Golda Meir, Israel’s first (and, so far, only) female Prime Minister, was born in Kiev in present-day Ukraine. In 1906, she and her family moved to Milwaukee. Her family was poor and Golda at age 14 was expected to leave school and find work and a husband. Instead, she ran away to Denver where, encouraged by her eldest sister, she embraced Labor Zionism. She returned to school and in 1921, soon after getting married, moved to Palestine.
Shrewd, charismatic, and fiercely committed, Meir was an important figure in the founding of the State of Israel and its first decades. She was a leader in the Histadrut trade union before being sent to the US where she raised vital funds to arm Jewish forces during the 1948 War of Independence. She was among the 22 men and two women who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence and received a rapturous welcome by Soviet Jews when she shortly afterward became the country’s first ambassador to the USSR.
From 1949, she was a Member of the Knesset. As Minister of Labor she oversaw the creation of Israel’s social welfare system and the integration of massive numbers of new immigrants. In 1955, she lost the battle to be mayor of Tel Aviv because religious parties refused to support a woman, the most overt but certainly not the only challenge that Meir faced as a rare female politician of that time. From 1956 to 1966, she was the world’s first female foreign minister. Plain-spoken, even blunt, Meir was an unlikely but effective diplomat, deepening Israel’s alliance with the US and helping create new ties with African nations.
Despite these achievements, it was her stint as Prime Minister that Golda (as she was widely known) is most remembered for. Few expected that she would become just the fourth woman in the world to become Prime Minister of a country. By 1969, the chain-smoking Meir had retired, was in poor health, and seventy years old. However, party leaders surprisingly called on her to replace Levi Eshkol, who had died in office. It initially appeared to be an inspired choice. While some intellectuals mocked her lack of education and poor (and American-accented) Hebrew, the public saw her as tough, warm, and experienced. In 1969, she took her centerleft Labor Alignment to what is still the best electoral showing in Israel’s history.
However, in 1973 came the Yom Kippur War. She led steadfastly during the conflict itself but was heavily criticized for her handling of the lead-up to the war and for the heavy casualties suffered by Israel. Some claimed that she squandered chances of a peace accord with Egypt before war broke out, that the army was ill-prepared and over-confident, and, most damagingly, that she ignored clear signs that Egypt and Syria were about to attack.
Fair or not, the allegations led to Meir’s resignation in 1974 and contributed to the center-left losing power in Israel for the first time in 1977. Meir has also been criticized for her brusque handling of protests by Israel’s Mizrachi Jews, for claiming that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, and for her hostility to feminism. Nonetheless, Golda Meir remains a hero to many, a crucial figure in the history of Israel, and a woman who broke into the male-only club of world leaders.