Golda Meir

Prime minister of Israel (1969-1974)

• Born: May 3, 1898
• Birthplace: Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine)
• Died: December 8, 1978
• Place of death: Jerusalem, Israel

Meir was a leading Zionist and inspirational figure for world Jewry who rejected life in the United States to emigrate to Palestine in 1920. She became a major role player in Zionist organizations there, eventually rising to become Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union (1948), minister of labor (1949), foreign minister (1956), and prime minister (1969).

Early Life

Golda Meir (mi-EER) was born to Moshe Yitzhak Mabovitch, a carpenter by training. Moshe and his wife had two other children: Sheyna and Zipke. The family moved from Kiev to their ancestral town of Pinsk after Meir’s birth but ultimately sought to leave Russia because of the violent attacks that threatened Jewish life there. In 1906, the family emigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Meir worked with her sisters in the family’s grocery store. Sheyna became involved in 1915 in the Poale Zion movement, a labor- and socialist-oriented branch of the Zionist movement, which in turn became an inspiration for Meir. Poale Zion aspired to national and social equality of the Jewish people in their own homeland through labor.

Meir fled home in 1912 at age fourteen and moved to Denver to live with Sheyna, who had gone there earlier for treatment of tuberculosis. Four years later (1916), she returned to Milwaukee under extreme parental pressure. While in Denver, she met Morris Meyerson (the name was Hebraized to “Meir” in 1956), whom she married in 1917. For a short time after her return to Wisconsin, Golda was enrolled in Milwaukee Normal School for Teachers. The idea of living and working in the United States did not have much appeal for Golda, who was more attracted to the Poale Zion leaders A. D. Gorden, Nachman Syrkin, and Shmaryahu Levin. She was instrumental in organizing the first Midwest marches in Milwaukee to protest the 1919 pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine. On May 23, 1921, the Meyersons departed for Palestine on the SS Pocahontas. They arrived in Egypt and then transferred by train to Tel Aviv. During the fall of 1921, the Meyersons joined Kibbutz Merhavia (a collective farm based on egalitarian principles). The kibbutz placed Golda face-to-face with issues relating to feminism and female emancipation. Golda, however, never considered herself a feminist. She worked in the fields picking almonds, planting trees, and taking care of chickens. On kitchen duty, she became known for introducing oatmeal and glasses into an otherwise Spartan environment.

In 1922, the Meyersons left Merhavia because of Morris’s health and because of his unwillingness to have a child reared by the collective methods of the kibbutz. Their first child, Menachem, was born in November, 1923. The Meyersons moved to Jerusalem to work for Solel Boneh, a government-owned company that was at that time in poor financial standing. A second child, Sarah, was born during the spring of 1926. Meir later lamented that if she could do things over again, she would have remained on the kibbutz. In this period, Meir believed that the application of Jewish labor to Palestine would also improve the quality of life for the Arabs. She always believed that had been the case, justified by the rise in the Arab population during the period of the British mandate over Palestine.

Life’s Work

During 1928, Meir became secretary of Moezet ha-Poalot, the Women’s Labor Council of the Histadrut (Jewish labor union of Palestine/Israel) and supervised training of immigrant girls. In 1932, she was sent back to the United States as a representative to the Pioneer Women’s Organization, where she would remain until 1934. Around this time her marriage broke up, but there was never a divorce. Morris continued to live in Israel and died there in 1951.

In 1934, Meir became a member of the executive committee of the Histadrut and head of the political department, which allowed her advancement into higher circles. In 1938, she was a Jewish observer to the Evian Conference, which failed to solve the problem of Jewish emigration from Europe in the face of Nazi brutality. During World War II, Meir was a member of the War Economic Advisory Council set up by the mandatory government in Palestine. In 1946, Meir was made acting head of the Jewish Agency after the British mandatory authorities arrested the leaders of the Jewish community following outbreaks of violence in the country. She later commented that her failure to be arrested was a minor insult of sorts because the British apparently believed she was unimportant. In fact, she was one of the most important negotiators for the Jewish community of Palestine during the last two years of the mandate. Meir remained as head of the Political Department until statehood.

During the last years of the mandate, Meir was an active opponent of Ernst Bevin, British foreign secretary, who favored the position of the Palestinian Arabs. Meir was indignant over powerlessness imposed on Jews by the white paper of 1939. She also expressed regret with the boundaries for a Jewish state proposed by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947, which excluded Jerusalem and parts of Galilee from the Jewish zone. In November, 1947, the United Nations proclaimed the partition of Palestine. In January, 1948, Meir visited the United States in the hope of raising between $25 and $30 million from American Jews for the State of Israel’s survival. In fact, she raised more than $50 million.

