Chapter 1: My Childhood

Early Life: In Europe

"In a way, I suppose that the little I recall of my early childhood in Russia, my first eight years, sums up my beginnings, what now are called the formative years. If so, it is sad that I have very few happy or even pleasant memories of this time. The isolated episodes that have stayed with me throughout the past seventy years have to do mostly with the terrible hardships my family suffered, with poverty, cold, hunger and fear, and I suppose my recollection of being frightened is the dearest of all my memories. I must have been very young, maybe only three and a half or four. We lived then on the first floor of a small house in Kiev, and I can still recall quite distinctly hearing about a pogrom that was to descend upon us. I didn’t know then, of course, what a pogrom was, but I knew it had something to do with being Jewish and with the rabble that used to surge through town, brandishing knives and huge sticks, screaming ‘Christ-killers’ as they looked for the Jews and who were now going to do terrible things to me and to my family.

I can remember how I stood on the stairs that led to the second floor, where another Jewish family lived, holding hands with their little daughter and watching our fathers trying to barricade the entrance with wooden boards. That pogrom never materialized, but to this day I remember how scared I was and how angry that all my father could do to protect me was to nail a few planks together while he waited for the hooligans to come. And, above all, I remember being aware that this was happening to me because I was Jewish, which made me different from most of the other children in the yard. It was a feeling that I was to know again many times during my life —the fear, the frustration, the consciousness of being different and the profound instinctive belief that if one wanted to survive, one had to take effective action about it personally."

"As for the Jews being a chosen people, I never quite accepted that. It seemed —and still seems to me —more reasonable to believe not that God chose the Jews but that the Jews were the first people that chose God, the first people in history to have done something truly revolutionary, and it was this choice that made them unique"

"Most of the young Jewish revolutionaries in Pinsk...were divided at that point into two main groups. There were the members of the Bund (Union) who believed that the solution to the plight of the Jews in Russia and elsewhere could be found when Socialism prevailed. Once the economic and social structure of the Jews was changed...anti-Semitism would totally disappear. In that better, brighter, socialist world, the Jews could still, if they so desired, retain their cultural identity, go on speaking Yiddish, maintain whatever customs and traditions they chose, eat whatever food they wanted to eat. But there would be no reason at all for clinging to the obsolete idea of Jewish nationhood...ironically enough, the bitterest enemies of Zionism were the Bundists."

Chapter 2: A political adolescence

**Early Life: Milwaukee

"But I was delighted by my pretty new clothes, by the soda pop and ice cream and by the excitement of being in a real skyscraper, the first five-storey building I had ever seen. In general, I thought Milwaukee was wonderful. Everything looked so colourful and fresh, as though it had just been created, and I stood for hours staring at the traffic and the people. The automobile in which my father had fetched us from the train was the first I had ever ridden in, and I was fascinated by what seemed like the endless procession of cars, trolleys and shiny bicycles on the street. We went for a walk and I peered, unbelieving, into the interior of the pharmacy with its papier máché fisherman advertising cod-liver oil, the barbershop with its weird chairs and the cigar store with its wooden Indian. I remember enviously watching a little girl of my own age dressed up in her Sunday best, with puffed sleeves and high-button shoes, proudly wheeling a doll that reclined grandly on a pillow of its own, and marvelling at the sight of the women in long white skirts and men in white shirts and neckties. It was all completely strange and unlike anything I had seen or known before, and I spent the first days in Milwaukee in a kind of trance.

Very soon we moved to a little apartment of Our own on Walnut Street, in the city’s poorer Jewish section. Today, that part of Milwaukee is inhabited by blacks who are, for the most part, as poor as we were then. But in 1906, the clapboard houses with their pretty porches and steps looked like palaces to me. I even thought that our flat (which had no electricity and no bathroom) was the height of luxury."

"In September, when we had been in America just over three months, my father told us to be sure and watch the famous Labor Day parade in which he, too, would be marching. Dressed up in our new clothes, Mother, Zipke and I took our places at the Street corner he recommended and waited for the parade to begin, not knowing exactly what a parade was, but looking forward to it anyway. Suddenly Zipke saw the mounted police who led the parade. She was absolutely terrified. 'It's the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!' she screamed, and sobbed so hard that she had to be taken home and put to bed. But for me that parade - the crowds, the brass bands, ,the floats, the smell of popcorn and hotdogs - symbolised American freedom. Police on horseback were actually escorting the marchers instead of dispersing them and trampling them underfoot, as they were doing in Russia, and I felt the impact of a new way of life."

"No modern hippie, in my opinion, has ever revolted as effectively against the ‘Establishment' of the day as those pioneers did at the beginning of the century. Many of them came from the homes of merchants and scholars, many even From prosperous assimilated families. If Zionism alone had fired them, they could have come to Palestine, bought orange groves there and hired Arabs to do all the work for them. It would have been easier. But they were radicals at heart and deeply believed that only self-labour could truly liberate the Jews from the ghetto and its mentality and make it possible for them to reclaim the land and earn a moral right to it, in addition to the historic right. Some of them were poets, some were cranks, some had stormy personal lives; but what they all had in common was a fervour to experiment, to build a good society in Palestine, or at least a society that would be better than what had been known in most parts of the world. The communes they founded —the kibbutzim of Israel —have endured, I am sure, only because of this genuinely revolutionary social ideal that underlay and still underlies them"

Chapter 3: I choose Palestine

"The first Palestinians I ever encountered were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was to become Israel’s second president; Ya’akov Zerubavel, a well- known Labour-Zionist and writer, and David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion came to Milwaukee to recruit soldiers for the Jewish Legion in 1916, soon after they had been expelled from Palestine by the Turks and ordered never to return. Zerubavel, whom the Turks had sentenced to prison, had succeeded in escaping but was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years of penal servitude.

I had never met people like those Palestinians before nor heard stories like those they told about the Yishuv (...which had by then been reduced from some 85,000 to only 56,000). This was my first clue about how terribly it was suffering from the brutality of the Turkish regime, which had already brought normal life in the country to a virtual standstill. They were in a fever of anxiety about the fate of the Jews of Palestine and convinced that an effective Jewish claim could be made to the land of Israel after the war only if the Jewish people played a significant and visible military role, as Jews, in the fighting. In fact, they spoke about the Jewish Legion with such feeling that I immediately tried to volunteer for it - and was crushed when I learned that girls were not being accepted."

"Slowly, Zionism was beginning to fill my mind —and my life. I believed absolutely that as a Jew I belonged in Palestine and that as a Labour-Zionist I could do my full share within the yishuv to help attain the goals of social and economic equality. The time hadn’t quite come yet for me to decide to live there. But I knew that I was not going to be a parlour Zionist —advocating settlement in Palestine for others —and I refused to join the Labour-Zionist Party until I could make a binding decision."

"Right after the war, when anti-Semitic pogroms broke out in the Ukraine and Poland (those in the Ukraine being largely the responsibility of the notorious commander of the Ukrainian army, Simon Petlyura, whose units did away with whole Jewish communities), I helped to organize a protest march down one of Milwaukee’s main streets. The Jewish owner of a big department store in town got wind of my plans and asked me to come and see him. ‘I understand that you intend to lead a demonstration down Washington Avenue,’ he said. ‘If you do so, I want you to know that I shall leave town.’ I told him that I had no objection at all to his leaving town and that I had every intention of going on with the plans for the march. However unwise he thought it might be, I wasn’t at all worried about what people would think or say. There was nothing for the Jews to be ashamed of; on the contrary, I told him, I was sure that by showing how we felt about the murder and maiming of Jews overseas, we would earn the respect and sympathy of the rest of the city."

"I think that it was while we were marching through town that day that I realized I could no longer postpone a final decision about Palestine. However hard it might be for those who were dearest to me, I could no longer put off making up my mind about where I was going to live. Palestine, I felt, not parades in Milwaukee, was the only real, meaningful answer to Petlyura’s murderous mobs. The Jews must have a land of their own again - and I must help to build it, not by making speeches or raising funds, but by living and working there."

"The Balfour Declaration —so named because it was signed by Arthur James Balfour, who was then Britain’s foreign secretary —was couched in the form of a letter addressed by Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild. It came just at the time that British forces, under General Allenby, had begun to conquer Palestine from the Turks, and although in years to come the ambiguous way in which it was worded was to be responsible for virtually endless bloodshed in the Middle East, in those days it was greeted by the Zionists as laying the foundations at last for a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. It goes without saying that the announcement filled me with elation. The exile of the Jews had ended. Now, the ingathering would really begin, and Morris and I together would be among the millions of Jews who would surely stream to Palestine."

Feminism

"Ben-Zvi often talked about a fourth member of their group, Rachel Yanait, who was later to become his wife. As I listen to him I began to think of her as typical of the women of the Yishuv, who were proving that it was possible to function as wives, mothers and comrades-in-arms, enduring constant danger and hardship not only without complaining, but with a sense of enormous fulfilment; and it seemed to me that she, and women like her, were doing more to further the cause of our sex - without the benefit of publicity - than even the most militant of suffragettes in the United States or England."

**The journey to Palestine

"In the early spring, we bought tickets for the S.S. Pocahontas and began to rid ourselves of those of our meagre possessions that seemed unsuitable for the life we were now going to lead as pioneers. Despite everything we had heard and read about Palestine, our ideas of life there were somewhat primitive; we expected to live in tents, so I cheerfully sold all of our furniture, our curtains, the iron, even the fur collar of my old winter coat (because we rather unrealistically believed that there was no need for winter clothes in Palestine). The only thing we agreed to take with us, in fact, was our gramophone and our records. The gramophone was the kind you wound by hand —so it could be played even in a tent —and we would at least have music in the wilderness for which we were headed."

"In Milwaukee, we parted from my parents and Clara. It wasn’t an easy parting, although we took it for granted that eventually, when Clara finished her studies at the University of Wisconsin, they would all follow us to Palestine. Still, I felt terribly sorry for my parents —especially for my father —when I kissed them good-bye at the station. My father was a strong man and able to bear pain, but that morning he just stood there, tears rolling down his cheeks. And my mother —perhaps remembering her own voyage across the ocean —looked so small and withdrawn.

The American chapter of my life was closing. 1 was to return to the United States often, in good times and bad, and even to remain there for many months at a time. But it was never to be my home again. I took a great deal with me from America to Palestine, more perhaps than I can express: an understanding of the meaning of freedom, an aware ness of the opportunities offered to the individual in a true democracy and a permanent nostalgia for the great beauty of the American countryside. I loved America and was always glad to come back to it. But never in all the years that followed have I known one moment of homesickness or ever once regretted leaving it for Palestine."

"There we met up with a group of Labour-Zionists from Lithuania who had actually reached Palestine twice before but had been turned away. Now, they were going to try to enter the country again. We had never met ‘real’pioneers of our own age before, and we were very impressed by them. They reminded me of people like Ben-Zvi and BenGurion, though they were much younger. Compared to us they were so experienced and hardy and they seemed so sure of themselves. In Europe they had worked on training farms established by the Zionist movement and they obviously regarded themselves, not without reason, as being infinitely superior to us. They made it quite clear that we were ‘soft’, spoilt immigrants from the United States, members of the bourgeoisie, in fact, who would probably run away from Palestine after a few weeks. Although we were all bound for the same destination on the same ship, they were going to travel as deck passengers and wanted nothing to do with us. I could hardly take my eyes off them; they were everything I wanted and hoped to be myself —dedicated, austere and determined. I admired and envied them enormously and wanted them to accept us as comrades, but they were very aloof.

In a letter written to Sharnai from Brindisi, Yossel described the Lithuanians as they appeared to us. ‘Real Hercules,’ he wrote, ‘who are ready to build a land on just foundations with their backs. And not only a land but a new language..splendid human material which would be the pride of any people.’

When we boarded the ship that was to take us to Alexandria, I suggested to my companions that we give up our ‘luxurious’ cabins and join the young Lithuanians on deck: No one was very keen about the idea, particularly since deck passengers were not entitled to any hot meals and by now we were all looking forward to some decent food. But I pressed the point; I argued that, in fact, it was our duty as potential pioneers ourselves to start sharing the life of our fellow-Zionists as soon as possible and that our behaviour, even on board ship, would be indicative of our sincerity and ability to take hardships in our stride."

Chapter 4: The start of a new life

"During the war, Tel-Aviv's entire population had been expelled by the Turks".

"The population of Tel Aviv in 1921 was made up in part of Jews who had come to Palestine (mostly from Lithuania, Poland and Russia) in what was known as the third A4yah (or wave) of Zionist immigration, and in part of ‘oldtimers’,who had been there from the beginning. Although some of the new immigrants were self-defined ‘capitalists’—merchants and tradesmen who set up small factories and shops —the vast majority were labourers. Just a year earlier, a General Federation of Jewish Labour (the Hictadrut) had been established, and within twelve months it already had a membership of over 4000.

Although it was only twelve years old, Tel Aviv was rapidly becoming self-governing. It had just been permitted by the British mandatory government to levy its own taxes on buildings and workshops and to run its own water system. Also, though it had no prison —and was not to have one for many years —it had its own twenty-five-man, all-Jewish police force, of which everyone was very proud. The main street (named for Theodor Herl) was adorned at one end by the Herzlia High School, which was the town’s first and most imposing building. There were a few other streets, a small ‘businessdistrict’ and a water tower that served as a gathering place for the young people. Public transportation was either by small buses or horse-drawn carriages, while Tel Aviv’s mayor, Meir Dizengoff, periodically rode through town on a splendid white horse."

"Although we had come to Palestine from different countries and from different cultures and often spoke different languages, we were alike in our belief that only here could Jews live as of right, rather than on sufferance, and only here could Jews be masters, not victims, of their fate."

"Perhaps at this point I should say something briefly about the Emek, because the story of the struggle to develop it is so integral a part of the story of the whole Zionist effort. When the First World War ended and the Mandate over Palestine was awarded by the League of Nations to Great Britain, the new hopes raised by the Balfour Declaration for the establishment of a full-fledged Jewish national home seemed to be on the way towards fulfilment. Years earlier, however, in 1901, the Jewish National Fund had already been formed by the Zionist movement for the exclusive purpose of buying and developing land in Palestine in the name of the entire Jewish people. And a great deal of the Jewish-owned land in Palestine was bought by ‘the people’ —the bakers, tailors and carpenters of Pinsk, Berlin and Milwaukee. As a matter of fact, ever since I was a little girl I can remember the small blue tin collection box that stood next to the Sabbath candles in our living-room and into which not only we, but our guests, dropped coins every week —and this ‘bluebox’ was likewise a feature in every Jewish home we visited. The truth is, from 1904 on it was with these coins that the Jewish people began to buy extensive tracts of land in Palestine.

Come to think of it, I am more than a little tired of hearing about how the Jews 'stole' land from Arabs in Palestine. The facts are quite different. A lot of good money changed hands, and a lot of Arabs became very rich indeed. Of course, there were other organisations and countless individuals who also bought tracts. But by 1947 the JNF alone...owned over half of all the Jewish holdings in the country. So let that libel, at least, be done with.

Around the time that we came to Palestine, a number of such purchases were carried out in the Ernek —despite the fact that much of the area consisted of the kind of deadly black swamps that inevitably brought malaria and blackwater fever in their wake. Still, what mattered most was that this pestilential land could be bought, though not cheaply; much of it, incidentally, was sold to the Jewish National Fund by a single well-to-do Arab family that lived in Beirut."

...A number of such purchases were carried out in the Emek - despite the fact much of the area consisted of the kind of deadly black swamps that inevitably brought malaria and blackwater fever in their wake...The next step was to make this land arable. In the nature of things, private farmers did not and could not interest themselves in a back-breaking and dangerous project which would obviously take years before it showed any profit. The only people who could possibly undertake the job of draining the Emek swamps were the highly motivated pioneers of the Labour-Zionist movement, who were prepared to reclaim the land, however difficult the circumstances and regardless of the human cost. What's more, they were prepared to do it themselves, rather than have the work done by hired Arab labourers under the supervision of Jewish farm managers."

Feminism

"Let me explain that in those days kibbutz women hated kitchen duty not because it was hard (compared to other work on the settlement, it was rather easy) but because they felt it to be demeaning. Their struggle wasn’t for equal ‘civic rights,' which they had in abundance, but for equal burdens. They wanted to be given whatever work their male comrades were given —paving roads, hoeing fields, building houses, or standing guard duty —not to be treated as though they were different and automatically relegated to the kitchen. All this was at least haifa century before anyone invented the unfortunate term ‘Women’s Lib’, but the fact is that kibbutz women were among the world’s first and most successful fighters for true equality. But I didn’t feel that way about working in the kitchen. I couldn’t for the life of mc understand what all the fuss was about and said so. ‘Why is it so much better,’ I asked the girls who were moping (or storming) about kitchen duty, ‘to work in the barn and feed the cows, rather than in the kitchen and feed your comrades?’ No one ever answered this question convincingly, and I remained more concerned with the quality of our diet than with ‘feminine emancipation’."

Chapter 5: Pioneers and problems

Western Wall

"One evening, however, I went to the Western Wall —not for the first time. Morris and I had gone there a week or two after our arrival in Palestine. I had grown up in a Jewish home, a good traditional Jewish home, but I wasn’t at all pious myself; and the truth is that I went to the Wall without much emotion, just as something that I knew I ought to do. Then, all of a sudden, at the end of those narrow, winding alleys in the Old City, I saw it. The Wall itself looked much smaller than it does today, after all the excavations. But for the first time I saw the Jews, men and women, praying and weeping before it and putting kvitlach —their scribbled petitions to the Almighty —into its crannies. So this was what was left of a past glory, I thought, all that has remained of Solomon’s Temple. But at least it was still there. And in those orthodox Jews with their kvitlach, I saw a nation’s refusal to accept that only these stones were left to it and an expression of confidence in what was to come in the future. I left the Wall changed in feeling —uplifted is perhaps the word.

In 1971, some fifty years later, I was awarded the Freedom of Jerusalem —probably the greatest tribute ever paid me —and at that ceremony I told of yet another memorable visit I had made to the Wall, this time in 1967, after the Six Day War. For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, we were banned by the Arabs from going to the Old City or praying at the Wall. But on the third day of the Six Day War —Wednesday, 7 June —all Israel was electrified by the news that our soldiers had liberated the Old City and that it was open to us again. I had to fly to the United States three days later, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave Israel without going to the Wall again. So that Friday morning —although civilians were not yet allowed to enter the Old City because shooting was still going on there —I received permission to go to the Wall, despite the fact that I wasn’t in the government then but just, an ordinary citizen, like any other.

I went to the Wall together with some soldiers. There in front of it stood a plain wooden table with some sub-machine guns on it. Uniformed paratroopers wrapped in prayer shawls clung so tightly to the Wall that it seemed impossible to separate them from it. They and the Wall were one. Only a few hours earlier they had fought furiously for the liberation of Jerusalem and had seen their comrades fall for its sake. Now, standing before the Wall, they wrapped themselves in prayer shawls and wept, and I, too, took a sheet of paper, wrote the word ‘shalom' on it and pushed it into a cranny of the Wall, as I had seen the Jews do so long ago. As I stood there, one of the soldiers (I doubt that he knew who I was) suddenly put his arms around me, laid his head on my shoulder and we cried together. I suppose he needed the release and the comfort of an old woman’s warmth, and for me it was one of the most moving moments of my life. But all that, of course, belongs to a much later era."

Economic crisis 1920s

"The late 1920s were depressing years throughout Jewish Palestine, not just for me. By 1927 7,000 men and women were without work in the yishuv —a sobering 5 per cent of Palestine’s total Jewish population. It was almost as though Zionism, in its great zeal, had over-reached itself. Many more immigrants were entering the country than the yishuv could possibly employ. Of the 13,000 Jews who arrived in Palestine in 1926, for instance, more than half left, and in 1927, for the first time, emigration was ominously higher than immigration. Some of the emigrants went to the United States, others to various parts of the British Empire. There was also a group that included members of the ‘Labour Battalion’ (which had been founded in 1920 to employ immigrants in cooperative road-building and quarrying projects financed by the mandatory government) —who returned to Russia for ideological reasons, where many of them subsequently were sent to Siberia or executed —also for ‘ideological’ reasons."

"There were various reasons for the severe crisis. The yishuv’s economy was still almost totally undeveloped. Other than in the building trades (which employed almost half of all the Jewish workers in Palestine) and the orange groves, there simply weren’t enough job opportunities or capital to go around. You could count the Jewish industrial enterprises on the fingers of one hand. There were the Dead Sea Works, a salt factory and quarries at Athlit, the Palestine Electric Corporation (which had built a power station on the banks of the Jordan River), the Shemen soap and edible oils factory, and the Nesher cement factory in Haifa. There were also a few other smaller enterprises including printing plants and wine cellars, but that was all.

