Golda
by Elinor Burkett
HarperCollins. 483 pp. $27.95

Reviewed by
Dean Godson

Golda Meir (1898-1978) is not quite Israel’s forgotten premier, but inside the borders of the Jewish state she is perhaps the least spoken of. This is arguably the last outcome anyone might have envisaged in her heyday. A little over three decades ago, she was one of the most celebrated figures in the world. Although initially a stop-gap Labor prime minister after Levi Eshkol died in 1969, she was, at the age of seventy-one, no Millard Fillmore or Chester Arthur. Charles de Gaulle, who normally stood stock-still in a room until others came up to him, would cross the floor to greet her; Anne Bancroft and Ingrid Bergman rushed to portray her on stage and screen; and her autobiography, My Life (1975), was a runaway bestseller.

“Our Golda,” as Israelis called her, played the role of the Jewish grandmother to the hilt—loving, fiercely protective, iron-willed, and manipulative all at once. She had loads of charm and an unfailing ability to strike the right populist note for Jewish audiences without alienating Gentiles. “I understand the Arabs want to wipe us out,” she would say in her best folksy manner, “but do they really expect us to cooperate?”

As the journalist Elinor Burkett notes in this new biography:

Perhaps because of her age, her sarcastic wit charmed when it might have offended coming out of the ruby red lips of a woman in a lithe young body. The package was perfect, from her sensible shoes, frumpy dresses, and swollen ankles to her old-fashioned handbag and omnipresent Chesterfields. She managed to translate her warts—prosaic warts with which so many could identify—into reassuring virtues.

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Although her name may have lost its luster, that can hardly detract from the drama of Golda’s life, which is always worth retelling and is on the whole told well by Burkett. It began as a classic story of Jewish escape to America from poverty and pogrom in late-19th-century Russia. Then, by way of a girlhood in Milwaukee, her American sojourn became but the prelude to her aliyah  to the Holy Land in the 1920’s. She had battled parents with conventional and ill-judged ideas about what she was destined for. (“You could be a very good housekeeper,” offered her mother. “But a clever woman you’ll never be.”) Although she married early, Zionism was the only love that ever really engaged her, and she was soon effectively separated from her husband. In later years her children had to attend party meetings in order to see her: she noticed them only as she conducted a head count of those voting in favor of her motions.

It is no less instructive to recall the role Golda played in many of the seminal events in the development of the state of Israel: her part in the creation of its national-insurance system; her status as one of the few really competent English speakers in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, a skill that enabled her, with the help of American friends, to become Israel’s preeminent fund-raiser; her outreach, during her tenure as the country’s longest-serving foreign minister, to the newly independent nations of black Africa, an initiative later tragically aborted by the Arab oil pressures after the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

But that conflict, which took place during her tenure as prime minister, brings us back to why Golda has become something of a non-person in her own country. The reason is simple: the Yom Kippur war and its aftermath triggered a massive retrospective reassessment of the nation’s leadership and its values. In particular, Golda was judged to be emblematic of the hubris of the immediate post-1967 era—an era of alleged lost chances to make peace with the Arabs and of the entrenchment of an occupation that many in the Israeli elite increasingly thought was rotting the nation from within. Yitzhak Rabin summarized the mood of the time when he observed early in 1973 that Golda, although enjoying “better boundaries than King David,” had failed to seize this propitious moment for deal-making.

In other words, Golda has become a sort of scapegoat for the sins of a whole society, or, perhaps, a reminder of a former self that many Israelis now want to forget. As Burkett rightly observes:

Golda wore the sheen of triumphant Israel in the days before that triumph became fashionably suspect and radiated moral certainty at a time when to be sure of one’s morals was still honorable.

There are ironies here. On the Palestinian question, Golda has become much too right-wing for contemporary tastes, especially in her supposed denial of the existence of a Palestinian nation. But, conversely, in her socio-economic views she would now be regarded as far too collectivist—very much Old rather than New Left. The machines of the Histadrut trade union and the Mapai party, of which she was an integral part and product, were at times downright Sovietological in their practice. In a telling passage in this book, the Left-libertarian Shulamit Aloni recalls the time “when I stood up at a meeting and started to talk about something and began by saying ‘I think.’ Golda interrupted and chastised me. ‘There is no I think,’ she said. ‘There is only we think.’”

