they fell ill, they looked for care at a Kupat Holim clinic, also run by Histadrut. If they had money to save or wanted loans, they made their deposits or applications to the Histadrut bank.
What the Histadrut couldn’t provide, another arm of a Zionist struc- ture dominated by Labor Zionists did. Immigrants arrived on visas ar- ranged by the Jewish Agency, the administrative body of the yishuv, which Ben-Gurion also ran. They looked to Mapai, the Labor Zionist political party, for both political direction and patronage.
Decked out in shorts or austere dresses with no hint of makeup, Labor Zionist leaders wore and lived their power lightly. But with little tolerance for disloyalty or public shows of disagreement, they knew how to wield it. Their closed circle controlled virtually every significant institution in the country.
Golda had earned her seat at the table with her perfect English, her way with foreign Jews and non-Jews alike, and her natural gift for oratory. But she was the junior-most member, given the most insignificant of jobs, the establishment of a tourism department to guide Protestant missionar- ies, quizzical overseas Zionists, and a rotating cast of British Labour Party activists around kibbutzim and cooperative marketing ventures.
Golda hated every minute of it. But membership in the Va’ad allowed her to involve herself in every corner of yishuv life. She helped set up a program to send recruiters to Eastern Europe to train future immigrants in Hebrew and farming. When Ben-Gurion tried to abolish the tradition of Histadrut employees receiving salaries based on need, she stood him down, horrified at the prospect of replacing a Socialist pay scale with Ben-Gurion’s more “flexible” one. And as immigrants began streaming out of a Germany where Jewish civil rights were being eroded by Nazi
militants, she threw herself into the problem of figuring out how to care for the children who’d arrived from Berlin without their parents, or what to do with the famous research chemist who didn’t want to lay bricks.
A font of energy, Golda happily raced off to Haifa for the morning to calm the charged air between employers and workers, inspected new Histadrut housing in the afternoon, and then spent the evening with her comrades figuring out how to finance their latest brainstorm. Within a year, she was elected to the secretariat, the inner cabinet.
In 1936, the Arab Higher Committee called a general strike, urging Arabs to cease work until the British prohibited Jewish immigration and land purchases. With construction, transportation, and food delivery at a standstill, the Histadrut vowed to replace every Arab worker with a Jewish one.
Faced with the resulting paralysis of the port of Jaffa, Remez asked, “Why not build a Jewish port and a Jewish shipping company?” It was another starry-eyed Histadrut idea, more the romance of seeing a Jewish star on a steamship than a practical necessity. Nachshon, Remez called his imaginary shipping line, borrowing the name of the first Israelite to throw himself into the Red Sea when others hesitated to obey Moses’ command.
Golda picked up the Nachshon banner and went on an American tour to raise the money. “The sea is an organic, economic, and political part of Palestine, and it is yet almost unpossessed,” she told audiences in the usual two dozen cities. “The force which drew us from the city to the farm is now driving us from the land to the sea.
“This is one more step toward the independence of a nation.”
On her way home, she rendezvoused with Remez in London to shop for vessels, although theirs was as much an intimate interlude as a buying trip. “We stayed quite a while in London,” she wrote of that trip. “We didn’t have very much to do, and we would sit up all night at the Lyons Corner House in Oxford Circus. . . . We used to walk for hours in the night.”
Golda thrived on the nitty-gritty of translating her vision of a
What the Histadrut couldn’t provide, another arm of a Zionist struc- ture dominated by Labor Zionists did. Immigrants arrived on visas ar- ranged by the Jewish Agency, the administrative body of the yishuv, which Ben-Gurion also ran. They looked to Mapai, the Labor Zionist political party, for both political direction and patronage.
Decked out in shorts or austere dresses with no hint of makeup, Labor Zionist leaders wore and lived their power lightly. But with little tolerance for disloyalty or public shows of disagreement, they knew how to wield it. Their closed circle controlled virtually every significant institution in the country.
Golda had earned her seat at the table with her perfect English, her way with foreign Jews and non-Jews alike, and her natural gift for oratory. But she was the junior-most member, given the most insignificant of jobs, the establishment of a tourism department to guide Protestant missionar- ies, quizzical overseas Zionists, and a rotating cast of British Labour Party activists around kibbutzim and cooperative marketing ventures.
Golda hated every minute of it. But membership in the Va’ad allowed her to involve herself in every corner of yishuv life. She helped set up a program to send recruiters to Eastern Europe to train future immigrants in Hebrew and farming. When Ben-Gurion tried to abolish the tradition of Histadrut employees receiving salaries based on need, she stood him down, horrified at the prospect of replacing a Socialist pay scale with Ben-Gurion’s more “flexible” one. And as immigrants began streaming out of a Germany where Jewish civil rights were being eroded by Nazi
militants, she threw herself into the problem of figuring out how to care for the children who’d arrived from Berlin without their parents, or what to do with the famous research chemist who didn’t want to lay bricks.
A font of energy, Golda happily raced off to Haifa for the morning to calm the charged air between employers and workers, inspected new Histadrut housing in the afternoon, and then spent the evening with her comrades figuring out how to finance their latest brainstorm. Within a year, she was elected to the secretariat, the inner cabinet.
In 1936, the Arab Higher Committee called a general strike, urging Arabs to cease work until the British prohibited Jewish immigration and land purchases. With construction, transportation, and food delivery at a standstill, the Histadrut vowed to replace every Arab worker with a Jewish one.
Faced with the resulting paralysis of the port of Jaffa, Remez asked, “Why not build a Jewish port and a Jewish shipping company?” It was another starry-eyed Histadrut idea, more the romance of seeing a Jewish star on a steamship than a practical necessity. Nachshon, Remez called his imaginary shipping line, borrowing the name of the first Israelite to throw himself into the Red Sea when others hesitated to obey Moses’ command.
Golda picked up the Nachshon banner and went on an American tour to raise the money. “The sea is an organic, economic, and political part of Palestine, and it is yet almost unpossessed,” she told audiences in the usual two dozen cities. “The force which drew us from the city to the farm is now driving us from the land to the sea.
“This is one more step toward the independence of a nation.”
On her way home, she rendezvoused with Remez in London to shop for vessels, although theirs was as much an intimate interlude as a buying trip. “We stayed quite a while in London,” she wrote of that trip. “We didn’t have very much to do, and we would sit up all night at the Lyons Corner House in Oxford Circus. . . . We used to walk for hours in the night.”
Golda thrived on the nitty-gritty of translating her vision of a
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