Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (10 page)

At two o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday 6 October 1973, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur (the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day of prayer and fasting), Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israeli forces in occupation of Arab land Israel had captured in the 1967 war. With three main exceptions—Egypt’s President Sadat and his “good friend” Henry Kissinger, and Syria’s President Assad—just about the whole world believed that Israel really was fighting for its survival.

The BBC had permanent news teams in Israel and reinforcements were sent within minutes of the first confirmed report of the Arab attack. I arrived on the second day of the fighting and my prime task was to secure the first foreign interview, world exclusive, with Golda. I discovered that she and her senior ministers were in an open-ended crisis session in the kitchen of her very modest Tel Aviv home. The kitchen was the only room in the house big enough to accommodate them all.

I did my usual thing—ordered three dozen roses and had them sent to Golda at home. In the circumstances as they were it was, I knew, a puny and pathetic gesture. I felt almost foolish. But I was determined that tradition would be maintained. Two hours later, and much to my surprise, Lou telephoned. Only her brevity indicated there was a crisis. “Alan, Golda thanks you for the roses as ever. She may or may not be able to talk with you this evening. Bye.”

I put my
Panorama
camera crew on alert.

While I waited for the call that might or might not come, I learned that Israel was in urgent need of supplies from America—tanks, anti-tank missiles and fighter planes especially. President Nixon had already been asked to provide an emergency airlift to Israel.

At about half past ten in the evening Golda telephoned me. “Alan, this is the one time I can’t give you the first interview. I’ve got to give the first one to the Americans. I need to apply some pressure.” She paused, uncertain, I thought, about whether she should tell me more. Then she confirmed what I had heard about Israel’s request to America for an emergency airlift of supplies.

“I understand,” I said. “My roses against American tanks and planes—it’s no contest.”

She chuckled. Then she said, “As a matter of fact I need to go to Washington to talk with Nixon face-to-face. I’ve asked Simcha to get me an appointment. I told him I am prepared to make the trip for just one hour with the President.” (Simcha Dinitz was Israel’s Ambassador in Washington. He was a man I knew well and liked. He had previously been Golda’s press secretary).

“Is Nixon giving you a hard time?” I heard myself asking.

Golda smiled aloud. “Nixon’s not the problem. Nixon I can handle.” Pause. When she spoke again there was no doubting the contempt in her voice. “The problem is Kissinger. He’s sitting at Nixon’s elbow telling the President to make us sweat.”

Some years later Kissinger wrote that when he received Golda’s request from Dinitz, he rejected it “out of hand and without checking with Nixon.”

An intriguing question readers might like to keep in the back of their minds is this:
In the face of the surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces, and when almost the whole world believed that Israel was fighting for its survival, why was Kissinger advising Nixon that he should not be in a hurry to supply the tanks and planes Israel was requesting, and that the President should, as Golda had put it, make the Israelis “sweat”?

My empathy with Golda on the human level did not turn me into a sycophant to protect the relationship. There was never an occasion on camera when I pulled my punches and refrained from asking her leading and challenging questions. And in private the nature of our relationship enabled me to say whatever I wanted. There was only one private occasion when I thought my frankness might bring our relationship to an end.

In the course of one of the long interviews for the
Panorama
profile I stopped the camera to allow us to have a cigarette. We both smoked 60 a day. Like Golda I had no time for small talk. As we puffed away I turned her attention to the subject of Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank. I said, “You know, Mrs. Meir, if Israel remains in occupation, there will come a day when many journalists, including me, will write and speak about the tramp of Jewish jackboots on Arab soil.”

For Jews there are only Nazi jackboots.

Golda froze with a hand on her heart as though to stem the blood where I had stabbed her. She seemed to be far away in the distant, unspeakable past. Eventually she held my eyes with her own. She was shocked and bewildered. Then, in a small, quiet voice not much above a whisper, she said, “You, Alan... Even you can say such a thing.”

I said, “Yes, prime minister. And I mean it.”

That exchange did put a chill into the atmosphere between us for the remainder of the time I spent with her that day, but it did not do lasting damage to the strength of our friendship on the human level. The next time we met the customary warmth was much in evidence. (It was, in fact, some time after that exchange that she inscribed the photograph “To a good friend, Alan Hart.”)

When I withdrew from institutional television to try to do something useful with my life, I asked Lou to make me a promise. To call me when Golda’s end was near. When I got the call, no matter where I was or whatever I was doing, I would go to Israel for a last conversation with Golda before the cancer claimed her.

It was to be nearly five years before Lou had need to deliver on her promise to me. The call came on a glorious summer morning when I was hammering my typewriter at home. I was so far away in my mind that it took me some time to realise the telephone was ringing. The fact that it was Lou could mean only one thing. She went straight to the point. “I’m sorry to tell you Golda’s end is near. She might have only two or three weeks left. If you want to come, come now.”

The wonderful thing about friendship, I mean the ability of one human individual to empathise with another, is that it’s not diminished by distance and time. You can go years without seeing or even talking to a good friend and, when eventually you reconnect, you pick up from where you left off as though it was yesterday. That’s the way my last meeting with Golda was. (I took a friend with me. I had told him that if Golda did not object he could sit in on our conversation. The friend was my Jewish accountant. It was my way of thanking him for his many years of friendship and service. I also thought it would be good to have a witness. Golda did not object and when the conversation was over, she allowed me to take a photograph of the two of them, my friend’s arm around her shoulder. It was, he said, “the proudest moment of my life.” And today that photograph has pride of place in his London home).

