In Honor of White Jewish Supremacist Golda Meir, Hater of the Sephardim
David Shasha
The Radical Israeli Activists Who Golda Meir Famously Called “Not Nice”
By: Tamar Fox
The Black Lives Matters movement has rich precedents not just in the American Black Panthers movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but in an Israeli activist group of the same name. Back in 1971 a group of Mizrahi young people gathered in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem. Fed up with Israeli policies that discriminated against its non-Ashkenazi citizens (including, notoriously, medical experimentation) they formed their own protest party, and called it the Israeli Black Panthers.
At the time, Mizrahi Jews made up more than half of Israel’s population, and the Israeli Black Panthers took off quickly, holding protests that attracted thousands of disaffected Mizrahi young people. The Panthers also engaged in some Robin Hood activism, stealing milk from the doorsteps of wealthy Ashkenazi homes, and delivering it to poor Mizrahi families.
Representatives of the Panthers met with then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, who famously dismissed them to the press by saying, “They’re not nice.” Just when the Panthers were gaining momentum in the upper echelons of the government, the Yom Kippur War abruptly shifted the public’s attention to security. Some Panthers went onto be influential members of political parties across the left/right spectrum, but they never again held one of their infamously raucous protests. The Panthers got the last laugh, though. In 2011 some activists renamed two streets in Israel: “Black Panthers Way,” and “They’re Not Nice” Alley.
From JTA, June 22, 2016
Israeli "Black Panthers" Meet with Prime Minister Meir to Discuss Mizrahi Jews
By: CIE Staff
https://israeled.org/israeli-black-panthers/
https://israeled.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/APRIL-13.png
Emerging in the early seventies, to protest against the social injustices felt by the Mizrahi Jews in Israel, the Black Panthers staged a number of demonstrations in the country and began to generate widespread support. The group took its name from the African-American movement that was active in the United States from the mid-sixties. Like the American movement, it sought to raise awareness of racial discrimination.
Saadia Marciano, a Moroccan born Jew and one of the founders of the Panthers, said that the group chose the name because they thought it would scare Prime Minister Golda Meir.
Many Mizrahim, including the leaders of the Panthers, believed Israel instituted discriminatory policies against them and favored Ashkenazi immigrants. During the first decade of the state, as the nation absorbed almost a million new Jewish immigrants, a disparity emerged between the treatment of those coming from Europe and the West and those who came from Arab lands and North Africa. Mizrahi immigrants were most often settled in transitional tent camps before housing could be built for them, while most often Ashkenazi immigrants were given preferred housing. There was a near complete absence of Mizrahi Jews from Israeli politics, senior public services and higher education in the fifties and sixties.
The Black Panthers staged a number of memorable demonstrations in Jerusalem to protest what they saw as inferior Sephardi treatment and access to basic services. In early April 1971, the group threatened a hunger strike at the Western Wall if the Prime Minister and other Israeli leaders would not meet with them.
During the April 13th meeting, Reuven Aberjil, one of the leaders of the Panthers, told the Prime Minister, “There are many obstacles for people like me: they don’t have the opportunity to rise [socio-economically]. We are not seeking welfare funds or charity. We are healthy and can work, so all we want is the opportunity to advance ourselves. We are not here to talk about my own employment. If it was just my problem, it would have been wonderful. But there’s the problem of the Sephardim or Mizrahim who form 65% of the country’s population. The situation of that group is poor, and many live under the poverty line, earning less than 400 liras a month. We are talking about families with 10 or more children. What they earn isn’t enough to live off. I wandered in the neighborhoods [where Sephardi Israelis live] and saw it with my own eyes.” (Israel State Archives)
One month later, 6,000 Black Panthers and their supporters held a massive demonstration in Jerusalem. Following the clash between demonstrators and police, Meir was quoted as saying the Panthers “are not nice people.” The quotation would stick with her and the Labor Party for years, exemplifying, many believed, the Ashkenazi establishment’s elitist approach toward the Mizrahi. Mizrahi disenchantment played out in the May 1977 election, where Menachem Begin’s Likud Party received a large percentage of the Mizrahi vote and ended the Labor Party’s twenty-nine year grip on Israeli political leadership.
The photo shows a Black Panther’s poster; the Hebrew says, “War on poverty – not the poor.”
The Israel State Archives has a collection of documents (in Hebrew with English descriptions) about the Black Panthers, which can be found HERE.
