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Friday, March 29, 2024

The Mystery of Golda’s Golden Gems – Part 2

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Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. (Photo Credit: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.)
Yom Kippur War: Israeli tank and wounded soldiers

Continued from last week.

Curiously, most of the books I looked at, as well as Meir’s own autobiography, “My Life,” con-tained no mention of these two most famous Meir quotes. Nor was either of them included in the New York Times’s 4,883-word Dec. 9, 1978 obituary of Meir—although Times reporter Israel Shenker found room for more than three-dozen other quotes from Meir.

My investigation took a turn when I found a 1970 collection of Meir quotes titled “As Good As Golda: The Warmth and Wisdom of Israel’s Prime Minister.” In this book, there are two quotes that bear close resemblance to the pair in question: “Peace will come when Nasser loves his own children more than he hates the Israelis” and “What we hold against Nasser is not only the killing of our sons but forcing them for the sake of Israel’s survival to kill others.”

Strangely, there are no citations for any of the quotes in the book, and while I found these two exact quotes in other books (all published in or after 1970), none of the citations were from origi-nal sources. Even more bizarre is that “As Good As Golda” was compiled and edited by Israel and Mary Shenker—yes, the same Israel Shenker who several years later would write the massive New York Times obituary that contained dozens of Meir quotes but, notably, not her two most famous ones. (We’ll probably never solve that particular puzzle, as Mr. and Mrs. Shenker are both deceased.)

In investigating the veracity of a historical occurrence or quote, one also wants to consider whether the event or statement in question is consistent with the personality, habits, or disposi-tion of the public figure connected to it. Just as it would have been out of character for the dili-gent Lincoln to have hastily written his Gettysburg Address on the train to Gettysburg or to have ad-libbed his speech on the Gettysburg battlefield, the sentimental nature of Meir’s alleged pro-nouncement about “forgiv[ing] the Arabs for killing our sons” seems inconsistent with her charac-ter.

Nasser was an avowed enemy of Israel who desired, along with Egypt’s Arab neighbors, to de-stroy the country. With so much Jewish blood having been spilled to preserve the nation’s very existence, would the iron-willed and resolute Meir really have said something that has such an abject ring of supplication and liberal political correctness to it?

In the chapter in her autobiography on the Yom Kippur War, Meir wrote, “For years we not only had seen our sons killed but had tolerated a situation so grotesque that it is almost unbelievable: The only time that Arab states were prepared to recognize the State of Israel was when they had attacked it in order to wipe it out.”

In her manifest disgust with the Arab wish to annihilate Israel, she certainly does not sound like she would have said something even remotely like, “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.”

And yet, despite the lack of verification for either statement and the fact that the “forgive them” quote in particular hardly accords with Meir’s well-known hardheaded persona, they’ve both be-come entrenched as immutable fact, as truth carved in stone, when apparently they stand on a foundation built of sand.

* * * * *

Historical truth is ill-served when so many people want to believe something even if it may not be true. A reputable scholar contacted by one of the archives I was in touch with for this article in-sisted on the veracity of the quotes—but at the same time acknowledged he couldn’t offer any evidence for them!

In August 2014, in the wake of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, the Anti-Defamation League placed an ad in The Hollywood Reporter that highlighted the two icon-ic Meir quotes and suggested they were applicable to contemporary events; readers were asked to join the 18 Hollywood executives whose names were listed “in calling upon world leaders and decent people everywhere to ensure that Hamas terrorists cannot be rearmed.”

The ad had both Meir quotes strung together with the singular attribution, “Golda Meir (1957).”

The ADL did not respond to repeated requests from The Jewish Press for a statement as to whether the organization possessed any verification of the quotes and why they ran together, as though they were part of the same statement.

Many references to the two Meir quotes either cite the aforementioned Marie Syrkin as the source or don’t give her name, but cite the places and years she provided for the statements. As noted earlier, the quotes appear in Syrkin’s “A Land of Our Own,” both on the same page, one underneath the other. The parenthetical attribution that follows the second quote, the one about forgiving the Arabs, is “Press conference in London, 1969.” Perhaps the only thing accurate about that citation is that Meir was in fact in London in 1969.

It is disconcerting to think that Syrkin, who passed away in 1989, may have made up the quotes for Meir or that she somehow got them wrong. She was a respected scholar and a friend of Meir who wrote prolifically about her and edited some of her speeches.

But a hint that Syrkin may have at least taken some artistic license in editing Meir can be glimpsed in this aside by Asher Weill, the managing director of the book publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson: “Mrs. Meir does not want the speeches to appear necessarily verbatim but they should be judiciously cut and style-edited.”

All said, it seems there are three possibilities surrounding the mystery of Meir’s two most herald-ed but troublingly elusive quotes:

(1) The words were indeed spoken by Meir exactly as we know them today, and I was remiss, as were the various repositories I contacted, in not locating them in their original sources.

(2) Meir expressed the thoughts in somewhat different language, and Syrkin or someone else re-wrote them as the quotes we are all familiar with.

(3) Meir never said them at all.

Many of us—perhaps most of us—will find it hard to accept that these two gems that have be-come inextricable parts of the fabric of 21st-century Jewish history and folklore did not come from the mouth of Golda Meir. But until their authenticity can incontrovertibly be verified, it cannot be said with certainty that Meir ever said either one of them.

(This article was first published by The Jewish Press of Brooklyn, N.Y./JNS.org)

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