Thinking Citizen Blog — Golda Meir: Minister of Labor, Foreign Minister, Prime Minister

Thinking Citizen Blog — Monday is Foreign Policy Day

Today’s Topic: Golda Meir (1898–1978): Minister of Labor (1949–1956), Foreign Minister (1956–1966), Prime Minister (1969–1974)

The May 24th post on the Israel-Palestine conflict led me to realize how little I knew about one of the titans of the 20th century — Golda Meir. So I did a little bit of digging and thought I would share some quotes of hers. I have also appended a few biographical notes from the earlier post for ease of reference. Warning: she was blunt. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.

BEAUTY, TINY SPARKS, OLD AGE

1. “Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.”

2. “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.”

3. “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.”

MOSES, MOSHE DAYAN, WOMEN’S LIBERATION

1. “Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”

2. When President Nixon told Prime Minister Meir that he would trade any three American generals for Moshe Dayan, she replied, “OK, I’ll take General Motors, General Electric, and General Dynamics.”(At the time the first two were in much better shape than they are today.)

3. “Women’s liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children.”

PEACE, RUSSIA VERSUS AMERICA, BEN GURION QUOTE

1. “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

2. “How can I explain the difference to me between America and Russia?… the America I’ve known is a place where men on horseback escort union marchers, the Russia I’ve known is a place where men on horseback slaughter young Socialists and Jews.”

3. “A story once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as ‘the only man’ in his cabinet. What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!”

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

ISRAEL, WAR, PALESTINIANS

1. “Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.”

2. “We hate war. We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown, and when strawberries bloom in Israel.”

3. “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 in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

NB: “When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqi border. Eastern West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 to 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians. There were Jews and Arabs.”

FOOTNOTE — Golda Meir (1898–1978) — teacher, atheist, socialist

Golda Meir was Prime Minister of Israel between 1969 and 1974. Born in Kiev (then part of Russia, now the capital of the Ukraine), she emigrated to the US with her parents in 1906. After working as a teacher, she moved to Palestine in 1921 with her husband. She was an atheist and a socialist of the “labor Zionist” variety. In Israel she rose through the ranks of the Histradut, the national trade union. In 1948 she was one of the 24 signers of the Israeli equivalent of the Declaration of Independence. “After I signed, I cried. When I studied American history as a schoolgirl and I read about those who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence, I couldn’t imagine these were real people doing something real. And there I was sitting down and signing a declaration of establishment.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golda_Meir

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/golda-meir-quotes-on-israel-and-judaism

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/538467/facts-about-golda-meir

Here is a link to the last three years of posts organized by theme:

PDF with headlines — Google Drive

YOUR TURN

Please share the coolest or most important thing you learned in the last week, month, or year related to foreign policy. Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in our life related to foreign policy.

This is your chance to make someone else’s day. And to consolidate in your memory something important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is the key to depth of thought. The prospect of imminent publication, like hanging and final exams, concentrates the mind. A useful life long habit.