Meir, Golda

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Golda Meir

Born on May 3, 1898 (Kiev, Ukraine)
Died on December 8, 1978 (Jerusalem, Israel)

Prime minister of Israel
Political activist

Golda Meir (pronounced may-EAR) became the first woman to lead a modern nation when she was elected prime minister of Israel in 1969. Over the previous forty-five years she had steadily risen through the political ranks, proving herself a strong, opinionated leader. The events of her life included the persecution she felt during her childhood in Russia, her active participation in the budding Zionist movement (the movement to create a Jewish homeland) in the United States during her teenage years, and her pioneering move to Palestine in the 1920s. All of these experiences fueled her fervent desire to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Her devotion to nation building took precedence over her marriage, her children, and sometimes her own health. For her efforts she earned a place in the hearts of her people. Known as "the uncrowned queen of Israel" and "Mother Courage," Meir is one of Israel's most beloved leaders.

"We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon—no alternative."

Born into poverty

Meir was born Golda Mabovitch on May 3, 1898, in Kiev, Ukraine, at the time a part of Russia. (She took the last name Meir in 1956, when Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion [1886–1973; see entry] persuaded her to change her name to a more Hebrew-sounding name as a way of showing allegiance to Israel.) Meir's early childhood was marked by poverty and discrimination. Russians had imposed restrictions against Jews since the 1840s, and Meir's parents, Moshe and Bluma Mabovitch, found it difficult to make a living. Her father was trained as a carpenter, but was unable to find enough work to support his wife and three young daughters. More than their economic stability, the Mabovitchs worried about their safety. In the 1880s Russians began violent attacks on Jews, called pogroms. In the dark of night, Russians would roam the streets, shouting "Death to Jews." Some would break into Jewish homes and rob or harm the inhabitants. When she was four years old Meir remembered her father nailing boards across the entrance of the family's home to guard against attacks. The experience convinced Meir that "this was happening to me because I was Jewish," as she recalled in her autobiography. The feeling of injustice and horror never left her.

In 1903 Moshe Mabovitch sold his tools and immigrated to the United States, promising to send for his wife and children when he had made enough money to pay for their safe passage. Bluma Mabovitch moved with her children to her hometown of Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, where she supported her young family by selling homemade bread. After three years in the United States, Moshe Mabovitch earned enough money to move his entire family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There Bluma Mabovitch opened a grocery store with an attached apartment where the family lived. For the first time, the Mabovitchs had running water, a flush toilet, and an icebox. Although the family remained relatively poor, the Mabovitchs found peace in Wisconsin and delighted in their ability to raise their children free from the anti-Semitism (discrimination against Jews) that they had experienced in Russia. The move also gave the children an opportunity for education. Each morning Meir would open her mother's store and then go on to school.

An early activist

Meir was thrilled with her new experiences, but noticed by the fourth grade that not every student could afford textbooks. School was free, but students were expected to pay a small fee for textbooks. Not all students' families could afford this fee. Meir felt that something should be done, and in 1909 she founded the American Young Sisters Society and led a drive to raise funds for schoolbooks. It was her first experience with activism.

Meir enjoyed school and excelled in every subject. She wanted to earn a high school diploma and become a teacher, but her parents had other plans for their daughter. They wanted her to marry, even knowing that married women were not allowed to teach at the time. Meir could not submit to her parents' wishes. At age fifteen she moved to Denver, Colorado, to live with her married sister, Sheyna. Meir enrolled in high school there and earned money at her brother-in-law's dry-cleaning shop.

Meir soon became involved in politics. In her sister's home, Meir listened to political debates about such ideas as socialism (a political theory about a society in which the control and ownership of industry, land, and profits are held collectively by the government) and Marxism (a political theory created by Karl Marx [1818–1883] that calls for a classless society). She grew especially interested in Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

By the time she was seventeen, Meir's parents asked her to move back to Milwaukee. They promised to support her desire to earn her high school and teaching diplomas. Meir did finish school, earning a teaching certificate from the Milwaukee Teachers' Training College. But her first love was now Zionism. In 1917 she took a job with the Poalei Zion, a group that promoted the ideals of Zionism. She passed out pamphlets about pioneers to Palestine, where most Zionists believed the Jewish nation should be formed, and collected donations for the Jewish National Fund, which helped buy land in Palestine for Jewish settlers. After hearing about new pogroms in Poland and Ukraine, Meir organized a protest march that drew thousands and gained national attention. Soon Meir had resolved that she must move to Palestine to carry on her efforts.

Life in Palestine

Since leaving Denver, Meir had never lost contact with Morris Meyerson, a man whom she had met at her sister's house. The couple married on December 24, 1917. Although Meyerson did not share his wife's enthusiasm for life in Palestine, he agreed to move with her. In 1921 they immigrated to Palestine to live on a kibbutz, a communal settlement where settlers share all property and work collaboratively. Meir worked hard on the kibbutz, raising chickens, picking almonds, and planting trees, and she soon took over management of the community kitchen. Within a year, Meir won an elected position on the kibbutz steering committee and became the kibbutz's representative to the Histadrut, the leading organization of Zionist labor unions. Meyerson did not thrive on the kibbutz, however, and the couple moved to the more urban areas of Tel Aviv and later Jerusalem, in order to improve his health. Meir adjusted readily to city life, taking a job with Histadrut. After the birth of her children, Menachem and Sarah, however, Meir quit her job and devoted herself to motherhood.

