Author Topic: interesting article about golda meir  (Read 656 times)

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Offline q_q_

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interesting article about golda meir
« on: September 14, 2008, 03:37:36 PM »
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1039291/Hatred-lust-Iron-Lady.html

Gerald Kaufman, if it's the one that's well known. Is a BIG anti-semite.

But anyway, here is the contents of the link.

Golda Meir: The Iron Lady Of The Middle East By Elinor Burkett (Gibson Square, £17.99)
By Gerald Kaufman
Last updated at 3:24 PM on 28th July 2008


I first got to know Golda Meir in the late Sixties, when she was Prime Minister of Israel and I worked for Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street. I was involved in a deal in which Britain, limited by embargoes on supplying weapons to Israel, sold warplanes to Singapore, whose government then sold similar aircraft to Israel. Golda never forgot.



 
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir gestures at a news conference as she arrives for talks with President Richard M. Nixon in Washington, D.C. 1973.
As one of her family friends put it: 'If you were on her white list, she welcomed you like a real Jewish mother and you could do no wrong.' On one occasion she invited me to spend the Jewish New Year with her at the family kibbutz in the southern Negev desert.

On the other hand, to anyone who aroused her hostility, she was, as an Israeli trade union leader put it, 'extremely vindictive'. One journalist wrote about 'her infamous nasty look'.

It is not surprising that her view of the world was so uncompromising. This excellent biography describes how she started life in 1898 in a poverty-stricken family of Russian Jews who emigrated to the United States. Golda wanted to become a teacher. Her mother, however, told her: 'You could be a very good housekeeper. But a very clever woman you'll never be.'

Golda married a dreamy music-lover called Morris who was dragged along in her wake as she became a fiery Zionist Socialist. She believed there must be an independent Jewish state and a British-governed Palestine, to which she emigrated in 1921.

Poor Morris never had a chance. She trampled on his aspirations and neglected their two children. She was also sexually promiscuous, acquiring the nickname 'The Mattress', and was accused of sleeping her way to power.

Among those with whom she had affairs were Zalman Shazar, who would later become President of Israel.

She was appointed Prime Minister in 1969, having earned her rise to power by raising tens of millions of dollars in fundraising trips to the United States. The money had paid for the arms desperately needed in Israel's war of independence.

Burkett describes how, 'despite her old-fashioned clothes and antipathy to make-up, she was a vain woman. Her nails were always manicured, and she never went to bed without washing and brushing her hair'.

She was also brave. She made dramatic, covert trips in the desert, once disguised as an Arab woman, to meet King Abdullah of Jordan, whose country was an adversary of Israel. In 1973, his successor, King Hussein, who had sent her pearls for her 75th birthday, flew secretly to Tel Aviv to warn her that Syrian troops were massing on Israel's border.

Yet while Golda could have cordial relations with these Arab leaders, she had less admiration for certain Jewish politicians. She loathed Shimon Peres, now the country's President, and detested one-time US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. On the other hand, she got on well with his President, Richard Nixon, who publicly proclaimed that he loved her.

Golda was tough: she was seriously ill for years, but when asked by journalists how she was feeling, she replied: 'Nothing serious. A touch of cancer here, a little tuberculosis there.' She was, however, often wrong. She stored up trouble for her nation, which persists lethally to this day, by insisting: 'There is no Palestinian people.' And she made a near-fatal miscalculation following King Hussein's 1973 warning by failing to call up army reserves when the Egyptian and Syrian armies were poised for invasion. Although Israel won the Yom Kippur War, 2,500 of its soldiers were killed.

Yet when Golda died at 80, she was still regarded as the Iron Lady, a title she won ahead of Margaret Thatcher.

Golda once said: 'There is one thing I want to see before I die: that my people should not need expressions of pity any more.' However Israel is regarded 30 years after her death, it is certainly not with pity..