no one here, no one.”
Golda’s old friend Regina put it bluntly. “She certainly never should have had children.”
chapter five
I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.
W
hen Golda left Milwaukee in 1921, she never mentioned how long she thought it would take to build a Jewish Socialist paradise
in Palestine. But when she returned from the United States in 1934, that chimera seemed even more elusive than it had thirteen years earlier. The Jewish population had increased 400 percent, but almost three-quarters of the residents of Palestine were still Arabs. Yishuv leaders churned out reports about a 200 percent increase in exports, a tenfold growth in the citrus industry, and a 1,000 percent rise in electricity. But since they’d started from zero, the figures weren’t all that impressive. Tel Aviv might have been burgeoning, with a population of 150,000, but the yishuv was still welfare dependent, begging for handouts from a skeptical interna- tional Jewish community.
Increasingly well-organized Arabs were lashing out at the Jewish pres- ence not only with semi-organized and random attacks, but with strikes, assaults on travelers, and the burning of thousands of the trees the pio- neers had lovingly planted. Desperate to bolster the economy, yishuv
leaders inflamed their anger further with campaigns to pressure Jewish- owned businesses to replace cheap Arab workers with “Jewish labor” and consumers to “buy Jewish.” The Jewish press railed against employers who deprived Jewish immigrants of jobs by employing “alien” workers and housewives who purchased Arab-grown tomatoes.
Hostile Arabs were the tip of an iceberg of problems. Despite Britain’s pledge to the League of Nations that it would use its mandate to create a Jewish homeland, London had been inching away from its own promises almost as soon as the Balfour Declaration was issued for fear of damaging its position in the Middle East. After each outbreak of Arab rioting, the Foreign Office dispatched a commission of inquiry into its cause. The verdict was always the same: the Arabs resented the growing Jewish pres- ence and the only way to calm the situation was to avoid “a repetition of the excessive immigration.”
Emboldened by such conclusions, the Arabs took to regular rioting in the hope that the next commission would persuade Britain to end Jewish immigration entirely. And a long series of reports and White Papers about the alleged scarcity of open land and the royal obligation to the Arabs led yishuv leaders to believe that the government was laying the groundwork to move in that direction.
“You know, the trouble with you is you want a national home but all you’re getting is a rented flat,” Victor Adler, head of the Socialist Interna- tional, cautioned Golda.
To make matters worse, Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists were fending off constant power plays by other Zionist groups. It wasn’t just the Jewish capitalists tying all of Ben-Gurion’s plans in a knot. Kibbutzniks accused their old comrades of selling out their pioneering spirit for urban decadence. Religious Jews demonstrated against the desecration of the Sabbath. And Zionist revisionists, the yishuv ’s right, declared war on la- bor’s hegemony.
The problems were messy and contentious, and Golda couldn’t have been happier debating them from inside the Histadrut’s Va’ad HaPoel, its executive committee, a sort of shadow legislature in the government-in-
the-making, to which she’d been appointed after her return from Amer- ica. By 1934, Histadrut members traveled to work each morning in buses run by a Histadrut company along roads built by Solel Boneh; toiled for Histadrut-owned stores, offices, or factories; and bought food produced by Histadrut members at Histadrut cooperative stores. Their children studied at Histadrut-run schools, where they learned the fundamentals of Labor Zionism. When
Golda’s old friend Regina put it bluntly. “She certainly never should have had children.”
chapter five
I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.
W
hen Golda left Milwaukee in 1921, she never mentioned how long she thought it would take to build a Jewish Socialist paradise
in Palestine. But when she returned from the United States in 1934, that chimera seemed even more elusive than it had thirteen years earlier. The Jewish population had increased 400 percent, but almost three-quarters of the residents of Palestine were still Arabs. Yishuv leaders churned out reports about a 200 percent increase in exports, a tenfold growth in the citrus industry, and a 1,000 percent rise in electricity. But since they’d started from zero, the figures weren’t all that impressive. Tel Aviv might have been burgeoning, with a population of 150,000, but the yishuv was still welfare dependent, begging for handouts from a skeptical interna- tional Jewish community.
Increasingly well-organized Arabs were lashing out at the Jewish pres- ence not only with semi-organized and random attacks, but with strikes, assaults on travelers, and the burning of thousands of the trees the pio- neers had lovingly planted. Desperate to bolster the economy, yishuv
leaders inflamed their anger further with campaigns to pressure Jewish- owned businesses to replace cheap Arab workers with “Jewish labor” and consumers to “buy Jewish.” The Jewish press railed against employers who deprived Jewish immigrants of jobs by employing “alien” workers and housewives who purchased Arab-grown tomatoes.
Hostile Arabs were the tip of an iceberg of problems. Despite Britain’s pledge to the League of Nations that it would use its mandate to create a Jewish homeland, London had been inching away from its own promises almost as soon as the Balfour Declaration was issued for fear of damaging its position in the Middle East. After each outbreak of Arab rioting, the Foreign Office dispatched a commission of inquiry into its cause. The verdict was always the same: the Arabs resented the growing Jewish pres- ence and the only way to calm the situation was to avoid “a repetition of the excessive immigration.”
Emboldened by such conclusions, the Arabs took to regular rioting in the hope that the next commission would persuade Britain to end Jewish immigration entirely. And a long series of reports and White Papers about the alleged scarcity of open land and the royal obligation to the Arabs led yishuv leaders to believe that the government was laying the groundwork to move in that direction.
“You know, the trouble with you is you want a national home but all you’re getting is a rented flat,” Victor Adler, head of the Socialist Interna- tional, cautioned Golda.
To make matters worse, Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists were fending off constant power plays by other Zionist groups. It wasn’t just the Jewish capitalists tying all of Ben-Gurion’s plans in a knot. Kibbutzniks accused their old comrades of selling out their pioneering spirit for urban decadence. Religious Jews demonstrated against the desecration of the Sabbath. And Zionist revisionists, the yishuv ’s right, declared war on la- bor’s hegemony.
The problems were messy and contentious, and Golda couldn’t have been happier debating them from inside the Histadrut’s Va’ad HaPoel, its executive committee, a sort of shadow legislature in the government-in-
the-making, to which she’d been appointed after her return from Amer- ica. By 1934, Histadrut members traveled to work each morning in buses run by a Histadrut company along roads built by Solel Boneh; toiled for Histadrut-owned stores, offices, or factories; and bought food produced by Histadrut members at Histadrut cooperative stores. Their children studied at Histadrut-run schools, where they learned the fundamentals of Labor Zionism. When
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