Saturday, March 28, 2015

AviShlaim. The face that launched a thousand MiGs. As prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir’s greatest talent was for saying no. Guardian. 15 Aug 2008, last modified 15 Aug 2008.



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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