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Golda Meir

Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974

Golda Meir (born Golda Mabovitz (גולדה מאיר‎ 3 May 1898 – 8 December 1978) was an Israeli politician and one of the founders of the State of Israel. She served as Minister of Labor, Foreign Minister, and as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. She is the only woman to have served as a Prime Minister of Israel.

Many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? … Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

Born in Kiev in the Russian Empire to Jewish parents, Meir immigrated as a child with her family to the United States in 1906.

Quotes

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We don’t thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient.
 
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.
 
Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
 
Above all, this country is our own. … Being a Jew is no problem here.
 
I am a Palestinian, from 1921 to 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport.
  • It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]'.
    • As acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department visited Arab Haifa and reported to the Jewish Agency Executive (6 May 1948); as quoted in The birth of the Palestinian Refuge problem revisited by Benny Morris, p. 309–10 (2nd edition, 2004), citing Protocol of meeting of JAE (6 May 1948), CZA 45/2
  • My delegation cannot refrain from speaking on this question — we who have such an intimate knowledge of boxcars and of deportations to unknown destinations that we cannot be silent.
  • Is it really asking too much for a people to want to decide its own fate; to demand that it alone shall choose flow and by whom it shall be governed; that its young people if they rise against what they believe is wrong shall not be deported from their home and country?
  • It is the tragedy of our generation, that small nations have not yet gained the security of exercising their natural right—namely that of being masters of their own destiny.
  • Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.
    • Speech to the Knesset, reported in Ner (October 1961)
  • There were no such thing as Palestinians. 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.
    • As quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969), also in The Washington Post (16 June 1969)
  • We don’t thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient.
    • Vogue (July 1969)
  • We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon — no alternative. The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.
    • As quoted in LIFE magazine (3 October 1969), p. 32
  • It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don't want victories anymore.
    • As quoted in LIFE magazine (3 October 1969), p. 32
  • 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 Iraqian 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.
    • "Iron Lady of Israeli politics" Thames TV (1970)
  • I have given instructions that I be informed every time one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in the middle of the night. When President Nasser leaves instructions that he is to be awakened in the middle of the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there will be peace.[1]
  • [The Soviet government] is the most realistic regime in the world — no ideals.[2]
  • If we have to have a choice between dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.
    • As quoted in As Good as Golda : The Warmth and Wisdom of Israel's Prime Minister (1970) edited by Israel Shenker and Mary Shenker, p. 26
  • We owe a responsibility not only to those who are in Israel but also to those generations that are no more, to those millions who have died within our lifetime, to Jews all over the world, and to generations of Jews to come. 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.
    • As quoted in As Good as Golda : The Warmth and Wisdom of Israel's Prime Minister (1970) edited by Israel Shenker and Mary Shenker, p. 28
  • When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.
    • Press conference in London (1969), as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242
  • This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.
    • As quoted in Le Monde (15 October 1971)
  • Women’s Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.
    • As quoted in Newsweek (23 October 1972)
  • Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided — not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing.
    • Time (19 February 1973)
  • 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!
    • At a dinner honoring West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, as reported in The New York Times (11 June 1973, p. 3)
    • Unsourced variants: Moses dragged us for 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.
      Moses dragged us through the desert for 40 years to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.
  • In Israel, we read from right to left.
    • To Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, who had written her that he considers himself 'an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third'[3]
  • To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.
    • When questioned on Israel's future, in The New York Times (12 December 1974)
  • Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
    • The Observer (29 December 1974)
  • It is not only a matter, I believe, of religious observance and practice. To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it.
    • My Life (1975), p. 459
  • I am also grateful that I live in a country whose people have learned how to go on living in a sea of hatred without hating those who want to destroy them and without abandoning their own vision of peace. To have learned this is a great art, the prescription for which is not written down anywhere. It is part of our way of life in Israel. Finally, I wish to say that from the time I came to Palestine as a young woman, we have been forced to choose between what is more dangerous and what is less dangerous for us. At times we have all been tempted to give in to various pressures and to accept proposals that might guarantee us a little quiet for a few months, or maybe even for a few years, but that could only lead us eventually into even greater peril.
    • My Life (1975), p. 459
  • One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
    • My Life (1975), p. 231
  • I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like détente when there’s a good English phrase for it — cold war.
    • As quoted in Newsweek (19 January 1976)
  • What do you gain, Soviet Union, from this miserable policy? Where is your decency? Would it be a disgrace for you to give up this battle?
    • On the suppression of freedom of Jews in the USSR to the World Conference on Soviet Jewry, Brussels, in The New York Times (20 February 1976)
  • 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.
    • On 30th anniversary of the founding of Israel, in International Herald Tribune (11 May 1978)
  • 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!
  • Whether Women are better than men, I can say they are certainly no worse.
    • Golda Meir Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved July 7, 2022.