There was also another very serious problem. The wages of Jewish workers were very low then but Arab labourers were willing to work for even less, and many Jewish orange growers yielded to the temptation of hiring the cheaper Arab labour. As for the mandatory government, other than the network of roads it constructed, it did virtually nothing to develop the economy of the country and had already begun to give way to the anti-Jewish pressure of Arab extremists, such as the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, and others. Although only a few years had passed since the Mandate over Palestine was granted to Britain, the government was already displaying considerable hostility to the Jews. Even worse, it had moved to curb the rate of Jewish immigration into Palestine, and in 1930 threatened to stop it altogether for a while. In short, the Jewish national home was not flourishing."

Histadrut

"On those rare visits to Tel Aviv, I was always depressed and shocked by the sight of unemployed men on the street corners and the desolate look of half-finished buildings all over town. It was as though a huge burst of energy had worn itself out. Of course, outsiders might have seen it all differently. Despite the economic crisis, thousands of Jews were living in Palestine, raising their children there, developing their own leadership, creating agricultural and urban settlements and doing all this aided —in the final analysis —only by a Zionist movement abroad, which was in itself a remarkable achievement. Seen as historians would one day see it, even that bleak period would take on a brighter hue. But I wasn’t an outsider or a historian, and I longed to take an active part in helping to improve the situation, to do something about it myself.

My great good fortune was that the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labour, that organization in which and for which I was to work for so many years, was interested in the services of someone like myself. I had already worked in Tel Aviv for Solel Busch and had gone on working for it —though only briefly —in Jerusalem, and I knew many of the people in the Labour movement. They were the kind of men and women I most admired and liked. I wanted to learn from them and work with them, and I felt completely at home with them. They saw the basic aims of the Histadrut as I did —not so much the protection of the immediate bread-and-butter interests of the workers as the creation of a labour community committed to the future of the Jews of Palestine, those who were already there and those who were still to come.

In many ways, the Histadrut was entirely unique. It could model itself on no other existing labour organization because the position of the Jewish worker in Palestine then was totally unlike that of the worker in Britain, France, or America. As elsewhere, the economic rights of the Jewish worker, as well as the Arab worker, in Palestine had to be guarded, including the right to strike, the right to a decent wage, the right to paid annual holidays, to sick leave, and so forth. But even though its official title was the General Federation of Jewish Labour, it would be an over-simplification to describe the Histadrut only as a trade union, because it was much more than that, in concept as well as practice. First of all, the H?stadrut based itself on the unity of all the workers in the yishuv —whether they were wage earners, members of kibbutzim, blue- or white-collar workers, manual labourers or intellectuals —and from the start it was in the forefront of the struggle to bring Jews to Palestine, even though the burden of increased immigration inevitably fell on its own shoulders.

Secondly, Palestine didn’t have a ‘ready-made’ economy that could absorb the steady flow of Jewish immigrants into the country. There was the smattering of small industry, of course, and the agricultural settlements. But these enterprises couldn’t sustain a country with a growing population; and we who had come to Palestine to build the Jewish national home knew that we had to create what today is so casually referred to as a ‘national economy’! If you stop to think about what this involves —industry, transport, construction, finance, not to speak of tools for dealing with welfare, unemployment, and so forth —the job ahead of us was actually the creation of something almost out of nothing. Even at the time of which I write, when the workers of Palestine were still few in number and very isolated, through the Histadrut they unhesitatingly undertook the responsibility of being the vanguard of a state-in-the-making, though certainly no one imposed this mission upon them.

Because it was so highly motivated from the very beginning by the Zionist ideal, the Histadrut regarded each and every facet of life in the Jewish national home as being of equal importance. There were (and there still are) two standards by which all Histadrut projects were judged: did they answer an urgent national need and were they acceptable (or necessary) from the socialist point of view?

One good example is the Histadrut’s determination to develop its own economic enterprises, control of which would be vested in the labour community as a whole. As early as 1924, a legal body called Hevrat Ha-Ova’im (its clumsy English name was the General Cooperative Association ofJewish Labour in Palestine), representing each and every member of the Histadrut, became the ‘owner’of all the Histadrut’s ‘assets’,of which there were not very many then. Solel Boneh was one of these ‘assets’,and when it over-expanded and collapsed in 1927 nobody outside the Labour movement imagined that it could ever be re-established. But the Histadrut knew that there was, and would always be, a great need for a building and public works company that could serve the national requirement in a way that no private company ever could or would. So, eventually, Sold Bonch was reborn. Today —having undergone various processes of reorganization, including its in 1958 reconstruction on the basis of three companies (a building company, an overseas and harbour works company and an industrial holding company with its subsidiaries), it is one of the largest and most successful firms in the entire Middle East. When I recall the gloom and tension that existed in Sold Boneh’s dingy little office in Jerusalem in 1927, when there wasn’t enough cash to pay the book-keeper even once a month, and then think of the 50,000 men and women employed last year by these three components of the original Solel Boneh, with their combined turnover of about 2 billion Israeli pounds, I defy anyone to argue that Zionism is not utterly incompatible with pessimism —or that socialism is, of necessity, inefficient unless combined with ruthlessness.

To those critics of the Jewish Labour movement who said fifty years ago that the Histadrut’s concept of its role was romantic, grandiose and doomed to failure, let me point out that Solel Boneh not only weathered five remarkably difficult decades but lived to play a most decisive role in the building of thousands of homes, roads, schools and hospitals in Israel as well as to pioneer in extensive Israeli projects carried out in Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East itself. But Solel Boneh was only one of the Hisladrut’s creations. There are dozens of others —agricultural, industrial, educational, cultural, and even medical —and all of them are rooted in the enduring conviction that the real strength of the workers in Israel expresses itself in the priority given to the up- building of what is now the Jewish state."

Feminism

"The Women’s Labour Council and its sister-organization abroad, the Pioneer Women, were the first and last women’s organizations for which I ever worked. I was attracted to them not so much because they concerned women, as such, but because I was very interested in the work they were doing, particularly in the agricultural training farms they set up for immigrant girls. Today the Labour Council (which is part of the Histadrut) is occupied mainly with social services and with labour legislation for women (maternity benefits, retirement, etc.), but in the 1930s its emphasis was almost entirely on vocational training for the hundreds of young girls who came to Palestine to work on the land but who had no farming background at all or any trade. The council’s training farms gave those girls a lot more than just vocational know- how. They helped to speed up the girls’ integration into the country, to teach them Hebrew and to give them a sense of stability in a new land, to which most of them came without families and some even without the consent of their parents. These ‘working women’s farms’ were set up at a time when the idea that women should be trained for anything, let alone agriculture, was still considered absurd by most people.

I am not a great admirer of the kind of feminism that gives rise to bra-burning, hatred of men or a campaign against motherhood, but I had a very great regard for those energetic hard-working women within the ranks of the Labour movement...who succeeded in equipping dozen of city-bred girls with the sort of theoretical knowledge and sound practical training that made it possible for them to do their share of the work going on in agricultural settlements throughout Palestine. That, to me, is constructive feminism and matters much more than who sweeps the house or who sets the table."

"About the position of women generally, of course, there is very much to say (and much, perhaps too much, has already been said), but I can put my own thoughts on the subject into a nutshell. Naturally women should be treated as the equals of men in all respects. But, as is true also of the Jewish people, they shouldn’t have to be better than everyone else in order to live like human beings or feel that they must accomplish wonders all the time to be accepted at all. On the other hand, a story —which, as far as I know, is all it was —once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as ‘the only man’ in his cabinet. What amused me about it was that obviously he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest possible compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!

The fact is that I have lived and worked with men all my life, but being a woman has never hindered me in any way at all. It has never caused me unease or given me an inferiority complex or made me think that men are better off than women —or that it is a disaster to give birth to children. Not at all. Nor have men ever given me preferential treatment. But what is true, I think, is that women who want and need a life outside as well as inside the home have a much, much harder time than men because they carry such a heavy double burden (with the notable exception of women who live in kibbutzim, where life is organized to enable them to work and raise children at the same time). And the life of a working mother who lives without the constant presence and support of the father of her children is three times harder than that of any man I have ever met."

Sacrifices

"Were Sheyna and my mother right when they charged me for years with depriving the children of their due? I suppose that I shall never be able to answer this question to my own satisfaction - and that I will never stop asking it. Were they proud of me, then or later? I like to think so, of course, but I am not really sure that being proud of one's mother makes up for her frequent absences. I remember that once when I was the Chairwoman of a public meeting and asked 'all those in favour' of whatever the issue was to raise their hands, to my utter astonishment I saw Sarah and Menachem (who had stolen into the hall to fetch me) loyally raise their hands to indicate their approval. It was the most reassuring vote of confidence I ever got, but it didn't keep me from feeling that being able to vote for your mother is not nearly as good or as important as having her at home when you get back from school."

Berl Katznelson

"What did he believe in? Like most of us —though we might have forgotten had Berl not reminded us so often —he believed that our kind of socialism had to be different; that we were creating a society, not just a trade union; and that the class struggle had no significance in a community that had no classes yet. He believed that Zionism was one of the world’s greatest revolutionary movements, and he described it as ‘the plot on which contemporary Jewish history hinges’. It meant, he said ‘a total rebellion against the bondage of the Diaspora —in any form’, and ‘the creation of a working Jewish population versed in all branches of agriculture and industry’. He became the intellectual parent of many of the Histadrut’s most important bodies. It was Ben who formulated the need for a workers’ bank, for a cooperative wholesale society and for a workers’ sick fund.

This concern with essentials led him also to father first the concept of a large unselective immigration of Jews to Palestine (at a time when there was a tendency in the Labour movement to advocate the support primarily of pioneers who had already received some prior training in agriculture abroad) and then the so-called ‘illegal’ immigration of Jews into Palestine. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘not the pioneer but the refugee will lead us,’ and what he was talking about was the destiny of the yishuv working itself out through heroic acts undertaken in small stages, step by step —as indeed happened, though Berl didn’t live long enough to know it. One of those small stages for which he was also responsible was the dropping of Palestinian Jews behind the Nazi lines (within the framework of the Allied armies) in a desperate attempt to reach the Jews of Europe during the Second World War, and he was the first of us to formulate the urgent claim to statehood, though it was Ben-Gurion who brought it before the world at a meeting in a New York hotel in 1942."

"Since it took him so long to come to a conclusion about anything, Ben was always a great admirer of people like Ben-Gurion, who could make up their minds quickly and take action. He considered Ben-Gurion to be the greatest statesman that the movement —and the Jewish people —had ‘in our time’, and to his dying day Ben-Gurion kept Bed’s photograph on his desk. It is also the only photograph in my living-room now. On at least one occasion, however, Ben’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for policies favoured by Ben-Gurion led to a vote in the Labour party against Ben-Gurion. Not that Ben canvassed against him or tried to sway anyone in the opposite direction. It was enough for the Labour leadership to know that Ben was not in favour of something for that something to be reviewed very carefully, even if its proponent was B.-G. In 1937, when Ben-Gurion favoured the Royal (Peel) Commission proposal to partition Palestine, Berl opposed our giving our consent to the Peel plan on the grounds (which turned out to be correct) that the British would never go through with it, whereas our agreement would forever be on the record and would certainly be held against us."

Chapter 6: We shall fight Hitler

British views of Jews and Zionism

"The British regarded us as a singularly complicated breed of native, less charming than the humble and picturesque Arabs and much more pretentious and demanding...There had been another wave of Arab riots in 1929...and although the British had eventually restored peace, they did so in a manner calculated to impress upon the Arabs that no one would be punished very severely for murdering Jews or for looting Jewish property."

"I returned to London again that year for a week or two as a delegate to thc Imperial Labour Conference. Ranisay MacDonald was then prime minister. Although he himself was sympathetic to, even concerned with, the yishuv’s progrcss, it was his government that issued the notorious White Paper of 1930 (known as the Passfield Paper) whittling down Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Thirteen years after the Balfour Declaration, the British seemed to be more concerned with appeasing the Arabs than fulfilling their promise to the Jews. Someone in London said to me cynically: ‘YouJews wanted to own a national home, but all you are getting is a rented flat!’ The truth was even harsher, however. It was beginning to look as though our landlord now wanted to break the lease altogether, although in 1930, of course, no one imagined that it would only take eighteen more years for the British to declare that the Mandate was absolutely unworkable."

"Perhaps it was because I had lived in America for so long that I didn’t fall quite as thoroughly under the spell of the British as many of my colleagues did. I admired and liked the British people, including the leadership of the Labour Party, but I can’t honestly say that I was really taken by surprise when we were so badly let down by them, then or later. Many, if not most, Palestinian Jews were afflicted in those years by what turned out to be the pathetic belief— all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding —that Britain would keep faith with us after all, regardless of increasing Arab pressure and the traditionally pro.- Arab stand of the Colonial Office. I think that much of this reluctance to face up to the fact that the British government was in the process of changing its mind about its responsibility to the Zionists stemmed from the tremendous respect in which British democracy was held by Jews who had been brought up in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe.

On the whole, for many years, most of my colleagues tended to regard British parliamentary and civic institutions and procedures as only a little short of miraculous, while I, who had actually lived in a democracy, was rather less dazzled. Incidentally, it is remarkable that despite the long, stormy, and often terrible conflict between us and the British, and the way in which that conflict ended in 1948, we Israelis still hold the British people in great and truly affectionate esteem and are more hurt by being let down by the British than by any other nation. There are various reasons for this. One is, of course, that it was Britain that gave us the Balfour Declaration. Another is that the Jews have never forgotten the lonely British stand against the Nazis, and yet another may he, I think, the in-horn Jewish respect for tradition. At all events, throughout the thirty-odd years of the Mandate, the yishuv always made a clear-cut distinction between the Palestine mandatory government and the British people, between the man in the street in England and the officials of the Colonial and Foreign Offices, and went on hoping to win unqualified British support. But on the political level, at least, it remained mostly an unrequited love."

Socialism

"To the extent that the Histadrut represented what was on the whole an extremely advanced form ofJewish self-government in Palestine, the Va’ad Hapoel was its ‘cabinet’—within which, for the next very stormy fourteen years, I was assigned various portfolios and responsibilities. None of these, as I look back, were either easy to carry out or likely to make me particularly popular inside the Histadrut itself. But they did have one great asset: they all had to do with what in fact most concerned and interested me —the translation of socialist principles into the down- to-earth terminology of everyday life.

I suppose that if times had been good economically and politically —or at least better —in the Palestine of the mid-193os and the 1940s, it would have been relatively easy to ensure a just sharing of burdens within the labour community. After all, other than what they did for a living, there really were no differences at all —either economic or social —between the so-called rank and file of the membership and the so-called Hzstadrut leadership. We were all paid a fixed basic living wage which varied only according to actual seniority and the number of dependants in each family, and there were no exceptions to this rule. I know that today people in Israel and elsewhere regard this kind of egalitarianism not only as old-fashioned but as downright unworkable. Perhaps it is, but I myself approved of it and have always approved of it. I still think that it made good sound socialist sense —which usually means good sound common sense —for the janitor of the Histadrut building in Tel Aviv who had nine children to support to get a considerably fatter pay envelope than I, who had only two children to support. Socialism in practice involved much more than my calling this janitor Shmuel and his calling me Golda. It meant also that his obligations to the other members of the Histadrut were the same as mine, and the economic situation in Palestine, as well as everywhere else, being as difficult as it was then, this aspect of trade unionism became the focal point of most of my battles within the Histadrut.

Payment of Histadrut dues was fixed according to a sliding scale, like income tax. It was paid every month in a lump sum that covered trade union funds, pension funds and the Kupat Holim (the Workers’ Sick Fund) and was known as the ‘singletax’. I was convinced that this single tax should be assessed not according to basic wages or average earnings or some theoretical sum, but on the full pay that each worker actually received. Otherwise, where was the ‘equality’ we talked about so much? Was sharing to be the sole property of the kibbutzim, or could give-and-take be made the way of life among the workers of Tel Aviv, too? And what about the Histadrut membership’s collective responsibility for comrades who were unemployed? Was it conceivable that the Histadrut should make its voice heard (and its presence felt) on each and every issue that vitally concerned the yishuv —immigration, settlement, self-defence —but avert its gaze from the men and women who were without jobs and whose children were barely getting enough to eat? If nothing else, mutual aid —one of the bases of the Histadrut —was certainly a prerequisite of socialism, however hard-up an employed member of the Histadrut might be and regardless of how painful it was to turn over a day’s salary each month to a special unemployment fund. But I felt very strongly about these fundamental matters and persisted in setting up an unemployment fund, despite the very vocal opposition to it. We called it Mifdeh, which means ‘redemption’, and when the number of unemployed increased (at one point during the 1930S about 10,000 Histadrut members were out of work, I pressed for an increase in the unemployment tax and we established Mifdeh B.

Some of my friends charged me with ‘destroying the Histadrut’ and ‘demanding the irripossible’, but Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson and David Remez all backed me, and the Histadrut nonetheless managed to remain intact. As a matter of fact, it turned out that the Mifdeh campaign served as a very important precedent for much heavier voluntary taxation that came not very long afterwards in the form of the Kofer Hajishuv (‘ransom of the yishuv’), established when the toll in life and property of the Arab disturbances of 1936 became so high that we were forced to levy a defence tax on virtually the entire Jewish population. And even later, during the Second World War, when we set up a War Needs and Rescue Fund, we relied again on experience gained in the days of those loathed Mifdeh drives."

Hitler comes to power

"Hitler had come to power in 1933, and however absurd his loudly proclaimed programme for world domination by the Aryan ‘race’ had seemed at first, the violent anti-Semitism which he had preached from the start was obviously not just a rhetorical device. One of Hitler’s very first acts, in fact, was the passage of savage anti-Jewish legislation that stripped Germany’s Jews of all usual civil and human rights. Of course, no one, myself included, dreamt then that Hitler’s vow to destroy the Jews would ever he literally carried out. In a way, I suppose, it should be chalked up to the credit of normal decent men and women that we couldn’t believe that such a monstrously evil thing would ever actually happen —or that the world would permit it to happen. It wasn’t that we were gullible. It was simply that we couldn’t conceive of what was then still inconceivable.

Today, however, no horror is inconceivable to me any more. But even before Hitler’s 'Final Solution’, the first results of Nazi persecution —legally enacted —were terrible enough. There was only one place on the face of the globe to which the Jews could come as a right, no matter what restrictions the British sought to impose on their immigration to Palestine and by 1934, thousands of up-. rooted homeless refugees from Nazism were making their way to us."

Haganah

"The riots started in April 1936. By the summer it was no longer safe for Jews to travel from one city to another. Whenever I had to go from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for a meeting —which was frequently —I kissed the children good-bye in the morning knowing that I might well never come home again, that my bus might be ambushed, that I might be shot by an Arab sniper at the entrance to Jerusalem or stoned to death by an Arab mob on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The Haganah was much better equipped and larger than it had been at the time of the Arab riots of 1929, but we had no intention either of turning it into an instrument of counter-terror against the Arabs just because they were Arabs or of providing the British with any excuse for further clamping down on Jewish immigration and settlement, as they tended to do whenever we visibly played too active a role in our own defence. Although it is always much harder to exercise self-restraint than it is to hit back, we had one paramount consideration: nothing must be done - even in the face of constant danger and harassment - that might provoke the British into slashing the number of Jews allowed to enter Palestine. The policy of self-restraint (Havlagah in Hebrew) was rigidly enforced. Whenever and wherever possible, Jews defended themselves from attack, but there were virtually no acts of retaliation by Haganah throughout the three years of what the British, with splendid understatement, chose to call the 'disturbances'.

This determination of ours to defend ourselves but not to retaliate was not, however, universally applauded in the Yishuv. A minority clamoured for counter-terror and denounced the policy of havlagah as cowardly. I was always among the majority that was absolutely convinced that havlagah was the one and only ethical course we could follow. The notion of attacking Arabs indiscriminately, regardless of whether or not they were the particular perpetrators of an outrage, was morally abhorrent to me. A specific attack had to be repelled and a specific criminal had to be punished - well and good. But we were not going to kill Arabs just because they were Arabs or engage in the kind of wanton violence that typified the Arab method of fighting us."

