Golda Meir

Golda Meir was prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, and remains the only woman to have held the office. She was born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv, then in the Russian Empire, and her earliest memory was of her father boarding up the door against a pogrom. The family emigrated to Milwaukee in 1906. She trained as a teacher, joined the Labor Zionist movement, and in 1921 moved with her husband to Mandatory Palestine, settling on a kibbutz. She rose through the Histadrut trade union federation and the Jewish Agency, raised money in America for the coming war, and was one of the signatories of Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. She was the first ambassador to Moscow, then minister of labour, then foreign minister, in which role she built relations with the newly independent states of Africa. She became prime minister at seventy-one after Levi Eshkol died in office. Her premiership is defined by the Yom Kippur War. Warnings of an Egyptian and Syrian attack accumulated through 1973, and she chose not to order a pre-emptive strike, partly to keep American support. The attack on 6 October caught the army unready and the early losses were severe. The Agranat Commission cleared her of direct blame and put it on the military, but the public did not, and she resigned in April 1974. She was famously blunt, and Ben-Gurion is supposed to have called her the only man in his cabinet, a remark she disliked. She had eleven grandchildren and kept working from her kitchen table, where much of the cabinet's real business was done over tea. She was already suffering from the lymphoma that killed her in 1978, which was kept secret throughout her premiership.

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