Golda Meir
The article is published in the language of the original
She was the daughter of a carpenter from Kyiv — and a prime minister. She was implacable, even fanatical, and — at the same time — profoundly human, old-fashioned in her kindness and attentiveness. She purchased weapons and knew them well — and planted trees in the desert. In creating and defending a small state for her people, she changed a great deal for the better all over the world. She became a legend of our century, and perhaps not of ours alone. Her name was Golda Meir. Golda means “golden,” and Meir “the one who gives light.”
Golda Meir was one of the first women in the world to reach the position of head of government. Before her, only in Ceylon and India had governments been headed by women — Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Indira Gandhi. A woman of extraordinary common sense, she possessed a remarkable ability to identify the weak points in an opponent’s argument. For example, shortly after the state was established there were several cases of rape in Israel, and during a cabinet meeting one of its members proposed banning women from being out on the streets alone at night until the rapists were caught. “I don’t quite understand you,” Golda objected. “It is men who commit the violence. It is men who should not be allowed out on the streets at night.”
Golda Meir (Mabovitch) (1898-1978) was born in 1898 in Kyiv, in the Russian Empire, into a poor Jewish family; there were eight children in the family, five of whom (four boys and one girl) died in infancy, and only Golda herself and her two sisters survived. Her father, Moshe Mabovitch, was a carpenter and her mother a wet nurse. The beginning of the 20th century in the Russian Empire was marked by the onset of Jewish pogroms, so no Jew in Russia could feel safe, especially in places where the Jewish population was a minority. That is why in 1903 the Mabovitch family was forced to return to Pinsk (Belarus), to the house of Golda’s grandparents.
That same year Moshe Mabovitch left for the United States to earn a living. Three years later, in 1906, Golda, her sisters and her mother also emigrated to the United States. There they settled in the north of the country, in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
After finishing school, Golda became a teacher — and an active supporter of Zionism. In her early twenties she married, made aliyah to Eretz Israel and joined a kibbutz. Before long, Golda became one of the leaders of the Labor Party and a close associate of Ben-Gurion, who once remarked: “Golda is the only man in my cabinet.”
She was always ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of realizing her childhood dream — the unification of the Jewish people. Years of hardship and of living in constant fear of annihilation forged a firm and unbending will that kept carrying her along the long road to the top.
Her dream came true on May 14, 1948, when the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine. Golda Meir became one of the two women who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence; the declaration was signed by 38 people in all, among them only two women, Golda Meir and Rachel Cohen-Kagan. Well-informed politicians used to say: “If Ben-Gurion is the father of the Israeli state, then Golda is its mother.”
In 1948, on the eve of Israel’s establishment, Ben-Gurion sent her to a secret and dangerous meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, to try to persuade the monarch not to take part in the Arab war against the Jewish state that was about to be proclaimed. The attempt, however, proved futile.
Four days after the State of Israel was proclaimed, the Soviet Union recognized it de jure. This friendly gesture from Moscow was vitally important for the newborn state, which had by then been at war for four days with its neighbors — the countries of the Arab League: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — while Egyptian Spitfires were already bombing Tel Aviv in full force. Moscow, “for all its sympathy with the national liberation movement of the Arab peoples,” not only officially condemned that aggression at the time, but also, through its Eastern European satellites, stepped up deliveries of weapons and ammunition to Israel. In parallel, Stalin instructed the Committee of Information to use covert operations to support the interests of the USSR in the Middle East, where a Soviet agent network was being deployed under cover of the flow of Jewish emigration from Eastern European countries. The flow of arms from Eastern Europe to Israel was so substantial that Washington even issued a note of protest, accusing Czechoslovakia of violating the terms of the Jewish-Arab truce established by the UN Security Council on June 11, 1948. The communist world, however, did not give up military aid to the young state, in the hope of drawing it onto its own side.
In June 1948 G. Meir was appointed Israel’s first ambassador to the USSR and held that post until March 1949. Her appearance at Moscow’s main synagogue during Rosh Hashanah was greeted with delight by tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, who staged a powerful demonstration to welcome her. Among them were state security agents armed with cameras: a great many of those who came to greet Golda received long sentences in Soviet camps. Later (from 1958 to 1966) Golda took up the post of Israel’s minister of foreign affairs and became the initiator of a policy of active assistance to the young states of Africa and of cooperation with them.
After the death of Levi Eshkol she became prime minister (1969). Although many on the left believed that she was pursuing a harsh policy (Golda persistently opposed the creation of yet another “Palestinian” Arab state in Eretz Israel and denied the very existence of a “Palestinian” people), the prime minister passionately hoped for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the end of the 1960s, when Israel was waging a sluggish and extremely costly war of attrition against Egypt, she was asked when peace with Egypt would be concluded. “I have given instructions,” she replied, “that I be informed about every one of our soldiers who is killed, at any hour, even in the dead of night. When President Nasser also gives instructions that he be woken in the dead of night if any Egyptian soldier is killed, then peace will come.” The last years of her life were overshadowed by a sense of guilt for not having mobilized the Israeli reserve army during the days that remained before the start of the Yom Kippur War. Although Golda herself sensed that war was approaching, she nonetheless relied on the firm assurances of her military advisers that there was no cause for concern.
When the combined forces of Egypt and Syria unexpectedly went on the offensive, hundreds of Israeli soldiers who had been caught off guard were killed; more than 2,700 soldiers died in the weeks that followed. “I will live with these terrible thoughts for the rest of my life,” Golda wrote in her autobiography.
Perhaps nothing captures Golda’s soul more vividly than her well-known statement: “The only thing I cannot forgive the Arabs is that they forced our sons to kill their sons.”
This Russian immigrant, who had studied at college for only a single year and grew up in a ghetto in Milwaukee, became the only woman to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence, its first ambassador to Russia, its first minister of labor and social insurance, its first woman minister of foreign affairs and, finally, its first and only woman prime minister. Her spirit, persistence and confidence helped her build the State of Israel and ultimately led her to become the first woman leader. Meir served as a model for future women leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, and as an inspiring example for every woman drawn to the role of a fighter for power on an international scale.
Based on materials from:
http://www.jobs.ua/business_articles/2/49/
http://www.eleven.co.il/article/12686
http://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/123/arhiv.htm
http://jhist.org/teacher/06_167.htm
“A Woman-Myth.” Preface and general editing by Ya. Tsur, Shymkent: “Aurika,” 1997. —560 pp.