From Center for Israel Education, April 13, 1971
What Golda Meir Really Thought of Big Mizrahi Families
By: Ofer Aderet
Prime Minister Golda Meir was shocked by her visits in 1971 to two Mizrahi families in Jerusalem and the parents’ apparent willingness to have more.
Meir made the remarks at a session of the Prime Minister’s Committee for Children and Youth in Distress that she had set up. The transcript of the meeting was among the documents that were released Wednesday by the Israel State Archives to mark 50 years since the launch of the Campaign to Eradicate Illiteracy. The program focused on teaching Hebrew to adult immigrants.
“There’s another truth that’s not pleasant to mention,” Meir told the panel, describing a family with 10 children that had only recently moved from a one-and-a-half-room apartment to a four-room apartment on a doctor’s recommendation, in part because the father of the family has asthma. Both he and his wife sold produce in the city’s Mahane Yehuda market, Meir related.
“And though I didn’t ask them, I’d bet my head they can’t read or write. They’re at an age where they could have another 10 children,” Meir said.
“The man said to me, ‘You see, we love giving many children to the State of Israel.’
“Had I the courage and the honesty,” Meir continued, I would have said, ‘Leave that to others, you’ve done your part for the state, on behalf of the state I thank you, and now, for the sake of the state, focus on educating the children you already have.’ I think the oldest child was 12 or 13.
“But I didn’t say that, because I knew it would spark a firestorm, from a religious perspective, and also because they’d say, ‘She’s afraid the Mizrahi population will grow … only Ashkenazim should be allowed to have 10 children.’”
Meir also said she thought children from such families should be removed from their homes.
The anti-illiteracy program was launched after a survey showed there were some 250,000 adults in Israel who could neither read nor write.
The campaign, as part of which soldiers were dispatched to disadvantaged communities as teachers, continued to operate through the mid-1970s.
From Haaretz, October 2, 2014, From SHU 658, November 5, 2014
Book Review: Wresting Golda Meir From the Shadows
By: Ethan Bronner
Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, Schocken Books, 2017
In late September 1973, Israel’s Labor Party made its final campaign pitch for the upcoming elections. It placed ads in all the newspapers with a picture of its leader, the admired and beloved prime minister, Golda Meir, surrounded by reassuring words: “Quiet reigns on the banks of the Suez. The lines are secure; the bridges are open; Jerusalem is united.”
Days later, on Yom Kippur, Syria and Egypt launched a massive pincer attack from north and south, their advancing tanks crushing the illusions of a complacent nation and forever shifting public opinion away from Meir. Despite hard-fought victories in both the war and the postponed vote, she resigned four months after re-election, condemned as a woman out of her depth (emphasis on “woman”). She died in 1978. And while American Jews remember her with pride and fondness (she spent her girlhood in Milwaukee and spoke a disarming Midwestern English of pinched nasal vowels), Meir has remained an object of some scorn in Israel. Her miscalculation contributed to the deaths of thousands. Her dismissal of the Palestinian nation (“no such thing as Palestinians,” she notoriously said) has won her few admirers on the left.
But perspectives have begun to shift with the passage of time. As 2018 approaches — the 120th anniversary of Meir’s birth — we are in the midst of a re-evaluation of her legacy that places the 1973 disaster into a broader context of a life of rich accomplishment. In that emerging view, her failure to anticipate the attack must be understood as a reflection of the thinking of her security establishment; her leadership during the war was forceful. Last year, the Israeli state archives published a 700-page volume of her notes and documents with scholarly comment that reflects such revisionism. A grandson of Meir’s has recently started a foundation in her name to spread the word and to mark the anniversary. Events are planned both in Israel and the United States.
To this growing Golda rethink, Francine Klagsbrun has contributed a thorough and absorbing examination of the woman and her role in Zionism and Israel. “Lioness” wrests Meir from the shadow of the Yom Kippur War and presents her life and career as a lens to examine Israel’s challenges — borders, settlements, occupation, terror and the social and ethnic divide between Jews of European and those of Middle Eastern origin. The author of more than a dozen books, many on Jewish subjects, and an essayist for The Jewish Week, Klagsbrun has spent years reviewing thousands of pages of documents, interviewing those closest to Meir (most now dead) and, while writing with affection, applying the tools of a contemporary truth tester (no, Meir never witnessed a pogrom as a small child in Kiev despite often invoking memories of one; and no, despite a Broadway play and a book by Seymour Hersh, Meir didn’t threaten to unleash nuclear weapons in the 1973 war if Nixon didn’t airlift needed supplies).
