Golda Meir Dies: Israel's Iron Lady at Eighty

Golda Meir died on December 8, 1978, at eighty years old. She had kept her lymphoma secret for twelve years while running Israel's foreign ministry and then the country itself. She was prime minister when Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War on October 6, 1973, a surprise attack that nearly destroyed the Israeli Army before reserves mobilized and the tide turned. Intelligence chief Eli Zeira had dismissed warnings from King Hussein of Jordan, who had personally traveled to Tel Aviv to tell Meir that war was imminent. She chose to wait rather than launch a preemptive strike, partly because she feared losing American support if Israel was seen as the aggressor. The decision cost hundreds of Israeli lives in the first days of fighting. She resigned in April 1974, accepting responsibility for the intelligence failure. Born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv in 1898, she emigrated to Milwaukee at age eight and grew up in a family so poor that she organized a fundraiser for school textbooks at eleven. She moved to Palestine in 1921, joined the Histadrut labor federation, and rose through the Labor Party hierarchy. She served as ambassador to the Soviet Union, where over fifty thousand Soviet Jews gathered to greet her at a Moscow synagogue in 1948, a spontaneous demonstration that stunned both the Israeli delegation and the Soviet government. She became foreign minister in 1956 and prime minister in 1969, the third woman in modern history to lead a nation. She did not think "woman" was the interesting part of that sentence. She died knowing the war that ended her career would define her legacy.