"In 1946 - he asked for a few month's leave from the Jewish Agency...so that he could learn exactly what the Haganah had at it's disposal and what it was likely to need for the struggle he was so sure lay ahead...After he had been back at work for a few days, he called me up. 'Golda,' he said, 'Come over. I want to talk to you.' He was walking back and forth in his big study upstairs, pacing the floor. 'I tell you,' he said to me, 'I feel as though I were going mad. What's going to happen to us? I'm sure the Arabs will attack us, and we're not prepared for it. We have nothing. What's going to happen to us?' He was literally beside himself with anxiety.'"

**Stolen land

"Let me at this juncture deal also - even if very briefly - with the ridiculous accusation that I have heard for so many years to the effect that we ignored the Arabs of Palestine and set about developing the country as though it had no Arab population at all. When the instigators of the Arab disturbances of the late 1930's claimed, as they did, that the Arabs were attacking us because they had been 'dispossessed', I did not have to look up British census figures to know that the Arab population of Palestine had doubled since the start of Jewish settlement there...Not only did the living standard of the Arabs of Palestine far exceed that of the Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, but, attracted by the new opportunities, hordes of Arabs were immigrating to Palestine from Syria and other neighbouring countries all through those years.

And let me add, there was no time during the thirties that I did not hope that eventually the Arabs of Palestine would live with us in peace and equality as citizens of a Jewish homeland - Just as I kept on hoping that Jews who lived in Arab countries would be allowed to live there in peace and equality. This was another reason why our policy of self-restraint in the face of the Arab attacks seemed so important to me. Nothing, I felt, must be allowed to complicate or embitter the future. It didn't work out that way, but it took us all a long time to accept the fact that the reconciliation we expected was not going to take place."

Peel Commission

"The proposed Jewish state was not my idea of a viable national home for the Jewish people. It was far too small and far too cramped. I thought it was a grotesque proposal and I said so, though most of my colleagues, led by Ben-Gurion, reluctantly decided to accept it in the end. 'Some day, my son will ask me by what right I gave up most of the country and I won't know how to answer him,' I said at one of the many party meetings at which the Peel proposal was debated...But we were wrong and Ben-Gurion, in his greater wisdom, arguing that any state was better than none, was right

Thank God it was not because of me that we didn't get that state in 1937 but because of the Arabs, who flatly turned down the partition plan - though had they accepted it, they could had a 'Palestinian' state forty years ago. The guiding principle behind the attitude of the Arabs in 1936 and 1937, however, was exactly what it has been ever since: decisions are made not on the basis of what is good for them but on the basis of what is bad for us. And in retrospect, it is clear that the British themselves never intended to implement the Peel plan. At all events, I certainly couldn’t have lived with myself all these years if I had thought —in the light of what happened afterwards —that it was I who was to blame for its collapse. If we had had even a tiny little mockery of a state only a year before the war broke out, hundreds of thousands of Jews —perhaps many more —might have been saved from the ovens and gas chambers of the Nazis."

Refugees

"In the summer of 1938 I was sent to the International Conference on Refugees that was called by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Evian-les-Bains. I was there in the ludicrous capacity of 'the Jewish observer from Palestine', not even seated with the delegates but with the audience, although the refugees under discussion were my own people, members of my own family, not just inconvenient numbers to be squeezed into official quotas, if at all possible. Sitting there in that magnificent hall and listening to the delegates of thirty-two countries rise, each in turn, to explain how much they would have liked to take in substantial numbers of refugees and how unfortunate it was that they were not able to do so, was a terrible experience. I don't think that anyone who didn't live through it can understand what I felt at Evian - a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror. I wanted to get up and scream at them all, 'Don't you know that these "numbers" are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps, or wandering around the world like lepers, if you don't let them in?' Of course I didn't know then that not concentration camps but death camps awaited the refugees whom no one wanted. If I had known that, I couldn't have gone on sitting there silently hour after hour being disciplined and polite.

I remember at one point thinking back to the Socialist international I had attended the year before, when I had watched the Spanish delegation, weeping and imploring for help so Madrid might be saved. All that Ernest Bevin could find it in his heart to say to them was 'British Labour is not prepared to go to war for you.' Much later, I was to learn lessons of my own about socialist brotherhood, but at Evian I realised - perhaps for the first time since I was a little girl in Russia listening in terror to the hooves of Cossack horses thundering through town - that it is not enough for a weak people to demonstrate the justice of its demands.

To the question 'To be or not to be?' each nation must make its own reply in its own way, and Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive. A great deal has happened to the world, to the Yishuv and to me personally since 1938, and much of what has happened has been terrible. But at least the words 'Jewish refugees' are no longer heard anywhere because now there is a Jewish state that is prepared and able to take in every Jew - skilled worker or not, old or young, sick or healthy - who wants to live there.

Nothing was accomplished at Evian except phraseology, but before I left I held a press conference. At least the journalists wanted to hear what I had to say, and through them we could reach the rest of the world and try again to get its attention. ‘There is only one thing I hope to see before I die,’ I told the press, ‘and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.’"

Chapter 7: The struggle against the British

British views of Jews and Zionism

"As a matter of fact, it was only when the British government decided —in the face of all reason or humanity —to place itself like an iron wall between us and whatever chance we had of rescuing Jews from the hands of the Nazis that we realized that political independence was not something that we could go on regarding as a distant aim. The need to control immigration because human lives depended on such control was the one thing that pushed us into making the sort of decision which might otherwise have waited for much better (if not ideal) conditions. But the 1939 White Paper —those rules and regulations laid down for us by strangers to whom the lives of Jews were obviously of secondary importance —turned the entire subject of the right of the yishuv to govern itself into the most pressing and immediate need that any of us had ever known. And it was out of the depth of this need, essentially, that the State of Israel was founded, only three years after the end of the war.

What was it that we demanded of the British and that they so stubbornly refused to give us? Today the answer seems incredible, even to me. The truth is that all the Yishuv wanted from 1939 to 1945 was to take in as many Jews as could be saved from the Nazis. That was all. Just to be allowed to share the little that we had with men, women and children who were fortunate enough to not have been shot, gassed or buried alive yet by the very people to who downfall the entire British Empire was in any case totally committed.

We didn't ask for anything else: not for privileges of any kind, not for power, not for promises relating to the future. We just begged - in view of the death sentence that had been passed on millions of European Jews by Hitler and was being carried out - to be permitted to try and rescue as many of them as possible before they all perished and bring them to the one place where they were wanted.

...It was then that we all knew what many of us had always suspected: no foreign government could or would ever feel our agonies as we felt them, and no foreign government would ever put the same value on Jewish lives that we did. It wasn't a very complicated lesson to learn, but once learnt it wasn't likely that any of us would forget it, though just as incredibly the rest of the world, with very few exceptions, seems by now to have done so."

"Incidentally, it was not the only time I walked out of a room in that period. Only a few months earlier I had gone to see the government's chief secretary about something and was astounded to hear him say pleasantly: 'Mrs Meyerson, you must agree that if the Nazis persecuted the Jews, they must have had some reason for it.' I got up and walked out without a word and refused to see him again. Afterwards, I was told that he couldn't imagine why I was so enraged."

Haganah

"From the start, Eliahu conceived of the Haganah not as a guerrilla movement or as any kind of elite force, but as the most broadly based possible national response to the need of theyishuv to protect itself and as an integral part of the Zionist movement. Self defence, he believed, was neither less nor more important than the conquest of the desert or the ingathering of the exiles. This being so, the Haganah had both to grow out of and belong to the entire Jewish population and therefore it had to function under the supreme authority of the yishuv’s national institutions, regardless of how secret its specific functions might have to be. From this concept stemmed also Eliahu’s attitude towards the two dissident military organizations that eventually came into being —the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (IZL) and Lehi (the Stern Group), which evolved primarily because they disapproved of the Haganah’s policy of self- restraint, non-retaliation and avoidance, not to say abhorrence, of Jewish terrorism. But from the very beginning, Eliahu understood the need to prepare the Haganah for its ultimate role in the struggle for independence, and he always regarded it as the nucleus of a Jewish army able and entitled to defend the right of the Jews to come to Palestine, to settle in it and to lead a free life in it.

Defined in these terms, the Haganah had a truly unique role to play. Self-defence, in Eliahu’s eyes, meant that the yishuv used its always- meagre resources wherever and whenever they were needed most. The same young men and women who brought Jews to Palestine ‘illegally ’also guarded settlers putting up stockades and water towers in areas forbidden to Jewish settlement under the White Paper, manufactured and tried to stockpile arms against future attack and even parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe. He moulded the Haganah into a true instrument of national redemption, always keeping its component parts interchangeable and readying it so that in 1948, when it proved necessary, it could become the instrument of national redemption. He guarded and cherished this ultimate purpose so that it never became contaminated."

Haganah worked with British to fight Irgun and Lehi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saison

Terrorism/Fedayeen

"...In a world that has chosen to endow Arab terrorism with glamour and to admit to the so-called council of nations a man like Yassir Arafat, who has not one constructive thought or action to his credit and who, to put it quite plainly, is only a costumed multiple murderer heading a movement dedicated solely to the destruction of the State of Israel. But it is my profound conviction - and consolation - that the seeds of the inevitable failure of Arab terrorism lie in the very concept of terrorism itself. No movement, regardless of the money available to it or the appeasement upon which it feeds - and this case it is the sort of appeasement that has always brought disaster upon the world - can succeed for long if the calibre of its leadership is shoddy and if its only commitments are to blackmail and bloodshed. It is not by killing and maiming children, hijacking aircraft or murdering diplomats that real movements of national liberation accomplish their aims. They must also have content, goals that will serve them long after the immediate crisis has passed, and they must - to use an old-fashioned word - have some claim to intellectual and moral purity."

Relationship with Germany

"Interviewers have sometimes asked me what I feel about the Germans, and perhaps this is the time and place to answer that question. Post-war Germany was something with which the State of Israel had to deal, make contact and work. That was one of the facts of life after the Second World War, and facts of life have to be faced, however painful they are. It should go without saying that nothing will ever diminish the impact of the Holocaust. Six million murdered Jews are also a fact of life, a fact that must never be erased from the memory of man, and certainly that no Jew —or German —should ever forget. But although it took years before I forced myself— in 1967 —to set foot on German soil again, I was always in favour of reparations, of taking money from the Germans so that we could build up the State of Israel, for I believe that they owed us that much so that we could absorb the Jews who had remained alive. I also believe that Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust.

And when the time was ripe, years later, I was in favour also of diplomatic relations with Germany, though I violently opposed that government’s choice of an ambassador and was outraged when I learned that Rolf Pauls had fought and even been wounded (he lost an arm) in the war. ‘Nevermind that he is a brilliant career diplomat,’ I said, ‘and never mind that he was not a member of the Nazi party. Let the Germans at least send an ambassador who has no war record at all.’ But the German government refused to change its mind Rolf Pauls came to Israel and there were demonstrations against him, and I was sure he would have to be rec4lled. Fortunately, however, I was wrong. Today, he is Bonn’s ambassador to Peking, but he is still one of Israel’s staunchest and best friends.

When Pauls first presented his credentials in Jerusalem, I was Israel’s foreign minister. Since I assumed that he had been told and thus knew exactly how I felt about his appointment, it was not an easy moment, but at least, I thought, it was a moment for truth. ‘Youhave a most difficult task before you,’ I said to him. ‘This is a country made up, to a large extent, of the victims of the Holocaust. There is hardly a family that does not live with nightmare recollections of the crematorium, of babies used as targets for Nazi bullets, of Nazi “scientific” experiments. You cannot expect a warm reception. Even the women who will wait at table, if you ever come to me for a meal, have Nazi numbers tattooed on their arms.’

‘I know,’ Pauls answered. ‘I have come to you now from Yad Vashem (Israel’s memorial to the six million) and there is already one thing I can promise you. For as long as I serve here, I shall make it my business to see that any German who comes to this country goes first —as I did today —to that memorial.’ And he kept his word."

Eichmann trial

"Although nothing ever can or will bring the slaughtered back to life, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 5961 was, I believe, a great and necessary act of historic justice. It took place two decades after those desperate years in which we tried in every way possible to deny him his prey, but it is part and parcel of the record of the Holocaust nonetheless. I was (and I am) absolutely convinced that only the Israelis were entitled to try Eichmann on behalf of world Jewry, and I am deeply proud that we did so. It was not, in any sense, a question of revenge. As the Hebrew poet Bialik once wrote, not even the devil himself could dream up an adequate revenge for the death of a single child, but those who remained alive —and generations still unborn - deserve, if nothing else, that the world know, in all its dreadful detail, what was done to the Jews of Europe and by whom.

For as long as I live, I shall never forget sitting huddled in that courtroom with Sheyna, hearing the evidence of the survivors. Many of my friends had the strength to attend the trial day after day, but I must confess that I only went twice. There are not many things in life that I have knowingly dodged, but those living testimonies of torture, degradation and death —given in the chill presence of Eichmann himself —were literally unbearable for me, and instead I listened to the trial on the radio, as did most people in Israel. But that, too, made it impossible to go on normally with life. I worked, of course, went to the office every day, ate my meals, brushed my hair, but my inner attention was always fixed on what was happening in the courtroom, and the radio was always on, so that the trial dominated everything for weeks, for me and for everyone else. I remember listening to the people who gave evidence and wondering how and where they had found the will to live, to rear new families, to become human beings once more. I suppose the answer is that all of us, finally, crave life —regardless of what the past has held —but just as I cannot really know what it was like in the death camps, so I cannot really ever know what it was like to start all over again. That knowledge belongs to the survivors."

Post war British struggle

"Still, it seemed probable to most of us that when the war ended in an Allied victory, as it obviously would, the British would rethink their catastrophic Palestine policy. At the very least, we were sure in 1945 that whatever Jews had stayed alive in Europe would be let into Palestine. In the dawn of a new post-war era, the White Paper would certainly be abrogated, particularly since there was now a Labour government in Britain. For thirty years, the British Labourites had condemned the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and issued one pro- Zionist statement after another. It may have been extremely naïve of us to have believed that now everything would change, but it was certainly not unreasonable —especially in the light of the horrifying spectacle of hundreds of thousands of emaciated survivors tottering out of the death camps into the arms of the liberating British forces.

Of course, we were quite wrong. British policy certainly did change, but it changed for the worse. Not only did Mr Attlee’s government not revoke the White Paper, but it announced that it saw no need to honour any of the pledges it had made about Palestine —pledges made, even worse, not only to us but to millions of British workers and soldiers. Ernest Bevin, the new British foreign secretary, had a ‘Final Solution’ of his own for the problem of the Jews of Europe, who were now becoming known conveniently as ‘displaced persons’. If they pulled themselves together and made a real effort, they could settle down quietly in Europe again. Never mind that the continent was one great cemetery for millions of murdered Jews or that there was only one place in the whole world to which the wretched DPs wanted to go —Palestine.

It was hard, almost impossible, for me to believe that instead of helping us —as it had solemnly promised to do for so long —to lay the foundations for Jewish independence in Palestine, a British Labour government, come to power in the wake of a world war, was now prepared to send British soldiers to wage war against innocent people who asked only one thing: that they be allowed to live out their days among other Jews in Palestine. All things considered, it was not much of a request, but Bevin turned it down with unprecedented harshness and with a lunatic stubbornness, as though the fate and future of the entire British Empire depended on keeping those few hundred thousand half-dead Jews from entering Palestine. I couldn’t account then —and even today I cannot account —for the blind fury with which the British government pursued those Jews —and us. But it was that fury which left us with no alternative at all other than to take up the challenge, though we certainly weren’t well equipped to do so. Between the summer of 1945 and the winter of 1947, we transported some 70,000 Jews from the DP camps of Europe on those thoroughly inadequate ships of ours and got them through a blockade ferociously maintained by a government made up of men to whose stirring proclamations on Zionism I myself had listened at countless Labour Party conferences."

"...The British government's astonishing refusal to agree to an appeal made by no less a person than President Truman, who asked that 100,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria be allowed to enter Palestine - exclusive of the White Paper - in a one-time gesture of mercy and humanity. But Mr Attlee and Mr Bevin, who apparently thought that the 'problem' of European Jews was created only in order to embarrass the British government, said no to President Truman, too."

"On Saturday, 29 June 1946, the British government in effect declared war on the Yishuv. One hundred thousand British soldiers and nearly 2000 policemen broke into dozens of Kibbutzim and villages; raided the national institutions...slapped a curfew on all the cities in the country that had a Jewish population; imprisoned over 3000 Jews, including most of the Yishuv's leaders. The purpose of this was at least threefold. It was intended to demoralise and punish the Yishuv, to destroy the Haganah and to put a stop - once and for all - to 'illegal' immigration by jailing the people who were responsible. It failed on all three count, but from that 'Black Saturday' on, Palestine became, quite literally, a police state."

"I suggested that the Yishuv's response to the mass arrest of thousands of people could only be civil resistance. Not only was it impossible to take what had happened lying down, but unless we did something effective I was sure that the Irgun Zvai Le'umi and the Stern Group would take the matter into their own hands...I was and always have been unalterably opposed - both on moral grounds and tactically - to terror of any kind, whether waged against Arabs because they are Arabs or against the British because they were British. It was and has remained my firm conviction that, although many individual members of these dissident groups were certainly extremely brave and extremely dedicated, they were wrong (and thus dangerous to the Yishuv) from start to finish"

"But when I went to see him that day in 1946, he was still in his prime and very powerful. ‘Ifyou call upon the yishuv to adopt a policy of civil disobedience towards the government of Palestine,’ I said, ‘it will show the world that we cannot acquiesce in what has happened. Only you have the necessary authority to make this proclamation effective.’

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘But I must be assured by the Haganah that nothing will be done - no actions taken —until the Jewish Agency meets in Paris in August.’ I promised him to make every effort to secure such an assurance from the five people (I was not yet one of them) who decided these matters, and I went to Eshkol at once to find out whether this could be done. In actual fact, action had already been decided upon by a vote of three to two, but when Eshkol heard what Weizmann wanted he immediately said that he would change his vote. He, too, realized that if the national institutions failed to react, the Irgun Zvai Le’umi would certainly do something. Then Weizmann backed down. I think probably his friends in England talked him out of leading a civil disobedience campaign, but whatever his reason was, I was very upset and angry."

Chapter 8: We have our state

Cyprus detention camps

"In the course of that year, the battle against Jewish immigration turned into open warfare not only against the entire yishuv as such, but also against the refugees themselves. It was as though Ernest Bevin had nothing else whatsoever on his mind except how to keep Jewish refugees out of the Jewish homeland. The fact that we refused to solve this problem for him apparently infuriated him so that he eventually lost control altogether, and I honestly believe that some of the decisions he made regarding Palestine could only have been the result of his intense personal rage against the Jews because they could not and would not accept the judgement of the British foreign secretary as to how or where they should live.

I don’t know (nor really does it matter any more) whether Bevin was a little insane, or just anti Semitic, or both. What I do know is that he insisted on pitting the strength of the British Empire against the will of the Jews to live and that by so doing he not only brought great suffering to people who had already suffered enormously, but also forced upon thousands of British soldiers and sailors a role that must have filled them with horror. I remember staring at some of the young Englishmen who guarded the DP detention camps on Cyprus —when I went there myself in 1947 —and wondering how on earth they managed to reconcile themselves to the fact that not so long ago they were liberating from Nazi camps the very same people whom they now kept penned behind barbed wire on Cyprus only because these people found it impossible to go on living anywhere except Palestine. I looked at those nice young English boys and was filled with pity for them. I couldn’t help but think that they were no less victims of Bevin’s obsession than the men, women and children on whom their guns were now trained night and day."

"I often bumped into people who had attended that meeting in Cyprus and remembered it well. About five years ago, for instance, I was visiting a kibbutz in ‘the Negev when a middle-aged woman came up to me very hesitantly. ‘Excuse me for bothering you,’ she said, ‘butt his is the first opportunity I have had in all these years to thank you.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘I was on Cyprus with a baby in 1947,’ she replied,’ ‘and you saved us. Now I’d like you to meet that “baby”. ’The ‘baby’ was a sturdy, pretty girl of twenty who had just finished her military service and obviously thought I had taken leave of my senses when I gave her a great big kiss in front of everybody —without a word of explanation."

Cunningham

"After Cunningham left Palestine on 14 May 1948 I didn’t expect to hear from him ever again. But one day several months after I became prime minister I got a letter from him. It was written by hand from the country place in England to which he had retired, and its essence was that however great the pressures upon us, Israel should not budge from any of the territories we had taken in the Six Day War, unless and until we were guaranteed secure and defensible borders. I was very touched indeed by his letter."

