, then foreign minister of Turkey, by the Netherlands’ foreign minister, Joseph Luns, then secre- tary-general of NATO, all of which were similarly hushed up.

In January 1973, Pope Paul VI offered his services as a mediator dur- ing his first meeting with an Israeli prime minister. But the encounter was too tense to lead to anything productive, and its aftermath negated any possibility that the Vatican would be seen as a neutral arbiter. Min- utes after Golda left the Vatican, the papal spokesman told the press that the pope had agreed to Golda’s request to see him only because “he con- siders it his duty not to let sleep any opportunity to act in favor of peace, in defense of all religious interest, particularly the weakest and most de- fenseless, and most of all the Palestinian refugees.”

The most infamous private peace effort was the Nahum Goldmann affair, which solidified Golda’s reputation for inflexibility. Goldmann was a peculiar character even in the cosmos of Zionist odd ducks. An ebul- lient Lithuanian who’d been a leading force in German Jewry before the Second World War, he went on to become one of the major figures of Diaspora Zionism and the president of the World Jewish Congress. By the late 1960s, Goldmann was living in a gracious apartment on the

Avenue Montaigne in Paris, an aging swell pontificating condescend- ingly about a country where he’d never really lived, calling Israelis a “people who are impossible to like.”

For Israelis, Goldmann was both an annoying and useful maverick. He negotiated the reparations treaties with West Germany and was a firm supporter of Zionist causes across the globe. But he had the irritating habit of acting as if he were an official of the Israeli government.

In the spring of 1970, Goldmann informed Golda that he’d been in- vited to meet with Nasser on the condition that she consent to the visit. “Nasser, all of a sudden, is so worried about the Israeli government that no Jews and no Israeli citizens should go see him without the permission of the Israeli government?” Golda replied, horrified at the prospect of a man she didn’t trust talking with Nasser.

“How do you imagine the meeting will unfold?” she asked, and Gold- mann quickly assured her that he didn’t expect to negotiate with Nasser but would serve only as “a sounding board.” Golda continued to press him for details. “You’re going to sit there and Nasser will speak and then you’ll say thank you very much. I’ve sounded you out?”

After a long discussion, Golda indicated that she needed to discuss the matter with her cabinet, but Goldmann objected, worried that Begin’s people would undermine any chance that Golda might agree. Nonethe- less, Golda raised the issue with her ministers, who dismissed the idea as absurd.

Two days later, Golda informed Goldmann of that decision, and within twelve hours, demonstrators were outside her office chanting, “Golda, if you can’t make peace, GO!” and “We want a Goldmann-Nasser meeting.” Seeing the invitation as a major breakthrough, a wide segment of the Is- raeli press castigated Golda mercilessly. University professors and intellec- tuals organized against her and a group of high school students wrote her a letter refusing to carry out their military service “under the circum- stances.”

Golda assured the public that she had repeatedly sought meetings with Egyptian officials, although she refused to offer details of any of the

secret negotiations. But almost breathless at the prospect of an end to more than two decades of war, Israel’s peace movement wasn’t in the mood to believe her.

If they’d known the full details of the Goldmann affair, they might have cut Golda some slack. Although Goldmann maintained that Egyp- tian foreign minister Mahmoud Riad was involved in arranging his visit, Riad denied that account. According to him, Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Tito had raised the possibility of a meeting between Nasser and Gold- mann, but Riad had rejected the idea out of hand.

Despite the Goldmann fiasco, freelance peace negotiators, with their strange blend of vanity and idealism, continued to hound Golda, and she never barred her door. The most dogged was Marek Halter, a Jewish painter and political activist living in Paris.

Born in the Warsaw Ghetto, Halter had first met Golda shortly after the 1967 war, and three years later he approached her with a plan to open a dialogue between Israel and Egypt using a more appropriate intermedi- ary than Goldmann, Lyova Eliav, secretary-general of the Labor Party and well-known dove. Some Egyptian friends had shown interest in the idea, as had Eliav. But Eliav wasn’t sanguine about securing Golda’s agree- ment.

Golda, however, surprised them. “Eliav isn’t Goldmann,” she said. “He’s one of us, he’s part of Israel. But I hope you realize how hard it is for me to start us on an adventure like that without knowing where it may take us.”

Thinking to appeal to Golda’s concern for her reputation, Halter re- minded her how many people held her personally responsible for Gold- mann’s failed trip. But as indifferent as ever to popular sentiment, Golda seemed worried only about how serious the Egyptians were about talking. “Personally, I have nothing against it,” she concluded. “Anything that may help to promote peace is important. . . . But I can’t make a commit- ment all by myself. We have a National Unity government. It will fall if your plan succeeds. I don’t mind that, but I wouldn’t want it to fall for nothing.”

Give me twenty-four hours, Golda asked, promising to talk to other members of her cabinet. A day later, she gave Halter permission to pro- ceed. “I ask only one thing of you,” she said. “Report to me directly on what happens. I hope you succeed. For us, for the Arabs, for all of us.”