Fallaci interview (1973)

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America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities … but it’s still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom!
Interview with Oriana Fallaci published in Ms. magazine (April 1973)
  • It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? . . . Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.
  • I thought that a Jewish state would be free of the evils afflicting other societies: theft, murder, prostitution... But now we have them all. And that’s a thing that cuts to the heart ...
  • 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.
  • From Russia I didn’t bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror ...
  • Those nuts that burn their bras and walk around all disheveled and hate men? They’re crazy. Crazy.
  • I'm a slave to this leaf in a diary that lists what I must do, what I must say, every half hour.
  • I want to see a film, they send the Israeli army reserves to escort me! What kind of life is this?
  • What person with any sense likes himself? I know myself too well to like myself.
  • I prefer to stay alive and be criticized than be sympathized.


Disputed

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  • When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.
    • as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242
    • Variants:
    • Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.
    • Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.
      • As quoted in Media Bias and the Middle East (2003) by Paul Carlson, p. 10
    • Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us.
      • As quoted in The Agony of the Promised Land (2004) by Joshua Levy, Ch. 23 "The Hope for Peace", p. 187
    • We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.

Quotes about Meir

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  • When Golda Meir's speech at Brandeis in June 1973 was disrupted by picketers holding signs that said, "Gramma, how many babies did you kill today?" Diane Balser protested. Her family adored Golda Meir-and, further, "this was Brandeis," where Balser was then enrolled as a Ph.D. student in sociology. Regardless of her disagreement with the Israeli prime minister's policies, Balser saw the placards as "anti-Semitic and as misogynistic attacks on a Jewish woman."
    • Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)
  • In 1973, she (Betty Friedan) returned from a visit to Israel disappointed that Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to meet with her, viewing her as an "American witch of women's liberation who might possibly infect Israeli women."
    • Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)
  • By that time it was already clear that the next prime minster was going to be Golda Meir, a woman whom I frankly detested – a mutual sentiment, I might add. I knew her as an opinionated, obstinate person, primitive in her outlook, rigid in her attitudes, with a genius for reaching and exploiting the deepest fears and prejudices of the Jewish masses. I was certain that with her as prime minister, all peace efforts would come to a total standstill.
    • Uri Avnery My Friend, the Enemy (1986) – page 80
  • Golda is the best man in my Cabinet.
  • he (Shimon Peres) maintains an ongoing dialogue with the intellectual community. Now that is real change from, say, Menachem Begin-not to mention Golda Meir!
  • We must understand that there was no "Jewish justice," as Golda Meir said in one of her less sterling moments, nor was there "Arab justice," a claim that also has proponents; rather, there were two deep traumas, on which a completely new life, a different world, new hope must be built.
    • Shulamith Hareven "No One Asked the Medics" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
  • Golda Meir relates in her memoirs that when she arrived at the newly established Kibbutz Merhavia, she found the members eating what she called "terrible food": vegetables that "weren't even cooked" in "some awful green oil," spicy olives "that are bad for you, as everyone knows." She took over with a firm hand, and from the day she entered the kitchen she "forced" (as she put it) her companions to desist from their wayward "native" habits, and to start their day with good, hot, cooked mush. Their feeble protests were soon stilled, and they adapted. No wonder it was Golda who later declared that there was no such thing as a Palestinian (by her lights, there wasn't) and that the palm of her hand would sprout hair if Anwar Sadat really came to Jerusalem.
    • Shulamith Hareven "On Being a Levantine" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
  • Rita Giacoman mentions in passing that she returned from the U.S. to teach public health at Birzeit University in 1969, when Golda Meir announced that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. "So I had to come home," she says, matter of factly, "in defiance of Golda Meir-and today no one dares say it."
    • Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "I've been to Israel and Palestine" in The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (1992)
  • Golda Meir was asked that question: "We hear you don't mind getting older?" And she said, "That's true, but I never said it was a pleasure."
    • 1995 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

References

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  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ [2]
  3. ↑ [3]
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