I've known him for over 30 years. A significant portion of readers would probably recognize his name. He has held important positions on behalf of his country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and international organizations.
When we met last week, and we talked about the abundance of holidays we were blessed with this month, he told me that he would have to stay out of the sukkah. "What are you talking about?" I asked. Then he told me the secret. His father was a Jew who hid from the Nazis during the last three years of World War II. After the Holocaust he met a young Christian woman. He asked for her hand and she complied. But her parents vetoed the marriage unless he converted, agreed to educate the children in Christianity, and did not tell them about his origins. Love prevailed, and his father accepted all conditions. Only after my friend reached middle age did his father amaze him with the story of his Jewish origins.
Since then, he has pondered, quite a bit, about his identity. Not that he would leave everything tomorrow and immigrate to Israel, but when he retired, he toyed with the idea. Since his parents were not Jewish, he could have immigrated with the help of the "grandson clause" in the Law of Return, which also allows the grandson of a Jew to become a citizen. He is following, of course, what is happening now in Israel, and understands that one of the intentions of the current government is to abolish the "grandson clause" in order to close the gates to non-Jews according to halachic definitions. "Don't leave people like me out of the sukkah so easily," he warned as we parted, and I found a tear at the end of his eye.
Court of History
Golda's return. 50 years after the terrible Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Golda Meir is back in the headlines. The jury has not yet returned to the courtroom. In the court of history its fate is pending. But as the archives are opened, it seems that we can get closer to a decision as to its functioning: it was primarily responsible for not preventing the war, and the main responsibility for not beating it.
Golda with Sharon, Photo: Zion Yehuda / GPO
Even if it is true that she sought to examine with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat options for political arrangements, her stubbornness to conduct direct negotiations with Egypt, and her opposition to a return to the 1967 border, prevented the possibility of finding a solution, even if partial, to the territorial dispute. It is a fact that in February 1971, Sadat accepted UN envoy Gunnar Jarring's proposal for a solution. Golda rejected the offer, and this is the biggest stain on her political moves. In the end, the peace treaty with Egypt was painfully similar to Jarring's proposal, except that Israel had to pay for some 2,600 fallen IDF soldiers and 10,000 wounded before signing it.
During the war, she maintained her resolve, even if she did so, partly because she understood the situation less than her ministers and advisers. It is no coincidence that Moshe Dayan fell into deep despondency, while she informed the Americans that the war would end within a few days. It is quite possible that her ability to maintain a kind of optimism helped us win by the skin of our teeth, and it is clear that some of her decisions during the war were correct and critical, but her success in conducting the war will not equal her responsibility for not achieving a solution with Sadat in order to prevent it.
Her words – at a meeting of the Labor Party's political committee – that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat deserve an Academy Prize and not a Nobel Prize still resonate with me ever since I heard her speak in the conference hall at the monumental 110 Hayarkon Street. Even when a peace agreement was signed, she was not willing to believe in it. It is reasonable to assume that had she served as prime minister when the Egyptian president announced in his speech to the Egyptian parliament that he was ready to go to Jerusalem, Golda would have received the warning of then-IDF Chief of Staff Motta Gur about Sadat's dangerous intentions and would not have invited him to Israel. After the war, when she was accused of responsibility for the disaster, she explained that she simply followed the advice of military experts.
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