UNSCOP

"Then, for reasons which will never be understood by me - nor, I suspect, by anyone else - just before UNSCOP was scheduled to leave Palestine, the British chose to demonstrate in the most unmistakable way just how brutally and tyrannically they were dealing with us and with the question of Jewish immigration. Before the shocked eyes of the members of UNSCOP, they forcibly caged and returned to Germany the 4,500 refugees who had come to Palestine aboard the Haganah ship Exodus 1947, and by so doing I think that they actually contributed considerably to UNSCOP's final recommendations. If I live to be a hundred, I shall never erase from my mind the gruesome picture of hundreds of British soldiers in full combat dress, bearing and using clubs, pistols and grenades against the wretched refugees on the Exodus, 400 of whom were pregnant women determined to give birth to their babies in Palestine. Nor will I ever be able to forget the revulsion with which I heard that these people were actually going to be shipped back, like animals in their wire cages, to DP camps in the one country that symbolised the graveyard of European Jewry."

"The voting took place at Lake Success in New York on 29 November. Like everyone else in the yishuv, I was glued to the radio, with pencil and paper, writing down the votes as they came through. Finally, at about midnight our time, the results were announced: thirty-three nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, were in favour of the partition plan; thirteen, including all the Arab states, opposed it; ten, including Great Britain, abstained. I went immediately to the compound of the Jewish Agency building, which was already jammed with people. It was an incredible sight: hundreds of people, British soldiers among them, holding hands, singing and dancing, with truckloads of more people arriving at the compound all the time. I remember walking up to my office alone, unable to share in the general festivity. The Arabs had turned the plan down and talked only of war. The crowd, drunk with happiness, wanted a speech, and I thought it would be wicked to dampen the mood by refusing. So from the balcony of my office, I spoke for a few minutes. But it was not really to the mass of people below me that I talked; it was, once again, to the Arabs.

‘You have fought your battle against us in the United Nations,’ I said. ‘The United Nations —the majority of countries in the world —have had their say. The partition plan is a compromise; not what you wanted, not what we wanted. But let us now live in friendship and peace together.’ That speech was hardly the solution for our situation. Arab riots broke out all over Palestine on the very next day (seven Jews were killed in an Arab ambush on a bus) and on 2 December an Arab mob set the Jewish commercial centre in Jerusalem on fire, while British police stood by, interfering only when the Haganah tried to take action."

Fundraising for the Haganah

"They listened and they wept and they pledged money in amounts that no community had ever given before. I stayed in the United States for as long as I could bear to be away from home —for about six weeks —and the Jews all over the country listened, wept and gave money —and when they had to, took loans from banks in order to cover their pledges. By the time I came back to Palestine in March, I had raised fifty million dollars, which was turned over at once for the Haganah’s secret purchase of arms in Europe. But I never deceived myself— not even when upon my return Ben-Gurion said to me ‘someday when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible’. I always knew that these dollars were given not to me, but to Israel."

King Abdullah

"Assassination is an endemic disease in the Arab world, and one of the first lessons that most Arab rulers learn in the connection is between secrecy and longevity. Abdullah's murder made a lasting impression on all subsequent Arab leaders, and I remember that Nasser once said to an intermediary whom we despatched to Cairo: 'If Ben-Gurion came to Egypt to talk to me, he would return home as a conquering hero. But if I went to him, I would be shot when I came back.' And I am afraid that is still the situation."

"The first time I met Abdullah was early in November He had agreed to meet me...He soon made the heart of the matter clear: he would not join in any Arab attack on us. He would always remain our friend, he said, and, like us, he wanted peace more than anything else"

"Throughout January and February, we maintained contact with Abdullah, as a rule through the good offices of a mutual friend, through whom I was able to send direct messages to the king. As the weeks passed, my messages became more worried. The air was thick with conjecture, and there were reports that, despite his promise to me, Abdullah was about to join the Arab League. ‘Wasthis indeed so?’ I asked. The reply from Amman was prompt and negative. King Abdullah was astonished and hurt by my question. He asked me to remember three things: that he was a Bedouin and therefore a man of honour; that he was a king and therefore doubly an honourable man; and finally, that he would never break a promise made to a woman. So there could not possibly be any justification for my concern."

"This time, however, Abdullah refused to come to Naharayim. It was too dangerous, he told us through his emissary. If I wanted to see him, I would have to come to Amman, and the risk would have to be entirely mine. He could not be expected, he informed us, to alert the Legion to the fact that he awaited Jewish guests from Palestine, and he would take no responsibility for anything that might happen to us en route."

"Then Abdullah entered the room. He was very pale and seemed under great strain. Ezra interpreted for us and we talked for about an hour. I started the conversation by coming to the point at once. ‘Have you broken your promise to me, after all?’ I asked him. He didn’t answer my question directly. Instead he said: ‘When I made that promise, I thought I was in control of my own destiny and could do what I thought right. But since then I have learned otherwise.’ Then he went on to say that before he had been alone, but now, ‘I am one of five,’ the other four, we gathered, being Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Still, he thought war could be averted.

‘Why are you in such a hurry to proclaim your state?’ he asked me. ‘What is the rush? You are so impatient!’ I told him that I didn’t think that a people who had waited 2,000 years should be described as being ‘in a hurry’, and he seemed to accept that.

‘Don’t you understand,’ I said, ‘that we are your only allies in this region? The others are all your enemies.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know that. But what can I do? It is not up to me.’ So then I said to him: ‘You must know that if war is forced upon us, we will fight and we will win.’ He sighed and again said ‘Yes. I know that. It is your duty to fight. But why don’t you wait a few years? Drop your demands for free immigration. I will take over the whole country and you will be represented in my parliament. I will treat you very well and there will be no war.’

I tried to explain to him that his plan was impossible. ‘You know all that we have done and how hard we have worked,’ I said. ‘Do you think we did all that just to be represented in a foreign parliament? You know what we want and to what we aspire. If you can offer us nothing more than you have just done, then there will be a war and we will win it. But perhaps we can meet again —after the war and after there is a Jewish state.’

‘You place much too much reliance on your tanks,’ Danin said. ‘You have no real friends in the Arab world, and we will smash your tanks as the Maginot Line was smashed.’ They were very brave words, particularly since Danin knew exactly what the state of our armour was. But Abdullah looked even graver and said again that he knew that we had to do our duty. He also added, unhappily I thought, that events would just have to run their course. All of us would know eventually what fate had in store for us."

"But I never saw Abdullah again, though after the War of Independence there were prolonged negotiations with him. Later I was told that he said about me: ‘If any one person was responsible for the war, it was she, because she was too proud to accept the offer I made her.’ I must say that when I think of what would have befallen us as a ‘protected’ minority in the kingdom of an Arab ruler who was himself murdered by Arabs within just over two years, I can’t bring myself to regret the fact that I disappointed Abdullah so much that night. But I wish that he had been brave enough to stay out of the war. It would have been so much better for him —and for us —if he had been a little prouder."

Declaration of independence

"On the morning of 14 May, I participated in a meeting of the National Council at which we were to decide on the name of the state and on the final formulation of the declaration. The name was less of a problem than the declaration because there was a last-minute argument about the inclusion of a reference to God. Actually the issue had been brought up the day before. The very last sentence, as finally submitted to the small sub-committee charged with producing the final version of the proclamation, began with the words: ‘With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hands in witness to this Proclamation.. .‘ Ben-Gurion had hoped that the phrase ‘Rock of Israel’ was sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy those Jews for whom it was inconceivable that the document which established the Jewish state should not contain any reference to God —as well as those who were certain to object strenuously to even the least hint of clericalism in the proclamation.

But the compromise was not so easily accepted. The spokesman of the religious parties, Rabbi Fishman-Maimon, demanded that the reference to God be unequivocal and said that he would only approve of the ‘Rock of Israel’ if the words ‘and its Redeemer’ were added, while Aaron Zisling of the left wing of the Labour Party was just as determined in the opposite direction. ‘I cannot sign a document referring in any way to a God in whom I do not believe,’ he said. It took Ben Gurion most of the morning to persuade Maimon and Zisling that the meaning of the ‘Rock of Israel’ was actually twofold: while it signified ‘God’ for a great many Jews, perhaps for most, it could also be considered as a symbolic and secular reference to the ‘strengthof the Jewish people’. In the end, Maimon agreed that the word ‘Redeemer’ should be left out of the text, though, funnily enough, the first English-language translation of the proclamation, released for publication abroad that day, contained no reference at all to the ‘Rock of Israel’, since the military censor had struck out the entire last paragraph as a security precaution, because it mentioned the time and place of the ceremony."

"Then, as though a signal had been given, we rose to our feet, crying and clapping, while Ben-Gurion, his voice breaking for the only time, read:

‘The State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and the in- gathering of exiles.’

This was the very heart of the proclamation, the reason for the state and the point of it all. I remember sobbing out aloud when I heard those words spoken in that hot, packed little hail. But Ben-Gurion just rapped his gavel again for order and went on reading:

‘Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent.’

And:

‘We extend the hand of peace and good neighbourliness to all the states around us and to their peoples, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.’"

Arab states opposition to Israel

"As a matter of fact, it has never ceased to astonish me that the Arab states have been so eager to go to war against us. Almost from the very beginning of Zionist settlement until today, they have been consumed by hatred for us. The only possible explanation - and it is a ridiculous one - is that they simply cannot bear our presence or forgive us for existing, and I find it hard to believe that the leaders of all the Arab states are and always have been so hopelessly primitive in their thinking.

On the other hand, what have we ever done to threaten the Arab states? True, we have not stood in line to return territory we won in wars they started, but territory, after all, has never ever been what Arab aggression is all about - and in 1948 it was certainly not a need for more land that drove the Egyptians northwards in the hope of reaching and destroying Tel Aviv and Jewish Jerusalem. So what was it? An overpowering irrational urge to eliminate us physically? Fear of the progress we might introduce in the Middle East? A distaste for Western civilisation? Who knows? Whatever it was, it has lasted - but then so have we - and the solution will probably not be found for many years, though I have no doubt at all that the time will come when the Arab states will accept us - as we and for what we are.

In a nutshell, peace is - and always has been - dependant entirely upon only one thing: the Arab leaders must acquiesce to our being here."

Chapter 9: Minister to Moscow

"I was constantly shocked by what I saw of the supposedly classless Soviet society. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I used to drive through the streets of Moscow and see middle-aged women digging ditches and sweeping the roads with only rags bound around their feet when it was 40 degrees below zero, while other women in furs and high heels stepped into enormous shiny cars."

**Going to Synagogue

"A few weeks later, it was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I had been told that on the High Holidays many more people came to synagogue than on Saturdays, and I decided, once again, that the entire legation would attend the Rosh Hashanah service. Then, a day or two before the holiday, a long article appeared in Pravda, written by Ilya Ehrenburg, the well-known Soviet journalist and apologist who was himself a Jew. Were it not for Stalin, Ehrenburg wrote piously, there would be no such thing as a Jewish state. ‘Nonetheless, let there be no mistake about it,’ he explained, ‘the State of Israel has nothing to do with the Jews of the Soviet Union, where there is no Jewish problem and therefore no need for Israel. That is for the Jews of the capitalist countries, in which, inevitably, anti-Semitism flourishes. And in any case there is no such entity as the Jewish people. That is as ridiculous a concept as if one claimed that everybody who had red hair or a certain shape of nose belongs to one people.’ Not only I but the Jews of Moscow read this article. And like me, because they were used to reading between the lines, they understood what it was all about and knew that they were being warned to keep away from us! The response which thousands upon thousands of these Jews deliberately and courageously chose to make to that sinister warning was something which shattered and overwhelmed me at the time I witnessed it and has inspired me ever since. There is not a detail about what happened on that New Year’s Day that I do not remember as vividly —and with as much emotion —as if it had taken place only a few hours ago.

As we had planned, we went to the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah. All of us —the men, women and children of the legation —dressed in our best clothes, as befitted Jews on a Jewish holiday. But the street in front of the synagogue had changed. Now, it was filled with people, packed together like sardines, hundreds and hundreds of them, of all ages, including Red Army officers, soldiers, teenagers and babies carried in their parents’ arms. Instead of the 2,000-odd Jews who usually came to synagogue on High holidays, a crowd of close to 50,000 people was waiting for us. For a minute, I couldn’t grasp what had happened —or even who they were. And then it dawned on me. They had come —those good, brave Jews —in order to be with us, to demonstrate their sense of kinship and to celebrate the establishment of the State of Israel. Within seconds, they had surrounded me, almost lifting me bodily, almost crushing me, saying my name over and over again. Eventually, they parted ranks and let me enter the synagogue; but there, too, the demonstration went on. Every now and then, in the women’s gallery, someone would come to me, touch my hand, stroke or even kiss my dress. Without speeches or parades, without any words at all really, the Jews of Moscow were proving their profound desire —and their need —to participate in the miracle of the establishment of the Jewish state, and I was the symbol of the state for them.

I couldn’t talk, or smile, or wave my hand. I sat in that gallery like a stone, without moving, with those thousands of eyes fixed on me. No such entity as the Jewish people, Ehrenburg had written. The State of Israel meant nothing to the Jews of the USSR! But his warning had fallen on deaf ears. For thirty years we and they had been separated. Now we were together again, and as I watched them, I knew that no threat, however awful, could possibly have stopped the ecstatic people I saw in the synagogue that day from telling us, in their own way, what Israel meant to them. The service ended, and I got up to leave, but I could hardly walk. I felt as though I had been caught up in a torrent of love so strong that it had literally taken my breath away and slowed down my heart. I was on the verge of fainting, I think. But the crowd still surged around me, stretching out its hands and saying ‘Nasha Golda’ (our Golda) and ‘Shalom,shalom’, and crying.

Out of that ocean of people, I can still see two figures clearly. A little man who kept popping up in front of me and saying ‘Goldele, leben zolst du. Shana Tova!’ (Goldele, a long life to you and a Happy New Year) and a woman who just kept repeating: ‘Goldele! Goldele!’ and smiling and blowing kisses at me.

It was impossible for me to walk back to the hotel, so although there is an injunction against riding on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays, someone pushed me into a cab. But the cab couldn’t move either because the crowd of cheering, laughing, weeping Jews had engulfed it. I wanted to say something, anything, to those people, to let them know that I begged their forgiveness for not having wanted to come to Moscow and for not having known the strength of their ties to us. For having wondered, in fact, whether there was still a link between them and us. But I couldn’t find the words. All I could say, clumsily, and in a voice that didn’t even sound like my own, was one sentence in Yiddish. I stuck my head out of the window of the cab and said: ‘A dank eich vos ihr seit geblieben ridden’ (Thank you for having remained Jews), and I heard that miserable inadequate sentence being passed on through the enormous crowd as though it was some wonderful prophetic saying."

"But by January 1949 it was apparent that Russian Jewry was going to pay a heavy price for the welcome it had given us, for the ‘treachery’ to Communist ideals that was —in the eyes of the Soviet government —implicit in the joy with which we had been greeted. The Yiddish theatre in Moscow was closed. The Yiddish newspaper Enigkeit was closed. The Yiddish publishing house Emes was closed; It didn’t matter that all of these had faithfully followed the Communist line. The fact remained that Russian Jewry had shown far too great an interest in Israel and the Israelis to please the Kremlin. Within five months there was practically no single Jewish organization left in Russia, and the Jews kept their distance from us."

**Meeting Ilya Ehrenburg and Polina Molotov

"Not long afterwards, I was also given the privilege of meeting Mr Ehrenburg. One of the foreign correspondents stationed in Moscow, an Englishman who used to drop in on Friday nights, asked me once if I wanted to meet Ehrenburg. ‘Asa matter of fact, I do,’ I said. ‘There are one or two things I’d very much like to talk to him about.’ ‘I’ll arrange it,’ promised the Englishman, but he never did. Then, a few weeks later, there was an Independence Day party in the Czech embassy and this same journalist came up to me. ‘Mr Ehrenburg is here,’ he said. ‘Shall I bring him over to you?’ Ehrenburg was quite drunk —not an unusual condition for him, I was told —and, from the start, very aggressive. He began speaking to me in Russian. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t speak Russian,’ I said. ‘Do you speak English?’ He looked at me nastily and replied. ‘I hate Russian-born Jews who speak English.’ ‘And I am sorry for Jews who don’t speak Hebrew or at least Yiddish!’ I answered. Of course, lots of people milling around overheard this exchange, and I don’t think it increased anyone’s respect for Mr Ehrenburg.

I had a much more interesting and rewarding encounter with another Soviet citizen at the reception given by Mr Molotov on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, to which all diplomats in Moscow are invited each year. The heads of legations were received by the foreign minister in a special room. After I had shaken hands with Molotov, his wife, Ivy Molotov, came up to me. ‘I am so pleased to meet you, at last,’ she said with real warmth and even excitement. Then she added: ‘I speak Yiddish, you know.’ ‘Are you Jewish?’ I asked in some surprise. ‘Yes,’ she said, answering me in Yiddish, ‘Ich bin a Tiddishe tochter’ (I am a daughter of the Jewish people). We talked together for quite a long time. She knew all about the events at the synagogue and told me how good it was that we had gone. ‘The Jews wanted so much to see you,’ she said. Then we touched on the question of the Negev, which was being debated at the United Nations. I made some remark about not being able to give it up because my daughter lived there, and added that Sarah was with me in Moscow. ‘I must meet her,’ said Mrs Mob- toy. So I introduced Sarah and Yael Namir to her, and she talked to them about Israel and asked Sarah dozens of questions about the kibbutzim, who lived in them and how they were run. She spoke Yiddish to the girls and was overjoyed when Sarah answered in the same language. When Sarah explained that everything in Revivim was owned collectively and that there was no private property, Mrs Molotov looked troubled. ‘That’s not a good idea,’ she said. ‘People don’t like sharing everything. Even Stalin is against that. You should acquaint yourself with Stalin’s thoughts and writings on the subject.’ Before she returned to her other guests, she put her arm around Sarah and, with tears in her eyes, said: ‘Be well. If everything goes well with you, it will go well for all Jews everywhere.’ I never saw or heard from Mrs Molotov again.

Many years later, in New York, Henry Shapiro, the veteran United Press correspondent in Moscow, told me that after her conversation with us, Ivy Molotov had been arrested"

**Arab boycotts after '49

"On 20 April 1949 I returned to Israel. At this point, I think it is important to describe what was happening there, because in the course of 1949 and 1950 Israel underwent a process that no other country has ever undergone in quite the same way, and that was to result in the doubling of our population within only two years. The War of Independence ended (to the extent that it ever ended) in the spring of 1949, and armistice agreements —though not peace treaties —had been signed with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria through the good offices of Dr Ralph Bunche (who had taken Count Bernadotte’s place as UN mediator). Unfortunately, however, their signatures didn’t mean that the Arab states were now reconciled to our existence. On the contrary, it meant that the war they were so anxious to wage against us and which they had lost on the battlefield would now be fought differently and in a manner less likely to result in their defeat but just as likely, they hoped, to destroy the Jewish state. Having been trounced in battle, the Arabs now switched from military weapons to economic ones. They boycotted any companies or individuals that traded with her. They closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, in the face of the international convention which stipulated that the Canal must be open to all nations at all times.

But they didn’t stop killing Jews altogether. For years there was a steady infiltration across our borders of armed Arab gangs that murdered and robbed Israelis, set fields and orchards on fire, stole cattle and generally made life a misery in our border settlements. Whenever we protested or tried to convince the United Nations that these constant raids were, in fact, a continuation of the war and a major violation of the armistice agreements, the Arab states, loudly proclaiming their innocence, said that there was nothing whatsoever they could do about these ‘incidents’—although we knew that they were providing the money, arms and backing and, what’s more, we could prove our allegations. Under normal circumstances, I suppose this continuous, malicious and very dangerous harassment would have so enraged us that we would have retaliated in a way, and on a scale, appropriate to a sovereign state. But since, at that point, we were all so preoccupied with the problem of feeding, housing and employing the 684,201 Jews from seventy countries who arrived in Israel between 14 May 1948 and the end of 1951, all we did, at first, was to complain to the United Nations about the raids and hope that something would be done about them."

