BY ANAT ROSENBERG
Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel and the only woman ever to hold that title, was way ahead of her time. Born in Tsarist Russia in 1898, she grew up in Milwaukee and immigrated to mandatory Palestine in 1921. A die-hard socialist, she joined a kibbutz and then took on various public-service jobs that brought her to the attention of David Ben-Gurion, propelled her into the political limelight and ultimately into the prime minister’s seat. Golda, as she insisted everyone call her, held her own in Israel’s patriarchal society. While her legacy has been marred by the Yom Kippur War, author Francine Klagsbrun, in her new book “Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel” writes that the war “does not define Golda Meir.” Klasgbrun, who won the National Jewish Book Award for “Lioness,” spoke with AMIT about Golda the politician and the woman, and about what we can still learn from her today.
AMIT: Congratulations on the National Jewish Book Award. Do you feel that it affirms your view that it’s time to give Golda Meir her due?
Francine Klagsbrun: Yes, I do indeed. I mean it’s very lovely for me, but it’s also great for Golda—I don’t know how, but the word got out in Israel, and I’ve gotten notes and emails congratulating me from Israel and that makes me happy—because that lets them see that she’s important.
AMIT: Why did you decide to write about her in the first place? What drew you to her?
FK: Well, what drew me to her was that the publisher asked me to do it [laughs]. But as soon as it came up, I thought, this is something I really do want to do, because here she is, this woman head of Israel, of the government—that has not happened since then in Israel and certainly hasn’t happened here in the United States—and I wanted an answer to who was this woman? I got very caught up in who was she? Why, how did she get where she was in that very male-oriented society that she lived in? I wanted to learn more about Israel, actually, even though I’ve gone there a million times. Once I got caught up in that, it was so fascinating.
AMIT: You had access to a lot of recently published archival materials—how did you get your hands on those?
FK: Once they open an archive, anyone can use it. There are materials that were kept closed for 30 years or more, so once they were opened, I hired an Israeli researcher who is also a historian, who was extremely helpful, because I spent a lot of time in Israel, but I couldn’t live there.
AMIT: You spent about eight years on the book. What were some of the more interesting or unknown things that you discovered about Golda?
FK: Some of it was personal things that I really didn’t know much about—family issues. By now everybody knows that she had lovers, but I found letters that had not been published from lovers to her, and letters from her husband, who was suffering [and] wanted her back, so that was fascinating. There’s a cache of letters that some family member gave me that were her husband’s family writing about him and about her that nobody’s ever seen before, so that was really interesting to me. Then, you know the workings of the government. The arguments in the cabinet. I mean if you read the cabinet meetings, it is very interesting, because Golda, her chief weapon was sarcasm, and she could be really sarcastic to people who disagreed with her, and they could be pretty rough, all of them. So that was extremely interesting, to read original material like that.
AMIT: You also interviewed her two children.
FK: Yes, I got to know her children really well.
AMIT: What was that like for you?
FK: Well, that was very important for me, and actually they both died since then. But her son, Menachem, took the lead in all this. At first, he said, ‘We’ve decided as a family we’re not going to cooperate with you, because there have been too many negative things written about our mother.’ But he sort of checked me out, and I guess I checked out okay, so at first [they agreed to cooperate] tentatively, and then they really came to trust me. I said, ‘I’m telling you now I’m not going to cover up her faults. I’m going to present her as she was, but I’m not going to go out of my way to be negative. My goal is to be fair, and I promise you I will be as fair as I could be.’ And they accepted it. I think they were glad that somebody was trying to be fair to her.
Francine Klagsbrun. (Credit: Joan Roth)
AMIT: Obviously, because of the Yom Kippur War, Golda gets quite a bad rap. But why do you think that there is such a discrepancy about her legacy in the U.S. versus Israel? Is it just because the war hit closer to home in Israel?
