Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file that is, well, it's heavy. It's heavy
with history, heavy with emotion, and just heavy
with the kind of contradictions that make you
stare at the ceiling at two in the morning. Yeah,
trying to figure out how one person could contain
them all. Exactly. We're talking about a figure
who was somehow both the adorable cake baking
grandmother of a nation. And at the same time,
a chain smoking political operator who ordered
assassinations. And who held the fate of the
Middle East in her handbag, so to speak. It's
one of those biographies where if you wrote it
as a novel, an editor would send it back saying,
tone it down. It's not believable. Too much.
It's just too much. We are talking, of course,
about Golda Meir. The Iron Lady. The original
Iron Lady. And, you know, that's a crucial point.
The press gave her that nickname a full decade
before Margaret Thatcher even. set foot in Downing
Street. So our mission for today isn't just to
recount a Wikipedia page or list off a bunch
of dates. We have a specific goal with this stack
of sources we've been pouring over. Right. We
need to try and reconcile the two Goldas that
history has left us. Version A and version B.
Exactly. You have version A, the founding mother.
the lioness of Zionism, the woman on the banknote
who represents the sheer miraculous survival
of the state. And then you have version B, which
I think has gotten a lot louder in recent years,
the symbol of this. ossified leadership, the
woman who was asleep at the wheel in 1973. And
of course, the politician whose views on Palestinians
are still radioactive today. So our goal is to
find the aha moments, the things that explain
how a carpenter's daughter from Milwaukee, of
all places, ends up running a war room in Tel
Aviv. We want to understand the steal, the survey,
and yes, the massive, massive failures. And to
do that, you can't start in Israel. You can't
even start in Milwaukee. You have to go back
further. We have to go all the way back to the
Russians. Empire to Kiev in 1898. And the sources
all point to this one memory that Golda herself
said was the moment her life truly began. She's
just a little girl, maybe four or five years
old. And she's not playing with dolls or running
in a field. No. She's standing in a hallway watching
her father, Moshe, taking these big planks of
wood and frantically nailing them across the
front door of their house. Because there's a
pogrom coming? A mob. A mob is coming to attack
Jews. That image. It's like the rosebud of her
entire life, you know? It's the key that unlocks
her whole psyche. She wrote about the rage she
felt seeing her father, this big, strong man,
a carpenter, reduced to complete and utter helplessness.
He couldn't fight. He could only hide. And that
feeling of never again. It didn't start with
the Holocaust for her. It started right there
in that hallway in Kiev. That was the foundational
trauma. It frames absolutely everything. Her
entire political philosophy later on. Yeah. It
wasn't just about power or territory. It was
about the absence of fear. Yes. It was about
making sure that no Jew would ever have to be
the person hiding behind a boarded -up door again.
But they do get out. Her father leaves first,
goes to New York, finds the unions there a bit
too tough to crack, and ends up in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. And the rest of the family joins him
in 1906. And this is the part of the story that
always gets me. For the first big chunk of her
life, Golda Meir wasn't really Israeli. She was
an American teenager. She was Golda Mabovich
from Milwaukee. And she spoke English with a
perfect Midwest accent. But this was not some
kind of, you know, leave it to beaver childhood.
The sources are pretty clear that by the age
of eight, eight years old. Unbelievable. She
is basically running her mother's grocery store.
on the north side of town. Because her mother
has to go to the market at four in the morning
to buy supplies. Right. And this is where you
see the builder archetype emerge almost immediately.
There's this incredible anecdote from 1908 that
I think just perfectly sums up who she would
become. The textbooks. The textbooks. She's in
grade school. She sees her classmates can't afford
their textbooks. Now, most kids, what do they
do? They feel bad. Maybe they complain to the
teacher. Maybe share their book if they're nice.
Golda organizes a fundraiser. She doesn't just
organize a fundraiser. She creates a whole society,
the American Young Sisters Society. I mean, even
the name sounds so serious and official. It sounds
cute, but look at the logistics she pulled off.
She's maybe 10 years old. She rents a hall. She
mobilizes a committee of her friends. She schedules
a public meeting and gets up and gives a speech
to a room full of adults to raise capital. That
is terrifyingly competent. I was still trying
to figure out how to tie my own shoelaces at
that age. It's a complete precursor. I mean,
the exact mechanism she used to get textbooks
in Milwaukee is the same one she used 40 years
later to buy spitfires and tanks for the Israeli
army. She understood it instinctively. She got
it early on. If you want to change reality, you
don't pray, you don't ask for permission, you
organize. You pool your resources and you act.
