Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (11 page)

The highlight for me of Golda’s account of the fighting was the moment she stopped the countdown to World War III and a possible nuclear holocaust; but that story has its rightful place in the pages to come.

It was Golda who introduced the subject of Secretary of State Kissinger, the most famous and the most powerful Jewish American of the time. She told me that when he arrived and they were alone together, he said this, very quietly: “Mrs. Meir, do you mind if I give you some advice...” Long pause. “Now that this airlift is underway, you must use it as the opportunity to take everything possible from Nixon—every tank, every plane, every bomb because the day may come when he will not any more be willing to supply in the manner to which you have become accustomed. The pressures from the Arabs are such that he can longer resist them.”
¹⁵

Golda did not tell me what she said to Kissinger in reply. To me she said, “If he expected me to be surprised by his news, he must have been disappointed. Of course I was not surprised by what he said.”
¹⁶

And she knew that I understood why she was not surprised.

In private conversations over the years Golda and Moshe Dayan were only two of a number of Israel’s leaders who told me they had taken it as read, from the moment of the birth of their state, that there could come a time when it would be required by America and the West as a whole to become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency. In private, Dayan was the most pessimistic of them all. Not too long after the 1967 war he told me he was convinced that a day would come when the West concluded that Israel was dispensable. And that, he said, was the real reason why Israel had to be and remain the military superpower of the region.

The truth as I came to know it from my own American sources could be boiled down to this: Whenever an American President was confronted by the need to make a critical decision about what to do in the Middle East, he asked himself only one question: “Who am I most afraid of?” The longer form of the same question was: “Who is the biggest threat to the interests of my party and my own re-election prospects—Israel and its powerful lobby in these United States or the Arabs?”

Whenever an American President was confronted by the need to make a critical decision about what to do in the Middle East, he asked himself only one question: “Who am I most afraid of?”

When Kissinger said what he said to Golda, he was speaking against the background of not only the Yom Kippur war which was raging, but the first great oil price rise explosion that came with it. In effect Kissinger was telling Golda that perhaps the time was approaching when an American president would conclude that he should be more frightened of the consequences of offending the oil-exporting Arabs than he was of the consequences of provoking the wrath of Israel and the Zionist lobby in America.

I asked Golda how much she had trusted Kissinger. She was well aware that I was not a member of his fan club. She gave me two answers.

The first was mainly in the form of a gesture. She raised her non- smoking hand high and formed the shape of a right angle, almost, by making the gap between her thumb and index finger as wide as it could possibly be. Then, slowly, very slowly, she closed the gap until finger and thumb were just about touching. “That much,” she said.

The second answer was in the form of a short story. When Kissinger visited Israel it was his practice to slap Israeli cabinet ministers on the back and call them by their first names. They responded, as he obviously intended them to respond, by calling him Henry. “But not me,” Golda said. “I always called him Mr. Secretary of State or Dr. Kissinger. And I insisted that he called me either Mrs. Meir or Madame Prime Minister.” Pause. “If you’re on first name terms with such a man he will screw you.” That was wisdom of a kind most Arab leaders lacked. Especially Sadat. And he got screwed. Perhaps such wisdom is only a mother’s thing.

Though Begin was leading for Israel when it happened, Golda was among Israel’s VIPs who lined up to welcome President Sadat and shake his hand when he made his historic visit to Israel on 20 November 1977. When Golda and I talked for the last time, Israel’s separate peace with Egypt was a
fait accompli
. I asked her what, really, she thought about it.

She replied: “It would not have happened if I had been prime minister. I would not have exchanged even a few grains of Sinai sand for a separate peace with Egypt.”

If Golda had said that in public at the time of the separate peacemaking, she would have been dismissed by many in the West— politicians, leader writers and other commentators—as a stubborn old war horse and yesterday’s woman. Some might even have said she had lost her marbles. But events were to prove that Golda was right. Again. The main effect of the separate peace with Egypt was to give Begin’s Israel unlimited freedom to impose its will on the Arabs by force and, by so doing, jeopardise the prospects for a comprehensive peace, a peace most Arabs, by 1973, wanted on terms which any rational Israeli government and people would have accepted with relief.

As I watched Begin and his ministers leaving the cemetery, I felt the gentle touch of a hand on my arm. It was Lou. “Do you want to come back to the apartment for a drink?”

I asked who else would be there.

“Nobody else,” Lou replied. “Just the two of us. There is something I must tell you.”

We drove the short distance in sombre silence but once inside the apartment Lou’s mood changed, so much so that I was surprised by her apparent cheerfulness. “It’s not a time to be sad,” she said. “Golda had a great life and, to tell you the complete truth, it was a much longer life than she expected to have.”

I gave Lou a “tell me more” look.

“It’s no longer a secret that she was diagnosed with cancer 17 years ago,” Lou added. (Israel’s newspapers had revealed that fact with the announcement of Golda’s death). “But still a secret is that when she was diagnosed all those years ago, she was given only three months to live.”

We agreed that Golda’s survival for so long was a tribute to her iron will and evidence that a strong mind can sometimes keep even cancer at bay.

Eventually I said to Lou, “What is it that you must tell me?”

She took time to collect her thoughts.

Eventually she said: “Do you remember the TV interview in which Golda told you there was no such thing as a Palestinian and that the Palestinians did not exist?”

“My dear Lou,” I replied, “not only do I remember, the whole world remembers and will never forget!”

I was not the only reporter to whom Golda made such a statement, but because what she said to me was on camera, from her own lips, it had had a far wider and greater impact than quotations attributed to her in newspapers.