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Elinor Burkett has produced a useful account of Meir’s life, and her book has real virtues. First and foremost, it rescues Meir from the relative obscurity into which she has fallen, reminding readers of episodes that were well known at the time but many of which have been long forgotten. Golda is also unpretentious, and mercifully light on psychobabble—reflecting, perhaps, its subject’s own lack of introspection.

But there are also serious shortcomings, not all of which are the author’s fault. One of them has to do with the relatively small amount of fresh oral testimony that can be obtained. It is striking how many of the dramatis personae of Meir’s premiership are no longer with us or are unable to talk. The list includes most of the senior generals of the Yom Kippur war, who were only in their mid-40’s at the time: Haim Bar Lev, David Elazar, Shmuel Gonen, Ariel Sharon, and Aharon Yariv. Of the key military figures of the war, only three survive: Yitzhak Hofi of the northern command, Eli Zeira, the ill-fated head of military intelligence, and Israel Lior, Meir’s military secretary. Burkett says she could gain access to none of them. Despite her repeated efforts, Shimon Peres, too, declined to speak.

Nor does Burkett have a command of Hebrew, which means she could not read Zeira’s or Lior’s memoirs. This is a serious if common failing when writing books about the Jewish state: despite the massive international interest in Israeli affairs, little of the most interesting literature is available in English.

These deficiencies take their toll. Burkett ably recounts such episodes as the internal recriminations in the Israeli Labor party after the 1973 war, and in general she does well in bringing out the paradoxes of Golda: the ardent party factionalist who demanded absurdly high levels of personal and political loyalty but who nonetheless brought Moshe Dayan (the key figure in a rival split-away faction of Mapai) into her inner councils and stuck with him to the point of self-destruction; the grandmother of the nation who enjoyed little in the way of a sustained intimate relationship with her own grandchildren; the liberated woman who did surprisingly little for the advancement of other women.

Yet the big questions of her premiership remain unanswered. Why did Golda cling to Dayan for so long? Why, in September 1973, did she ignore the warning of King Hussein of Jordan, who flew his own helicopter to a Mossad safe house to tell the leader of Israel, a country with which his kingdom was still at war, that it would soon be attacked by Egypt and Syria? Why, despite her high reputation in America, did she seem to have so few cards to play in Washington during the crises of the Yom Kippur war and its aftermath?

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Should we care about any of this now? Yes: a case can be made that Golda’s tenure in office defined the moral and political parameters within which all Israeli governments have operated since her time. After all, if her government failed to take the risks for peace that it should have taken, and thereby became responsible for the deaths of 2,500 Israelis in the 1973 war, does that not impose a burden upon every subsequent government to travel “the extra mile” to avoid war, even if the price to be paid is very high indeed?

But what if this interpretation—by now, the predominant narrative of the years 1967-73—is based upon an inaccurate reading of history?Burkett quotes a remark of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s widow to an Israeli newspaper in 1989:

I do not agree with those among us and among you who assert today that Sadat tried to achieve a real peace before 1973. Sadat needed one more war in order to win and enter into negotiations from a position of strength.

The trouble with so much Israeli introspection and even self-flagellation over 1973 is that, until such time as historians obtain genuine access to the archives of Egypt and Syria, it will remain impossible to obtain a full picture of what really happened.

Golda’s premiership was a turning point in another way as well. Although Arab fedayeen had engaged in terrorism both before and after the creation of the state, Meir was the first Israeli prime minister to contend with large-scale international terrorist “spectaculars” that were themselves a form of armed propaganda intended for global consumption. In deed and especially in speech, she responded with a crispness and moral clarity that no successor has matched. Israel desperately needs those skills on the international scene today, as the Jewish state half-heartedly fights a rearguard action against the latest third-world campaign of delegitimation.

A master of PR, Meir also understood its limitations. As she told a private gathering in New York on her first visit to the United States as prime minister: “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive with a bad image.” She was no genius, and she made some dreadful errors, but she had huge reserves of common sense and she understood two large, related things: first, the enduring nature of Arab hostility to the Zionist enterprise; second, the vulnerability of that enterprise. Although this book constitutes a renewed start, Golda still awaits a truly full-scale biography.