But that knack for organizing. Yeah. It didn't
seem to extend to her own family life, which
sounds incredibly stifling. Oh, very much so.
Her mother, Bloom, was very traditional. The
plan was simple. You finish a little bit of school,
you find a good husband, you learn to bake bread,
and that's your life. That was the ceiling of
ambition her mother had for her. And Golda was
having none of it. Not a chance. She rebels hard.
She runs away from home. She gets on a train
and goes to Denver to live with her older sister,
Shana. And we really need to double click on
this Denver period. The sources frame this as
her real university. She didn't go to some Ivy
League school. She went to Shana's living room.
the intellectual evenings. It was basically a
salon in the classic European sense. Right. You
had anarchists, socialists, Zionists, trade unionists.
All chain smoking and drinking tea and arguing
about the fate of the world until sunrise. And
this is where Golda gets radicalized in the best
sense of that word. She moves from a sort of
vague cultural Jewish identity to a hard edged,
very specific political ideology. Socialist Zionism.
Exactly. And we should probably define that because
those words get thrown around a lot. What did
socialist Zionism actually mean to a teenager
in Denver in, say, 1913? It wasn't just about
having a country, right? No, it was so much more
than that. It meant that the return of the Jewish
people to their homeland had to be a revolution
of labor. They wanted to create a new kind of
Jew, a Jew who was strong, who worked the land,
who lived in these communes, these kibbutzim,
sharing everything. A rejection of the old stereotypes.
A total rejection of the merchant or intellectual
stereotype. It was about becoming a worker. It
wasn't just about building a country. It was
about building a utopia. And somewhere in the
middle of all this high -minded debate, amidst
all the tea and the cigarette smoke, she meets
a guy. Morris Meyerson, the sign painter. who
sounds like he was her complete opposite. The
sources describe him as gentle, quiet. He loved
poetry. He loved music. He just wanted a peaceful
evening at home. And she's this, tornado of political
activity. But they fall in love. They do. But
even in romance, Gold is a negotiator. When they
decide to get married in 1917, back in Milwaukee,
she hits him with an ultimatum, a literal precondition
for the marriage certificate. She says, I will
marry you, but on one condition. We are moving
to Palestine. Which is such a heavy ask. Yeah.
Hey, honey, let's leave, you know, modern America
with its plumbing and its electricity and move
to malaria infested backwater of the crumbling
Ottoman Empire. And Morris, bless his heart,
he agrees. Maybe he thought she'd grow out of
it or maybe he was just that much in love. I
don't know. But they arrive in 1921 on a ship
called the SS Pocahontas. And the reality check
must have been brutal. Oh, immediate. They apply
to join a kibbutz, kibbutz Moravia. And they
get rejected. They get rejected. The kibbutz
members looked at this American girl with her
nice clothes and she actually brought an electric
iron with her. Oh, that's amazing. And they just
assumed she was a princess. They thought, she
won't last a week in the fields. She'll break
a nail and run back to Milwaukee. So she has
to prove them wrong. The sources describe her
work. Picking almonds. planting trees, and eventually
taking over the chicken coops. And apparently
she was fanatical about it. She wanted to be
the perfect worker. She wanted to prove she could
suffer and toil just as much as anyone born there.
It was a point of pride. But the Kibbutz saw
the same thing we saw in that Milwaukee story.
They saw a leader. Exactly. They realized, okay,
she's a hard worker, but her real talents are
being wasted on chickens. This woman is an incredible
organizer. She's a brilliant talker. So they
pull her out of the fields. And they send her
as their representative to the Institute, the
General Federation of Labor. And that's the beginning
of her political career. But what about poor
Morris? Morris just couldn't adapt. He hated
the physical labor. He hated the communal living
with its total lack of privacy. He got sick.
He was deeply unhappy. And this becomes a really
tragic thread in her life. Her rise to power.
It basically comes at the direct cost of her
marriage. They separated years later, though
they never actually divorced. She shows the cause
over the home every single time. Which brings
us to the pivotal year, 1948. The state of Israel
is about to be declared. The British are pulling
out. Five Arab armies are warming up their tanks
on the borders. And the Jewish leadership has
a massive... Massive problem. They're broke.