Golda was not alone in her view that the Palestinians did not exist. Her statement represented Zionism’s official line on the matter; a line that was accepted and repeated parrot-like by Israel’s unquestioning supporters everywhere.

What she had actually said on camera was: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
¹⁷

Lou continued. “Golda told me to give you a message, but she made me promise I would not deliver it until she was dead.” Pause.
“She told me to tell you that as soon as those words left her mouth, she knew they were the silliest damn thing she ever said!”
¹⁸

The significance of that message from the grave was almost impossible to exaggerate.

On a personal level I took it to mean that Golda wanted me to know that she was not actually as deluded as I might have imagined her to be on account of her denial, while she lived, of the existence of the Palestinians as a people with rights and an irrefutable claim for justice.

Put another way, she was acknowledging the difference between, on the one hand, Israel’s propaganda—the myth Zionism had created to fool the world and comfort itself—and on the other hand, what she knew to be true. In effect and posthumously Mother Israel was admitting that the creation of the Zionist state had required the doing of an injustice to the Palestinians, and that Israel was living a lie.

The problem for Golda’s generation with the truth—the actual existence of the Palestinians—was that it raised fundamental questions about the legality and morality of the Zionist enterprise (her life’s work) and the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

On reflection, and because of her last message to me, I am inclined to the view that Mother Israel went to her grave troubled by the injustice done to the Palestinians in the name of Zionism. She would not have been able to escape the logic of reality and the question it begged.
If the Palestinians did not exist—no problem. But if really they did exist— “What have we done?”

The Golda Meir I knew would have asked herself that question when it was obvious—as it was before her death—that the regeneration of Palestinian nationalism was as much a
fait accompli
as the existence of her state.

As it happened the truth was too uncomfortable for Mother Israel to confront while she lived. That was to be a task for her children. The implication of her last message to me was that she wanted them to confront it, by asking themselves what they must do to right the wrong done in Zionism’s name to the Palestinians. (Some of my secular, anti-Zionist Jewish friends have said that I have been much too kind to Golda. She was, they insisted, “an unchangeable gut-Zionist zealot.” They could be right and I could be wrong; but I think I knew Golda more intimately than they did and I’ll stick with my own interpretation).

In the minds of Zionism’s founders a Jewish state in Palestine was to be the answer to the age-old curse of anti-Semitism, which, at the time of Zionism’s birth in 1897, was mainly a phenomenon of European cultures. For many centuries previously Eastern Europe and mainly the Russian Empire of the Tsars had been the heartland of world Jewry. For most Jews in this heartland life was one of abject poverty and they were required to live in ghettos—designated and restricted areas where they could be watched and controlled. And more easily persecuted. But the ghetto was not just a physical thing. It was a mental thing. A Jewish mindset. A coping mechanism.

According to Zionism, it was only in a state of their own that Jews could be guaranteed security and freedom from persecution. In effect Zionism said: “Jews cannot afford, ever, to trust the Gentiles. Without a state of our own, we Jews are doomed to extinction.” Zionism was therefore about separating Jews and Gentiles and, in essence, it was a
philosophy of doom
.

Before Zionism there was a Jewish
philosophy of hope
. It had been given concrete expression by the coming into being of the Haskala (Enlightenment) movement of the 18th century. The Haskala solution to the problem of anti-Semitism—the persecution of the Jews in their Eastern European heartland, was emigration and assimilation (the opposite of separation) in Western secular culture. This, the Haskala movement reasoned, was most likely to be the best form of protection for Jews. The giant of anti-Semitism would never die, but in the West it might well be encouraged to remain asleep if Jews contributed to Western societies and demonstrated their loyalty to the states of which they became citizens. In other words, if Jews made the effort, they would in time be accepted and permitted to lead fulfilling and secure lives in the Western nations of which they became citizens.

The nature of the challenge for Jews who took the Haskala route to salvation was clear. They had to cast off their ghetto mentality and all the practices, habits and attitudes which went with it. To become acceptable as Jewish Englishmen, Jewish Frenchmen, Jewish Americans and so on, they had to make themselves—apart from their religion which was a private matter—indistinguishable to the limits of the possible from all other Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans and so on. If they did not, they would stand out as being less than normal Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans and so on. In that event stereotyping could well lead to anti-Semitism being given new life in the West, especially when the governments or peoples of the host nations needed somebody to blame.

Simply stated, the Haskala route to salvation required migrating Jews to invest hope in the belief that they would not be persecuted in the West if they demonstrated willingness and an ability to assimilate: if, in other words, they proved that they had escaped from both the physical ghetto and the ghetto of the mind. For people whose entire history had been one of persecution that was never going to be easy. Those seeking a new life in England, for example, did not need reminding that Jews in England had been slaughtered and that, after the killing, the surviving Jews had been expelled from the country in their entirety—by Edward I in 1290.

The proof that most Jews did and do still prefer the vision of hope is in the simple fact that today, and despite the Nazi Holocaust that gave Zionism the appearance of being right, the majority of the world’s Jews do not live, by choice, in the Zionist state of Israel. (If it continues to be unwilling to make peace on terms the Palestinians can accept, my prediction is that a significant number of rational Israeli Jews—they form about half the present Jewish population of Greater Israel—will take their leave of the state. And what a final irony in the story of Zionism that would be. Exodus II, but out of Israel. As I write to slightly revise and update this book for its American edition, there is evidence that the number of Israeli Jews who are abandoning the Zionist state is becoming more than a trickle, with some of the best and the brightest being the most eager to seek a new life in America, Canada and Europe).