Golda Meir was only Israeli PM ever wakened by predawn warning of war.
By ABRAHAM RABINOVICHgolda meir 248 88 ap(photo credit: AP archive photo)
That 3 a.m. phone call that roused Hillary Clinton during her campaign has been forwarded to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni whose opponents have picked up on the query, "Who do you want answering the phone?" Their answer is that Livni, and by inference any woman, should not be wakened by phone calls that may require tough military decisions.
"Whoever lacks understanding in security matters, cannot serve as prime minister," declared former defense minister Shaul Mofaz. Labor Party leader Ehud Barak concurred. "I'm not convinced that when it comes to important security issues... the foreign minister has what it takes to provide answers."
As it happens, the only Israeli leader ever wakened by a predawn warning of imminent war was a 75-year-old grandmother, Golda Meir - perhaps the only female national leader ever to receive such a wake-up call. Her subsequent behavior supports the notion that it is not gender but character that counts in a crisis.
MEIR'S BEDSIDE phone rang at 4:30 a.m. on Yom Kippur 1973. The caller was her military aide, Maj.-Gen. Yisrael Lior, passing on a report from the Mossad that a two-front war would break out this day at dusk. The warning had been received by the intelligence agency during the night from a top aide to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat serving as an Israeli informant.
Meir's instinctive response was less than decisive: "Yisrael, what do we do now?"
Golda Meir's personal courage was a matter of record. On the eve of the War of Independence in 1948, she had journeyed to Jordan dressed as an Arab woman in a failed attempt to persuade King Abdullah to stay out of the fighting. But she knew nothing of military matters. She once admitted to Lior that she did not know what a division was. However, she had two military stalwarts on whom she could confidently rely - defense minister Moshe Dayan, the country's military icon, and Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. David Elazar, a strong leader.
When she arrived in her office on Yom Kippur morning, grey-faced at the prospect of heavy casualties, she discovered that Dayan and Elazar had only conflicting advice to offer. With the Arab armies deployed on the country's borders, Elazar wanted immediate mobilization of the reserves, which constituted two-thirds of the IDF. He also wanted the air force to undertake a preemptive strike. In a meeting between the two men, Dayan had refused to authorize either one of Elazar's requests.
Despite the Mossad warning, the defense minister was not certain war was imminent. A similar alarm in the spring had proved false. Mass mobilization, he said, would be viewed by the world as an act of war and could provoke the Arabs to attack. Likewise, he said, the world - read Washington - would not accept another preemptive strike only six years after Israel had carried one out in the Six Day War. Military Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Eli Zeira, who for weeks had been dismissing the Arab buildup as non-threatening, supported Dayan's skepticism.
As the generals and other advisers debated the issue in her office on Yom Kippur morning, it became clear that Meir herself would have to decide. An inveterate chain smoker, she lit cigarette after cigarette, filling the room with acrid smoke that made those present squint. She hesitated, but in the end made a clear decision. Agreeing with Dayan on the matter of a preemptive strike, she ruled it out. Israel might soon be needing American aid and it was imperative that it be clear to Washington that Israel had not started the war. "If we strike first we won't get help from anybody."
But she accepted Elazar's demand for immediate mobilization of all reserve combat units. "If war does break out, better to be in proper shape to deal with it even if the world is angry with us," she said.
FALLING BACK on common sense and political experience, she had come to the right conclusions. Her decision on mobilization saved the Golan Heights when reservists, summoned from Yom Kippur prayers during the day, helped stem the Syrian tide in fierce tank battles that night. Likewise, refraining from a preemptive attack ensured vital political and logistic support from Washington in the critical days ahead.
Meir made another fateful decision that day, this time under her mandate as grandmother rather than prime minister. Dayan had wanted evacuation of children from Golan Heights settlements to be put off until late afternoon, since he believed it possible that the perceived war threat would dissolve before then, obviating the need for evacuation. Meir ordered the evacuation to get under way immediately. When the war began hours earlier than expected with a massive Syrian artillery barrage on all the settlements, the children and their mothers were safely away.
At a cabinet meeting shortly after noon, amid mounting signs of an imminent attack, Dayan briefed his colleagues in a wavering voice. Shock was evident in his demeanor. Two massed armies were going to attack within hours and the bulk of the IDF was still unmobilized. Meir walked heavily when she entered the room and her eyes were downcast, but when she spoke her voice was firm. She would leave the running of the war to Dayan and Elazar, particularly the latter, but when called upon to make decisions in the coming weeks she did so sensibly. She never broke down even though strong men about her wavered as the country's very survival appeared in jeopardy.
Five days into the war, she made another critical decision when her senior military advisers were unable to agree among themselves. The Syrian divisions that broke through on the Golan Heights the first day of the war had been driven back to the prewar line in battles that littered the Golan with hundreds of disabled tanks. Some of the generals wanted to cross the line and drive toward Damascus once their exhausted troops had had a day's rest. Others pointed out that the Syrians had fallen back in good order to a strong defense line and warned that any attack would be costly and risk failure. The latter group advocated remaining in place on the Golan and shifting one of the three armored divisions there to the southern front where the decisive battle had yet to be fought with the Egyptian forces that had crossed into Sinai.
Meir may have missed some of the more arcane tactical points in the heated exchange of views, but she understood the essentials. It would take four days to transfer a division from the Golan to the southern front. But strong calls were already being made in the UN for a cease-fire. If a cease-fire were imposed before the division arrived in Sinai, the war would end with a territorial loss in the south where the Egyptians were dug in on the Sinai bank of the Suez Canal and no gain in the north, adding up to a clear defeat.
Grasping the political dimension of the dilemma, her decision was unhesitating - to drive toward Damascus. She wanted captured Arab territory to bring to the bargaining table when the fighting stopped and Syrian territory was most in reach. The ability of Israeli forces to reach within artillery range of the Syrian capital before the war ended may help account for the Golan having remained the most peaceful of the country's borders for the past 35 years.
Unlike Golda Meir, Livni has a security background, one that includes service as a lieutenant in the army and several years as a Mossad operative in Europe. In addition, her father, Eitan, was a formidable operations chief for the pre-state Irgun underground and presumably inculcated his daughter with security insights. All this is no guarantee that she would deal with a crisis as well as did Meir. But the latter clearly demonstrated in 1973 that being a woman does not preclude confronting a pre-dawn crisis more acute than a crying baby.
The writer is author of The Yom Kippur War (Schocken, New York).
abra@netvision.net.il
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