**Labour Minister

"As for our resources, despite the magnificent response of world Jewry, there was never enough money. Thanks to our neighbours, our defence budget had to stay sky high, and anyhow all the other essential needs of the state had to be met somehow. We couldn’t close down our schools or our hospitals or our transport or our industries (such as they were) or put too tight a rein in any way on the state’s development. So everything had to be done at the same time, But there were things that we could do without after all —so we did without them. We rationed almost everything —food, clothing and shoes —and got used to the idea of an austerity that lasted for years. Recently I came across one of my own ration books, a drab little booklet issued by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 1950, and I recalled the hours I stood in line for a few potatoes or three eggs or the frozen fish on which we feasted so gratefully —when we got it. Luckily, I still had clothes from my stay in Russia. But most Israelis had a very hard time indeed. Their standard of living dropped drastically. Whatever had been sufficient for one family in i8 now had to be shared with two or three other families. Oldtimers, who had just emerged from months of a terrible war, might have been forgiven for rebelling against the new demands made on them. But no one rebelled. A few people said that perhaps the immigrants should wait wherever they were until times were better here. But no one, no one at all, ever suggested that the burden was too heavy or that the infant state might collapse under it. The national belt was tightened —and tightened again —and still we all managed to breathe. And about one thing we were all in agreement: without those Jews, Israel wasn’t worth having."

"But there had to be priorities, and for me, at least, housing and jobs for the immigrants headed the list. Not all of my colleagues agreed with me. A barrage of experts explained to me in detail, with charts and graphs, why a housing programme of the kind I envisaged was not a good idea. It would only lead to inflation, they said. It would be far wiser to put the little money at our disposal into factories or streamlined methods of agriculture. But I couldn’t accept or support any recommendation that didn’t deal with the absorption of immigrants, first and foremost, from the human point of view. And I certainly didn’t believe that anything could ever be as ‘productive’—in terms of Israel’s future —as decent housing. To me it seemed absolutely clear that good citizenship, a real sense of belonging, the beginning of integration —in other words, the creation of a good society —depended to an overwhelming degree on how people lived, and there was no point in our talking loftily about social responsibility, education or even public health unless we got at least some of the new immigrants out of those dreadful tents and into proper housing as soon as possible. A few weeks after I returned from Moscow, I went to the Knesset with a plan for building an initial 30,000 housing units and got it through, despite the objections...

I got the money and we began to build those units. Of course, at first we made all kinds of mistakes —some of them serious —both in planning and in execution. We miscalculated, sited badly, fell behind the flow of immigration. In the end, we couldn’t build quickly enough or well enough, and by October 1950 we had only constructed a third of the units we had undertaken to build because an unusually severe winter forced us to divert funds earmarked for building to the emergency purchase of thousands of metal huts, which were better than tents in the winter but like roasting ovens all through Israel’s long, hot summer. Still, not a single family that entered Israel in those great waves of immigration ever lacked shelter of some kind. Somehow we found or invented accommodation for everyone. When the corrugated metal huts ran out, we used canvas and nailed it to wooden frames and created tens of thousands of fabric shacks; when these ran Out we went unhappily back to tents for a while. But no one slept out of doors, and we never stopped building.

By the end of 1950, however, we knew that we couldn’t go on thinking of those ‘temporary camps’ as reception centres that could be neatly folded away within a few months. They were obviously going to have to do for several years, and, that being the case, their entire character would have to change. They would have to be turned into work villages and moved to the outskirts of towns arid cities, so that the new immigrants could live near places where labour was in demand. They would have to be so organized that the people in them could become more or less self-sufficient, cooking for themselves, rather than eating in public kitchens, and participating in the upkeep of public services. We couldn’t levy rates and taxes on penniless men and women, but we could prevent them from feeling that they were the objects of charity.

The new camps were called ma‘abarot, the plural of the Hebrew word ma’abara (place of transit), and by November 1951 we had set up 112 ma’abarot, housing a total population of 227,000 new immigrants. But if we were not to create two classes of Israelis —the relatively well- established ‘old timers’, on the one hand, and the new immigrants in their crowded, ugly ma’abarot on the other —we would have to supply a lot more than just housing. We would have to see to it that the new immigrants worked and got paid for their work, and I believed that there was only one way of doing this: a public works programme would have to be established.

That was not easy either. The majority of the so-called oriental Jews (those from the Middle East and North Africa) had virtually no skills that were applicable to their circumstances in the new state. We feared that many of them would get used to doing nothing but living on a dole for years and years, while the gap between them and us widened. But social welfare, however enlightened, certainly wasn’t the answer. Employment opportunities had to be created, and we would have to create them, so we set in motion a chain of special projects that offered work to people who had never used drills or held bricks in their hands or even worked in fields. The Ministry of Labour launched a massive road-building scheme throughout the country, and hundreds upon hundreds of acres of stony, stubborn land were cleared, terraced and afforested, by hand. And all the time we went on building and training the immigrants, though the tide of immigration didn’t slow down until 1952.

The real problem, of course, wasn’t the difficulty of creating a labour force or building houses or absorbing thousands of immigrants into our economy. Those were all urgent matters, but they were never at the ci our concern. What really preoccupied us in those days —and what, in part, still preoccupies all thinking Israelis —was how to weld together people who, on the surface, had so little in common and found it so hard to understand each other. But, again because we had no alternative, we often succeeded where success seemed impossible. I remember, for instance, how pessimistic —not to say disapproving —some of my colleagues were about the road-building. Not only didn’t we need all those approach roads, but importing the building materials was in itself a luxury, and anyhow the roads would be no good because we didn’t have the kind of workers we needed. But I relied on three things: the dedication and ingenuity of the old timers; the growing desire of the new immigrants to earn an honest day’s wage and not to be turned into perpetual wards of the state or the Jewish Agency; and the understanding and generosity of world Jewry, which responded again and again to our endless pleas for help. Looking back, I must say that I was very rarely disappointed, though anyone watching the way in which those roads were built in 1949 and the early 1950s would have been justified in considering us all to be a little mad. We used to take one skilled construction worker from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, turn him overnight into the foreman of a road-building crew somewhere in the south and leave him to cope with the problem of supervising ten men who spoke ten different languages, came from ten different countries and had only been in Israel for a few intolerably confusing months. But somehow or other, though perhaps inefficiently and too expensively, the roads (wryly nicknamed ‘the golden roads’ in my honour) were built."

**Jerusalem

"The rest of the world managed to disregard the tie that has always existed between us and the City of David. Both the Peel Commission and UNSCOP had taken the position that Jerusalem must not be included either in the proposed Jewish or Arab state, and the UN General Assembly decided that Jerusalem should be internationalised, administered through a special council and its own governor and guarded by an international police force. The point of all this, ostensibly, was to protect the holy places so that 'order and peace' might reign in Jerusalem forever. The Arabs, of course, rejected this plan lock, stock and barrel, along with the entire partition proposal. But we accepted it, though very unhappily, and comforted ourselves with the UN promise that at the end of ten years there would be a referendum 'leading to certain modifications'. Since there were 100,000 Jews and only 65,000 Arabs in Jerusalem in 1948, it seemed not impossible that, in the end, Jerusalem would be ours. Not that we ever intended to expel the Arab population (as has, I think, been amply proven by the events in that city since the Six Day War), nor that we didn't bitterly resent the implication that we were likely to disturb the 'order and peace' of a city that has been sacred to us for over 2,000 years.

...That special council never came into existence, but Jerusalem came - and remained for months - under Arab fire. During that siege of Jerusalem, when the city was mercilessly shelled by Egyptians and Jordanians, all of the great international concern for the holy places just vanished into thin air. Apart from a few feeble resolutions at the United Nations, no one, except the Jews, said or did anything to halt the Arab assault on the city, and no one, except the Jews, moved to rescue either its people or its ancient sites. The Arab Legion occupied the Old City, and every single Jew in it who remained alive was thrown out. In fact, we became the only people to be denied access to the holy places, but still no one, except the Jews, said a word. Nobody even asked: 'How is it that the Jews can no longer go to synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City or pray at the Western Wall?' In view of the deafening silence, we could hardly be expected ever again to rely on anyone else to protect Jerusalem or take seriously any Christian or Moslem protestations of anxiety about the holy places."

Relations with Arabs

"It also had another by-product that mattered to me: because the percentage of babies born in hospital rose as a result of the maternity benefits, infant mortality - which was high among the new immigrants and the Arabs - dropped. I went to Nazareth myself to hand the first cheque to the first Arab woman who had her baby in hospital there, and I think I was more excited than she was."

"Something else may come as a surprise to certain of Israel’s ‘constructive critics’, particularly those of the so-called New Left. Along with all the rest of the building and settlement we did in those hectic seven years, we also built for the Arabs, because when we talked about the citizens of Israel, we meant all the citizens of Israel. Whenever I had arguments with local people in Kiryat Shmonah and similar places, there was always someone in the crowd who shouted that the Arabs were better off. It wasn't true, of course, but it is equally untrue - and far more wicked - to claim that we ignored the Arabs altogether. The truth is that we used the houses of those Arabs who ran away from the country in 1948 for new immigrant housing whenever we could, although the properties remained under the supervision of a special custodian. At the same time, we allocated more than 10 million pounds for new Arab housing and rehoused hundreds of Arabs who remained in Israel but were displaced as a result of the fighting. There was such an outcry about the way we used absentee property - as though there were a better way to use it - that in 1953 we passed a Land acquisition Law under which at least two-thirds of all the Arabs who put in claims were paid compensation, given back their property or given other property in its place - and none of them was asked to take a loyalty oath before his claim was honoured.

Whenever I read or hear about the Arabs whom we allegedly dealt with so brutally, my blood boils. In April 1948, I myself stood on the beach in Haifa for hours and literally beseeched the Arabs of that city not to leave. Moreover, it was a scene that I am not likely to forget. The Haganah had just taken over Haifa, and the Arabs were starting to run away - because their leadership had so eloquently assured them that this was the wisest course for them to take and the British had so generously put dozens of trucks at their disposal. Nothing that the Haganah said or tried did any good - neither the pleas made via loudspeakers mounted on vans nor the leaflets we rained down on the Arab sections of the town ('Do not fear!' they read in Arabic and Hebrew, 'By moving out you will bring poverty and humiliation upon yourselves. Remain in the city which is both yours and ours.')...They were determined to go. Hundreds drove across the border, but some went to the seashore to wait for boats. Ben-Gurion called me in and said: 'I want you to go to Haifa at once and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated properly. I also want you to try to persuade those Arabs on the beach to come back. You must get it into their heads that they nothing to fear.' So I went immediately. I sat there on the beach and begged them to return to their homes. But they had only one answer. 'We know that there is nothing to fear but we have to go. We'll be back.' I was quite sure that they went not because they were frightened of us but because they were terrified of being considered traitors to the Arab 'cause'.

Why did we want them to stay? There were two very good reasons: first of all, we wanted to prove to the world that Jews and Arabs could live together - regardless of what the Arab leadership was trumpeting; secondly, we knew perfectly well that if half a million Arabs left Palestine at that point, it would create a major economic upheaval in the country. This brings me to another issue with which I might just as well deal now. I should very much like, once and for all, to reply to the question of how many Palestinian Arabs did, in fact, leave their homes in 1947 and 1948. The answer is: at the very utmost, about 590,000. Of these, some 30,000 left right after the November 1947 UN partition resolution: another 200,000 left in the course of that winter and the spring of 1948 (including the vast majority of the 62,000 Arabs of Haifa); and after the establishment of the state in May 1948 and the Arab invasion of Israel, yet another 300,000 Arabs fled. It was very tragic indeed, and it had very tragic consequences, but at least let everyone be clear about the facts as they were - and still are. The Arab assertion that there are 'millions' of 'Palestinian refugees' is as dishonest as the claim that we made the Arabs leave their homes. The 'Palestinian refugees' were created as a result of the Arab desire (and attempt) to destroy Israel. They were not the cause of it. Of course, there were some Jews in the Yishuv who said, even in 1948, that the Arab exodus was the best thing that could have happened to Israel, but I know of no serious Israeli who ever felt that way.

Those Arabs who stayed in Israel, however, had an easier life than those who left. There was hardly an Arab village with electricity or running water in all of Palestine before 1948, and within twenty years there was hardly an Arab village in Israel that wasn't connected to the national electric grid, or a home without running water."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_land_and_property_laws#Absentees'_Property_Laws

Religious bloc

"The religious question —by which I mean the extent to which the clerical parties had their way —flared up sporadically all through the i 950s. We were determined not to be drawn (if it could be avoided) into open conflict with the religious bloc because we had troubles enough without that particular headache. Nonetheless, every now and then there were explosions which brought cabinet crises in their wake. Suffice it to say that no easy way was ever found of getting around the place of religion in the Jewish state. It bedevilled us then and, to some degree, it still bedevils us now.

One of the jokes which Israelis told in those days was about the man who sighed: ‘Two thousand years we waited for a Jewish state, and it had to happen to me!’ I think that all of us probably felt that way —though very fleetingly —at one time or another during those first years of statehood."

Chapter 10: The right to exist

Ben Gurion and Sharett

"Ben-Gurion was an activist, a man who believed in doing rather than explaining and who was convinced that what really mattered in the end - and what would always really matter - was what the Israeli's did and how they did it, not what the world outside Israel thought or said about them...Being liked or not - or even being approved of or not - was not the kind of thing that interested Ben-Gurion. He thought in terms of sovereignty, security, consolidation and real progress, and he regarded world opinion, or even public opinion, as relatively unimportant compared to these."

"Sharett, on the other hand, was immensely concerned with the way in which policymakers elsewhere reacted to Israel and what was likely to make the Jewish state look 'good' in the eyes of other foreign ministers or the United Nations. Israel's image and the verdict of his own contemporaries - rather than history or future historians - were the criteria he tended to use the most often. And what he really wanted most for Israel, I think, was for it to be viewed as a progressive, moderate, civilised European country of whose behaviour no Israeli, least of all himself, ever needed be ashamed."

Method of retaliation

"Sharett was just as convinced as Ben-Gurion that the incessant incursions across our frontiers by gangs of Arab infiltrators had to end, but they disagreed sharply on the method that should be used. Sharett did not rule out retaliation. But he believed more strongly than most of us did that the most effective way of dealing with this very acute situation was by continuing to put maximum pressure on the powers-that-be so that they, in turn, would put maximum pressure on the Arab states to stop aiding and abetting the infiltrators. Well-worded protests to the United Nations, skilful and informed diplomatic notes and clear, repeated presentation of our case to the world would, he was sure, eventually succeed, whereas armed reprisals by Israel could only result in a storm of criticism and make our international position even less comfortable that it was. He was 100 per cent right about the criticism. It was more than just a storm, it was a tornado. Whenever the Israel Defence Forces retaliated against the infiltrators - and sometimes, unavoidably, innocent Arabs were wounded or killed along with the guilt - Israel was promptly and very severely censured for 'atrocities'.

But Ben-Gurion still saw his primary responsibility not to the statesmen of the West or to the world tribunal, but to the ordinary citizens who lived in the Israeli settlements that were under constant Arab attack. The duty of the government of any state, he believed, was first and foremost to defend itself and to protects its citizens - regardless of how negative the reaction abroad might be to this protection. There was also another consideration of great importance to Ben-Gurion: the citizens of Israel...had to be taught that the government, and only the government, was responsible for their security. It would have obviously been much simpler to have permitted the formation of a number of anti-terrorist vigilante groups, shut an official eye to private acts of retaliation and vengeance and then loudly disclaim all responsibility for the resultant 'incidents'. But that was not our way. The hand extended in peace to the Arabs would remain extended, but at the same time the children of Israeli farmers in border villages were entitled to sleep safely in their beds at night. And if the only way of accomplishing this was to hit back mercilessly at the camps of the Arab gangs, then that would have to be done."

Terrorism/Fedayeen

"The Arab states had long ago explained their position. 'We are exercising a right of war,' an Egyptian representative had said in 1951 in defence of Egypt's refusal to let Israeli ships go through the Suez Canal. 'An armistice does not put an end to a state of war. It does not prohibit a country from exercising certain rights of war.' That these 'rights' were still being fully upheld in 1955 and 1956 we know all too well. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power in Egypt in 1952 and was now the most powerful figure in the Arab world, openly applauded the Fedayeen. 'You have proven,' he told them, 'that you are heroes upon whom our entire country can depend. The spirit with which you enter the land of the enemy must be spread.' Cairo Radio also praised the murderers endlessly in language that was crystal clear: 'Weep O'Israel,' was one refrain, 'the day of extermination draws near'.

The United Nations did nothing effective to put a halt to the Fedayeen outrages. The UN secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, did succeed in arranging a ceasefire that lasted for a few days in the spring of 1956, but when the Fedayeen went back to crossing the border, he let it go at that and didn't return to the Middle East."

1956: Suez

"Despite all this - and the unconcealed Soviet-Arab preparations for another war - the United States and Britain refused to sell us arms. It didn't matter how often of how loudly we knocked on their doors. The answer was always negative, though at the very beginning of 1956 the United States - still refusing to sell us arms - indicated to France and Canada that it didn't mind if they did so."

"There is already so much literature (some of it fact and some of it fiction) about the Sinai Campaign that I think my own contribution can be quite modest. But I must stress one fact. Regardless of the abortive French and British attempt to seize the Suez Canal, Israel’s own strike against the Egyptians in 1956 had one goal and one goal only: to prevent the destruction of the Jewish state. The threat was unmistakable. As I later said at the UN General Assembly, ‘Even if no one else chose to do so, we recognized the symptoms.’ We knew that dictatorships —including those given disarmingly to informing the world of their plans —usually keep their promises, and no one in Israel had forgotten the lesson of the crematoria or what total extermination really meant. Unless we were prepared to be killed off, either piecemeal or in one sudden attack, we had to take the initiative —though, God knows, it wasn’t an easy decision to make."

"We had counted on surprise, speed and utterly confusing the Egyptian army, but it was only when I myself flew to visit Sharm el-Sheikh at the southernmost tip of Sinai and toured the Gaza Strip by car afterwards that I really understood the extent of our victory —the sheer size and desolation of the territory through which those tanks, half-tracks, ice-cream trucks, private cars and taxis had raced in under seven days. The Egyptian defeat was absolute. The nests of the fedayeen were cleaned out. The elaborate Egyptian system to defend Sinai —the fortresses and the battalions concealed in the desert —was put totally out of commission. The hundreds of thousands of weapons and the millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition —mostly Russian —stock-piled for use against us were worthless now. A third of the Egyptian army was broken. Of the 30,000 Egyptian soldiers whom we found pathetically wandering in the sand, 5,000 were taken as prisoners to save them from dying of thirst (and eventually exchanged for the one Israeli the Egyptians had managed to capture).

But we hadn’t fought the Sinai Campaign for territory, booty or prisoners, and as far as we were concerned, we had won the only thing we wanted: peace, or at least the promise of peace for a few years, perhaps even for longer. Although our casualties were ‘light’, we desperately hoped that the 172 Israelis who were killed (some 800 were wounded) would be the last battle casualties we would ever have to mourn. This time, we would insist that our neighbours come to terms with us and with our existence."

"I have always thought that had the Anglo-French attack on Suez been more swift and efficient, the storm of protest in those countries would have died down in the face of afait accompli. But as it was, the combined assault failed, and the French and British backed down as soon as the United Nations, under intense US and Soviet pressure, demanded that they withdrew their troops from the Suez Canal zone. It (UN) also demanded Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.

That was the beginning of the four and a half heart-breaking months of diplomatic battle that we waged - and lost - at the United Nations in our attempt to persuade the nations of the world that if we retreated to the armistice lines of 1949, war would again break out in the Middle East one day. Those people, those millions of people who even today have still not quite grasped the realities of Israel's struggle to stay alive, and who are so quick to condemn us for not being 'more flexible' and for not retreating pleasantly to our former borders each time we are forced to go to war, might do well to ponder the course of events following 1956 and ask themselves what was gained by the fact we did reluctantly withdraw then from Sinai and the Gaza Strip. The answer is: only more wars, each one bloodier and far more costly than the Sinai campaign had been. Had we been allowed to stay where we were until the Egyptians agreed to negotiate with us, the recent history of the Middle East would certainly have been very different. But the pressure was intense, and in the end we gave in. President Eisenhower, who had been kept totally in the dark by his European allies, was furious and said that unless Israel withdrew at once, the United States would support sanctions against her at the United Nations."