Utterly broke. They have people willing to fight,
but they have no heavy weapons, no planes, no
tanks. The treasurer of the Jewish agency, a
man named Eliezer Kaplan, does the math. He figures
they need about $7 to $8 million just to survive
the first few weeks. And he doesn't think he
can get it. He thinks maybe, maybe he can scrape
that together from American donors. But the mood
in the U .S. was donor fatigue. They'd been giving
for years. And this is when Golda steps in and
says, let me go. And Kaplan, the treasurer, actually
tried to stop her. He said, the Americans are
tired of giving. You won't get a dime. Don't
waste the money on a plane ticket. She went anyway.
And she didn't just go to New York. She crisscrossed
the country. And she didn't have a PowerPoint
presentation or a slick video. She just stood
up there with no notes, this intense woman from
Milwaukee, and she just told these crowds of
American Jews the truth. What did she say? She
basically said, we are going to fight. If we
have guns, we'll fight with guns. If not, we'll
fight with stones. But you have to decide if
we are going to live or die. If we die... The
dream dies with us. And the money just starts
pouring in. Raining down. She raised over $50
million. In 1948 dollars. In 1948 dollars. Adjusted
for inflation, you're talking about hundreds
of millions, maybe a billion in terms of purchasing
power for a tiny brand new state. It completely
changed the trajectory of the war. Ben -Gurion's
famous quote. David Ben -Gurion, the first prime
minister, said, Someday when history is written,
it will be said that there was a Jewish woman
who got the money which made the state possible.
It funded a third of the entire war effort. Incredible.
She literally bought the weapons that saved the
country. So she funded the war. But she also
tried to stop it, or at least manage the odds
through some incredibly risky personal diplomacy.
This is the spy thriller part of her story. It
really is. It's May 1948, just days before independence
is declared. She needs to know one thing for
certain. Is King Abdullah I of Jordan going to
join the other Arab armies and invade? So what
does she do? She disguises herself as an Arab
woman. I just... I still can't get over this
image. Golda Meir in full traditional Arab dress,
getting in a car, crossing enemy lines, and driving
to Amman for a secret meeting with a king. The
danger is immense. If she's caught, she's not
just a prisoner of war. She's a spy. She's dead.
So she gets to the meeting. And it's this fascinating
clash of worlds. She reminds Abdullah that he
had promised in a previous secret meeting not
to attack. And Abdullah gives this very... poetic
and very sad answer. He says, when I made that
promise, I was alone. Now I am one of five, meaning
the other Arab leaders. He said the pressure
was just too great. And he asks her to wait.
He says, why are you in such a hurry to declare
independence? And her response is just legendary.
It's pure Golda. She looks at him and says, we've
been waiting for 2000 years. Is that being in
a hurry? The steal. Yeah. Just. Pure steel. Right.
And she walked away from that meeting knowing
that war was unavoidable. She failed to stop
it, but she succeeded in confirming the intelligence.
She came back and told Ben -Gurion, prepare for
the absolute worst. So the war happens. Israel
survives against all odds. Golda signs the Declaration
of Independence. She's one of only two women
to do so. Right. And then her reward for all
this is not a cabinet post in Tel Aviv. No. She
gets shipped off to Moscow. Which she hated,
apparently. She felt like she was being exiled
from the main event. She was appointed minister
plenipotentiary to the Soviet Union. And this
posting leads to what's known as the Rosh Hashanah
incident, which is one of the most emotional
moments in modern Jewish history. You really
have to understand the context here. This is
Stalin's Soviet Union. The Iron Curtain is down.
Soviet Jews are terrified. Their culture is being
systematically crushed. Hebrew is banned. Zionism
is a capital crime. So Golda decides to go to
the Moscow Choral Synagogue for the New Year
services. She probably expected to find a few
old men praying quietly in the shadows. But when
she arrives, the street is packed. Completely
packed. Estimates say up to 50 ,000 people showed
up. They are risking their jobs, their freedom,
maybe their lives. to be there. And when they
see her, the living, breathing representative
of this new Jewish state, they just erupt. And
they're chanting. They're chanting Nasha Golda,
which is Russian for our Golda. That must have
been an absolutely electrifying moment. It terrified
the Soviet authorities. It was this spontaneous
proof that despite decades of brutal suppression,
Jewish identity was still alive and kicking.
For Golda, it was a profound validation of everything
she believed in. That the state wasn't just for
the people living there? No, it was a beacon.
