Golda Meir

Golda Meir: The Milwaukee Schoolteacher Who Ran a War

On 22 January 1948, four months before Israel existed, a fifty-year-old woman from Wisconsin stood up in a Chicago hall and asked American Jews for money. She raised over $30 million on that trip and eventually some $90 million — roughly a third of the $275 million the coming war would cost. David Ben-Gurion described her afterwards as the "Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible." Twenty-five years later, the same instinct for the decisive moment failed her catastrophically on a single October morning.

Kiev to Milwaukee

She was born Golda Mabovitch on 3 May 1898 in Kiev, in the Russian Empire, to Moshe Yitzhak Mabovitch, a carpenter, and Blume Neiditch. Her father emigrated to New York in 1903 and Milwaukee in 1905, sponsoring the family's crossing in 1906. Her mother ran a grocery on Milwaukee's north side where Golda worked as a girl. She had two sisters, Sheyna and Tzipke.

She graduated as valedictorian of Fourth Street Grade School in 1912, attended North Division High School, ran away to a sister in Denver, returned and graduated in 1915, then trained at the Milwaukee State Normal School and taught at the Yiddish-speaking Folks Schule in 1917. She was naturalised as a US citizen on 9 July 1917, joined the Young Poale Zion labour Zionist youth movement, embraced socialist Zionism and spoke at public meetings. On 24 December 1917 she married Morris Meyerson, a sign painter and socialist. In 1921 they sailed for Mandatory Palestine aboard the SS Pocahontas.

The Kibbutz and the Union

They settled at kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezreel Valley, where she did agricultural and kitchen work and was chosen as the kibbutz's representative to the Histadrut, the general federation of labour. That selection set the shape of her career: she was a union politician before she was anything else. She left for Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where both her children were born — Menachem in 1924 and Sarah in 1926 — and was elected secretary of the Working Women's Council in 1928. In 1934 she joined the Histadrut executive committee and became head of its political department, which was the real apprenticeship.

In July 1938 she attended the Évian Conference as the Jewish observer from Palestine and watched thirty-two nations decline to admit Jewish refugees. She told the press afterwards: "There is only one thing I hope to see before I die and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore."

The Woman Who Got the Money

When the British arrested Moshe Sharett and others during Operation Agatha in June 1946, Meir became acting head of the Jewish Agency's political department and the principal negotiator with the Mandatory authorities. Then came the American fundraising tour of January 1948. On 14 May 1948 she was one of twenty-four signatories — and one of two women — on Israel's Declaration of Independence. "After I signed, I cried," she wrote later. "When I studied American history as a schoolgirl...I couldn't imagine these were real people doing something real."

Appointed minister plenipotentiary to the Soviet Union in June 1948, she found the posting isolating; despite her Ukrainian birth she spoke no Russian. On Rosh Hashanah, 3 October 1948, thousands of Soviet Jews mobbed her at the Moscow Choral Synagogue chanting "Nasha Golda" — Our Golda. Israel put the scene on its 10,000-shekel banknote in 1984.

Seven Beautiful Years

As Minister of Labour from 1949 to 1956 — the period she called her "seven beautiful years" — she built the physical apparatus of a country absorbing mass immigration. She oversaw more than a hundred ma'abarot, temporary immigrant camps, and by 1956 had eliminated two-thirds of them and moved 120,000 families into permanent housing. Between 1949 and 1956 her ministry built 200,000 apartments and 30,000 houses, alongside hospitals, schools and roads, and she established social security, maternity benefits, work-accident insurance, widow and orphan benefits and burial assistance. In 1955 she lost the Tel Aviv mayoralty by two votes from a religious bloc that objected to a woman mayor; she was furious and privately relieved to stay in cabinet.