UN

"In December 1956 I left for the United Nations filled with forebodings. But before I went, I wanted to see Sinai and the Gaza Strip for myself, and I am glad that I did, because otherwise I would never have really comprehended the full gravity of the situation we had been in prior to the Sinai Campaign. I shall never forget my first sight of the elaborate Egyptian military installations —built in defiance of the United Nations itself- at Sharm el-Sheikh for the sole purpose of maintaining an illegal blockade against our shipping. The area of Sharm el-Sheikh is incredibly lovely; the waters of the Red Sea must be the bluest and the clearest in the world, and they are framed by mountains that range in colour from deep red to violet and purple. There, in that beautiful tranquil setting, on an empty shore, stood the grotesque battery of huge naval guns that had paralysed Eilat for so long. For me, it was a picture that symbolized everything. Then I toured the Gaza Strip, from which the fedayeen had gone out on their murderous assignments for so many months and in which the Egyptians had kept a quarter of a million men, women and children (of whom nearly 6o per cent were Arab refugees) in the most shameful poverty and destitution. I was appalled by what I saw there and by the fact that those miserable people had been maintained in such a degrading condition for over eight years only so that the Arab leaders could show the refugee camps to visitors and make political capital out of them. Those refugees could and should have been resettled at once in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East —countries, incidentally, whose language, traditions and religion they share. The Arabs would still have been able to continue their quarrel with us, but at least the refugees would not have been kept in a state of semi-starvation or lived in such abject terror of their Egyptian masters.

I couldn’t help comparing what I saw in the Gaza Strip to what we had done —even with all the mistakes we had made —for the Jews who had come to Israel in those same eight years, and I suppose that is why I began my statement to the UN General Assembly on 5 December 1956 by talking not about the war we had won, but about the Jewish refugees we had settled:

Israel’s people went into the desert or struck roots in stony hillsides to establish new villages, to build roads, houses, schools and hospitals; while Arab terrorists, entering from Egypt and Jordan, were sent in to kill and destroy. Israel dug wells, brought water in pipes from great distances; Egypt sent in fedayeen to blow up the wells and the pipes. Jews from Yemen brought in sick, undernourished children believing that two out of every five would die; we cut that number down to one out of twenty-five. While we fed those babies and cured their diseases, the fedayeen were sent in to throw bombs at children in synagogues and grenades into baby homes.

Then I went on to those celebrated ‘rights of war’, to that discredited excuse of a ‘belligerent status’ against Israel, the screen behind which Colonel Nasser had trained and unleashed the fedayeen:

A comfortable division has been made. The Arab states unilaterally enjoy the ‘rights of war’; Israel has the unilateral responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one-way street. Is it then surprising if a people labouring under this monstrous distinction should finally become restive and at last seek a way of rescuing its life from the perils of the regulated war that is conducted against it from all sides?"

"Over and over again the Israeli government has held out its hand in peace to its neighbours. But to no avail. At the ninth session of the General Assembly, the Israeli representative suggested that if the Arab countries were not yet ready for peace, it would be useful, as a preliminary or transitory stage, to conclude agreements committing the parties to policies of non- aggression and pacific settlement. The reply was outright rejection. Our offer to meet the representatives of all or any of the Arab countries still stands. Never have we heard an echo from across our borders to our call for peace."

"'The countries of the Middle East are rightly listed in the category of the 'underdeveloped': the standard of living, disease, the illiteracy of the masses of people, the underdeveloped lands, desert, and swamp - all these cry out desperate for minds, hands, financial means, and technical ability. Can we envisage what a state of peace between Israel and its neighbours during the past eight years would have meant for all of us? Can we try to translate fighter planes into irrigation pipes and tractors for the people in these lands? Can we, in our imagination, replace gun emplacements by schools and hospitals? The many hundreds of millions of dollars spent on armaments could surely have been put to a more constructive purpose. Substitute cooperation between Israel and its neighbours for sterile hatred and ardour for destruction and you will give life and hope and happiness to all its people'

But walking back to my seat, I could see that no one else in that vast hall had shared the brief vision of the future with me, and I remember how surprised I was when a delegate sitting somewhere behind me applauded me as I sat down. The seating at the United Nations is always alphabetical; lots are drawn at the first meeting of each session as to which country should be seated first, and all the others are then seated in alphabetical order. At that session, Holland happened to be behind us. I nodded my head very gratefully to the Dutch delegate - one of the few not to vote against us - but I still took my place with a sense of great emptiness and utter disbelief. I had spoken to the United Nations and one would have thought from the expression on the faces of most of the delegates that I had asked for the moon, when in fact all I had done - all that Israel has ever done at the United Nations - was to suggest that the Arabs, fellow-members of that organisation, recognise our existence and work together with us towards peace. That no one had jumped up to seize the opportunity, to say: 'Alright, let's talk. Let's argue it all out. Let's make an effort to find a solution' was like a physical blow to me - not that I had many illusions left about the kind of family that family of nations was."

Withdrawal from Sinai

"Those were terrible months. Our phased withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Sinai was going on all the time, but nothing was being said or done to force the Egyptians to agree to enter into negotiations with us, to guarantee the lifting of the blockade of the Straits of Tiran or to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip. The four questions we had asked in November 1956 were still unanswered in February 1957. And I still couldn’t get through to the Americans —least of all to the US secretary of state, that cold, grey man, John Foster Dulles —that our very life depended on adequate guarantees, real guarantees with teeth in them, and that we couldn’t return to the situation which had existed before the Sinai Campaign. But nothing helped. None of the arguments, none of the appeals, none of the logic, not even the eloquence of Abba Eban, our ambassador to Washington. We just didn’t talk the same language, and we didn’t have the same priorities. Dulles was obsessed by his own ‘brinkmanship’, by his fear of a looming world war, and he told me in so many words, and more than once, that Israel would be responsible for that war, if it broke out, because we were so ‘unreasonable’"

"There were many days during that period when I wanted to run away, to run back to Israel and let someone else go on hammering away at Dulles and Henry Cabot Lodge, the head of the US delegation at the United Nations. I would have done anything just not to have to face another exhausting round of talks that always seemed to end in recriminations. But I stayed where I was, tried to swallow my bitterness and sense of betrayal, and at the end of February we arrived at a compromise of sorts. The last of our troops would leave the Gaza Strip and Sharm el-Sheikh in return for the ‘assumption’ that the United Nations would guarantee the right of free passage for Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran and that Egyptian soldiers would not be allowed back in the Gaza Strip. It wasn’t much, and it certainly wasn’t what we had been fighting for, but it was the best we could get —and it was better than nothing.

On 3 March 1957, having first had each last comma of it checked and cleared by Mr Dulles in Washington, I made our final statement.

The government of Israel is now in a position to announce its plans for full and prompt withdrawal from the Sharm el-Sheikh area and the Gaza Strip. In compliance with Resolution i of 2 February 1957, our sole purpose has been to ensure that on the withdrawal of Israeli forces, continued freedom of navigation will exist for Israel and international shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Straits of Tiran.

And then, as I had promised myself I would do, I said:

Now may I add these few words to the states in the Middle East area and, more specifically, to the neighbours of Israel? Can we from now on, all of us, turn a new leaf, and instead of fighting among each other can we all, united, fight poverty, disease, illiteracy? Can we, is it possible for us to pool all our efforts, all our energy, for one single purpose —the betterment and progress and development of all our lands and all our peoples?

But no sooner had I taken my seat than Henry Cabot Lodge got up. To my astonishment, I heard him reassure the United Nations that while the rights of free passage for all nations through the Straits of Tiran would indeed be safeguarded, the future of the Gaza Strip would have to be worked out within the context of the armistice agreements. Perhaps not everyone at the United Nations that day understood what Cabot Lodge was saying, but we understood all too well. The US State Department had won its battle against us, arid the Egyptian military government, with its garrison, was going to return to Gaza. There was nothing I could do or say. I just sat there, biting my lip, not even able to look at the handsome Mr Cabot Lodge while he pacified all those who had been so worried lest we refuse to withdraw unconditionally. It was not one of the finest moments of my life."

"During my term of office as foreign minister, I visited the United Nations often. I was there at least once a year as head of Israel’s delegation to the General Assembly, and there wasn’t a single time that I didn’t make an attempt to contact the Arabs somehow —or, to my sorrow, a single time that I succeeded. I remember once, in 1957, seeing Nasser there from a distance and wondering what would happen if I just went over to him and began to chat. But he was surrounded by his bodyguards, and I had my bodyguards, and it obviously wouldn’t work. But Tito was at that same session, and I thought perhaps I could talk to him and he would arrange something. So I asked someone in our delegation to talk to a member of the Yugoslav delegation and try to set up a meeting between Tito and me. I waited and waited and waited. I even postponed my return to Israel, but there was no reply. Then, the day after I had left New York, we got an answer: Tito would meet me in New York. But I was already back home. We tried again —there was silence again."

"There wasn’t one possible intermediary whom I didn’t approach during that period. At one Assembly session, I became quite friendly with the wife of the acting head of the Pakistani delegation, that country’s ambassador to London. One day, she approached me, of her own accord, and said: ‘Mrs Meir, if we women are in politics, we ought to try and make peace.’ Well, that was just what I had been waiting for. I said to her: ‘Let me tell you something. Never mind about peace. Invite a few of the Arab delegates to your home and invite me. I promise you, on my word of honour, that as long as the Arabs don’t want anyone to know about our meeting, no one will know. And I don’t want to meet them for peace negotiations. Just to talk. Just to sit in one room together.’ She said: ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll do it. I’ll start to organize it at once.’ So I waited and waited, but nothing happened. One day I asked her to have a cup of coffee with me in the Delegates’ Lounge, and we were sitting there when the foreign minister of Iraq came in. (He was the gentleman who had once pointed at me from the General Assembly rostrum and said: ‘Mrs Meir, go back to Milwaukee —that’s where you belong.’) She turned white. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘he’ll see me talking to you,’ and she got up in a panic and left. That was the end of that.

And so it went, even down to the casual meetings we might have had at diplomatic luncheons. Every head of a UN delegation learned very quickly that if he wanted the Arabs to come, then he mustn’t invite us. There was one foreign minister who was new to the game and who did invite both the Arabs and the Israelis. He not only invited us, he even seated an Iraqi delegate across the table from me. Well, the Arab sat down, started to eat his smoked salmon, raised his eyes, saw me, stood up and left. Of course, at the large receptions or the cocktail parties for hundreds of people, it was possible for a host to invite Arabs and Israelis, but for a dinner or a luncheon —never! As soon as an Arab delegate caught sight of one of the Israelis, he Ad walk out of the room, and there was nothing we could do about it."

Chapter 11: African and other friendships

Aiding Africa

"Still, the world was not made up exclusively of Europeans and Asians. There were also the emerging nations of Africa, then on the verge of achieving independence, and to the black states-ui-the-making there was a great deal that Israel could and wanted to give. Like them, we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together and how to defend ourselves. Independence had come to us, as it was coming to Africa, not served up on a silver platter but after years of struggle, arid we had had to learn —partly through our own mistakes —the high cost of self-determination. In a world neatly divided between the ‘haves’and the ‘have-nots’,Israel’s experience was beginning to look unique because we had been forced to find solutions to the kinds of problems that laige, wealthy, powerful states had never encountered. We couldn’t offer Africa money or arms but, on the other hand, we were free of the taint of the colonial exploiters because all that we wanted from Africa was friendship. Let me at once anticipate the cynics. Did we go into Africa because we wanted votes at the United Nations? Yes, of course that was one of our motives —and a perfectly honourable one —which I never, at any time, concealed either from myself or from the Africans. But it was far from being the most important motive, though it certainly wasn’t trivial. The main reason for our African ‘adventure’ was that we had something we wanted to pass on to nations that were even younger and less experienced than ourselves.

Today, in the wake of the post-Yom Kippur War rupture of diplomatic relations between most of the African states and Israel, the chorus of cynics also includes disillusioned Israelis. ‘It was all a waste of money, time and effort,’ they say, ‘a misplaced, pointless, messianic movement that was taken far too seriously in Israel and that was bound to fall apart the moment that the Arabs put any real pressure on the Africans.’ But, of course, nothing is cheaper, easier or more destructive than that sort of after-the-fact criticism, and I must say that in this context I don’t think it has the slightest validity. Things happen to countries as they do to people. No one is perfect and there arc setbacks, some more damaging and painful than others, but not every project can be expected to succeed fully or quickly. Moreover disappointments are not failures, and I have very little sympathy indeed for that brand of political expediency that demands immediate returns. The truth is that we did what we did in Africa not because it was just a policy of enlightened self-interest —a matter of quid pro quo —but because it was a continuation of our own most valued traditions and an expression of our own deepest historic instincts.

We went into Africa to teach, and what we taught was learned. No one regrets more bitterly than I that, for the time being, the African nations —or many of them —have chosen to turn their backs on us. But what really matters is what we —and they —accomplished together; what the thousands of Israeli experts in agriculture, hydrology, regional planning, public health, engineering, community services, medicine and scores of other fields actually did throughout Africa between 1958 and 5973, and what the thousands of Africans who trained in Israel during those years took home with them. Those benefits can never be lost, and those achievements should never be minimized. They are of enduring worth, and nothing can erase them, not even the current loss to Israel of whatever political or other benefits we derived from our ties with the governments of the African states. Ungrateful those governments most certainly have been, and it will take a great deal of effort on their part to remove the bad taste left by their desertion of us in a time of crisis. But that is no excuse for disowning, or belittling, what I honestly believe to have been a profoundly significant, not to say unprecedented, attempt on the part of one country to better human life in other countries, and I am prouder of Israel’s International Cooperation Programme and of the technical aid we gave to the people of Africa than I am of any other single project we have ever undertaken.

For me, more than anything else, that programme typifies the drive towards social justice, reconstruction and rehabilitation that is at the very heart of Labour-Zionism —and Judaism. The philosophy of life that impelled the men and women of Merhavia in the 1920s to dedicate themselves to pioneering within a cooperative framework, that led my daughter and her comrades to continue in that same demanding pattern in the Revivim of the 1940s and that is responsible today for each new kibbutz established in Israel is identical, I believe, with the vision that took Israelis into African countries for years to share with the Africans the practical and theoretical knowledge that alone could answer Africa’s needs in a changing world in which it was, at last, responsible for its own destiny. Not that all those who took part in the sharing of our national experience with the Africans were socialists. Far from it. But for me, at least, the programme was a logical extension of principles in which I had always believed, the principles, in fact, which gave a real purpose to my life. So, of course, I can never regard any facet of that programme as having been ‘in vain’, and equally I cannot believe that any of the Africans who were involved in it, or reaped its fruits, will ever regard it in that light either.

One other thing: we shared with the Africans not only the challenges posed by the need for rapid development but also the memory of centuries of suffering. Oppression, discrimination, slavery —these are not just catchwords for Jews or for Africans. They refer not to experiences undergone hundreds of years ago by half-forgotten ancestors but to torment and degradation experienced only yesterday. In 1902 Theodor Herzl wrote a novel in which lie described the Jewish state of the future as he imagined it might be. The novel was called Aitneuland (‘Old-New Land’), and on its title page were written the words: ‘If you will it, it is no dream’ —words that became the motto and inspiration of the Zionist movement. In Aitneuland there is a passage about Africa which I used to quote sometimes to African friends and which I should like to quote now:

‘There is still one other question arising out of the disaster of the nations which remains unsolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold. Their children grew up in strange lands, the objects of contempt and hostility because their complexions were different. I am not ashamed to say, though I may expose myself to ridicule in saying so, that once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans."

Conference on cooperation

"It was a curious and dramatic confrontation. Here we were, in the first African country to achieve independence (excluding, of course, Liberia and Ethiopia). I, the foreign minister of a Jewish state that was all often years old, and sixty men whose countries would achieve their freedom within only two or three years. We had all lived through so much, all struggled so hard for our liberty —they, representing still uncounted millions upon millions of people spread over the vastness of Africa, and we, in our one tiny country that had been battered and besieged for so long. It seemed to me that afternoon that this was a truly historic meeting of the kind that perhaps Herzl himself had envisaged. I couldn’t identify most of the Africans by name, but Padmore told me who they were: the leaders of fighting Algeria, of all the other French colonies, of Tanganyika, of Northern and Southern Rhodesia. The atmosphere in the room was very charged. I could feel the tension and the suspicion, neither of which were much allayed by Padmore’s opening words. ‘I have called this meeting,’ he said, ‘so that you can meet the foreign minister of a young country that has just achieved its independence and that has taken remarkable strides forward in every field of human endeavour.’

For a few seconds, there was an uncomfortable silence, then the representative of Algeria rose. In an ice-cold voice, he asked the most provocative —and relevant —of all possible questions. ‘Mrs Meir,’ he said, ‘your country is being armed by France, the arch-enemy of all those who sit around this table, a government that is fighting a ruthless and brutal war against my people and that uses terror against my black brethren. How do you justify your intimacy with a power that is the primary foe of the self-determination of the African people?’ And he sat down. I was not at all surprised by the question, only by the fact that it opened the meeting. Somehow I had expected more phraseology and more time. But I was glad that we were not going to indulge in any amenities or shadow boxing, and I didn’t need time for preparation.

I lit a cigarette and looked around the table again. Then I answered the question. ‘Our neighbours,’ I said to the sixty African leaders staring at me with such coldness and hostility, ‘are out to destroy us with arms that they receive free of charge from the Soviet Union and for very little money from other sources. The one and only country in the world that is ready —for hard currency, and a lot of it —to sell us some of the arms we need in order to protect ourselves is France. I do not share your hatred for de Gaulle, but let me tell you the truth —whether or not you like it. If de Gaulle were the devil himself I would regard it as the duty of my government to buy arms from the only source available to us. And now let me ask you a question. If you were in that position, what would you do?’

I could almost hear the sigh of relief that swept the room. The tension was over. The Africans knew that 1 had told them the truth and that I was not trying to put anything over on them, and they relaxed at once. Now there was no stopping the barrage of their questions about. They were hungry for information —about the kibbutzim, the Histadrut, the army - and they bombarded me with queries. They were also quite frank in return. One young man from Northern Nigeria (which is almost entirely Moslem) even stood up and said: ‘We have no Jews in Northern Nigeria, but we know that we are supposed to hate them!’

That dialogue with the African revolutionaries went on for the duration of my stay in Ghana, and it laid the foundation for our International Cooperation Programme. I won the respect and the friendship of the African leaders, and they were anxious to meet and work with other Israelis. They were not used to white men who laboured with their own hands or to foreign experts who were willing to leave their offices and work at the site of a project, and the fact that we were what they termed ‘colourblind’ was tremendously important...

By not behaving as they had learned to expect foreigners to behave, I think we helped to build much more than farms, industrial plants, hotels, police forces or youth centres for so many of the African countries; we helped to build the self-confidence of the Africans. We proved to them, by working with them, that they could become surgeons, pilots, citrus growers, community workers and foresters and that technical ability was not —as they had been made to believe for so many decades —the permanent prerogative of the white race.

Of course, the Arabs did their best, even then, to convince the Africans that we were fundamentally no different from other ‘colonialists’, but the Africans, for the most part, knew better. They knew that when Israeli experts were engaged by Zambia, it didn’t turn Zambian chickens into ‘colonialist’ chickens, and that the fish-processing programme that Israelis developed in Mali didn’t result in ‘imperialist’ fish. They also knew that the hundreds of African trainees who studied agriculture in Israel were not being trained in exploitation. In fact, we set up three basic criteria for our programme, and I think that it is not immodest to claim that even these criteria were a new departure. We asked ourselves, and the Africans, three questions about each proposed project: is it desired, is it really needed, and is Israel in a position to help in this particular sphere? And we only initiated projects when the answer to all three questions was ‘yes’, so the Africans knew that we didn’t regard ourselves as being able, automatically, to solve all their problems."

Getting along with the Africans

"There were quarrels, projects that came unstuck and hurt feelings on both sides. But for the most part, because both the Africans and Israelis so deeply understood the value of what they were trying to do, the cooperation worked. And nothing delighted me more than meeting Africans who had trained in Israel and who showed me around their African clinics, farms or schools, cheerfully explaining everything to me in fluent Hebrew —to say nothing of the African sabras I met everywhere, the black children who had been born in Israel and whose first language had been Hebrew. Those African children —however ‘radicalized’ they may become —will never, I know, think of the friends they made in Beersheba, Haifa or Jerusalem or, for that matter, of me as their ‘enemy’, regardless of what they may say in public."

"One of the reasons, I think, that I got along so well with them —even though we did not always see eye-to- eye on everything —was that I practised what I preached, and they saw me do it. In 1964, for instance, I attended the Independence Day ceremonies of Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) including a visit for all the guest VIPs to the Victoria Falls, which are partly in Zambia and partly on the territory of what was then still called Southern Rhodesia. We were taken to the falls in buses, and when we reached the border between the two countries, the police of Southern Rhodesia had the effrontery to refuse to let the blacks on my bus get out, although they were all African dignitaries and President Kaunda’s personal guests. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard a police officer say, ‘whites only.’ ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to enter Southern Rhodesia either.’ There was great consternation, and the Rhodesians tried very hard to get me to leave the bus, but I wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I have no intention of being separated from my friends,’ I repeated. The whole busload of us then happily travelled back to Lusaka, where Kaunda received me as though I were Joan of Arc rather than just a woman who couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate racial discrimination in any form."