It was a source of pride and hope for Jews trapped
everywhere. She wrote later that she felt like
she was dissolving into the crowd, that the boundary
between her and them had just vanished. She eventually
comes back to Israel and gets the job she always
wanted. what she later called her seven beautiful
years. She becomes the minister of labor in 1949.
And this is where the revolutionary ideals meet
the brutal reality of governing. It's one thing
to talk about building a socialist utopia in
a Denver living room. It's another thing entirely
when you're the minister of labor in 1950. Israel's
population is doubling, then tripling. Immigrants
are pouring in from the displaced persons camps
in Europe, Holocaust survivors, and then... Huge
waves from Arab countries, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco.
And they arrived with nothing. No money, no Hebrew,
and literally nowhere to sleep. This is the era
of the Marlboro, the transit camps. We're talking
about tent cities. Tent cities, tin huts, mud
in the winter, baking heat in the summer, disease,
unemployment, despair. And gold is the person
responsible for fixing this nightmare. And she
was ruthless about it. About the construction.
Absolutely ruthless. She oversaw the construction
of 200 ,000 apartments. Now, were they pretty?
No. They were these brutalist concrete blocks,
these shikunim. But she got people out of the
tents and into homes with a roof and a door.
She was also building the welfare state. Social
security, maternity leave, health care infrastructure.
This goes back to the core contradiction we talked
about at the start. If Golda had retired in,
say, 1965, she would be remembered almost universally
as the great builder, the social architect. A
mother of the welfare state. Exactly. She was
literally constructing brick by brick the country
she had dreamed of all those years ago. Then
comes the foreign ministry in 1956. And this
is where she stops being Golda Meyerson. And
becomes Golda Meir. Why the name change? It was
Ben -Gurion's policy. He insisted that all foreign
service members, all diplomats representing Israel
abroad have Hebrew names. So Meyerson, her married
name, became Meir. Which means illuminate or
burn brightly. Pretty fitting, I'd say. And her
time as foreign minister is interesting. She
seems to have focused very heavily on Africa.
What was the thinking there? Well, she saw a
kind of shared experience. Israel was a young
nation that had thrown off. British colonial
rule. These newly independent African nations
were throwing off British, French, Belgian colonial
rule. So there was a sense of solidarity. Sense
of solidarity. Absolutely. She believed Israel
could be a model that they could teach these
new countries how to build a nation from scratch.
You know, irrigation techniques, agricultural
co -ops, public health clinics. It was soft power.
but also something more. I think so. The sources
suggest she was genuinely invested in this idea
of an alliance of young post -colonial nations,
and she traveled extensively building relationships
and alliances that actually lasted for decades.
Okay, so she does all that, then she retires
in 1966. She's tired. Yeah. And we now know she's
sick. She has lymphoma, though she keeps it a
complete secret from the public. She thinks she's
done. And then, in 1969, Prime Minister Levi
Eshkol dies suddenly of heart attack. The Labor
Party is in chaos and they need a unifying figure,
a stabilizing hand to hold the coalition together.
And they look around the room and there's Golda,
the grandmother of the nation. She's 71 years
old. And she becomes the prime minister. The
accidental prime minister. And, you know, initially
she is wildly popular. She leads the party to
its best ever election result. She's this tough
but motherly figure. But this. This is where
the conception begins to take hold. And it's
where her legacy gets really, really complicated.
Let's talk about that. Because her time as prime
minister is really defined by two massive blind
spots. Her blindness to the Palestinian issue
and her blindness to the war drums beating in
1973. They're connected in a way. They both stem
from a kind of intellectual rigidity. A certainty
that her view of the world was the only correct
one. Let's start with the Palestinians. There's
a quote from a 1969 interview with the Sunday
Times that has haunted her legacy ever since.
Oh, it's the they did not exist quote. It's probably
the single most famous or infamous thing she
ever said. The interviewer asked her about the
rise of the Palestinian fedayeen, the fighters.
And Golda said, quote. There was no such thing
as Palestinians. It was not as though there was
a Palestinian people in Palestine considering
itself as a Palestinian people. And we came and
threw them out and took their country from them.
They did not exist. Hearing that today, I mean,
it's just shocking. It sounds like a complete
denial of reality. And the sources are clear.
