“Is this the Israel you dreamed of when you came here as a pioneer so long ago?” asked the interviewer.
Golda lit a cigarette, and blowing smoke through her nostrils, sighed, “No, this is not the Israel I dreamed of. I naively thought that in a Jewish State there would not be all the evils that afflict other societies – theft, murder, prostitution. It’s something that breaks my heart. On the other hand” – her voice became resonant, even buoyant – “speaking as a Jewish socialist, Israel is more than I could ever have dreamed of, because the realization of Zionism is part of my socialism. Justice for the Jewish people has been the purpose of my life. Forty or fifty years ago I had no hopes that we Jews would ever have a sovereign state to call our own. Now that we have one, it doesn’t seem to me right to worry too much about its defects. We have a soil on which to put our feet, and that’s already a lot.
“And as for my socialism, to be honest there’s a big difference between socialist ideology and socialism in practice. All socialist parties that have risen to power soon stoop to compromise. The dream I had, the dream of a just world united in socialism, has long gone to the devil. You can have all the dreams you like, but when you’re dreaming you’re not awake. And when you wake up you realize your dream has very little in common with reality.”
The two women were now leaning closer to one another, speaking almost secretly, as if I was not there, and Golda, clearly under Fallaci’s spell, began confessing such private feminine intimacies I felt my cheeks heat up:
“It was hard, hard, hard!” she lamented, recalling her motherly neglect of her children when they were very young and they most needed her. “When you’re at your job you’re thinking all the time of the children you’ve left at home, and when you’re at home you’re thinking of the work you should be doing at your job. It breaks one’s heart to pieces. My children, Sarah and Menachem, suffered so much on my account. I left them alone so often. I was never with them when I should have been. And when I had to stay home because of a headache or something like that, they were so happy. They would jump up and down, and laugh and sing, ‘Mamma’s staying home. Mama’s got a headache. Mama’s staying home.’ ”
Meekly, she went on:
“If your husband is not a social animal like yourself, and feels uncomfortable with an active wife like myself, a wife for whom it’s not enough to be a wife, there’s bound to be friction. And the friction may even break up the marriage, as it did mine. So, yes” – she paused to extract a handkerchief from her handbag and blow her nose – “I’ve paid for being what I am. I’ve paid a lot.”
Fallaci bent closer, and whispered. “That sense of guilt toward your children, did you also feel it toward your husband?”
Golda sat bolt upright, and with a wag of a finger, admonished, “Oriana, I never, ever talk about my husband. Change the subject.”
“But did you?” The Italian’s eyes were compelling, magnetic, her voice mesmeric.
The prime minister studied her fingernails in pensive silence, and said in a thawed tone, “Well, all right, for you I’ll try.”
Dabbing an eye with her handkerchief, she said morosely, “My husband, Morris, was an extraordinarily nice person – educated, kind, good. Everything about him was good. I met him when I was fifteen. We got married soon afterwards. From him I learned all the beautiful things, like music and poetry. But I was too different from him. He was only interested in his family, his home, his music, his books. For me, domestic bliss wasn’t enough. I wasn’t born to be satisfied with music and poetry. He wanted me to stay at home and forget politics. Instead, I was always out, always in politics. I had to be doing what I was doing. I couldn’t help myself.”
She took a breather to light another cigarette, and following the trail of the smoke with a dismal eye, flared, “Yes, of course I have a sense of guilt toward him. I made him suffer so much. He came to this country for me because I wanted to come. He came to kibbutz for me because I wanted the kibbutz. He took up a way of life that did not suit him because it was the kind of life I could not do without. It was a tragedy,” – her mouth tightened – “a great tragedy. He was such a wonderful man. With a different sort of a woman he could have been so very happy.”
“Did you not ever make an effort to adapt yourself to him, to please him?”
