Golda Meir: The Iron Lady of the Middle East
by Elinor Burkett
Gibson Square, £17.99

JUST two years after Israel crushed its Arab neighbours in the 1967 war, Golda Meir was called upon to serve as the nation’s new premier. The nicotine-stained grandmother, clad in dour ill-fitting suits, orthopaedic shoes and apparently clueless as to how many soldiers made up a brigade, appeared inept to lead what had just become the new Sparta of the Middle East. Not least because she had already achieved fame in much of the West as a feminist and socialist icon. Her autobiography became an international bestseller. She was portrayed on stage and screen by Anne Bancroft and Ingrid Bergman. Having sponsored African liberation movements in the 1950s she was received as royalty throughout black Africa. But she resigned in 1974 after an unprecedented campaign of vilification attributing to her, quite unjustly, the blame for Israel’s initial military failings in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Elinor Burkett, a feminist writer based in Zimbabwe, set herself the task of rehabilitating Golda Meir’s reputation in this comprehensively researched and well-written biography.

Meir’s passionate and uncompromising brand of socialist Zionism took shape at a young age in Tsarist Russia. Having witnessed the pogroms – only just escaping a troop of Cossacks slashing the air with their sabres while vowing to kill the Jews – her family fled to Milwaukee and she to Palestine in 1921. There she immersed herself in labour and trade union politics.

David Ben Gurion dispatched her to New York following the 1947 partition of Palestine by the general assembly of the United Nations. She raised $50 million for the Jewish war effort by raising the spectre of a second Holocaust, this time committed by Israel’s Arab foes. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, a guest of Hitler during the war years, obliged by making no secret of his desire to eradicate Palestine’s 700,000 Jewish population. Ben Gurion appointed her minister of labour in 1949 and then foreign minister in 1956. It was plain from the outset that she lacked an appreciation for the subtleties of diplomacy. She loathed the urbane, sophisticated “Oxford-Cambridge clique” that dominated Israel’s foreign ministry. Abba Eban declined the position of adviser on foreign affairs to the PM’s office by declaring of Golda that “she and I would be happy and creative in proportion to the geographic distance separating us from each other.”

She was sidelined in policy making decisions regarding the Arab world and bypassed in dealings with the US. Prompted by her socialist idealism, she developed her own alliances with emerging black African states, becoming a regular guest of Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere. Burkett reveals that she even sanctioned the financing of Robert Mugabe’s office in Accra. At her behest Israeli construction companies built Nigeria’s Parliament building, major highways and bridges. In the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, Israeli companies developed water projects. Israel’s Zim shipping company helped develop Ghana’s Black Star Lines. She refused to visit white South Africa and instructed Israel’s UN delegation to vote in favour of anti-apartheid resolutions in the general assembly.

At the age of 70, and suffering from cancer, Meir became prime minister. In contrast to most of her successors, the West Bank and Gaza never featured on her personal map of Israel. Burkett observes that her “Judaism was too secular and too light on ancient history to entangle her in Old Testament nostalgia, and her nature was too practical to blind her to the daunting demographics. Who could think about Rachel’s tomb when retaining it meant keeping another 1.1 million Arabs inside Israel’s borders?”

The years between 1969 and 1973 ought to have provided an excellent opportunity to resolve what was then a purely territorial dispute between the two sides – unencumbered by the religious fundamentalist factor that now plagues the Middle East. Burkett, who writes from a trenchantly pro-Israeli perspective, attributes blame squarely on the Arab side for the failure to achieve peace. She cites the summit of Arab states in Khartoum following the 1967 war which not only rejected Levi Eshkol’s offer to trade the occupied territories for peace treaties, but emasculated Arab manoeuvrability for a generation by vowing no recognition, negotiation or peace with Israel. She cites a plethora of public statements by Yasser Arafat telling the world that peace could only be achieved following the destruction of Israel. However, one simply cannot ignore the fact that Meir’s failure to appreciate the distinctive Palestinian grievance within the overall Arab-Israeli  conflict hardly provided an incentive to compromise.

In 1973 Israel was booming economically and confident militarily. Meir’s swashbuckling defence minister, Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1967 war, was openly contemptuous of Arab military ability. Israeli intelligence findings, corroborated by a CIA report of a massive build up of Egyptian troops at the Suez Canal, were ignored. The October 1973 war saw, for the first time, Israeli positions overrun with an Egyptian army advancing towards the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes. The Syrians appeared within reach of Galilee and Haifa was exposed to invasion.

A clearly shaken Meir asked her medics to provide her with suicide tablets which she would take in the event of an Arab seizure of Israel. Israeli Phantom jets and Jericho missiles were armed with nuclear warheads ready to effect the Samson option. Assistance from the Americans was not easily forthcoming.

The author describes how, at this juncture, Meir provided her nation with platinum quality leadership. She appealed directly to her friends in Congress, to the powerful union leader George Meany and to America’s Jewish community for support. An Israeli diplomat observed at the time that “the Almighty had placed massive oil deposits under Arab soil – but it is our good fortune that God placed

five million Jews in America.” Nixon eventually relented. A massive US airlift of weaponry was despatched to Israel and, within two weeks, the Israeli military reversed the situation. 40,000 troops of the Egyptian Third army were surrounded by a pincer movement that left Ariel Sharon’s tanks within 65 miles of Cairo. Israeli forces regained the Golan heights and dug in 26 miles from Damascus.

Militarily, the Israeli army achieved a victory almost as impressive as the one achieved six years earlier. The Israeli public, however, never forgave Meir for the initial losses. Some 3,000 Israelis died in the war, a number proportionately greater than the losses sustained by the US in the Vietnam conflict. She was called a “murderer” by those who had lost their sons on the battlefield. She resigned in 1974 and died four years later, tormented by guilt over the failure to launch a pre-emptive strike in the days preceding the Yom Kippur war.

David Harounoff