I had not in fact talked with Golda since our telephone conversation on the second evening of the Yom Kippur war, when she told me she was seeking a face-to-face meeting with President Nixon.

I knew the Golda Meir I would meet for the last time was an old lady in torment for a reason that had nothing to do with her cancer and the nearness of death. In
My Life
she had said, “I will never again be the person I was before the Yom Kippur war”
¹²
(Given that Golda had had no intention of writing a book, how did
My Life
come to be written? The morning after the BBC transmitted my
Panorama
profile of her, publisher George Weidenfeld boarded a plane at London’s Heathrow bound for Tel Aviv. Golda told me, “He arrived with a contract for my life story in one hand and a cheque in the other.” Initially Golda told George that she didn’t want to write a book, partly because she had not kept a diary and partly because she did not have the time. Eventually George prevailed upon her to work with a ghost writer he would provide. It was not an experience Golda enjoyed).

Despite the fact that Israel achieved a stunning and comprehensive military victory, and that its forces could have gone on to capture Cairo and Damascus, the main consequence of that war for Israel, the loss of 2,500 Israeli lives, was the cause of Golda’s torment and the main reason for her surprise resignation as prime minister on 11 April 1974.

For non-Jewish readers who may not appreciate the impact on the Israeli psyche of the loss of 2,500 lives, the following might be helpful. In proportional terms of losses to population, Israel’s losses in a few weeks were equivalent to three or more times America’s losses in the Vietnam War over seven years.

Mother Israel believed that if she had listened to the warnings of her own heart, and followed her own gut instincts, many of those Israeli lives would not have been lost. She believed, in short, that she had failed her nation.

Was she right to blame herself for the scale of Israel’s losses?

I think not. If there was someone in Israel’s political, military and intelligence establishments who was not at all to blame or was least to blame, that someone was Golda. But I could understand why she blamed herself.

On Friday 5 October, the day before Egyptian and Syrian forces launched their surprise attack, Golda was right and all the men in her Cabinet, and the brilliant generals in the highest levels of Israel’s military and intelligence establishments, were wrong.

Of all the information that poured into the prime minister’s office on that Friday there was one little fragment that meant more to Golda than all the other pieces put together. Soviet military advisers in Syria were packing and leaving with their families in a hurry. “Why the haste?” Golda asked herself. “What do those Russian families know that we don’t know?”

All of Mother Israel’s instincts, her intuition, told her it could mean only one thing. Syria was about to attack. And Golda knew, as all first-year students of the Arab–Israeli conflict ought to have known, that Syria’s President Assad would not dream of attacking alone. If Syria was about to attack, Egypt was about to attack.

As a precaution, and even though she was well aware of the economic cost, and even though it was the eve of Yom Kippur, Golda wanted to order a full-scale mobilisation and call up the reserves. But all the men in her cabinet, including Defence Minister Dayan, and the best and brightest minds in the country’s military and intelligence establishments, told her not to worry. They were on top of the situation, they said, and they would get sufficient warning of any Arab attack. What they meant and had no need to say was that in the most unlikely event of failure by their own intelligence people and systems, they would still get adequate warning of an Arab attack from the Americans—from their even more superior intelligence gathering apparatus. At the time nobody in Israel, absolutely nobody, had considered the possibility that somebody in America might be wanting an arrogant, expansionist and uncompromising Israel to be taught a little lesson by Sadat.

When the war was over Golda believed, and surely she was right to believe, that if she had ordered a full-scale mobilisation, some and perhaps many of the 2,500 would not have had to sacrifice their lives. It is also conceivable that such a precautionary move by Israel would have caused Egypt’s President Sadat to change his mind about attacking. (Kissinger would have been disappointed but that is a story for later).

In
My Life
Golda said: “That Friday morning I should have listened to the warnings of my own heart and ordered a call-up. For me that fact cannot and never will be erased, and there can be no consolation in anything that anyone else has to say or in all the commonsense rationalisations with which my colleagues have tried to comfort me. It doesn’t matter what logic dictated. It matters only that I, who was so accustomed to making decisions, and who did make them throughout the war, failed to make that one decision. It isn’t a question of feeling guilty. I, too, can rationalise and tell myself that in the face of such total certainty on the part of our military intelligence, and the almost equally total acceptance of its evaluations on the part of our foremost military men, it would have been unreasonable of me to have insisted on a call-up. But I know that I should have done so, and I shall live with that terrible knowledge for the rest of my life.”
¹³

To the nation in her resignation statement Golda said: “I have come to the end of the road. It is beyond my strength to continue carrying the burden.” To her cabinet colleagues she said: “This time my decision is final. I beg you not to try to persuade me to change my mind for any reason at all. It will not help.”

In
My Life
Golda also said: “What those days (of the Yom Kippur war) were like for me I shall not even try to describe.” When I talked with her for the last time she gave me, without any prompting, a very vivid description of what those days were like. For her.

At the start of our conversation, which lasted nearly five hours, she described what was undoubtedly her worst moment of the war and probably her whole life. On Sunday 7 October, the second day but the first morning of the war—when Egyptian forces in strength were overwhelming Israel’s lightly defended positions along the East bank of the Suez Canal—Dayan, in Golda’s kitchen, made a pragmatic proposal. To save the lives of those frontline Israeli soldiers who were still holding out but who undoubtedly would be killed within hours if not minutes, Israel should “surrender” those positions and withdraw some 25 kilometres or so to establish a new first line of defence.

To me Golda said: “I told Moshe there was no such word as surrender in Hebrew; but I knew he was right. I got up from the kitchen table and went into that little room there (she pointed to the toilet). And I vomited.”
¹⁴