FK: I think that’s a very large part of it. There were 2,600 casualties, and that’s a lot of people for Israel, so everybody knew somebody who was killed or wounded or in the war, and they felt that, ultimately, she was responsible for them being taken by surprise, although her generals kept assuring her that everything was going to be okay and there would not be a war. I think another part of it really is misogyny, a kind of sexism—that maybe from the war, they sort of went backwards and began criticizing her style. Instead of confident, now she was self-righteous. Before you might have said fearless, now she was arrogant. Israelis also blame Moshe Dayan, but his reputation has not suffered as much as hers.
AMIT: Do you think that she’s held to a higher standard than men like Moshe Dayan or other colleagues or peers?
FK: I do. I think Moshe Dayan and particularly Eli Zeira who was the head of AMAN, the military intelligence, kept reassuring her. Whatever signs there were of war, it was always no, there was a low probability of war, because they had what they called the “conception” [“conceptzia” in Hebrew] that if Egypt didn’t get the weapons from the Soviet Union that would allow it to strike Israel, then Egypt would not go to war and Syria would not go to war without Egypt. Her mistake was listening to her generals. But what would another head of state do? Was it because she was a woman that she listened? People have said that. ‘Well, you know, she listened to her male generals,’ But I don’t know. If you were a man head of state and your generals kept telling you there’s not going to be a war, would you go ahead and prepare for the war anyway?
AMIT: You also wrote that she knew that if she were to launch a preemptive strike that she wouldn’t have gotten aid from the United States, so it seems like she really was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
FK: People criticized her for not preempting, but the fact is that [Henry] Kissinger did warn her against preempting. She knew she would need the United States one way or another, so she didn’t want to do that. The one thing she always blamed herself for was that she had this intuitive feeling, certainly close to when the war was going to break out, and that she did not listen to her own intuition at the time.
AMIT: Do you think that Israeli leaders today can learn something from her about bridging gaps between Israel and American Jews and the Diaspora?
FK: Golda was the first to really develop a very close relationship between Israel and the United States on a governmental level, and also on a people level. She was here a great deal. She came almost every year, and Americans were very proud of her. She was one of us, and made good. They were very taken with her. She was a very charismatic person. I think her attitude to America was not one of arrogance that we often see now. You know, ‘Israel has prospered and we don’t need America.’ I mean, I’ve been told this. ‘We don’t need America. We don’t need American Jews.’ She always thought, yes, Israel absolutely needed America and needed American Jews, and they still do.
AMIT: You also said that one of the more puzzling aspects of her life was her rejection of the women’s movement. Yet her actions and behavior clearly would be described as feminist by today’s standards. Were you able to decipher that at all?
FK: I think there are two parts to that. One was that she was a socialist, and saw society in socialistic terms—that they didn’t need separate movements for any one group, because under a socialist state you’d all be equal. The other, quite frankly, was that she wanted to make her way in this man’s world, and even today, female leaders do not announce themselves as feminists. You never hear the word ‘feminist’ being used to describe Theresa May, for example. But they didn’t go out of their way to say ‘those crazy, bra-burning women,’ as she did. She was a little excessive in that. But I think she was living in this man’s world, and even as prime minister, just to hold that position and to get ahead, she was not going to identify with the women’s movement.
AMIT: You cover her personal life in great detail, including the fact that her marriage dissolved even though they didn’t formally divorce, and that she had affairs. Was that a conscious effort to try to humanize her?
FK: I was not writing a political bio, although it does have a lot of politics in it. I really thought a biography of somebody should have their life. It’s interesting to learn what a person is like, you know?
AMIT: Finally, with the 120th anniversary of her birth coming up, what would you want Israelis and American Jews to remember about Golda or to take away from your book?
FK: I’d like them to remember that she was really, truly instrumental in the founding of the state. Ben-Gurion was the vision behind it, there’s no question about that. He was the great force. But she did an enormous amount to make that happen and worked very hard and raised money, and I think Israelis particularly should know that, because I don’t think they do.
The other was that she had enormous integrity. Whatever other criticisms you have about her, she lived modestly. One time she gave a check to the government because she thought that she had spent more money than she should have. That would never happen today. There was an integrity and a modesty, and I think that’s a really important lesson to keep in mind today. —AR
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