Meir was restless at home, and by 1928 she decided to return to work. She missed being an active participant in the building of the Jewish homeland. She became the secretary of the Moetzet Hapoalot, the Women's Labor Council, where she helped women settling in Palestine. Her position required her to move back to Tel Aviv. She took her children with her, but left her husband behind in Jerusalem. She remained married until Meyerson's death in 1951, but spent little time with him after 1928. Although her job required long hours and much time away from her children, it fulfilled Meir's desire to make an impact on more people's lives. This was the job that set Meir on a course to devote the rest of her life to her Jewish homeland.

Increased political responsibility

Meir quickly rose through the ranks of the labor organizations and obtained various political positions throughout the 1930s. Throughout World War II (1939–45; a war in which France, Great Britain, the United States and their allies defeated Germany, Japan, and their allies), Meir worked to bring Jews into Palestine. When the British government imposed a limit on Jewish immigration into Palestine in a White Paper (official document) in 1939, Meir worked to find exceptions to allow more Jews, especially children, to escape the horrors of the concentration camps in Europe, where Jews were being imprisoned and subject to mass extermination. Unable to convince Great Britain, which controlled Palestine during the war, to allow unlimited emigration of Jews from Germany, even in the face of the brutal persecution Jews faced from Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) Nazi Party, Meir renewed her devotion to a Jewish homeland. In defiance of British regulations, she joined the underground Jewish defense organization called Haganah and smuggled Jews into Palestine during the war.

In 1946 Meir was elected to lead the political department of the Jewish Agency, the governing body of Jews that served as an interim government for the Jewish state. Meir joined a hunger strike in 1947 to protest the British refusal to allow a shipload of Jewish immigrants to enter Palestine. Shortly after the strike, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. Meir vigorously opposed this decision, believing that the Jewish people had a right to create their independent state throughout all of Palestine, including Jerusalem, which under the United Nations plan would have resided in Arabic territory. As tensions rose between Arabs and Jews in 1947, Meir disguised herself as an Arab woman in order to travel into Transjordan (now Jordan) to negotiate with the Arab leader King Abdullah (1882–1951; reigned 1921–51). During the trip she had to pass undetected through ten Arab checkpoints. Although her efforts failed to keep Transjordan from joining the other Arab nations in the war against Israel, Meir's trip demonstrated her deep commitment to her country. In January 1948 Meir toured the United States, speaking to various groups in order to raise money for weapons to protect an independent state of Israel. Within six weeks she returned with $50 million.

When Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, Meir was one of the twenty-five signers of the new nation's Proclamation of Independence. The proclamation triggered a war. The next day seven Arab nations, who refused to recognize the Jewish state on land that had been home to Palestinians for generations, began dropping bombs on the new country. Although the United States quickly recognized the new nation and would soon become Israel's closest ally, Israel and its Arab neighbors had just begun a series of conflicts that would remain unresolved nearly six decades later.

The turmoil in her newly formed country did not deter Meir from continuing her efforts. She was elected into the first Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 1949, as a candidate of the country's strongest political party, the Mapai (which would later become the Labor Party). She remained in the government for the next twenty-five years. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, appointed Meir in 1949 to be the Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Russia, the capital of the Soviet Union. She served at the post for seven months, until Ben-Gurion appointed her to his cabinet as minister of labor and development, a post in which she remained until 1956. As minister of labor, Meir worked to improve the living conditions of Israel's tens of thousands of immigrants, many of whom were living in tents. To do so, she initiated Israel's first national insurance bill; oversaw the development of what is known as the "Meyerson Plan" (at the time Meir was still using her married name), which provided for the building of thirty thousand low-cost housing units; and created a public works program to create jobs for Israelis. During her tenure Meir eliminated Jewish refugee tent cities in Israel and built roads, dubbed "golden roads" in her honor.

Reached top echelons of government

Ben-Gurion appointed Meir to be his foreign minister in 1956. The position of foreign minister is considered the second most important rank in the Israeli government. Showing his respect for the tough Meir, Ben-Gurion declared her "the only man" in his cabinet, according to Robert Slater in Golda. As foreign minister, Meir negotiated cooperative efforts between Israel, Britain, and France. She also began a series of trips to Africa in order to win the support and allegiance from African nations for Israel. She noticed that the emerging African nations were going through the same growing pains that Israel had experienced. She sent Israeli doctors, teachers, and engineers to Africa in order to help these new nations, which had previously been managed by imperial powers such as France and Great Britain. She succeeded masterfully, though many African countries later switched their allegiance from Israel to Arab nations after Meir left her position.

