A Tough, Maternal Legend

Golda Meir: 1898-1978

Her last name was Meir, but few Israelis ever thought of her as anything but Golda. To many people, her face was an appropriate symbol of Israel itself: strong, disarmingly homely, above all tough. It was a face that inspired love but also demanded respect--and the operative word was "demanded." Golda was of that generation of pioneers who built the Jewish state; she served as its Prime Minister through five years and one war. When she died last week at the age of 80, from the complications of lymphoma, an illness she had kept secret for twelve years, she still ranked high on any list of the world's most admired women. The dumpy, doughty lady with her drab dresses, hair strewn with gray, and ever present cigarette was a figure of legend, and yet historians were divided on whether a cold-eyed examination of her record would ultimately justify the adulation she sought and gained.

As with so many legends, the private personality did not totally correspond to the public image. Golda came on, for instance, as the classic Jewish mother: hectoring, fond, overwhelmingly concerned, vulnerable to slights, demanding affection as a duty, offering sacrifice as emotional blackmail, but basically all heart. Still, she was also a fierce Zionist revolutionary, a driving organizer, a persuasive advocate who made up for her lack of stylish eloquence with a peasant shrewdness and a gift for using simplistic anecdotes to convey home truths. In 1969, for example, when Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser kept stating that another Arab-Israeli war was inevitable, she was reminded of a man in a Russian village who always could predict what night the horses were going to be stolen. Why? Because he was the thief.

Golda made much of her humble beginnings, and humility was a trait she often professed. In real life she rarely practiced it. "Nobody crosses Golda," a former aide once said. She never forgot a slight. Yet she was willing to listen to almost anybody who asked for an audience, even though her listening could be a form of stonewalling. At the end, the coffee cups empty, the ashtrays full, the air staled in the close room, Golda would show her interlocutors into the thin dawn light--red-eyed, hoarse, exasperated, exhausted, knowing themselves defeated by the unshakable conviction of this indomitable woman. "It is like arguing before a judge," said one participant. "When she makes a decision, it's made."

On her strong, hunched shoulders, Golda seemed to carry the entire history of the Jewish ordeal, seeing herself as a paradigm of the Jew from the Diaspora returned to the promised land. And if her audience did not immediately sense that, Golda made sure they soon did. "I, the daughter of Moshe Mabovitch, who was just an ordinary carpenter . . ." was one of her favorite ways of beginning a speech. What she had not experienced in person, she assumed by proxy. Diplomats emerged from interviews with a stunned look, complaining that all they had wanted to do was to discuss a minor customs regulation; instead they had found themselves confronted with the weight of 50 years of the Jewish struggle for a national home.

For Golda, that struggle began in her memory when she was four years old, watching her father trying to barricade the entrance to their small house in Kiev against rampaging Cossacks. What she felt then and many times later in her life was "the fear, the frustration, the consciousness of being different and the profound instinctive belief that if one wanted to survive, one had to take effective action about it personally." Her father emigrated to the U.S. in 1903, and brought over his wife and their three daughters three years later to settle in Milwaukee. As a teenager, Golda was already interested in politics, encouraged by the example of her elder sister Sheyna. Intent on becoming a schoolteacher, Golda ran away from home to live with her sister in Denver. There she married a mild, intellectual sign painter, Morris Myerson, whom she argued into emigrating to Palestine in 1921. They lived for two years in a kibbutz (where Golda promptly took over and reorganized the communal kitchen), then moved to Tel Aviv and later Jerusalem, where their two children, Menachem and Sarah, were born. But she soon realized, as she wrote in her autobiography My Life, that she had to decide whether "to devote myself entirely to my family" or to "have the kind of purposeful life for which I so yearned." (Golda and her husband separated soon after the birth of their second child; Morris died in 1951.)

In the late '20s, Golda became active in Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation; in 1940 she was named head of its political department. After World War II, with all signs pointing toward an end to Britain's mandate over Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, dispatched Golda to the U.S. to raise money for arms that the new Jewish state would need. She minced no words. As she told a Chicago assembly of fund raisers: "You cannot decide whether we will fight or not. We will. You can only decide one thing: whether or not we shall be victorious." Within weeks the American Jewish community raised $50 million, which

Ben-Gurion used to buy weapons for his underground army, the Haganah. History, he said later, would record that "there was a Jewish woman who got the money that made [Israel] possible."