In many ways, as Klagsbrun’s narrative makes clear, Meir was the archetypal Zionist. An Eastern European Jew who, after a lengthy American detour, immigrated to Palestine in 1921, Meir embodied the movement’s socialist and egalitarian modesty as well as its tough-minded militarism. She was what the Israelis call a bitzuist — a doer. She not only raised millions of dollars for Zionism and Israel but also fought to save European Jews from the Nazis, carried out clandestine visits to Jordan’s King Abdullah and, as labor minister, built tens of thousands of homes for new immigrants. Born Golda Mabovitch in the humblest of origins (her father’s inability to earn an income kept the family in penury for years), Meir quickly stood out once she landed in America with her family, embraced the Zionist movement and rose through relentless focus and networking.
But, of course, Meir was highly atypical for a simple reason: She was a woman. When she was named foreign minister in the 1950s, she was the only woman in the world to hold that job. When she became prime minister in 1969, she was one of three women in such a post but the other two — Indira Gandhi of India and Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon — came to their roles following the death of a father and a husband.
Everything about how Meir dealt with her gender is fascinating, telling and often somewhat tragic. She suffered from it but was not above exploiting it (“Call me Golda,” she disarmingly told everyone). Just as Barack Obama studiously avoided being seen as a black president, Meir stayed far away from both femininity and feminism. She wore no makeup, smoked like a chimney and, although she began her political rise through the Zionist women’s associations in the late 1920s, she claimed later never to have belonged to a women’s organization. Nixon said of Indira Gandhi that she acted “with the ruthlessness of a man but wanted always to be treated like a woman,” whereas Meir “acted like a man and wanted to be treated like a man.” Ben-Gurion referred to Golda as “the only man in the cabinet.”
There is every reason to see all the manliness pretense as a survival mechanism, pure and simple. There was no model for an ambitious female politician and Meir was not about to devote time to inventing one.
Meir married her American boyfriend Morris Meyerson, a dreamy lover of music and poetry who (like her father) never earned much of a living, never really wanted to move to Palestine and pretty much never saw his wife. The marriage collapsed as Golda took lovers from among her political colleagues (and she later took the Israeli name “Meir”). Their son and daughter were badly neglected as she spent months at a time abroad on fund-raising and diplomatic missions and, when home, stayed at meetings late into the night. Despite suffering personally from societal indifference toward working mothers, Meir never made the issue her own. She was vicious to Shulamit Aloni, an Israeli feminist and civil rights lawyer, a rising power within Labor whom she forced out. In the 1970s, when feminists began to exert influence globally, she dismissed them as “crazy women who burn their bras and … hate men.”
Klagsbrun presents all this as part of the broad sweep of Meir’s life but the topic is ripe for deeper exploration. As part of the renaissance in Meir scholarship, others are taking a closer look at her specifically as a woman leader. (Pnina Lahav, a law professor at Boston University, is deep into a book that analyzes Meir as a victim of sexist mores, a trailblazer and a role model.)
Golda Meir was prime minister of Israel when the Palestinian movement became enamored of terrorism, hijacking planes and kidnapping Israeli Olympic athletes. She had no patience for talk of a Palestinian state other than Jordan. “There will be no third state in the area,” she said. While that put her at odds with most thinking in the recent past, she would feel at home with the political debate in Israel today, where talk of a Palestinian state is fading fast. That may not bring the world any closer to peace in the Holy Land. But it will probably aid in Meir’s rehabilitation.
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review, November 19, 2017, re-posted to SHU 821, December 20, 2017
The Ardent, Stiff-Necked Spirit of Golda Meir
By: Neil Rogachevsky
One of God’s less charitable epithets for the children of Israel in the desert is am k’shey oref: a “stiff-necked” people. Yet some biblical scholars have seen the phrase as a kind of backhanded compliment. Rigidity, myopia, lack of imagination are hardly admirable traits; but when expressed as fastidiousness, perseverance, single-minded devotion to a worthy goal, mightn’t there be something to say for them?
This, at any rate, is the label that repeatedly comes to mind for the subject of Francine Klagsbrun’s Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, a mammoth, meticulously researched, and engaging biography of Israel’s fourth prime minister. Golda, as she was universally known, was a famously stiff-necked individual if ever there was one.