Golda’s dark brown eyes were full of pain. “For him I made the biggest sacrifice of my life: I left the kibbutz. There was nothing I loved more than the kibbutz: the work, the camaraderie. In the beginning our kibbutz was nothing but swamp and sand, but soon it became a garden full of orange trees, full of fruits. Just to look at it gave me such joy that I could have spent my whole life there. But Morris couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand the hard work. He couldn’t stand the hot climate. He couldn’t stand the communal way of life. He was too individualistic, too introverted, too delicate. He got sick and we had to leave for Tel Aviv.”
Restlessly, she began to stroke the arm of her chair, and between clenched teeth went on, “My feeling of anguish at leaving kibbutz still goes through me like a needle. It was really a tragedy for me. But I put up with it for his sake, thinking that in Tel Aviv our family life would be more tranquil, more harmonious, but it wasn’t. In 1938 we separated. In 1951 he died.”
“Wasn’t he proud of you, at least in the last years?” asked Fallaci compassionately.
Golda answered with a twisted smile: “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know what he thought in his last years. He was so withdrawn that it was impossible to guess. Anyway, his tragedy did not come from the fact of not understanding me. His tragedy came from the fact that he understood me only too well, but could not change me. He understood I had no choice but to do what I was doing, and he did not approve of what I was doing. It was as simple as that. And who knows” – this with a shrug and in almost a whimper – “if he wasn’t right?”
“But you never thought of getting a divorce, never thought of remarrying?”
Golda Meir answered with a vigorous shake of the head. “Never! Such an idea never entered my mind. You have to understand, I’ve always gone on thinking I’m married to Morris. Even though we were so different and incapable of living together, there was always love between us. Ours was a great love! It lasted from the day we met to the day he died. And a love like that can never be replaced, never.”
The prime minister rose to her feet, and pumping cheer back into her voice said, “So now you know, Oriana, what I’ve never told anybody else. Come back soon, but without that thing, eh?” She was pointing to the tape recorder. “Come back just for a chat, over a cup of tea!”
“Oh, I shall, I shall,” gushed Fallaci with a huge hug, and I drove her back to the American Colony Hotel where the concierge informed her that her flight to Rome, scheduled for the following day, had been duly confirmed. We parted, and I assumed that was the last I would see of her.
I was wrong. The following night, at an outrageous hour – two in the morning according to my bedside clock – I was jerked out of bed by the peal of the telephone and, fumbling for the receiver, yawned into it, “Who is this?”
“Oriana Fallaci. I’m in Rome.” She sounded distraught.
“I know you’re in Rome. What do you want?”
Sobbingly she said, “I’ve been robbed.”
“Robbed – of what?”
“The tapes of my Golda interview. All my Golda Meir tapes have been stolen.”
I sat up. “How? When? Who?”
She churned out the answer in an intense machine-gun ratter: “I checked into the hotel. I took the tapes out of my purse. I put them in an envelope on the desk. I left the room. I locked the door. I gave the key to the desk clerk. I was away for no more than fifteen minutes. When I got back the key was gone. The door of my room was open. None of my valuables were taken, just the tapes. The police are here now. They suspect it’s a political theft, as if I don’t know that already.”
“But by whom?”
“An Arab lo
oking for information, maybe; some personal enemy of Golda, maybe; even some journalist jealous of me, maybe. One thing for sure: I was followed. Somebody knew I was arriving in Rome today. Somebody knew the hour of my arrival. And somebody knew the hotel I’m staying at.”
“So what do you want of me?”
There was a pause, and I could hear her catching her breath. “I want you to arrange a repeat interview with Mrs. Meir.”
“That’s asking a hell of a lot.” I was wide awake now.
“Please try, please.” She was sobbing again.
“Okay, I’ll try. But I can’t promise anything. Send me a telegram explaining what happened and I’ll show it to Golda. It might help.”
Next morning the telegram came. It read:
MRS. MEIR EVERYTHING STOLEN STOP REPEAT EVERYTHING STOLEN STOP TRY SEEING ME AGAIN PLEASE
When I explained the circumstances, Golda’s face turned grim. “The poor, poor thing,” she said in motherly pity. But then her eyes went steely and her voice obstinate: “Obviously, someone doesn’t want this interview to be published, so we’ll just have to do it again. Tell her, yes, and find me a couple of hours soon.”
