Golda meir husband

For all her grief and remorse over the Yom Kippur War, for all the humiliation and pain of her people’s rejection of her, she was nonetheless able in her final years to evolve into an elder statesman and beloved public citizen, a woman whom bus drivers insisted on taking to her front door and whom organizations clamored to honor. In time, her image regained its luster, and her reputation as a philosopher-comedian entered the realm of legend.

As a politician and Jewish nationalist, Meir was consistent, strong in her resolve, and undisturbed by nuance or self-doubts. The Zionist cause to her was a moral, historical, and political imperative. Though she was eager to make peace with “the Arabs,” and often begged for Arab recognition and Arab partners, her refusal to acknowledge the existence of “Palestinians” or, consequently, Palestinian suffering, was for many years a stumbling block to progress.

As a woman, on the other hand, Meir was a study in contradictions. Though her public persona was almost neuter, she was reputed to have had many lovers for many years. Foremost among them were David Remez, Israel’s Minister of Transport and then of Education, and by some accounts the true passion of her life; and Zalman Shazar, one of the preeminent architects of the Jewish state and eventually its president. Though she exhibited stereotypically feminine attributes—the cooking, the warmth and emotionality, the matronly appearance—those who knew her never fail to mention her toughness.

“To survive Israeli politics she had to become tough, she had no choice; she must have gone through hell to get where she did,” says M.K. Colette Avital, who began her career in Israel’s foreign ministry under Meir’s tenure and became one of her nation’s top-ranking foreign service officers. Avital remembers her old boss as someone who could be rigid and hot-tempered, someone who “disliked women, never really helped women.”

Jew, Zionist, Israeli—these were the identities that defined Golda Meir’s life and galvanized her loyalties while the female aspect of her being remained devoid of consciousness or commitment. (“Whether women are better than men I cannot say,” she once wrote, “but I can say they are certainly no worse.”) While she was voted the Most Admired Woman in America during the 1970s, simultaneously serving as feminism’s poster girl—the face above the caption “But Can She Type?”—the reality was far more complex. She acknowledged the important role women played in the founding of the State of Israel but was unwilling to bond in solidarity with her sex. Rather than recognize in her life experience the untenable pressures that plague virtually all achieving women, she attributed her strains and sacrifices to her private feminine or maternal failures, faulting her own aspirations, her love of political work, and her burning ambitions for the Jewish state. As Prime Minister, she did not focus on child care policy or concern herself with the problems of working women or use her influence to argue for equal gender arrangements in the home or encourage more women to run for public office. The conflicts that tore her apart helped her to sympathize passively with the “heavy double burden” of working mothers but did not inspire her to politicize that sympathy and identify with feminist goals. In fact, she seemed to go out of her way to criticize feminism and distort the tenets of the women’s movement. She did, however, have her epiphanic moments. When Israel was experiencing an epidemic of violent rapes and someone at a cabinet meeting suggested women be put under curfew until the rapists were caught, Meir shot back, “Men are committing the rapes. Let them be put under curfew.”

When Ben-Gurion first made her a minister in his cabinet, the religious bloc objected to the idea of a woman ruling over men, though they finally acquiesced on the grounds that Deborah, the biblical judge, had been acceptable to God. However, when Meir was a candidate for mayor of Tel Aviv, the religious objections defeated her, to her everlasting fury. When Ben-Gurion described her as “the only man” in his cabinet, Golda was amused that he thought “this was the greatest possible 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!” She noticed the disparity but seemed to miss the larger point. She once said in a speech to the UN that the world might be better off if political leaders allowed themselves to “feel more and think less.” Yet she did not deduce that having more women in power might add the missing component to public life.

Just as some Jews choose not to be Jewish-identified because they think they have the option to behave as if peoplehood doesn’t matter, Golda Meir chose not to be woman-identified and behaved as if gender doesn’t matter. But, of course, when one is Jewish and female, both facts matter.

She died on December 8, 1978, at age eighty, a titan of modern Zionism, a history-making national leader, one of the most accomplished women of the twentieth century—still feeling guilty about falling short as a wife and mother.