Golda was no sooner back from that trip than Ben-Gurion sent her on a secret mission in 1947 to Trans-Jordan's King Abdullah. She went to the desert meeting disguised as a peasant woman. On an earlier visit, Abdullah had agreed not to attack Israel. At this second meeting, he turned elusive. Why be in such a hurry to proclaim your state? "We have been waiting for 2,000 years," retorted Golda. "Is that hurrying?"

After Israel proclaimed its independence, Ben-Gurion named her as the new nation's first ambassador to Moscow. He later made her Minister of Labor, then Foreign Minister, a post in which she stoutly supported his policy of tough retaliation for every act of Arab sabotage or raid. Said Ben-Gurion: "She is the only man in my Cabinet." Overall, she had a love-hate relationship with Israel's blustery, impulsive first Premier. At his behest, she Hebraized her last name from Meyerson to Meir (meaning illumination). Privately she referred to Ben-Gurion as "that man." But he was indulgent of her tirades in closed Cabinet sessions. "You have to forgive her," he would say. "She had a very difficult childhood."

In 1965, in a mood of weariness, she decided to retire from foreign affairs, and became secretary general of Israel's Labor Party. When Premier Levi Eshkol died suddenly of a heart attack in 1969, the Labor Party asked her to succeed him, not only out of love but to avoid a split between factions loyal to the flamboyant Moshe Dayan and his archrival Yigal Allon. She duly burst into tears, expounded her devotion to her children and grandchildren, professed inadequacy--and accepted.

Golda took over as Israel's fourth Premier, more the autocrat than the mother comforter. But even in this dominating role, she injected a maternal element into the cold science of international relations. She assembled her senior cabinet members at supper in her kitchen to discuss affairs of state amid aromatic fumes of the chicken soup she loved to cook. She met Prime Ministers and Presidents at the grandest of diplomatic dinners wearing her severely cut suits and orthopedic shoes. She tolerated bodyguards with reluctance but would often brew tea for them in the morning's small hours on some of her sleepless nights.

As Premier, she was ruthlessly realistic throughout the so-called war of attrition; her response to any Arab raid or act of terrorism was to order even heavier counterviolence. "We are finished with gimmicks--with observers and emergency forces and demilitarized zones and armistices," she said. "It is a mistake to consider that the reason for the conflict between us is over some territory. We can compromise about that. They don't want us here. That's what it is all about. They don't want us, period."

Domestically, she let Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir run the country as if it were his private store. Thanks to generous infusions of U.S. aid and contributions from Israel's American Jewish supporters, the private store thrived mightily, despite inflation, high taxes and rising military costs. In foreign policy, she reflected her country's cockiness after the stunning victories of the 1967 Six-Day War, as well as the average Israeli's suspicion that there could be no peace with Israel's neighbors. Said she: "The Arabs wish us dead. We want to live. That's very hard to compromise." She steadfastly ignored any signals to the contrary. More than that, she too casually dismissed the rising sense of nationalism among Arabs living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

She fell from power concerning an issue about which she was certainly right and her advisers wrong. In the fateful few days before the 1973 October War, her intelligence officers and military advisers, including Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, insisted that the Arabs were not about to attack. They advised her against ordering total mobilization of Israel's defense forces, arguing that it would be provocative. Golda listened--and hesitated. "I, who was so accustomed to making decisions, failed to make that one decision," she wrote in My Life. "That Friday morning I should have listened to the warnings of my own heart and ordered a call-up." Israel, of course, won the fourth of its wars with the Arabs, but not before Egyptian forces drove into Sinai and Syrian tanks nearly broke through on the Golan Heights. More than 2,500 Israelis died; her fellow citizens blamed Golda, and in the aftermath, she resigned.

In the years of retirement, Golda was rather like a queen in exile. She remained a voice of authority in the Labor Party, promoting the victory of her successor Yitzhak Rabin and then mourning Labor's loss in the 1977 elections to Likud and her old enemy, Menachem Begin. When Anwar Sadat came on his famous visit to Jerusalem, his confrontation with "the Old Lady" made headlines. "He's not as ugly as I thought," she observed tartly, but she was disappointed by his tough Knesset speech. She appreciated the risks the Egyptian leader had taken, but she remained deeply skeptical of that peace, deeply convinced of Israel's need for eternal vigilance. As she had said many times prior to Sadat's visit, "Our secret weapon is that we have no alternative. We have no other way." Ironically, though, history may well decide that the greatest failure of Israel's strong-willed old lady was her own lack of vigilance on the eve of the October War.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.