It was with much joy that the two women embraced one another once again when, a couple of weeks later, the interview was repeated – even better than before. Again, Golda Meir gave Oriana Fallaci all the time she needed.
Recalling the episode, Fallaci was to write:
Naturally, the police never got to the core of the mystery surrounding the theft of the tapes. But a clue did offer itself. At about the same time as my interview with Golda Meir, I had asked for one with Muammar el-Kaddafi [president of Libya]. And he, through a high official of the Libyan Ministry of Information, had let me know he would grant it. But all of a sudden, a few days after the theft of the tapes, he granted an interview to a rival Italian weekly. By some coincidence, Kaddafi regaled the correspondent with sentences that sounded like answers Mrs. Meir had told me…How was it possible for Mr. Kaddafi to answer something that had never been published and that no one, other than myself, knew? Had Mr. Kaddafi listened to my tapes? Had he actually received them from someone who had stolen them from me?23
Shortly thereafter, Oriana Fallaci sent me a copy of her Vietnam War book, Nothing, and So Be It, with a dedication that read:
To my friend Yehuda Avner who shared a drama of mine and, thank God, did not share this Vietnam one. With love and thanks – Oriana Fallaci.
This bold chronicler of people and of wars was the only journalist I knew who had talked four times and for over six hours with Prime Minister Golda Meir. Well do I recall her last question at her last session which she put in a seemingly off-the-cuff manner:
“Mrs. Meir, do you really intend to retire soon?”
Golda’s response was a resolute earful:
“Oriana, I give you my word. In May next year, nineteen seventy-three, I’ll be seventy-five. I’m old. I’m exhausted. Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop the plane, you can’t stop the storm, you can’t stop time, so one might as well accept it calmly, wisely. So no, I can’t go on with this madness forever. If you only knew how many times I say to myself: To hell with everything, to hell with everybody. I’ve done my share, now let the others do theirs. Enough! Enough! Enough!”
She said this jabbing the air as if pointing to those who should be making her life easier. But then, she leaned back, and with one corner of her mouth pulled in a slight smile, she chuckled: “What people don’t know about me, Oriana, is that I’m really bone lazy by nature. I’m not one of those who has to keep busy all day. In fact, I like nothing better than to sit in an armchair doing nothing. Mind you, I do enjoy cleaning the house, ironing, cooking, and things like that. In fact, I’m an excellent cook. And, oh, something else – I like to sleep. Oh, how I love to sleep! And I also like being with people. To hell with serious political talk – I just like to chat about trivial, everyday things. And I love going to the theater and to the movies – but without bodyguards underfoot. Whenever I want to see a film they send out the army reserves. You call this a life? There are days when I would just love to pack it all in and walk away without telling a soul. If I’ve stayed so long in the job it’s only out of a sense of duty, nothing else. Yes, yes, I know, people don’t believe me. Well, they’d better believe me now! I’ll even give you the date when I’ll step down: October 1973. In October ’73 there’ll be elections. Once they’re over, I’m gone. It’s goodbye!”
Skeptics across the political spectrum tended to take her protestations with a grain of salt. After all, Golda Meir could never resist a challenge, and she was becoming increasingly embroiled in one right now – a fight against the spreading scourge of Arab terrorism. And when confronted with that kind of warfare she was no Venus; she was Mars.
Title page of celebrated journalist Oriana Fallaci’s book on the Vietnam War, with dedication to the author.
Photograph credit: Chanania Herman & Israel Government Press Office
Prime Minister Golda Meir consulting with her defense minister Moshe Dayan, 10 April 1973
Chapter 19
The Shame of Schoenau
How does one treat with terrorists? Deal with them and you’re done for; don’t, and innocents die.