Foreign Minister, and Africa

Ben-Gurion made her Foreign Minister in 1956, and she changed her surname from Meyerson to Meir — "illuminate" — to comply with the requirement that foreign service staff take Hebrew names. She helped plan and coordinate the Suez invasion with the French and led Israel's delegation through the UN debates that followed. Her most original initiative was the cultivation of newly independent African states, which she framed as peer-to-peer rather than patron-to-client: "Like them, we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn...how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate...how to live together, and how to defend ourselves." She secured the American sale of Hawk missiles in 1962. Her record was not uniformly humane: in 1958 she pressed to restrict the immigration of disabled and sick Polish Jews, writing that Israel could not "continue accepting sick and handicapped people." Diagnosed with lymphoma in late 1965, she retired from the ministry in January 1966.

Prime Minister, and October 1973

Levi Eshkol died in February 1969, and on 7 March the party's central committee chose Meir. At seventy-one she led the reconfigured Alignment to fifty-six seats in the 1969 election — still the best result any single Israeli faction has ever recorded. She met Nixon, Ceaușescu, Paul VI and Willy Brandt; accepted the American initiative ending the War of Attrition in 1970; and after the Munich massacre in 1972 ordered Mossad to hunt down Black September and PFLP operatives. In a Sunday Times interview of 15 June 1969 she said of the Palestinians: "There was no such thing as Palestinians...They did not exist" — described by Al Jazeera as one of her defining and most damning legacies.

On 6 October 1973, six hours before the Yom Kippur War began, she heard Moshe Dayan argue that war was unlikely and General David Elazar demand full mobilisation and a pre-emptive strike. She ordered the mobilisation and refused the strike, reasoning that Israel firing first would cost it American support — a judgement Henry Kissinger later confirmed. The Agranat Commission cleared her of direct responsibility, finding that she "decided wisely, with common sense and speedily, in favour of the full mobilization of the reserves...thereby performing a most important service for the defence of the state." The public did not agree. She resigned on 11 April 1974: "Five years are sufficient...It is beyond my strength to continue carrying this burden."

Why Golda Is Called a Genius

The faculty was persuasion at scale, plus an unusual tolerance for being the only person in the room who believed something. The 1948 fundraising tour is the clearest evidence: she convinced American Jews with no obligation to her to finance a war for a state that did not yet exist, and the sum she raised was a third of its cost. Ben-Gurion's phrasing — the woman "who got the money which made the state possible" — is as close to a contemporary genius claim as the record supports, and it is about capability, not intellect. The second faculty was administrative: the Labour Ministry years, in which she moved 120,000 families out of tents and built a welfare state from nothing in seven years, are the achievement most historians rate highest.

The counter-case is severe and she would not have flinched from it. Most historians judge her a better minister than premier. Her denial that Palestinians existed was not a gaffe but a stated position, and it has outlived nearly everything else she said. She refused Sadat's pre-war overtures, offering only "most of Sinai," and the intelligence failure of October 1973 happened on her watch even though the Agranat Commission exonerated her personally. Her biographer Meron Medzini notes she "was never taken with the routine and often dull diplomatic work in the Foreign Ministry." She was a builder and a mobiliser, not a strategist, and the job she is most remembered for required the thing she had least.

Iron Lady, and the Shoes

She published My Life in 1975, a New York Times bestseller, and spoke in the Knesset in November 1977 welcoming Anwar Sadat. She died of lymphatic cancer in Jerusalem on 8 December 1978, aged eighty, and was buried on Mount Herzl. She received Princeton's James Madison Award and the American Mothers' World Mother honour in 1974, the Israel Prize in 1975, and induction into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1985; Time named her one of its women of the year in 2019, for 1956. Her name is on a library and a school in Milwaukee, a museum in Denver, streets in Kyiv and across Israel, and Tel Aviv's performing arts centre. The orthopaedic shoes she favoured became known in Israel as na'alei Golda — Golda's shoes — and were issued to women soldiers until 1987. Anne Bancroft, Ingrid Bergman, Colleen Dewhurst, Tovah Feldshuh, Lynn Cohen and Helen Mirren have all played her. Culturally Jewish and privately atheist, she left the best summary of her own position: "I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God."