Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War: 50 years later

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/10/2023 (743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fifty years ago, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, started after sundown on Friday Oct. 5, 1973. At the time, as a 17-year-old and somewhat cognizant of world affairs, I recall there was serious concern about the State of Israel’s security, but no reason to believe that its enemies were about to start another war six years after they had been soundly defeated in the Six-Day War of June 1967.

I was wrong. And so, too, were Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces David (Dado) Elazar.

Before prayer services resumed the next morning in Winnipeg, the unthinkable had happened. Early on Saturday morning when Israel was literarily shut down, Egypt and Syria, armed with military weaponry supplied by the Soviet Union, had launched a brazen attack from the south and the north.

The new film Golda captures Meir’s intense struggle — she is superbly played by Helen Mirren with prosthetics and lots of make-up — to defeat the Arab armies once more.

Israel’s ultimate victory in the 19-day war was dependent on the courage and training of its soldiers, and more pragmatically on the military aid and equipment supplied by the United States. In the midst of the Cold War, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — realistically performed by Liev Schreiber — was determined to thwart any efforts by the Soviet Union to expand its sphere of influence in the Middle East.

What is absent from the film, however, other than a few tidbits of information, is any real historical perspective on Meir, her background and the war’s aftermath.

Born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv in 1898, Meir immigrated to Milwaukee in 1906 with family members. An ardent Labour Zionist, she and her husband Morris Meyerson (later shortened to Meir), immigrated to Palestine in 1921, which was then under British Mandate. From that point on, as she and Morris had a family, her life was devoted to making the State of Israel a reality in 1948.

She was a senior union organizer and then a leading politician. She served in key cabinet positions from 1949 to 1966, until serious health problems led to her semi-retirement. When Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died in February 1969, Meir was recruited to takeover. She reluctantly did so, becoming prime minister, the first and only woman to hold that position, about a month later, at the age of 71.

A chain-smoker, Meir was tough — she was rightly called Israel’s “Iron Lady” — and opinionated, yet humble enough to acknowledge that she was not infallible.

In an interview she did with the Sunday Times (London) in June, 1969, she stated that “there was no such thing as Palestinians.” If you read her entire comments (found on Wikipedia), it is clear her words were taken out of context. But no matter how much she tried to explain herself, she was denounced by Arab leaders and other world leaders — and still is to the present day.

All assertions to the contrary, Meir wanted only one thing: peace with Israel’s Arab neighbours, though not at the cost of its security. During her first few years in power, she declared many times that she was prepared to negotiate with Arab leaders. But Anwar Sadat, who became president of Egypt in September 1970, and the leaders of Syria and Jordan, among others, refused.

Meir was later criticized for rebuffing Sadat’s so-called desire for peace in the months leading to the Yom Kippur War, though it is not clear how genuine he was or whether he was prepared to compromise. His main goal in 1973 was to restore Egyptian pride following the humiliating defeat in 1967, and reclaim land in the Sinai.

As Egypt and Syria mobilized first in May 1973 and then in October, Meir sensed the worst. But her concerns were dismissed by both Dayan and Elazar.

When the worst did finally happen and the attack began, she never forgave herself for not heeding her gut instinct. At the end of the war, Israel had indeed won the battle and regained territory taken during the conflict, yet had lost approximately 2,600 soldiers with another 8,000 wounded. The combined Egypt and Syrian losses were about 15,000 killed and 30,000 wounded.

The fallout from the war has never ended. Within a few years, Sadat, acknowledging the futility of war with Israel, signed a peace treaty that still holds. It was, however, one of the factors that led to his assassination by Egyptian soldiers loyal to the Islamic Jihad. King Hussein of Jordan also agreed to peace terms in 1994; Syria never has and likely will not at any time in the near future.

The fact that it took a nearly a week of bitter conflict for Israel to regain the upper hand in the 1973 war exposed its vulnerability and had a severe psychological impact on its citizens. Though an official government inquiry cleared Meir and Dayan of any wrongdoing — the main scapegoat was Chief of Staff Elazar — Meir, who resigned as prime minister in June 1974, accepted the blame for the miscalculation. She died four years later. Israeli politics shifted to the right, where it remains even more so entrenched currently.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.