Klagsbrun, a long-time literary journalist, is the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish and non-Jewish subjects. Lioness is her first foray into Israeli history, a daunting field of inquiry through which she has steered with impressive scholarship; her research in Israeli and American archives seems to have left no stone unturned. Though clearly sympathetic to her subject as a kind of Jewish and feminist hero, Klagsbrun has also written a balanced work, and indeed largely resists the urge to psychoanalyze her subject or parse her thoughts.
This strikes me as the right approach to Golda, a woman of few words who accomplished much by dint of the ones she had and through her own force of will. Throughout her life, as Klagsbrun shows, Golda stubbornly held to her most cherished ideas and her way of advancing them.
Klagsbrun does not miss a beat of that life. She covers Goldie Mabovitch from her birth in 1898 as a carpenter’s daughter in Kiev, through her family’s immigration to America and her youth in Milwaukee, to her political and post-political life in Israel. We learn of her aliyah at twenty-one to Mandate Palestine, her experiences first in a kibbutz and then in Tel Aviv, her rapid ascent up the greasy pole of the Israeli labor movement to the position first of foreign minister and finally prime minister. Along the way, we read with sadness of her difficult marriage to Morris Meyerson and her sometimes frivolous, not to say callous, attitude to family life.
A socialist from her early teens, Golda never deviated from her belief in the redemptive power of labor, even in the 1960s and 70s when Israel’s socialist policies were clearly inhibiting the country’s development. Religion never interested her. Apart from her perennial annoyance with Israel’s rabbinic authorities, she mostly neglected the religious issue in the Jewish state, and for that matter in the Jewish soul. In thought and action, she was, in her own way, perfectly emblematic of the “mainstream” Zionism of the early to mid-20th century, which drew its energy from sweaty political meetings and smoke-filled rooms where the lines between union business and political business were impossibly blurred.
Golda herself seemed to draw energy and satisfaction from these twinned poles of labor-party politics. Little room was left for the things in-between, whether personal or political. Even when foreign minister and later prime minister, her famous “kitchen” conversations with friends and visitors formed but another extension of the informal, passionate political meetings that had been her lifeblood since adolescence.
To be sure, Golda’s stubbornness could at various times adapt to the demands of circumstance. If in her heart she believed that Germany after the Holocaust was forever damned, as prime minister she came to see the necessity and the benefit of relations with Bonn. Similarly, her implacable opposition to territorial negotiations with Egypt changed in the 70s as geopolitical realities shifted. By nature neither daring nor particularly imaginative, and at times prone to let vendettas or personal grudges influence her decisions, she could also be a politician of dispassionate common sense.
Of Golda’s political career, not so much as a single small incident seems missing from Klagsbrun’s narrative. Of the momentous ones, we are given detailed sketches of everything from her clandestine early-1948 meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan—in an effort to dissuade him from going to war with the Jewish state-to-be—to her five-year tenure (1969-1974) as prime minister, a period most notable for the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Klagsbrun also offers an interesting take on the few post-political years prior to her death in 1978, years that in this account were somewhat less wracked by self-doubt over her handling of the 1973 war than has been previously thought.
The most important part of Golda’s life was naturally her premiership. As Klagsbrun demonstrates, Golda’s unelected ascent to the job in 1969, following the death of Levi Eshkol, was anything but guaranteed. It was the labor kingmaker Pinḥas Sapir who correctly deduced that, as between the movement’s two warring factions, Golda could be the “consensus” (i.e., the least objectionable) candidate. Once in office, she dealt reasonably well with the major early issues confronting her. Thus, her firm response to the Egyptian “war of attrition” in 1969-1970 held off a larger war, at least for a while, and she distinguished herself in her advocacy for Soviet Jews, another lifelong preoccupation. The state’s inability to rescue its kidnapped athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 was entirely the fault of the West Germans.
Of course, the vexed question of the Yom Kippur War, both Israel’s lack of preparedness and its conduct of the battle once it erupted, remains the decisive and most controverted point of Golda’s tenure. As is well known, the joint attack by Syrian and Egyptian forces on October 6, 1973 caught Israel almost totally unawares, and initial attempts to repulse Syrian forces from the Golan and Egyptians from the Sinai met with decisive setbacks. The military suffered fierce casualties, and the country’s supply of aircraft and tanks was dangerously depleted.
