Golda meir marion s. trikosko

Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist famed for her rigorous, unyielding interviews of world leaders, left her first meeting with Golda Meir in despair.

In 1949, Golda Meir was elected to the Knesset for the Labor Party and served uninterruptedly until 1974. Golda Meir was the first woman to become Prime Minister of Israel. One such statement has been adapted to now say: “If Russia lays down its weapons, there is no war. “I had planned to come to Palestine, to go to [Kibbutz] Merhavia, to be active in the Labour movement,” she wrote.

In 1924, the couple left the kibbutz and lived briefly in Tel Aviv before setting up home in Jerusalem where they had two children. It’s a very different attitude to power… but it’s still immense power.” Still, Golda’s empathy and amiability should not be confused with weakness. During the war, she barely left her office, and stayed true to the lesson she learned during the desperate years prior to Israel’s independence: “One can always push oneself a little bit beyond what only yesterday was thought to be the absolute limit of one’s endurance.”

Avner movingly describes Meir’s Sukkot visit to soldiers attempting to celebrate the holiday on a desolate battlefield.

She was appointed Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union September 2, 1948 – March 1949. She talked to them with the “countenance of a concerned grandmother… [O]n that Sukkot day, this indefatigable and implacable old woman represented the very essence of Jewish self-defense; she was the fervent agent of the view that it was infinitely preferable to deal with power’s confounding implications than to be powerless again.” Her stoic leadership steered Israel to victory at a time when it faced the greatest threat to its existence.

I will never again be the person I was before the Yom Kippur War.”

Later in life, she visited her old school in Milwaukee. In 1948, she flew to the US and defied everyone’s expectations by singlehandedly stirring the hearts of American Jewry with her powerful rhetoric, returning to Israel with fifty million dollars – double the amount hoped for.

The shrewd foresight she displayed in rejecting the idea of a pre-emptive strike (and the warm relationship she had earlier cultivated with Richard Nixon) allowed for an invaluable airlift of planes and weapons from America that steered the course of victory decisively in Israel’s favor. In the years between 1928 and 1934, she was secretary of the Labor Party’s Women’s Labor Council, which required her to spend a period in the United States.

On December 8, 1978 she died of lymphoma in Jerusalem at the age of 80. “I defy anyone to argue that Zionism is not utterly incompatible with pessimism,” Golda wrote in her memoir. She reminds me so much of my mother – the same gray curly hair, her tired and wrinkled face, that sweet and energetic look.” In a recent press conference for the upcoming biopic, Golda, actress Helen Mirren called Meir “one of the most extraordinary characters I’ve ever played,” noting “…she was perfectly happy to toddle around in the kitchen making everyone coffee and playing the grandmotherly role.

Golda was exonerated by the official commission of enquiry after the war’s end, which praised her for her wisdom, common-sense and speedy decision making.

Golda served as Minister of Labor, Minister of Foreign Affairs and then as Israel’s Fourth Prime Minister from March 17, 1969 to June 3, 1974.