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."