Meir visited King Abdullah of Transjordan twice in an attempt to avert war between Jews and Arabs. The first time was November, 1947, when Meir, head of the Jewish Agency, met the king in a house at Naharayim, near the Jordan River. At this meeting, Abdullah indicated his desire for peace and that the two shared a common enemy, Hajj-Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian community. On May 10, 1948, the two again met in Amman after Meir crossed into Transjordan in disguise, hoping to avert a Jordanian invasion of Palestine. Abdullah asked her not to hurry in proclaiming a state. She responded that Jews had been waiting for two thousand years. Abdullah requested that the Jews drop their plans for free immigration. Later, rumor had it that Abdullah blamed the war on Meir, as she was perceived as being too proud to accept his offer.

Meir was one of the twenty-five signators of the Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. Shortly thereafter, she was again dispatched to the United States for additional fund-raising. She again raised millions of dollars that helped the state survive. Meir, however, did not have time to savor the fruits of statehood and was immediately dispatched to Moscow in 1948 as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. She arrived in Moscow on September 3, 1948, and established the Israeli mission there. She became the center of a famous demonstration outside the Moscow synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, 1948, which was one of the first indications that Zionist aspirations still existed among Soviet Jews. More than fifty thousand Soviet Jews came to see the first Israeli delegation in Moscow, which provided the first hint of the potential of a large exodus of Jews to Israel and the West.

After departing Moscow in 1949, Meir served in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) until 1974 and rose to many top governmental positions. As a member of the Mapai (labor) Party, she was elected to the First Knesset in 1949 and was appointed minister of labor. In charge of the large-scale immigration of Jews from Arab lands, particularly Iraq and Morocco, she was responsible for settling newcomers in tents and later in permanent housing. More than 680,000 Jews from Arab lands arrived in Israel during the period of her ministry. She had running battles with Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol about financial allocation for housing. All newcomers, however, were placed under shelter when they arrived in Israel, although conditions were very poor from 1950 to 1952. Meir’s theory was that all new immigrants had to be employed and get paid for their work. This employment came through huge public works projects, focusing on road building.

Meir herself believed that the most significant thing she did in politics was the work connected with the ministry of labor, because it symbolized social equality and justice. She was instrumental in the presentation of Israel’s first National Insurance Bill in 1952, which came into effect in 1954; the establishment of vocational training for adults and youngsters by allying the ministry of labor with older voluntary Jewish organizations such as the Histadrut (labor union), Organization for Rehabilitation Through Training (ORT), Hadassah (women’s organization), and Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO); and the development town projects, which were of only modest success.

In 1955, Meir attempted to become mayor of Tel Aviv but was defeated when the religious bloc in the Israeli Knesset refused to vote for a woman. In 1956, Meir became foreign minister, succeeding Moshe Sharett. She flew to France in 1956 with Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan to plan a joint attack on Egypt as an ally of Great Britain and France. She gave a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in March, 1957, in which she announced the Israeli military withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and Sharm-el-Sheik, which had been occupied by Israel in October, 1956, as a response to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba, and in which she called for all states of the Middle East to join in peaceful endeavors.

As foreign minister, Meir developed an energetic development program with emerging African nations. Part of this strategy was to obtain votes at the United Nations, but the bottom line on Israeli-African policy was the common history of suffering. Oppression against the Jews, in Meir’s mind, was similar to African slavery and European imperialism. During the late 1950’s, Meir traveled to Ghana, Cameroon, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and other states. African leaders often found her honest in her appraisals of the possibilities of development and the problems of instant solutions. The African policy, however, collapsed during and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when most African states bowed to Arab oil pressure and severed relations.

In 1965, Meir retired as foreign minister and became secretary-general of the Mapai Party. This was a critical period in the development of the center-left Israeli political parties, as part of the Mapai Party had split with David Ben-Gurion to establish Rafi, while Achdut Ha Avodah represented another position of labor. Meir believed that unification was necessary to ensure the future of the Mapai Party. During the crisis before the Six-Day War , Meir was brought into the government and supported a hesitant Eshkol. After the war, she participated in the unification in 1968 of the three labor parties into the new Israeli Labor Party.

When Prime Minister Eshkol died on February 16, 1969, Meir was chosen as prime minister (March 7, 1969) as a means to avoid an open struggle between Dayan and Yigal Allon. On matters involving peace with the Arabs, Meir was often said to possess hard-line bargaining positions. She believed that the only alternative to war was peace and the only way to peace was negotiations. She indicated her willingness to go anywhere to talk peace and to negotiate anything except national suicide. She was never willing to talk with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), however, which she viewed as a terrorist organization.

