GOLDA MEIR

Comprehensive biography of the famed Israeli leader whose legacy has come under criticism in recent years.

As Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and author of Antisemitism: Here and Now and History on Trial, amply demonstrates, Golda Meir (1898-1978) was a woman of action, and she had a way with a sharp riposte: When Richard Nixon commented on Abba Eban’s appointment as her counterpart to his Henry Kissinger, saying, “Just think, we now both have Jewish foreign ministers,” she replied, “Yes, but mine speaks English.” When a British official told her that German POWs would build military bases in Palestine during World War II, she pointed out that Jews were already there and in need of work. When he answered that Jewish militants tended to blow up British structures, she replied, “Nazis are more reliable?” More than possessing a sarcastic streak, Meir held fast to a number of beliefs that both hampered and furthered her goals: that the Arab nations were bent on annihilating Israel, the great powers were not to be trusted, and “her total devotion to the Zionist dream realized in a socialist context.” As Israel’s sole woman prime minister, she defended these views against both conservatives and a generation of younger Israelis such as Moshe Dayan while retaining strong ties to David Ben-Gurion and his cohort. “Golda and her fellow veterans dismissed this cadre of younger leaders as ambitious technocrats,” writes Lipstadt, while they strongly criticized her for her performance during the Yom Kippur War, which “became a little Vietnam, a never-ending encounter with continual losses and no change in the situation.” In this always thoughtful analysis, the author closes by wondering whether depictions of Meir as “stubborn” and unable to see shades of gray might not have been rendered as “firm” and “decisive” if Meir had not been a woman.

A nuanced account of a leader whose influence endures in the Middle East.