[gentle music]
- Can you be a good liberal and a good Zionist?
Well, given the increasingly "either-or" world
in which we live,
many assume the answer to be no.
You must choose.
You can either have a universal commitment
to healing the world,
or a particular loyalty to a specific group.
And, in fact, because of this supposed choice,
Zionists have been caricatured as too nationalist
and illiberal, neither altruistic nor universalistic.
But as it turns out, that choice is a false one.
And to see that, we needn't look further than Golda Meir.
- We welcome you as the Prime Minister of Israel.
- Golda Meir was a force.
She was a proud Jewish nationalist,
a tough, witty Zionist
who was tired of seeing Jews get pushed around,
and helped build the state of Israel.
- The story of modern Israel
is essentially the story of the return
to the ancestral homeland of exiles
from persecution, insecurity, and fear.
- Golda Meir was an equally proud,
universally-minded socialist,
trying to make the world a better place.
Here was a Zionist who chose to live in a community
where everybody was equal, who defended workers' rights,
who helped found a powerful labor union,
and who championed national healthcare
as part of an elaborate social welfare package for all.
And here was a Zionist who insisted
that even as a young, poor, and primitive country,
Israel should extend itself to help the rest of the world.
And yet none of these activities
ever weakened her full-time commitment to the Jewish people
and the Jewish democratic state, Israel.
- There's nobody else in the world
that wants peace more than we do.
- So, how did a Milwaukee school girl
end up being the world's most famous, progressive Zionist?
Born in 1898 in Kiev, Ukraine,
her earliest memory was her father
boarding up their front door
against rumored pogroms, Jew-hating riots.
Remembering that fear, she would say about Israel,
"Above all, this country is our own.
Nobody has to get up in the morning
and worry what his neighbors think of him."
And in 1943, as the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews,
she defined the Jewish nationalist movement, Zionism,
at its most basic, saying,
"There is no Zionism except the rescue of Jews."
But for Golda Meir, merely surviving was never enough.
Yes, Zionism was about defending Jews
after centuries of homelessness and persecution,
but it was also about redefining the role of the Jew
in the world.
"When Jews would return to their homeland," she imagined,
"they would make a better society."
But, back to her story,
Golda Mabovitch's family moved from Russia
to the safety of Milwaukee in 1906.
When she graduated as valedictorian
of the Fourth Street School in 1912,
she became the first person in her family
to graduate elementary school.
Today, it is the Golda Meir School
for Gifted and Talented Youth.
Rebelling against her mother,
who insisted she would only be a housewife,
young Golda ran away to Denver following her sister Sheyna.
In Denver, the 14-year-old joined the great debates
her sister had with others about how to gain equality,
for women, for workers, for Jews.
They believed in Socialist Zionism's promise
to use the new Jewish State to create an ideal egalitarian,
cooperative society.
In 1917, Golda married a socialist dreamer, Morris Myerson.
The two moved to Kibbutz Merchavia in Israel in 1921.
But the couple drifted apart, as Golda,
who eventually Hebraicized her last name to Meir,
became one of the most important Zionist leaders
in the pre-state period.
She helped found Mapai,
the Labor Party of the Land of Israel in 1930.
Sometimes, her two young children
had to attend Labor Party meetings just to see their mother.
It wasn't easy.
Golda Meir once wrote an essay, "Borrowed Mothers,"
describing her "inner struggles,"
and the, "Despair of the mother who goes to work,
as being without parallel in human experience."
As the Zionist leaders prepared to declare
their independence in 1948,
David Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir to America
to raise money for the new state.
Some hoped she would raise $7 million.
She aimed for $25 million,
and she returned with nearly $50 million.
Legend has it in suitcases, mostly in $1 and $5 bills.
"When the history of Israel is written one day,"
Ben-Gurion proclaimed,
"it will say, 'There was a Jewish woman
who got the money to make the state.'"
In early May, 1948,
Golda Meir dressed up as an Arab woman,
and traveled to Jordan, to meet King Abdullah secretly.