Late in 1969, Meir went to the United States to meet with President Richard M. Nixon and to fill a shopping list for weapons, especially a specific request for twenty-five Phantom and eighty Skyhawk jet aircraft. It was a warm meeting with the American president, and Meir stayed on for an extended speaking tour. In January, 1973, Meir met with Pope Paul VI, the first Jewish head of state to do so.

The October, 1973, Yom Kippur War was a watershed in Israeli history and a horrible period in Meir’s life. She became aware of plans for an Egyptian and Syrian attack against Israel but held off mobilization of reserves. Israel won the war but with substantial casualties. Meir also had a rift with General Ariel Sharon over disposition of the Egyptian Third Army, which had been surrounded by Israeli forces in Sinai. Meir, to save Sadat’s position as possible negotiator, ordered Sharon not to move against the Third Army. Meir also had ambivalent feelings about United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who threatened economic retaliation against Israel during cease-fire and disengagement negotiations. In the end, Meir believed that she had been correct in rejecting a preemptive strike against the Arab states, as the Arab attack ensured American aid, which, she believed, saved lives.

The Labor Party again prevailed in elections held on December 31, 1973, but Meir resigned less than four months later, on April 11, 1974. She became a casualty of the Yom Kippur War, so to speak, after the Agranat Commission’s report indicted the general staff, the military intelligence, the Sinai field commanders, and David Eleazar, who was the commander in chief, but not the minister of defense, Dayan. Meir left office on June 4 at age seventy-six. She continued as a spokesperson for Israel in academic and public circles. Meir died in Jerusalem on December 8, 1978, of leukemia, which she had lived with since the early 1970’s but had managed to hide from public view.

Significance

Meir was one of the most beloved of Israel’s leaders but unfortunately left office after what became a national disaster the Yom Kippur War. Still, she was highly regarded, even by her former enemies. In November, 1977, when President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt went on a peace mission to Israel, Meir was at the airport to greet him; Sadat regarded her as “the tough old lady.” Meir was generally considered a tough and often stubborn politician, holding onto views that had a foundation deep in her Zionist ideology, which was influenced by memories of atrocities against the Jews in Eastern Europe during her childhood and the Holocaust of World War II. This quality was useful for Israel as a nation of embattled people but became problematic once peace initiatives appeared, for Meir often believed such initiatives were insincere.

Meir helped create certain problems in the peace process that continued beyond her tenure as prime minister. She failed to establish any specific position about the occupied territories the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She insisted on direct negotiations with the enemy and opposed any form of mediation by outsiders. She refused, perhaps correctly, any interim withdrawal before a peace treaty was signed. Her most serious misjudgment was probably the failure to take up Sadat’s explorations for peace in 1971. Yet she was an exponent of peace and held a consistent view.

Bibliography

Bar-Joseph, Uri. The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. A history of the Yom Kippur War, focusing on the failure of Israeli intelligence before the 1973 Arab attack.

Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. New York: Times Books, 2006. Chronicles the birth of the settler movement in the Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War, including information about Meir’s administration.

Martin, Ralph. Golda Meir: The Romantic Years. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988. An examination of Meir’s personal life, with less emphasis on the politics of the Middle East.

Meir, Golda. My Life. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975. The most valuable work for understanding the life and accomplishments of Meir. This is not a diary but rather an exposition of what Meir believed were her most important accomplishments. Includes some texts of her more important speeches.

Rafael, Gideon. Destination Peace: Three Decades of Israeli Foreign Policy. New York: Stein & Day, 1981. An examination of Israeli foreign policy from the perspective of an individual who served as Israeli ambassador to London, permanent representative to the United Nations, and director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Contains many insightful references to the career of Golda Meir.

Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. A comprehensive history of Zionism and the state of Israel, with particular references to Meir’s prime ministry.

Shenker, Israel. “Golda Meir: Peace and Arab Acceptance Were Goals of Her Years as Premier.” The New York Times, December 9, 1978: 7. This is an article that appeared as part of an extensive obituary of Meir, summarizing her main approaches to the peace process.

Syrkin, Marie. Golda Meir: Israel’s Leader. New York: Putnam, 1969. An early and sympathetic portrait by a fellow American Zionist. Syrkin’s father, Nachman Syrkin, was a leading labor Zionist and strong influence on Meir during the 1930’s. Because they were completed before the end of Meir’s tenure as prime minister, neither work by Syrkin provides a full picture of Meir’s life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Golda Meir: Woman with a Cause. New York: Putnam, 1963. This portrait, like Syrkin’s later work, is based on a very close friendship between Meir and Syrkin.