There was, and is, a great deal of blame to go around for this failure. Israel’s famous sense of invincibility after the Six-Day War of 1967, fed by top generals like Moshe Dayan, was real and had permeated Israeli society. No one grasped, for instance, how greatly improved Egypt’s Soviet-built anti-aircraft capabilities had become in the interim.
As Klagsbrun shows, Golda did have concerns in the weeks leading up to the attack, questioning the confident report of Brigadier General Aryeh Shalev that, despite massive Egyptian and Syrian buildups, the likelihood of war remained low. Still, at the end of the day, the buck stopped with the prime minister. On military matters, Golda basically trusted the generals, and the generals were disastrously wrong.
Where Golda has not received enough credit is for her nerve and determination in the war’s aftermath. Both qualities served her well in the peace negotiations with Egypt that were spearheaded by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—even as, domestically, pressure mounted to hold the government accountable for its wartime failures.
The war years are well treated by Klagsbrun, as they have been by a variety of historians. But perhaps the most singular and fascinating contribution of this work lies in its account of Golda’s early life and particularly her upbringing in Milwaukee. For herein lies a puzzle.
Golda’s mother brought her daughters to America in 1906, in the wake of pogroms following the 1905 Russian revolution. Her father Moshe, who had come a few years earlier, was by then earning a living in Milwaukee as a carpenter working for the railroad. The Maboviches were hardly alone in making this trip. In the latter years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, 2,000,000 Jews would leave the Russian empire, mainly for the U.S. As Golda later put it, “to the [Russian] Jews, America was a kind of bank where you went to pick up the dollars scattered on the sidewalks.”
Of these immigrants, deeply wrapped up in the drama of American life, very few would later become active Zionists, let alone make their way to Mandate Palestine. Young Golda was different. Although she attended public school and quickly mastered English—indeed, all her life her English would be better than her Hebrew—from her teenage years on she became absolutely convinced that her future, and the future of the Jews, lay in Palestine.
How to explain this? No doubt part of the answer lies in the unique political climate of the Midwest and especially Milwaukee. Thanks to its population of German immigrants, some of whom had trained in universities, the city was one of the chief centers of progressivism in America, and ideological-political organization was a distinctive feature of Wisconsin life. As there was not much else to do in Milwaukee—in contrast to, say, New York—political and literary meetings became integral to the small Jewish community as well. Ironically, then, it was Golda’s upbringing in the periphery that may have helped point her outward, toward Zionism and away from the American frontier.
Encouraged by her elder sister Sheyna and her sister’s husband Shamai, Golda became close to Po’aley Tsiyon, the Zionist movement that combined Jewish nationalism with a heterodox and ultimately non-Marxist brand of socialism: up with class struggle, down with bourgeois values including religion, but yes to the nation-state and to some of the old trappings of tradition that still possessed the power to rally the base. In Palestine, this was the party of David Ben-Gurion, the precursor to Mapai and the present-day Labor party.
Golda attached herself to this plank, and in some sense never let go. Preternaturally serious, she refused to be what she called a “parlor Zionist” and followed through on her plan to “ascend” to Palestine at the end of World War I. Moving to newly-British Palestine in 1919, she brought along her devoted husband Morris (who was not at all cut out for what lay ahead). No longer an American, she nevertheless took something of the Midwest with her, becoming a rarity among Israel’s founders as a highly effective communicator on return trips to her former home. Her plain-spoken charisma, it turned out, worked well both in the yishuv and back in the Midwest.
It is impossible here to summarize all aspects of Golda’s life, or all of the details of this fine book. Above all, Francine Klagsbrun reveals a person single-mindedly committed to the Zionist cause. Never even in her youth did Golda so much as flirt with the competing ideologies of assimilationism, Bundism, or internationalist Communism. Like Ben-Gurion, one of her mentors, she believed that Israel was the venue of Jewish survival. Throughout her life, even her critics both within the Zionist movement and around the world had to concede her indefatigable devotion to that cause—as well as her political savvy, her genuine indifference to personal wealth and even health, and her open, simple, democratic sensibility.
To that mix of qualities, the sensibility of contemporary Israel may seem to offer a marked contrast. Certainly, the influence of Russian-style labor organizers is much diminished. The country, and its politics, have become at once more Mizraḥi, more religious, and more middle-class. But along with these and other changes that have been wrought in the transition from then until now, this book cannot help reminding us of how much of Golda’s ardent Zionist spirit remains in place today, intact and in fighting trim.
From Mosaic magazine, November 29, 2017, re-posted to SHU 823, January 3, 2017