We will crush them, we will split them open.” The message, with clenched teeth and cigarette in hand, came out of the mouth of a bent over woman, with gray hair, exhausted, brave: she did not believe what she was seeing. In the situation room the tragedy was felt. The instruction to the highest military authority, the legendary Moshe Dayan, was: “First go to television and then teach them a lesson they will never forget.” The survival of the State of Israel was in the balance. Egyptian and Syrian troops were attacking Israeli soil relentlessly and by surprise on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur. There were rumors, but the intelligence services did not get what they deserved.
Goldie Meyerson, Golda Meir (1898-1978), the first and last Israeli prime minister to date, seemed finished. She knew it. Zvi Samir, the head of the Mossad at the time, had warned her of a coded message: a list with five metals that meant “the war is going to start…”. “My gut knew it and I didn't pay attention to it,” she later declared, but she hesitated because there were previous false alarms.
Uncertainty reigned, Meir knew that Israel could not shoot first. The attack came on October 6, 1973, 50 years and one day before the Hamas attack this year.
Parallels such as decision-making, the hostage crisis and corpses, “which are never left behind,” are almost a carbon copy half a century later. Golda Meir is absolutely topical: the Nagrela publishing house has republished her autobiography, My Life, and her figure stars in a feature film, Golda (Diamondfilms), with a superb and unrecognizable Helen Mirren.
Nobody remembers anymore, but Meir, born in a very poor family that emigrated to the Golden Medine, that is, to the United States, to Milwaukee, was the Iron Lady long before the title was left to Margaret Thatcher. Two opposite figures, but attached to a bag. Meir, who resigned when the war was already “won,” now died 45 years ago, when she had already turned 80.
He lived long enough, from his hospital bed, to watch on TV the Camp David agreements signed by Menahem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat. A puff of oxygen and another from the cigarette that she never abandoned. In the middle of the screen, the resilient Jimmy Carter, 99 years old. Henry Kissinger, who has just died at the age of 100, appears throughout the film.
“At that time,” Meir recalls in his writings, “the highest personality in the Middle East was not President Sadat, nor President Assad, nor King Faisal, nor even Mrs. Meir. “It was US Secretary Dr. Henry Kissinger, whose efforts for peace can only be described as superhuman.” Kissinger (Liev Schreiber in the film) spends half the scenes of him in bed answering unexpected calls from Golda. “The first time I cried, but not the last, was when American military aid arrived,” she confessed in her autobiography.
Karl Marx does not appear in the film, but the spirit of his great motto does: “History happens twice: the first time as a great tragedy and the second as a miserable farce.” With 50 years of difference and with a geopolitical map radically different from the current one (illegal settlements, the change of alliances, the recognition of Israel by some Arab countries and the Gaza Strip caged with almost no oxygen to breathe since the Hamas attack on 7 October), there are surprising parallels between the two wars, the current one and the Yom Kippur war. And also between the two commanders in chief of the moment.
Meir was in power for a short time and was a solid Labor member (very critical, by the way, of her European socialist partners, especially the German Willy Brandt). Bibi Netanyahu, from Likud, has been premier six times and his position has shifted very far to the right. In his recent book and in statements in recent weeks, Netanyahu hammers home the message that hostages and prisoners must be returned to their families. “A sacred law,” Meir writes in her memoirs, “is not to leave anyone behind.” The “anguish of not being able to provide information about hostages and missing persons” was a personal “torment.” “I knew I had nothing to say to them, (but) I attended to them all,” she confessed.
Of course, deep down, the two large Cold War blocs were key to the conflict. Netanyahu trained at MIT and learned in the United States about free trade and new technologies to promote a small but advanced country, without natural resources. His position towards the White House is to listen and act his way. Meir did something like that, but like Zelensky now, he needed American planes and tanks. Not only did the prime minister grow up in Milwaukee, but she became a powerful speaker and activist throughout the country until she decided to immigrate to Palestine to help build a Jewish state.
Yours is the honor of having the first passport in the history of Israel. David Ben Gurion sent her to the US to raise funds (she raised 50 million). She and Rachel Cohen-Kagan were the only female signatories of the Israeli Independence Act. The Soviet Union, close to the Arabs, was key in the game that arose with the Yom Kippur War. Now, your potential Afghanistan is Ukraine. It is curious that both Cohen-Kagan and Meir were born in that country.
In the first lines of her memories of the 1973 crisis, Meir is very self-critical of her actions, but inflexible in her conclusions: “There are two things that I must make clear from now on: the first is that we won the Yom Kippur war. . The other is that the world at large and Israel's enemies must know that the circumstances that led to the loss of the more than 2,500 Israelis will never be repeated." The frame is the same (Marx, always Marx), but the painting is not finished yet. The current war continues. And the count of casualties on both sides does not stop.