She was hoping for peace, he was preparing for war.
When the King suggested that there was no hurry
to proclaim the state of Israel
as soon as Great Britain left Palestine,
as the UN decided it should do,
she responded, "We've been waiting for 2,000 years.
Is that hurrying?"
A few days later, when she was one of two women
and 22 men to sign Israel's Declaration of Independence,
this tough, no-nonsense woman cried.
"When I studied American history as a school girl,
and I read about those who signed
the Declaration of Independence," she explained,
"I couldn't imagine these were real people
doing something real.
And there I was sitting down
and signing a declaration of establishment."
As the state grew, so did Golda Meir's responsibilities.
As labor minister from 1949 to 1956,
she supervised the building of 200,000 apartments,
30,000 houses, hundreds of new businesses,
and dozens of new roads.
She also helped develop Israel's
National Insurance Act of 1954,
which remains the centerpiece
of Israel's social welfare system.
Remembering the social and religious debates of her youth,
she was still trying to make every Jew safe, proud, free,
and economically secure too.
In those days, Golda Meir also got used
to dismissing all kinds of sexist remarks
with her sharp wit.
When a cabinet colleague suggested a curfew
to keep women home after dark to protect them from rapists,
she retorted, "But it's the men who are attacking the women.
If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home."
This kind of sharpness helped Golda Meir as Foreign Minister
become the face of Israel, tough, modern,
yet also old-fashioned, wise, funny, and deeply Jewish.
When she took the job in 1956,
Israel was poor and struggling.
Nevertheless, she launched a special Israeli initiative
to work with developing countries, primarily in Africa.
Since then, Israel's agriculture experts at MASHAV
have trained over 230,000 farmers
and technical experts in 140 different developing countries.
Amazed by her generosity and impact,
the legendary Tanzanian President,
and anti-colonialist fighter, Julius Nyerere,
called Golda Meir "the mother of Africa."
In 1966, feeling sick and tired,
Gold Meir retired from Foreign Ministry.
Within months though, she came back,
becoming Secretary General
of the Socialist-Zionist Mapai party
to support her friend, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
During the tense days before the 1967 war,
people criticized Eshkol for not knowing what to do
as Israel's Arab neighbors threatened to
"throw the Jews into the sea."
But Golda insisted, "A leader who doesn't hesitate
before he sends his nation into battle,
is not fit to be a leader."
Golda Meir hated war, but understood the Zionist imperative:
when the enemy threatens you and your children,
"Ein Breira," there is no choice.
- We'll have to protect ourselves.
- How?
- We'll see. Best way we can.
- That sensibility shaped
two of her most famous quips
about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In 1957, she predicted that,
"Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children
more than they hate us."
And in 1969, she added that,
"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."
Levi Eshkol died suddenly in 1969,
and the Labor Party chose Golda Meir to replace him.
"Being 70," she sighed, "is no sin,
but it's not a joke either."
Her five years as Prime Minister were rocky.
Historians criticize her
for not being sufficiently sensitive
to the rights of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries,
for not acknowledging Palestinian nationhood,
and most problematic of all, for listening to those generals
who ignored signs of an impending
Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack
before Yom Kippur in 1973,
and mobilizing the troops too late.
Others note the leadership she offered
throughout the 1973 war,
which Israel eventually won inspired by her toughness.
- The very existence, the future of the Jewish people
depends upon Israel being free and safe, or not.
- Regardless of her political legacy
as Prime Minister,
Golda Meir's Zionist and liberal legacy is far more golden.
Her love of her country and her people,
combined with her love of humanity,
made her not only the Mother of Africa,
not only Israel's Jewish grandmother,
but one of the main symbols of the kind of nationalist
and egalitarian liberalism that gave birth to Zionism.
Golda Meir wasn't perfect,
but she is a perfect example of a liberal Zionist
who refused to live in the land of false choices,
of either-or,
but was happy to live in the messier
but more fulfilling world of the "and,"
the juggler, the balancer, redeeming the Jewish people,
and the world.