In 1965, at age sixty-seven, Meir retired from some of her government duties. She resigned her cabinet position, but continued to serve in the Knesset and remained active on the executive board of the Mapai Party. She had been diagnosed with cancer two years earlier, and had also suffered a variety of other health problems that required her to make frequent visits to the hospital. Meir kept the true nature of her health problems secret from even her closest friends, and each of her trips to the hospital was dismissed as related to minor problems such as a cold or fatigue. Not until her death would the public learn the severity of Meir's health problems. With fewer government responsibilities, Meir enjoyed spending time with her grandchildren.

Although her health continued to limit her activities, Meir remained a strong force within the Mapai Party. Party members strongly disagreed with each other, and many feared the party would suffer from its internal power struggles. By 1966 it became clear to Meir that she must come out of her semi-retirement to assume the leadership of the party as its secretary-general. It was felt that she was the only person who could hold the party together. She was the one person all sides trusted. "I truly believed that the future of the labor movement was at stake," Meir explained in her autobiography. "And although I could hardly bear the idea of giving up the peace and quiet I had finally attained—even if only for a few months—I couldn't turn my back at this stage of my life either on my principles or on my colleagues. So I said yes and went back to work, to traveling, to incessant meetings and to the bondage of an appointment book."

Became prime minister

As secretary-general, Meir worked hard to unite her party. When Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol (1895–1969; served 1963–69) died on February 26, 1969, his cabinet members selected Meir to be his successor. Meir stepped in as interim prime minister, but in October of that year she was elected to her own four-year term in office. Upon her election as the fourth prime minister of Israel, Meir became one of only a few women to lead a nation at that time. As prime minister Meir spent a great deal of time trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East. Israel had captured territory during the Six-Day War in 1967 that more than doubled its size and created thousands of Arab refugees. Israel had hoped to use the territory as a bargaining tool in peace negotiations with neighboring Arab nations. No nation would negotiate, however, and Israel remained in a state of alert while fending off periodic attacks along its borders.

As prime minister Meir kept in daily contact with her advisors and ministers. She often met with influential members of her political party around her kitchen table the Saturday night before official Sunday meetings of her cabinet members. Doing so kept her abreast of all the issues facing her country.

No Palestinians

The struggle between Israel and its Arab neighbors has been a constant source of debate since the formation of Israel in 1948. Israel's occupation of territories after the Six-Day War of 1967, including the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Sinai Peninsula, poured fuel on the fire of the struggle between Israelis and Arabs. Thousands of Arab refugees lived in the occupied territories. These people had either lived for years on the land that was now occupied by Israel or had fled there after Israel declared its independence. Calling themselves Palestinians, after the name of the former British territory, these Arabic people sought recognition of their right to their own nation of Palestine.

When Golda Meir assumed her position as Israeli prime minister in 1969, Palestinians were becoming more organized and vocal about their desire to create their own homeland. In an attempt to stop the growing momentum of the Palestinian movement, Meir declared in an interview with the Sunday Times of London on June 15, 1969, that "there was no such thing as Palestinians." She went on to say in Robert Slater's book Golda, "When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we [Jews] came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

Meir's words infuriated those who considered themselves Palestinians, uniting them in their desire for their own homeland. Many of them had lived on the land that was now Israel for generations. Arabs felt that Palestinians had been evicted from their homes and had an equal, if not greater, right to that land. One of the most powerful groups to emerge from this situation was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which committed itself not only to the creation of an independent Palestinian state but also to the destruction of Israel. As tensions between Israelis and Palestinians grew, according to Slater, Meir later tried to soften the meaning of her earlier statement, saying, "I am a Palestinian. From 1921 to 1948 I held a Palestinian passport. And I was aware that there were Arabs and Jews in Palestine and that all were Palestinians." Her words did little to lessen Arab outrage. Decades later, the conflict has yet to be resolved.

Peace was the most pressing issue in Israel during Meir's tenure as prime minister. On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt launched the Yom Kippur War (Arab countries refer to this war as the Arab-Israeli War) to win back some of the territories lost to Israel during the Six-Day War six years earlier. Although Meir and other Israeli officials secured aid from the United States, the war, which ended in late October, resulted in heavy losses of Israeli soldiers, though no loss of territory. Meir's popularity in Israel suffered. An investigation was conducted to discover who in the Israeli government was responsible for the country's lack of readiness at the onset of the war. As tensions within Israel rose, Meir declared her desire to retire, but members of her Labor Party convinced her to remain in office through the next elections.

When Meir won reelection on December 31, 1973, she was unsure of her ability to continue in the role of prime minister. She was tired and uncertain of her ability to successfully form a government. Although party members convinced her to stay in office for awhile, Meir's feelings did not change. On April 10, 1974, Meir announced her final retirement, and according to her autobiography said, "Five years are sufficient. It is beyond my strength to continue carrying this burden... . I beg of you not to try to persuade me to change my mind for any reason at all. It will not help."

Meir lived quietly in Jerusalem for another four years. She died of cancer on December 8, 1978. Only upon her death did even her closest friends learn of her struggle with the disease. Her funeral ceremony was attended by almost one hundred thousand mourners from around the world.