During 1972 and 1973, Arab terrorism against Israeli and Jewish targets was spreading like an epidemic across the whole of Western Europe: a Belgian plane hijacked en route to Israel; a Lebanese woman carrying weapons apprehended at Rome airport; eleven Israeli athletes mowed down at the Munich Olympics; a courier carrying weapons arrested at Amsterdam airport as he was about to board a plane for Israel; a Palestinian arrested at London airport charged with planning attacks on Israeli embassies in Scandinavia; an attack planned on the Israeli Embassy in Paris; an attempted attack on El Al passengers at Rome airport; an attempted attack on the Israeli Embassy and on an Israeli aircraft at Nicosia; an attack on the El Al office in Rome; letter bombs to Jewish and Israeli addresses in Britain and Holland; an attack on the El Al office in Athens.
And then came the shame of Schoenau – a tale of infamy that seized the assemblage of the Council of Europe in September 1973.
The Council of Europe in Strasbourg is that continent’s approximation of a representative House. At the time in question its approximately four hundred delegates watched with varying degrees of curiosity as Prime Minister Golda Meir, stooped and stern, mounted the podium. She was there at the invitation of the Council of Europe to state the case for Israel.
Generally speaking, Golda preferred to speak extemporaneously, but since this was a formal occasion protocol required she deliver a preprepared address. I, her in-house speechwriter, drafted one. It thanked the Council and individual European parliaments for raising their voices in support of Soviet Jewry’s right to freely emigrate to Israel [this was at the height of the worldwide “Let My People Go” campaign], delved into the intricacies of the Middle East conflict, pleaded for “the Council of Europe’s help to enable the Middle East to emulate the model of peaceful coexistence that the Council itself has established,” and concluded with a quote from the great European statesman, Jean Monnet, that “Peace depends not only on treaties and promises. It depends essentially upon the creation of conditions which, if they do not change the nature of men, at least guide their behavior towards each other in a peaceful direction.”
To my consternation, Golda never enunciated a single one of these words. Instead, she scanned the assembly from end to end, jaw jutting, brandished the written speech, and in a caustic voice, said, “I have here my prepared address, a copy of which I believe you have before you. But I have decided at the last minute not to place between you and me the paper on which my speech is written. Instead, you will forgive me if I break with protocol and speak in an impromptu fashion. I say this in light of what has occurred in Austria during the last few days.”
Clearly, the woman had decided it was i
diotic to read her formal address after the devastating news which had reached her just before leaving Israel for Strasbourg.
A train carrying Jews from communist Russia to Israel via Vienna had been hijacked on 29 September by two Arab terrorists at a railway crossing on the Austrian frontier. Seven Jews were taken hostage, among them a seventy-three-year-old man, an ailing woman, and a three-year-old child. The terrorists issued an ultimatum that unless the Austrian government instantly closed down Schoenau, the Jewish Agency’s transit facility near Vienna where émigrés were processed before being flown on to Israel, not only would the hostages be killed, but Austria itself would become the target of violent retaliation.
The Austrian cabinet hastily met and, led by Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, capitulated. Kreisky announced that Schoenau would be closed, and the terrorists were hustled to the airport for safe passage to Libya.
The entire Arab world could hardly contain its glee, and a fuming Golda Meir instructed her aides to arrange a flight to Vienna after her meeting in Strasbourg, where she intended to confront Chancellor Kreisky, a fellow socialist and fellow Jew.
To the Council of Europe she said, “Since the Arab terrorists have failed in their ghastly efforts to wreak havoc in Israel, they have increasingly taken their atrocities against Israeli and Jewish targets into Europe, aided and abetted by Arab governments.”
This remark caused a fidgety buzz to drone around the chamber, and it seemed to deepen when she spoke in particular, and with great bitterness, about the eleven Israeli athletes kidnapped and murdered at the Munich Olympics the previous summer, an outrage compounded by the German Government’s subsequent release of the captured killers in return for the freeing of a hijacked Lufthansa plane and its passengers.
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership Page 24