Ashkenazi immigration

"One of the topics of conversation and debate between myself and my colleagues in Mapai in those days was why there was such a relatively small immigration of Jews from the West. ‘They have it too good,’ was one explanation. ‘They will only come to us when they face real anti-Semitism elsewhere.’ But I felt this to be a very unjust oversimplification, and I used to have long arguments with Ben-Gurion about the unimpressive rate of immigration from such countries as the United States, Canada and Britain. ‘They will come, one day, if we are patient,’ I used to tell him. ‘It is not as simple to transplant oneself and one’s family as it used to be. Also people are not as idealistic, as romantic or as dedicated any more. It takes a tremendous amount of determination for a Zionist from Pittsburgh, Toronto, or Leeds to decide one day to settle permanently in Israel. It means much more than merely moving to another country. It involves learning a new language, accepting a different standard and way of life, and getting used to the sort of tensions and insecurities that we take for granted.’ I was no less anxious than Ben-Gurion for Western Jews to join us in their hundreds of thousands, millions even, but I was not as intolerant of their hesitation, and I was certainly not prepared —at this point in Israel’s history —to demand of Jews who supported the State of Israel without actually living there that they should no longer consider themselves Zionists but rather ‘friends of Zion’, a very diluted formula angrily suggested by Ben-Gurion."

Chapter 12: We are alone

Six Day War: Prelude

"In the meantime a number of events had occurred in the Middle East which were to place Israel’s future in far greater jeopardy than Labour disunity at home could ever have done. In 1966 preparations were already being made by the Arabs for another round of war. The symptoms were all familiar. As a matter of fact, in a way the prelude to the Six Day War of 1967 was identical with the prelude to the Sinai Campaign. Terrorist gangs —as actively encouraged and supported by President Nasser as the fedayeen had been in the 1950s —were operating against Israel both from the Gaza Strip and Jordan. They included a new organization, founded in 1965, known as Al Fatah which, under Yassir Arafat’s leadership, subsequently became the most powerful and well-publicized element in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Also, a united Egyptian—Syrian high command had been established and vast sums of money were allocated at an Arab summit conference for the express purpose of stockpiling weapons to be used against Israel —and, of course, the Soviet Union was still pumping both arms and money into the Arab states. The Syrians seemed bent on an escalation of the conflict; they kept up an endless bombardment of the Israeli settlements below the Golan Heights, and Israeli fishermen and farmers faced what was sometimes virtually daily attack by snipers. I used to visit those settlements occasionally and watch the settlers go about their work as though there was nothing at all unusual in ploughing with a military escort or putting children to sleep —every single night - in underground air-raid shelters. But I never believed them when they said that they had got quite used to living under perpetual fire. I don’t think parents ever get ‘used’ to the idea that their children’s lives are in danger.

Then, in the autumn of 1966, the Soviet Union suddenly began to accuse Israel of readying her forces for a full-scale attack against Syria. It was an absurd charge, but it was duly investigated by the United Nations and, naturally, found to be without any basin The Russians, however, kept on making the same accusations and talking about the Israeli ‘aggression’ that was bound to cause a third round of the Arab—Israel war, while the Syrians, receiving arms and financial aid from the Soviet Union, kept up their raids on our border settlements. Whenever the Syrian terror reached an intolerable point, Israel’s air force would go into action against the terrorists, and for a few weeks the border settlements could relax. But by the early spring of 1967 these periods of relative relaxation were becoming fewer and shorter. In April 1967, the air force was sent up in an action that turned into an air battle and resulted in the downing by Israeli planes of six Syrian MIGs. When this happened, the Syrians, egged on as always by the Soviet Union, once again screamed that Israel was making preparations for a major offensive against Syria, and an official complaint to this effect was even made on Syria’s behalf to Prime Minister Eshkol by the Soviet ambassador to Israel, Mr Chuvakhin. Not only was this one of the most grotesque incidents of the period, but it actually helped to trigger off the war that broke out in June.

‘We understand,’ Chuvakhin said very unpleasantly to Eshkol, ‘that in spite of all your official statements, there are, in fact, extremely heavy concentrations of Israeli troops all along the Syrian borders.’ This time, Eshkol did more than merely deny the allegation. He asked Chuvakhin to go up north and look at the situation along the border for himself and he even offered to accompany Chuvakhin on the trip. But the ambassador promptly said he had other things to do and refused the invitation, although all that was involved was only a few hours’ drive, Of course, had he gone he would have been forced to report to the Kremlin —and to the Syrians —that no Israeli soldiers were massed on the border and that the supposed Syrian alarm was absolutely unjustified. But this was exactly what he didn’t want to do. By refusing to take that trip, he successfully breathed new life into the lie that helped set in motion Nasser’s entry into the picture, and therefore the Six Day War.

At the beginning of May, responding to what he termed the ‘desperate plight’ of the Syrians, Nasser ordered Egyptian troops and armour to mass in Sinai, and just in case anyone misunderstood his intentions, Cairo Radio shrilly announced that ‘Egypt, with all its resources... is ready to plunge into a total war that will be the end of Israel.’

On 16 May, Nasser moved again - only now he gave orders not to his own army but to the United Nations. He demanded that the UN Emergency Force that had been stationed both at Sharm el-Sheikh and in the Gaza strip since 1956 get out at once. Legally, he had a right to evict the UNEF because it was only with Egypt's consent that the international police force had been stationed on Egyptian soil; but I didn't for a minute believe that Nasser actually expected the United Nations to do his bidding meekly. It was against all rhyme or reason for a force that had come into existence for the sole purpose of supervising the ceasefire between Egypt and Israel to be removed at the request of one of the combatants the very first moment that the ceasefire was seriously threatened, and I am sure that Nasser anticipated a long round of discussions, arguments and haggling. If nothing else, he almost certainly reckoned that the United Nations would insist on some kind of phasing-out operation. However, for reasons which have never been understood by anyone - least of all by me - the UN secretary-general, U Thant, gave in to Nasser at once. He didn't refer the matter to anyone else. He didn't ask the security council for an opinion. He didn't even suggest a delay of a few days. Entirely of his own accord, U Thant instantly agreed to the immediate withdrawal of the UNEF."

"That delusion was further strengthened on 22 May when Nasser, intoxicated by the success of his dismissal of the UNEF, made another test of the world’s reaction to his stated intention of entering an all-out war with Israel. He announced that Egypt was reimposing her blockade of the Straits of Tiran, despite the fact that a score of nations (including the United States, Britain, Canada and France) had guaranteed Israel’s right of navigation through the Gulf of Aqaba. It was without any question another deliberate challenge, and Nasser waited to see how it would be met. He didn’t have to wait very long. No one was going to do much about that either. Of course, there were protests and angry reactions. President Johnson described the blockade as ‘illegal’ and ‘potentially disastrous to the cause of peace’, and suggested that an international convoy, including an Israeli vessel, sail through the straits to call Nasser’s bluff; but he couldn’t persuade the French or British to join him. The Security Council met in an emergency session, but the Russians saw to it that no conclusions were reached. The British prime minister, my good friend Harold Wilson, flew to the States and to Canada to suggest that an international naval task force be organized to police the Straits of Tiran, but he also got nowhere with his suggestion. Even U Thant —realizing at last what a terrible mistake he had made —finally bestirred himself sufficiently to go to Cairo and try to reason with Nasser, but it was too late."

"The Soviet minister of defence brought Nasser a last-minute message of encouragement from Kosygin: the Soviet Union would stand by Egypt in the battle that lay ahead. So the stage was set. As for war aims, to the extent that Nasser felt obliged to explain anything to the Egyptian people —who were already in the first throes of war hysteria —it was enough to go on repeating the phrase ‘We aim at the destruction of the State of Israel’ and to tell the Egyptian National Assembly, as he did in the last week of May, ‘The issue is rut the question of Aqaba, the Straits of Tiran or the UNEF. . . The issue is the aggression against Palestine that took place in 1948.’ In other words, the war that was now in the making was to be the ultimate Arab war against us, and on the face of it, Nasser had every reason for thinking that he would win it."

"From the beginning, there was no question in anyone’s mind that war had to be averted —at almost any cost. There was no question that if we had to fight, we would do so —and win —but first every possible avenue had to be explored. Eshkol, his face grey with weariness and tension, set in motion a search for some kind of diplomatic intervention. That was the sum total of his requests; needless to say, we never asked for military personnel. Eban was sent on a round of missions to Paris, London and Washington...Eban came back with nothing except the worst possible news. Our gravest fears had been confirmed. London and Washington were sympathetic and worried, but still not prepared to take any action. It was too bad, but maybe the Arab frenzy would wear itself out. At all events, they recommended patience and self-control. There was no alternative other than for Israel to wait and see. De Gaulle had been more direct: whatever happened, he told Eban, Israel must not make the first move until and unless the Arab attack actually began. When that happened, France would step in to save the situation. To Eban's question: 'But what if we are no longer there to be saved?' de Gaulle chose not to reply, but he made clear to Eban that France's continued friendship with us depended entirely on whether or not we obeyed him."

**Six Day War: Aftermath

"More than that, world Jewry looked on, saw our extreme peril and our isolation and asked itself, for the first time I think: what if the State of Israel ceases to exist? And to this question there was also only one possible and short answer: no Jew anywhere in the world would ever feel free again if the Jewish state were to be eradicated. "

"I asked my friends in New York to arrange a meeting for me with at least some of the 2500 younger Jews from that city who had volunteered to go to Israel during the war.

It wasn't easy to arrange the meeting within twenty-four hours, but it was done, and over 1000 of those youngsters came to talk to me. 'Tell me,' I asked them, 'Why did you want to come? Was it because of the way you were brought up? Or because you thought it would be exciting? Or because you are Zionists? What did you think about when you stood in line last month and asked to be allowed to go to Israel?' There wasn't a uniform answer to my question, of course, but it seemed to me that one young man spoke for all of them when he got up and said: 'I don't know how to explain it you, Mrs Meir, but I do know one thing. My life will never be the same again. The Six Day War, and the fact that Israel came so close to being destroyed, has changed everything for me - my feelings about myself, my family, even my neighbours. Nothing will ever be quite the same for me as it was before.' It wasn't a very coherent reply but it came from his heart, and I knew what he was talking about. It was about his identity as a Jew and about the larger family to which he suddenly knew he belonged, for all of the differences between us. The threat we were experiencing, to be very blunt, was the threat of extinction, and to that Jews respond in the same way, whether they go to synagogue or not, whether they live in New York, Buenos Aires, Paris, Moscow, or Petah Tikvah. It is a deeply familiar threat, and when Nasser and his associates made it, they doomed their war to failure because we had decided - all of us - that there was to be no repetition of Hitler's 'Final Solution', no second Holocaust."

"There are two other general comments I must make about the Six Day War. The first should go without saying, but I have learned not to take anything for granted, and there may still be people who do not understand that we fought that war so successfully not only because we were made to fight it, but also because we most profoundly hoped that we would achieve a victory so complete that we would never have to fight again. If the defeat of the Arab armies massed against us could be made total, then perhaps our neighbours would finally give up their ‘holy war’ against us and realize that peace was as necessary for them as for us and that the lives of their Sons were as precious as the lives of our sons. We were wrong about that. The defeat was total, and the Arab losses were devastating, but the Arabs still couldn’t, and didn’t, come to grips with the fact that Israel was not going to accommodate them by disappearing from the map.

The second point of which I would like to remind my readers is that in June 1967 Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem were all in Arab possession, so that it is ludicrous to argue today that Israel's presence in those territories since 1967 is the cause of tension in the Middle East or was the cause of the Yom Kippur War. When Arab statesmen insist that Israel withdraw to the pre-June 1967 lines, one can only ask: if those lines are so sacred to the Arabs, why was the Six Day War launched to destroy them?"

"There was also Hussein, who had measured Eshkol's promise that nothing would happen to Jordan if he kept out of the war against the message he had received from Nasser that very morning informing him that Tel Aviv was being bombed by the Egyptians - never mind that Nasser didn't have a single bomber to his name by then. Like his grandfather before him, Hussein had carefully weighed the odds and made a mistake...As soon as the Jordanian shelling began, the IDF struck at Hussein also, and although the fighting on the Jerusalem front cost the lives of very many young Israeli's - who fought hand to hand and street by narrow street, rather than resort to the mortars and tanks that might have damaged the city and the Christian and Moslem holy places - it was already clear that night that Hussein's greed was going to lose him his hold on eastern Jerusalem, at the very least. At the risk of repeating myself, I must emphasise, at this point, that just as in 1948 the Arabs had hammered at Jerusalem without the slightest regard for the safety of its churches and holy places, so in 1967 Jordanian troops didn't hesitate to use churches and even minarets of their own mosques for emplacements. This may explain why we resent the fears that are sometimes expressed for the sanctity of Jerusalem under Israeli administration, to say nothing of what we discovered when we finally entered East Jerusalem; Jewish cemeteries had been desecrated, the ancient synagogues of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City had been razed to the ground and Jewish tombstones from the Mount of Olives had been used to pave Jordanian roads and Jordanian army latrines. So let no one ever try to convince me that Jerusalem is better off in Arab hands or that we cannot be trusted to take care of it."

"It was all over. The Arab states and their Soviet patrons had lost their war. But this time, the price for our withdrawal was going to be very high, higher than it had been in 1956. This time the price would be peace, permanent peace, peace by treaty based on agreed and secure borders. It had been a lightning war, but it had also been a cruel one. All over Israel there were military fhncrals again, many of them the funerals of boys whose fathers or older brothers had fallen in the War of Independence or the fighting that had plagued us ever since. We were not going to go through that anguish again if we could possibly help it. We were not going to be told what a wonderful people the Israelis are —they win wars every ten years, and they have done it again. Fantastic! Now that they have won this round, they can go back where they came from, so that Syrian gunners on the Golan Heights can again shoot into the kibbutzim, so that Jordanian Legionnaires on the towers of the Old City can again shell at will, so that the Gaza Strip can again be a nest for terrorists and the Sinai Desert can again become the staging ground for Nasser’s divisions.

‘Is there anybody,’ I asked at that rally in New York, ‘who is bold enough to say to us: “Go home! Start preparing your nine- and ten year-olds for the next war.” I am sure that every decent person in the world will say “no”, and —forgive me for being so blunt —most important of all, we ourselves say “no”.

'We had fought alone for our existence and our security and paid for them, and it seemed to most of us that a new day was really about to dawn, that the Arabs —trounced on the battlefield —might agree at last to sit down and thrash out the differences between us, none of which ever were, or are, insoluble."

Three nos

"But if the Arabs had learned nothing, we had learned something. We were not prepared to repeat the exercise of 1956. Discuss, negotiate, compromise, concede - all of these, yes! But not go back to where we had been on 4 June 1967. That accommodating we couldn't afford to be, even to save Nasser's face or to make the Syrians feel better about not having destroyed us! It was a great pity that the Arab states felt so humiliated by losing the war which they had started that they just couldn't bring themselves to talk to us, but on the other hand, we couldn't be expected to reward them for having tried to throw us into the sea. We were bitterly disappointed, but there was only one possible reply: Israel would not withdraw from any of the territories until the Arab states, once and for all, put an end to the conflict. We decided - and, believe me, it was not a painless decision - that whatever it cost us in terms of public opinion, money or energy, and regardless of the pressures that might be brought to bear on us, we would stand fast on the ceasefire lines. We waited for the Arabs to accept the fact that the only alternative to war was peace and that the only road to peace was negotiation."

242

"It will be noted that it does not say that Israel must withdraw from all territories, nor does it say that Israel must withdraw from the territories, but it does say that every state in the area has a right to live in peace within ‘secureand recognized boundaries’ and it does specify the ‘terminationof belligerency’. Furthermore, it does not speak of a Palestinian state, while it does speak of a refugee problem."

Chapter 13: The prime minister

"But my term of office began with one war and ended with another, and I can’t help thinking how symbolic it was that the very first instruction I gave to anyone in my capacity as prime minister was to tell my military secretary, Yisrael Lior, that I was to be informed as soon as the reports from any military action came in even if it was in the middle of the night.

‘I want to know the moment that the boys get back,’ I told him, ‘and I want to know how they are.’ I didn’t use the word ‘casualties’, but Lior understood and was horrified by the request. ‘You don’t really want me to phone you at 3 a.m.,’ he said. ‘Afterall, there is nothing you can do about it if there are any casualties. I promise to call you first thing in the morning.’ But I knew that I wouldn’t be able to bear the idea of sleeping soundly through the night not even knowing if soldiers had been killed or wounded, and I forced poor Lior to obey me. When the news was bad, of course, I couldn’t fall asleep again, and I spent more nights than I care to remember padding around that big, empty house waiting for morning and for more detailed information. Sometimes the bodyguards outside the house would see that the kitchen light was on at 4 am., and one of them would look in to make sure that I was alright. I’d make us both a cup of tea and we’d talk about what was happening at the Canal or in the north until I felt that I could go back to bed again."

"Then in August 1970 Mr Rogers’s ceasefire materialized. Nasser said that as far as he was concerned, it would only last for three months, but - as though the timing were symbolic —he died in September and Anwar Sadat became the president of Egypt. Not only did Sadat seem, at first glance, to be a more reasonable man who might soberly consider the benefits of an end to the war to his own people, but there were also indications that he wasn’t getting along too well with the Russians. And in Jordan, King Hussein, having happily sheltered the Palestinian terrorists for months, suddenly found himself so threatened by them that in September he turned on them and crushed them. So though it may have been a Black September for the Fatah, to me it looked, at long last, as if the US peace initiative and Dr Jarring might have some slim chance of success. The Arab leaders didn’t modify their statements about Israel in any way or alter their demands for a total withdrawal of our troops, but there was talk about re-opening the Suez Canal and rebuilding the ruined Egyptian towns along its banks, so that normal life could be restored in them —all of which gave rise to some optimism in Israel. Well, the ceasefire held; we stayed where we were; the Arabs continued to refuse to meet us or deal with us in any way, and the optimism in Israel slowly died down —but it didn’t vanish altogether and war didn’t break out in 1971 or 1972! But neither did peace, and Arab terrorism mounted both in its ferocity and its inhumanity."

Terrorism

"Certainly no one in the civilized world approved of the gunning down, at Lydda airport, of Catholic pilgrims from Puerto Rico and one of Israel’s most distinguished scientists, of the horrifying public kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games or of the slaughter of Israeli children trapped in the school building in the development town of Ma’alot. No one approved, and each outrage brought me its flood of official condolences and expressions of shock and sympathy. But nonetheless we were expected (and still are expected by many) to come to terms with the murderers in the way that other governments had, as if these suicidal fanatics should have been allowed to blackmail us and bring us to our knees. It has certainly been proven time and again that giving in to terror only leads to more terror. No one will ever know, however, what it cost the government of Israel to say no to the demands of the terrorists or what it was like to feel that no Israeli official working abroad was entirely safe from death by letter bomb, to say nothing of the fact that any quiet border town in Israel could be turned (as several were) into the scene of massacres caused by a few demented men who had been reared on hatred and the belief that they could drain Israel of its ability to stand firm in the face of grief and pain.

But we learned to hold out against the terror, to protect our aircraft and passengers, to turn our embassies into small fortresses and to patrol our schoolyards and city streets. I walked behind the coffins and visited the bereaved families of the victims of Arab terrorism and I was filled with pride that I belonged to a nation which was able to take these blows - these cowardly and evil blows - without saying 'Enough. We had had enough. Give the terrorists whatever they want because we have taken all that we can take.' Other governments surrendered to the demands of the terrorists, put planes at their disposal and released them from jail, while the foreign press and the New Left called them 'guerrillas' and 'freedom fighters'."

