“We will crush them, we will split them open.” The message, with clenched teeth, and cigarette in hand, comes out of the mouth of a lady with gray hair, exhausted, brave: she does not believe what she is seeing. The atmosphere of tragedy in the situation room could not be thicker.
The instruction to the highest military authority, Moshe Dayán, was: “Go to television first and then give them a lesson that they will never forget.” The survival of the State of Israel was in the balance. Egyptian and Syrian troops are attacking Israeli soil relentlessly and by surprise on the most sacred day of the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur.
There were rumors, but the intelligence services were not listened to as they deserved. Goldie Meyerson, Golda Meir (1898-1978), the first and last Israeli prime minister to date, seems finished. She knew it. Zvika Samir, the head of the Mossad at the time, had warned her of a coded message: a list with five metals that meant “the war is going to start…”.
“My gut knew it and I didn’t pay attention to them,” he later declared, but he doubted, there had been previous false alarms. Uncertainty reigned, Meir knew that Israel could not shoot first. The attack came on October 6, 1973, 50 years and one day before the recent Hamas attack.
The parallels such as decision-making, the hostage crisis and the corpses “that are never left behind” are almost a carbon copy half a century later. Golda Meir is absolutely current: the Nagrela publishing house has republished her autobiography, My Life, and she stars in a feature film, Golda (Diamondfilms), with a superb and unrecognizable Helen Mirren.
No one remembers anymore, but Meir, born in a very poor family that emigrated to Goldene Medine, (the Golden State), that is, the United States, to Milwaukee, was the Iron Lady, no matter how much the title she kept. , and for history, Margaret Thatcher. Two opposite figures, the socialist Meir, who resigned when the war was already “won,” died 45 years ago when she had already turned 80. She lived long enough, from her hospital bed, to watch the Camp David agreements on TV. signed by Benájem Begin and the Egyptian president Annuar el Saddat.
A puff of oxygen and another from the cigarette that he never abandoned. In the middle of the screen, the still resilient Jimmy Carter, who turned 99 in October (his wife died a few days ago). Henry Kissinger, who has just died at the age of 100, appears throughout the film. “At that time – Meir recalls in his writings – the highest personality in the Middle East was not President Sadat, nor President Assad, nor King Faisal, nor even Mrs. Meir. She was the Secretary of the United States, of Dr. Henry Kissinger, whose efforts for peace can only be described as superhuman.”
Kissinger (Liev Schreiber in the film) spends half of his scenes in bed answering untimely, early-morning calls from Meir. “The first time I cried, but not the last, was when American military aid arrived,” she confesses. Karl Marx does not appear in the film, but his spirit does: “History happens twice: the first time as a great tragedy and the second as a miserable farce.”
With 50 years of difference and with a totally different geopolitical map (with illegal settlements, the change of alliances, the recognition of Israel by some Arab countries, and the caging and vital needs that Gaza currently suffers since the Hamas attack on 7 October), there are surprising parallels between the two wars, the current one and the Yom Kippur war. And also between the two Israeli commanders in chief, then and now.
And Meir was in power for a short time and was a solid Labor member (very critical of her European socialist partners, especially the German Willy Brandt) and Bibi Netanyahu, from the Likud, has been premier six times and her position has veered increasingly to the right. In his recent book and in statements in recent weeks, Bibi Netanyahu hammers home the message that hostages and prisoners must be returned to their families.
“A sacred law,” Meir writes in her memoirs, “is not to leave anyone behind, the “anguish of not being able to give information about hostages and missing people” was a personal “torment” for her: “I knew I had nothing to tell them (but ) attended to them all.”
Of course, deep down, the two large blocs of the Cold War were key to the conflict. Netanyahu trained at MIT and learned the importance of trade and new technologies to boost a small country, with few natural resources but that could be very advanced. Netanyahu, in front of the White House, listen and then acts his way.
Meir did something like that, but like Zelensky now, he needed American planes and tanks. The prime minister not only grew up in Milwaukee, but she became a powerful speaker and activist throughout the country until she decided to emigrate to Palestine in pursuit of a Jewish state. Hers is the honor of having the first passport in the history of Israel.
David Ben Gurion sent her to the US to raise funds (50 million dollars). Only Raquel Cohen Kagan. And she was one of only two women, along with activist Rachel Cohen Kagan, signatories of the Israeli Independence Act. The Soviet Union was key in the sudden chess that emerged with the Yom Kippur War. Now, his Afghanistan is Ukraine. It is curious that both Cohen-Kagan and Meir herself were born in Ukraine.
In the first lines of his memories of the 1973 crisis, Meir is inflexible: “There are two things that I must make clear from now on: the first is that we won the Yom Kippur war. The other is that the world in general and Israel’s enemies in particular must know that the circumstances that led to the loss of the more than 2,500 Israelis who were killed will never be repeated.” The frame is the same (Marx, always Marx), but the painting is not finished yet. The current war continues. And neither does the casualty count.