Born in Tsarist Kyiv in 1898, Golda Meir grew up with what she called a ‘pogrom complex’. That perhaps explained why later, as Israeli prime minister, she had such harsh words for Palestinians and Arabs. But then she had harsh words for a lot of people. Moses, she complained, ‘took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil’. Women’s Lib, she averred, was ‘foolishness’, since the real discrimination was that men were unable to bear children.
She cuts a lugubrious figure, walking alone down long corridors, lighting one solemn cigarette after another
An inspired phrase-maker, a phenomenal organiser, a patriotic socialist who, as Labour minister, had practically created Israel’s welfare state, Meir makes an inviting subject for a biopic. And Golda starts in the right place, with the prime minister (Helen Mirren underneath three-and-a-half hours of make-up) walking through a crowd of protestors on her way to the 1973-4 inquiry into the Yom Kippur War.
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