Romania

"Many of the trips I took and talks I held must still remain secret, but I think that today I can write about one of them. At the beginning of 1972, the deputy foreign minister of Rumania came to Israel on a visit, ostensibly just to meet with people in our Foreign Office. But he made one special request: he asked to see me, and he stressed that he wanted to see me alone; no one else should be present at our conversation. We had very good relations with Rumania. It was the only East European country that hadn’t severed diplomatic relations with us after the Six Day War and that consistently refused to take part in the Soviet Union’s vicious anti-Israel propaganda campaign or join in the Soviet bloc’s denunciations of our ‘aggression’. We had entered into mutually profitable trade agreements with the Rumanians, exchanged art exhibitions, musicians, choirs and theatrical groups, and there was some immigration from Rumania. I had met (and liked) the attractive and energetic president of Rumania, Nicolai Ceaucescu, in ‘1970 and I admired him for not giving way to Arab pressure and for managing to retain diplomatic links with us as well as with the Arab states. I knew that Ceaucescu was anxious to promote a Middle Eastern peace settlement, and I wasn’t really surprised when his deputy foreign minister announced to me as soon as we were alone that actually he had come to Israel only in order to tell me the following:

‘I have been sent by my president,’ he said, ‘to inform you that when he visited Egypt recently, he saw President Sadat and that, as a result of their meeting, my president has a most important message for you. He would like to bring it to you himself, but since he can’t [he was going to China], he suggests that you come to Bucharest. You can come either incognito or, if you prefer, we will gladly issue you a formal invitation.’ I didn’t accept that going to China automatically ruled out a visit to Israel, but I said that, of course, I would come to Bucharest as soon as possible. Not incognito —that didn’t appeal to me as a way for the prime minister of Israel to travel (unless it was absolutely essential) —but just as soon as I got an official invitation. Ceaucescu’s invitation arrived shortly afterwards, and I flew to Rumania.

I spent fourteen hours (in two long sessions) with Ceaucescu, who told me that he understood from Sadat himself that the Egyptian leader was ready to meet with an Israeli —maybe with me, maybe not; maybe the meeting would be on a slightly lower level than the heads of state, but a meeting of some sort could take place. I said, ‘Mr President, this is the best news I have heard for many years’ —as indeed it was. We talked for hours about it, and Ceaucescu was almost as excited as I was. There was no question in his mind that he was delivering an historic and absolutely genuine message. He even talked to me about details. ‘We won’t work through ambassadors or Foreign Offices,’ he said, ‘not mine and not yours.’ He suggested that his deputy foreign minister maintain personal contact with me through Simcha Dinitz, then my political secretary, who had come with sue to Bucharest.

After so many years, it really looked as though the ice was about to break. But it didn’t. When I came back to Israel, we waited and waited —in vain. There was no follow-up at all. Whatever Sadat had told Ceaucescu - and he had certainly told him something —was totally meaningless, and I suspect that the reason I never heard anything more from Ceaucescu about the meeting with Sadat was that he couldn’t bring himself to confess, even to me, that Sadat had fooled him."

Criticism

"Even in Israel itself:, there were people who thought —and said loudly —that the government wasn’t doing ‘enough’ to fInd common ground with the Arabs, though they never managed to suggest anything that we hadn’t tried ourselves.

There was also a constant uproar from a numerically small but exceedingly vocal segment of the population about such things as the government’s decision, after the Six Day War, to allow a number of Jews to settle in Hebron, a town on the West Bank of the Jordan River (some 35 kilometres south of Jerusalem) in which, according to Jewish tradition, the biblical Patriarchs are buried and which was King David’s capital before he moved it to Jerusalem. The Crusaders had expelled the Jews from Hebron, but during Ottoman role in Palestine some Jews had returned there, and the town bad had a Jewish community right up to the time when a terrible Arab massacre finally drove the surviving Jews out of the town in 1929. After 1948 the Jordanians wouldn’t even let the Jews visit the holy Cave of Machpelah to pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. But Hebron remained holy to the Jews, and on Passover eve ig68, after it had come under Israeli administration, a group of young and militant orthodox Jews, defying the military ban on settlement in the West Bank, moved into the Hebron police compound and remained there without permission. There was no question but that they were behaving most improperly and in a manner that was very damaging to Israel’s ‘image’. The Arabs at once set up a great hue and cry about the ‘Jewish annexation’ of Hebron, and Israeli public opinion was very divided on the subject. On the one hand, the would-be settlers were obviously trying to create a fait accompli and force the Israeli government to make up its mind prematurely about the future of the West Bank and Jewish settlement there. On the other hand, though I deplored the way in which they had taken the law into their own hands, as though they were in the Wild West, I thought that the real issue was not really what they had done or even how they had done it, but something far more serious.

Was it logical, I asked myself and my colleagues, for the world (including our own super-pious ‘doves’)to demand of a Jewish government that it pass legislation expressly forbidding Jews to settle anywhere on earth? I didn’t know any more than anyone else did exactly what would happen to Hebron eventually. But let’s suppose, I said, that one day, please God, we will sign a peace treaty with Jordan and ‘return’ Hebron. Would that mean that we would agree that no Jews would ever be allowed to live there again? Obviously, no Israeli government could ever obligate itself to a permanent banning of Jews from any part of the Holy Land. And Hebron was not an ordinary market town; it meant a lot to believing Jews.

We debated and argued and examined the pros and cons for months and then, in 1970, we permitted the building of a limited number of housing units for Jews in an area on the outskirts of Hebron that the settlers named Kiryat Arba (‘The Town of the Four’, Hebron’s other Hebrew name) —and that particular storm died down. But other subsequent attempts at illegal settlements were more firmly dealt with —however painful it was for the government to have to order Israeli soldiers to drag Jews away from places in the West Bank in which they wanted to settle. We did allow Jews to settle in certain spots in the administered territories, but only when such settlement was fully in accordance with our political and military interests."

"I was immensely impressed —it is impossible not to be —not only (or even mostly) by the Vatican, but by the pope himself by the simplicity and graciousness of his manner and the penetrating gaze of his deep-set dark eyes. I think I would have been much more nervous about our talk if he hadn’t started it by telling me that he found it hard to accept the fact that the Jews —who, of all people, should have been capable of mercy towards others because they had suffered so terribly themselves —had behaved so harshly in their own country. Well, that is the kind of talk that I can’t bear, and particularly since it is simply not true that we have mistreated the Arabs in the administered territories. There is still no death penalty in Israel, and the most we have ever done is jail terrorists, blown up the houses of Arabs who have gone on sheltering terrorists, despite repeated warnings, and sometimes, when we have had no alternative, even expelled Arabs who have openly incited and encouraged the terrorists. But I challenge anyone to cite chapter and verse about brutality or repression. I was very tempted to ask the pope what his sources of information were, since they were obviously so different from mine, but I didn’t. Instead I said, and I could hear my own voice trembling a little with anger: ‘Your Holiness, do you know what my own very earliest memory is? It is waiting for a pogrom in Kiev. Let me assure you that my people know all about real “harshness” and also that we learned all about real mercy when we were being led to the gas chambers of the Nazis.’

It may not have been a conventional way of talking to the pope, but I felt that I was speaking for all Jews everywhere, for those who were alive and for those who had perished while the Vatican maintained its neutrality in the Second World War. I had a sense of participating in a truly historic confrontation, and the pope and I stared at each other for a second. I think he was quite surprised by my words, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, right into my eyes, and I looked back at him in the same way. Then I went on to tell him, very respectfully but very firmly and at some length, that now that we had a state of our own, we were through forever with being ‘at the mercy’ of others. ‘This is truly an historic moment,’ he said, as though he had read my mind."

Chapter 14: The Yom Kippur War

Cabinet meeting: Prelude

"By eight o’clock the meeting began. Dayan and ‘Dado’ differed as to the scale of the call-up. The chief-of-staff recommended the mobilization of the entire air force and four divisions and said that if they were called up at once they could go into action the next day, that is, Sunday. Dayan, on the other hand, was in favour of calling up the air force and only two divisions (one for the north and one for the south), and lie argued that if we had a full mobilization before a single shot was fired, the world would have an excuse for calling us the ‘aggressors’. Besides, he thought that the air force plus two divisions could handle the situation, and if towards evening the situation worsened, we could always call up more within a few hours. ‘That’s my suggestion,’ lie said, ‘but I won’t resign if you decide against me.’ ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘I have to decide which of them is right?’ But what I said was that I had only one criterion: if there really was a war, then we had to be in the very best position possible. The call-up should be as Dado suggested. But, of course, it was the one day of the year that even our legendary ability to mobilize rapidly partly failed us.

‘Dado’ was in favour of a pre-emptive strike since it was clear that war was inevitable in any case. ‘I want you to know,’ he said, ‘that our air force can be ready to strike at noon, but you must give me the green light now. If we can make that first strike, it will be greatly to our advantage.’ But I had already made up my mind. ‘Dado’, I said, ‘I know all the arguments in favour of a pre-emptive strike, but I am against it. We don’t know now, any of us, what the future will hold, but there is always the possibility that we will need help, and if we strike first, we will get nothing from anyone. I would like to say yes because I know what it would mean, but with a heavy heart I am going to say no.’ Then Dayan and ‘Dado’ went to their offices, and I told Simcha Dinitz (now our ambassador to Washington, who happened to be in Israel that week) to fly back to the States immediately and I called in Menachem Begin to tell him what was happening. I also asked for a cabinet meeting for noon and called the then US ambassador Kenneth Keating, and asked him to come and see me. I told him two things: that according to our intelligence, the attacks would start late in the afternoon and that we would not strike first. Maybe something could still be done to avert the war by US intervention with the Russians or maybe even directly with the Syrians and the Egyptians. At all events, we would not make a pre-emptive strike. I wanted him to know that and to relay that information as soon as possible to Washington. Ambassador Keating had been a very good friend to Israel for many years, both in the US Senate and in Israel itself. He was a man I liked and trusted, and on that dreadful morning I was grateful to him for his assistance and understanding.

When the cabinet met at noon, it heard a full description of the situation, including the decision to mobilize the reserves and also my decision regarding a pre-emptive strike. Nobody raised any objections whatsoever."

Dayan

"On the afternoon of 7 October, Dayan returned from one of his tours of the front and asked to see me at once. He told me that in his opinion the situation in the south was so bad that we should pull back substantially and establish a new defensive line. I listened to him in horror. Allon, Galili and my military secretary were in the room. Then I asked ‘Dado’ to come in too. He had another suggestion —that we should go on with the offensive in the south. He asked if he could go to the southern front to supervise things himself and for perrnission to make whatever decisions might have to be made on the spot. Dayan agreed and ‘Dado’ left. That night I called a cabinet meeting and got the ministers’ approval for us to launch a counter-attack against the Egyptians on 8 October. When I was alone in the room, I closed my eyes and sat perfectly still for a minute. I think that if I hadn’t learned, during all those years, how to be strong, I would have gone to pieces then. But I didn’t."

"On Sunday, Dayan came in to my office. He closed the door and stood in front of me. ‘Do you want me to resign?’ he asked ‘I am prepared to do so if you think I should. Unless I have your confidence, I can’t go on.’ I told him —and I have never regretted this —that he had to stay on as minister of defence."

Airlift

"I talked to Dinitz in Washington at all hours of the day and the night. Where was the airlift? Why wasn’t it under way yet? I remember calling him once at 3 a.m., Washington time, and he said, ‘I can’t speak to anyone now, Golda. It’s much too early.’ But I couldn’t listen to reason. I knew that President Nixon had promised to help us, and I knew from my past experience with him that he would not let us down. Let me, at this point, repeat something that I have said often before (usually to the extreme annoyance of many of my American friends). However history judges Richard Nixon —and it is probable that the verdict will be very harsh —it must also be put on the record forever that he did not break a single one of the promises he made to us. So why was there a delay? ‘I don’t care what time it is,’ I raged at Dinitz. ‘Call Kissinger now. In the middle of the night. We need the help today because tomorrow it may be too late.’

The story has already been published of that delay, of the US Defence Department’s initial reluctance to send military supplies to us in US planes and of the problems that arose when we feverishly shopped around for other planes —when all the time huge transports of Soviet aid were being brought by sea and air to Egypt and Syria and we were losing aircraft at a disturbing rate (not in air battles but to the Soviet missiles on both fronts). Each hour of waiting that passed was like a century for me, but there was no alternative other than to hold on tight and hope that the next hour would bring better news. I phoned Dinitz and told him that I was ready to fly to Washington incognito to meet with Nixon if he thought it could be arranged. ‘Find out immediately,’ I said, ‘I want to go as soon as possible.’ But it wasn’t necessary. At last, Nixon himself ordered the giant C-5 Galaxies to be sent, and the first flight arrived on the ninth day of the war, on 14 October. The airlift was invaluable. It not only lifted our spirits, it also served to make the American position clear to the Soviet Union and it undoubtedly served to make our victory possible. When I heard that the planes had touched down in Lydda, I cried for the first time since the war had begun, though not for the last. That was also the day on which we published the first casualty list: 656 Israelis had already died in battle.

But even the Galaxies that brought us tanks, ammunition, clothing, medical supplies and air-to-air rockets couldn’t bring all that was required. What about the planes? The Phantoms and Skyhawks had to be refuelled en route, so they were refuelled in the air. But they came —and so did the Galaxies that landed in Lydda, sometimes at the rate of one every fifteen minutes."

Embargo

"The next day I addressed the Knesset. I was very tired but I spoke for forty minutes because I had a lot to say, though most of it didn’t make pleasant hearing. But at least I could tell the Knesset that, as I was speaking a task force was already operating on the west bank of the Canal. I wanted also to make public our gratitude to the president and the people of America, and, equally clear, our rage at those governments, notably the French and British, that had chosen to impose an embargo on the shipment of arms to us when we were fighting for our very lives. And most of all, I wanted the world to know what would have happened to us had we withdrawn before the war to the pre Six Day War lines of 1967 —the very same lines, incidentally, that had not prevented the Six Day War itself from breaking out, though no one seems to remember that."

POWs

"I had been through this torment with the parents of boys taken prisoner in the War of Attrition, and there were days in the winter of 1973 when I could hardly bring myself to face yet another group of parents, knowing that I had nothing to tell them and that the Egyptians and Syrians had not only refused to give the Red Cross lists of captured Israelis months after the ceasefire, but even to let our army chaplains search the battlefields for our dead."

"I spent dozens of hours with those poor parents. though all that I could tell them in the beginning was that we were doing whatever we could to find their boys and that we would not agree to any arrangement that did not include the return of prisoners. But how many prisoners were there? I don’t think I ever wanted anything as desperately as I wanted those POW lists that were dangled in front of us so long and so cruelly. There is much for which I personally shall never forgive the Egyptians or the Syrians, but above all I shall never forgive them for withholding that information for so many days, out of sheer malice, and for trying to use the anguish of Israeli parents as a political trump card against us.

After the ceasefire and after the months of negotiations that led at last to the disengagement of troops on both fronts, when our prisoners finally returned from Syria and Egypt, the world at last learned for itself what we had already known for years: that amenities such as the Geneva Convention go by the board when Jews fall into the hands of Arabs —particularly into the hands of the Syrians —and perhaps our anxiety about our POWs was better understood."

Ceasefire proposal

"But it brought about an escalation of the crisis, and someone had to pay to bring about a relaxation of tension. The price demanded, needless to say from Israel, included our agreeing to permit supplies to reach the encircled Egyptian Third Army and to accept a second ceasefire that was to go into effect under the supervision of a UN force. The demand that we feed the Third Army, give it water and generally help its 20,000 soldiers to recover from their defeat was not, in any way, a matter of humanitarianism. We would gladly have given them all this had the Egyptians been willing to lay down their arms and go home. But this was exactly what President Sadat wanted to avoid. He was desperately anxious not to make public within Egypt the fact that Israel had prevailed in yet another attack upon her —the more so since for a few days in October the Egyptians were intoxicated by their apparent victory over us. So once again there was the standard concern for the tender feelings of the Arab aggressor, rather than for those of the victims of Arab aggression, and we were urged to compromise in the name of ‘world peace’.

‘At least,’ I told the cabinet that week, ‘let’s call things by their right name. Black is black and white is white. There is only one country to which we can turn and sometimes we have to give in to it —even when we know we shouldn’t. But it is the only real friend we have, and a very powerful one. We don’t have to say yes to everything, but let’s call things by their proper name. There is nothing to be ashamed of when a small country like Israel, in this situation, has to give in sometimes to the United States. And when we do say yes, let’s, for God’s sake, not pretend that it is otherwise and that black is white.’"

Lack of help from Europe

"I also had questions that weren’t answered to my satisfaction. I was still enraged over the refusal of my socialist comrades in Europe to let the Phantoms and Skyhawks land for refuelling as part of the airlift operation. One day, weeks after the war, I phoned Willy Brandt, who is much respected in the Socialist International, and said: ‘I have no demands to make of anyone, but I want to talk to my friends. For my own good, I need to know what possible meaning socialism can have when not a single socialist country in all of Europe was prepared to come to the aid of the only democratic nation in the Middle East. Is it possible that democracy and fraternity do not apply in our case? Anyhow, I want to hear for myself with my own ears, what it was that kept the heads of these socialist governments from helping us.’

The leadership meeting of the Socialist International was called in London and everyone came. Such meetings consist of the heads of socialist parties, those in government and those that are in parliamentary opposition. On that occasion, since I had asked that the meeting be called, I opened it. I told my fellow-socialists exactly what the situation had been, how we were taken by surprise, fooled by our own wishful thinking into believing the interpretation we were given of our intelligence reports, and how we had won the war. But it had been touch and go for days. Then I said: ‘I just want to understand, in the light of this, what socialism is really about today. Here you are, all of you. Not one inch of your territory was put at our disposal for refuelling the planes that saved us from destruction. Now, suppose Richard Nixon had said: ‘I am sorry but since we have nowhere to refuel in Europe, we just can’t do anything for you, after all.’ What would all of you have done then? You know us and who we are. We are all old comrades, long-standing friends. What did you think? On what grounds did you make your decisions not to let those planes refuel? Believe me, I am the last person to belittle the fact that we are only one tiny Jewish state and that there are over twenty Arab states with vast territories, endless oil and billions of dollars. But what I want to know from you today is whether these things are decisive factors in socialist thinking too?’

When I got through, the chairman asked if anybody wanted to speak. But nobody did. Then someone behind me —I didn’t want to turn my head and look at him because I didn’t want to embarrass him —said, very clearly: ‘Of course they can’t talk. Their throats are choked with oil.’ And although there was a discussion, there wasn’t really any more to say. It had all been said by that man whose face I never saw."

Chapter 15: The end of the road

"The Geneva talks opened on 21 December and, as I had feared, led almost nowhere. There was no real dialogue between the Egyptians and us. On the contrary, from the very first moment it was all too clear that nothing much had changed. The Egyptian delegation literally refused to permit its table to be placed next to ours, and the atmosphere was far from friendly. A military agreement was obviously a necessity for the Egyptians, but peace, we realized once again, was not what they were driving at. Still, even though no political solution came of that meeting, within a few days, at Kilometre 101, the disengagement treaty was signed, and we went on hoping that somehow or other a political solution could be found. Surely the Messiah had not come all the way to Kilometre 101 and then been too lazy to go on."

"I knew that —for historical reasons —there was a difference in the attitude of the population regarding territorial compromise on Sinai, for instance, and on the West Bank —though I myself felt that most Israelis would be prepared for a reasonable compromise on the West Bank too. However, I also thought it necessary to include in the government’s policy statement a clause to the effect that although the cabinet was authorized to negotiate and decide on territorial compromise with Jordan, before any actual treaty were signed the issue would be taken to the people in the form of new elections."

"Like my generation, this generation of sabras will strive, struggle, make mistakes and achieve. Like us, they are totally committed to the development and security of the State of Israel and to the dream of a just society here. Like us, they know that for the Jewish people to remain a people, it is essential that there be a jewish state where Jews can live as Jews, not on sufferance and not as a minority. I am certain that they will bring at least as much credit to the Jewish people everywhere as we tried to bring. And at this point I would like to add something about being Jewish. It is not only a matter, I believe, of religious observance and practice. To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for over 2000 years, with all the pain and torment that have been inflicted upon it. Those who have been unable to endure and who have tried to opt out of their Jewishness have done so, I believe, at the expense of their own basic identity. They have pitifully impoverished themselves.

I don’t know what forms the practice of Judaism will assume in the future or how Jews, in Israel and elsewhere, will express their Jewishness a thousand years hence. But I do know that Israel is not just some small beleaguered country in which three million people are trying hard to survive; Israel is a Jewish state that has come into existence as the result of the longing, the faith and the determination of an ancient people. We in Israel are only part of the Jewish nation, and not even its largest part, but because Israel exists Jewish history has been changed forever, and it is my deepest conviction that there are few Israelis today who do not understand and fully accept the responsibility that history has placed on their shoulders as Jews."

"So to those who ask: ' What of the future?' I still have only one answer: I believe that we will have peace with our neighbours, but I am sure that no one will make peace with a weak Israel. If Israel is not strong, there will be no peace."