Free Golda by Elinor Burkett

threatened, the Council would run a separate list of candidates in the next Histadrut election.
    An uneasy alliance of a dozen divergent ideological tendencies and competing power blocs, the Histadrut exercised only precarious con- trol over Jewish workers. If Maimon carried out her threat, she might embolden a dozen other interest groups, from the Orthodox to the Ye- menites, to follow suit, undermining the hegemony of the Labor Party leadership. So Ben-Gurion bowed to Maimon’s demands, assuming the women could be more easily controlled from within than from without.
    By the time Golda became involved in the Council, the women of the Second Aliyah, who’d envisioned a strong, independent body speaking boldly for workingwomen, were in open rebellion. Only the newer arrivals seemed content to be the Ladies’ Auxiliary that Ben-Gurion hoped for.
    Golda made her own sentiments crystal clear at the second Histadrut conference, held in Haifa in 1923. “It is a sad and shameful fact that we are forced to create a special organization to deal with matters of the woman worker,” she submitted. The goal, she said, should be for the Council to become redundant.
    Maimon and the other women were livid at the heresy, especially coming from a delegate allegedly representing the Council. Ben-Gurion, Remez, and Katznelson, on the other hand, were dazzled. Golda had made her first bid for membership in the boys’ club.
    Back home at Merhavia, she was greeted with grumbling, the other
    members growing impatient with her absences and her requests for new dresses or sandals for outside meetings. So when the leadership of Ah- dut, Ben-Gurion’s political party, asked her to accompany a prominent British suffragist married to a member of the British Parliament on a tour around Jewish Palestine, she demurred. Hobnobbing with the wife of a British grandee didn’t seem important enough to risk the wrath of her comrades. But Berl Katznelson himself appeared at Merhavia to persuade her. Golda was beside herself; she’d been noticed by the sage, the father figure to whom Ben-Gurion himself deferred. No kibbutznik could deny him.
    By the time Golda returned, Morris had reached his limit. When she broached the subject of having children, he offered her an ultimatum: If you want kids, we’re leaving. Or at least that was one of several stories that Golda offered up over the years. The other was that she, the dutiful wife, left her beloved kibbutz because Morris’ health was in serious jeopardy. “For him, I made the greatest sacrifice of my life,” she told Oriana Fallaci in a 1972 interview. “You see, there was nothing more I loved than the kibbutz. I loved everything about it—working with my hands, the social life, lack of materialism . . . but he was not able to tolerate it—physically or psychologically.”
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    Golda hadn’t left Milwaukee to become a Tel Aviv housewife, but that’s where she ended up, living with Sheyna and working as a part-time ca- shier for Solel Boneh, Histadrut’s building cooperative. Morris assumed that he and Golda would soon return to America. No matter how miser- able she was, though, Golda wasn’t budging beyond the Mediterranean Sea. The two were barely speaking.
    Their friends wondered how long the couple could keep going, or why they tried. Golda insisted theirs was an unbreakable emotional bond. “Ours was a great love,” she said. “It lasted from the day we met till the day he died.” Her friend Marie Syrkin didn’t buy that romantic
    argument. “To her affection for Morris was added a sense of guilt,” Syrkin wrote. “On account of her he had become deracinated and emotionally dependent. She was bound by his bondage.”
    Despite Golda’s protestations of devotion to Morris, in Tel Aviv she began seeing other men, and soon the gossipy yishuv was alive with ru- mors that Golda was involved with an older man, who later worked as a physician in Tel Aviv, and that something had sparked