Golda Meir was the only woman among the founding
fathers of the state of Israel. In many ways, her story reflects the story of
Israel itself. A working-class girl from pogrom-ridden Russia, she had a stormy
adolescence in Milwaukee, emigrated to Palestine in 1921, and rose steadily
through the ranks of the Labour party to become Israel’s labour minister,
foreign minister and finally prime minister.
Even at the height of her power, “Golda”, as she was
affectionately called, retained her warmth and informality. She looked like a
kindly Jewish grandmother, with her craggy face, baggy suits, orthopaedic shoes
and old-fashioned handbag, but this homely exterior masked a pugnacious
personality, a burning ambition, monumental egocentrism and an iron will.
The subtitle of this new biography is problematic.
She may have been “the iron lady” of Israel but she was most emphatically not a
lady of the Arab people. Indeed, far from being a regional icon, Meir
personified the most paranoid, aggressive and racist attitudes of the Zionist
movement when it came to dealing with the Arabs. She was afraid of Arabs, and
her fears were fuelled by personal memories of pogroms and by the collective
Jewish trauma of the Holocaust. Meir’s position was simple: them or us. She
absolutely refused to accept that the Arabs were moved by a sense of injustice,
that they felt humiliated, or that they had a different narrative of the
conflict in Palestine.
Elinor Burkett’s biography is readable and
fair-minded, but rather superficial. It is based largely on secondary sources,
newspaper reports and interviews with the subject’s family and friends. The
book does not break any significant new ground and, contrary to the extravagant
claims of the blurb, makes hardly any use at all of the official documents
released under Israel’s liberal 30-year rule. Burkett is better at dissecting
the many-sided personality of this unusual leader than at analysing the
political context in which she operated, and is at her best when contrasting
Meir’s tawdry private life with her sanctimonious public posturing.
Meir emerges from this account as a terrible mother
and a dreadful wife. She spent so little time with her two small children that
they were happy when she suffered one of her regular migraine attacks because
it meant she had to stay at home with them. Later on she insisted that one of
her grandchildren, who was born with mild Down’s syndrome, be sent away to an
institution. Meir also cheated on her long-suffering husband, Morris. Sometimes
she had more than one lover on the go. But although she herself was a liberated
woman, she never supported feminism as a political cause.
From the beginning Meir belonged to the hawkish wing
of the Labour party. In 1956 David Ben-Gurion chose her to replace the moderate
Moshe Sharett as foreign minister in order to clear the decks for the sordid
collusion with the colonial powers to attack Egypt. Meir had few qualifications
for the job; she was preferred mainly because she accepted Ben-Gurion’s
conception of the Foreign Ministry as little more than the PR wing of the
Ministry of Defence. She was, in fact, the perfect henchwoman for the chief
proponent of the policy of clobbering the Arabs hard until they surrendered.
Meir’s imperious personality, temper tantrums,
uncontrollable urge to be didactic and her disdain for diplomats did little to
endear her to her staff at the Foreign Ministry. Nor was she a patch on her
predecessor when it came to presenting Israel’s case abroad. Abba Eban, who was
extraordinarily eloquent in seven languages but had the backbone of a noodle,
observed that his boss used only 200 words, although her vocabulary extended to
500.
When prime minister Levi Eshkol died in February
1969, Meir was 71 years old, retired from politics and undergoing treatment for
cancer in Switzerland. The polls showed that only 3% of Israelis favoured her
as prime minister. Nevertheless, the Labour party bosses chose her as caretaker
leader, believing that only she could head off a clash between Moshe Dayan and
Yigal Allon. The experience of supreme power, however, acted as a tonic, giving
Israel’s first female prime minister a new lease of life and sustaining her for
five more years at the top.
Like Margaret Thatcher, she was a conviction
politician who radiated authority, but she was intellectually incapable of
making the kind of subtle distinctions that are so crucial in the conduct of
foreign policy. Her innate personal stubbornness was translated into a national
posture in the Middle East conflict, with disastrous consequences for her own
people and for the region as a whole. To be fair, Meir did not initiate the
building of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories - a violation of
international law and the main obstacle to peace. But she turned the
preservation of the post-1967 territorial status quo into a sacred mission that
precluded any peaceful settlement of the dispute with the Arabs.
One does not need a rich vocabulary to say “no”. She
said “no” to every peace plan during her premiership and had none of her own to
put forward. In February 1971, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt presented a plan
for an interim settlement based on a limited Israeli withdrawal into Sinai and
the reopening of the Suez Canal to international shipping. Even some of the
battle-hardened generals saw merit in this proposal, but Meir rejected it, at
least partly for personal reasons: she did not want to go down in Zionist
history as the first leader to retreat from territory. It is probable that
progress on Sadat’s proposal could have prevented the outbreak of the Yom
Kippur war, which claimed the lives of 2,838 Israeli soldiers. But Meir was
wedded to the policy of attrition. It left the leaders of Egypt and Syria no
option but to resort to military force in order to break the diplomatic
deadlock. This is what they did on October 6 1973, taking the Israel Defence
Forces by complete surprise and forcing it on to the defensive.
The war was a monumental strategic blunder. Burkett
argues that Meir’s iron resolve stood between Israel and surrender after the
defence minister, Moshe Dayan, lost his nerve in the initial phase of the
conflict. But it was Meir’s myopia, arrogance and diplomatic intransigence that
were primarily responsible for the outbreak of this war in the first place. A
commission of inquiry exonerated the prime minister, but the Israeli public
took to the streets in protest and her career came crashing down in flames.
Meir never tired of repeating that she was ready to
travel to any corner of the earth, at any time of day or night, to meet any
Arab leader who wanted to talk about peace. The reality did not match the
rhetoric, and most of her officials knew this. Behind her back they used to
joke about Golda’s launderette, which was open 24 hours a day. A fitting
epitaph might have been: “Golda’s launderette is closed for the duration.”
Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations
at the University of Oxford. His books include Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s
Life in War and Peace (Penguin).
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