This wasn't just a slip of the tongue. This was
her deeply held worldview. It was. She was an
old school, dyed in the wool Zionist who saw
the conflict in very simple terms. It was Jews
versus Arabs. She did not recognize a distinct,
separate Palestinian national identity. To her,
they were just southern Syrians or Jordanians
who happened to live in the area. And that blindness
had consequences. Massive consequences. It meant
she completely underestimated the rise of Palestinian
nationalism and the power of the PLO. She thought
she could just manage the status quo and the
occupied territories forever, that it was a problem
that could be contained, not one that had to
be solved politically. That same rigidity that
I know I'm right attitude, it served her well
when she was fundraising, but it's incredibly
dangerous when you're conducting diplomacy. And
you see again in 1972 with the Munich Olympics
massacre. Right. The Black September attack.
Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches murdered
on global television. Golda appealed to the world
to save our citizens. And when the international...
was, in her view, weak and ineffective, she didn't
hesitate. She authorized the Mossad to hunt down
and assassinate every single person believed
to be responsible. Operation Wrath of God. It
showed her ruthless streak. When it came to protecting
Israelis, there was no line she wouldn't cross.
But that ruthlessness, or maybe that overconfidence,
it eventually backfired spectacularly. Which
brings us to the tragedy. October 1973. The Yom
Kippur War. This is the fall. And to understand
what happened, you have to understand the Israeli
mindset at the time. You have to understand what
they called the conception, or in Hebrew, ha
-conceptia. Walk us through that. What was the
conception? In a nutshell, it was supreme overconfidence.
After Israel's stunning six day victory in the
1967 war, the Israeli military and intelligence
community convinced themselves of a very specific
narrative. Which was? That the Arabs knew they
couldn't possibly win a conventional war against
Israel and therefore they wouldn't even try.
Specifically, the conception was that Egypt would
not attack until it had an air force capable
of striking deep into Israel, which was years
away. So any evidence to the contrary was just
dismissed. It was filtered through this lens
of arrogance. Golda was actually getting raw
intelligence reports in the weeks leading up
to the war. Hey, the Syrians are massing hundreds
of tanks on the Golan Heights. The Egyptians
are moving massive amounts of equipment to the
Suez Canal. And she was worried. The sources
say she had a gut feeling that something was
wrong. She was. On October 5th, the day before
the war broke out, she called in her military
advisors. Her defense minister, the legendary
Moshe Dayan, was there, and she asked them point
blank, are you sure we're safe? And they basically
patted her on the head. They told her, don't
worry, Golda, it's just maneuvers. The Arabs
are too weak to attack. Don't panic. They were
prisoners of their own conception. Until 4 o
'clock in the morning on October 6th. Yom Kippur.
The holiest day of the Jewish year. The country
is shut down. People are in synagogue. And the
phone rings in Golda's residence. It's her military
secretary. And he says, it's not maneuvers. War
is starting today. Probably at sunset. So now
she has a decision to make. And this is probably
the most debated, most agonizing moment in Israeli
military history. Her chief of staff, David Elazar,
wants to launch an immediate preemptive strike.
Hit the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the
ground, just like they did in 67. annihilate
them before they can even get off the ground.
And Golda says no. Golda says no. And the question
is why? Why would the Iron Lady refuse to strike
first when she knows an attack is imminent? It
all came down to one person, Henry Kissinger.
Exactly. She was playing three -dimensional chess.
She knew the world had changed since 1967. Israel
was much more diplomatically isolated. And more
importantly, She knew they would eventually need
a massive American airlift of weapons and supplies
to win a prolonged war. And Kissinger had made
it crystal clear. He had basically told them,
if you guys strike first, if you are seen as
the aggressor, don't even bother calling us.
The line he supposedly used was, you wouldn't
get so much as a nail. So Goldemere, the tough,
uncompromising Iron Lady, made the conscious
decision to let her country get hit first. To
absorb the first blow. It is a chilling, almost
unbearable calculus to know the bombs are coming
and to wait for them all to secure your diplomatic
and military lifeline. And that decision, as
you said, both saved the country and nearly destroyed
it. Absolutely. By waiting, they allowed the
Egyptians and Syrians to make huge gains in the
first 48 hours. Thousands of Israeli soldiers
were killed or captured. The Golan Heights were
almost completely overrun. There were moments
in that war room. where Dien, the hero of 67,
was reportedly talking about the fall of the
Third Temple. He thought it was the end. He was
having a nervous breakdown. And Golda. Golda
was reportedly devastated. There were rumors
she contemplated suicide in those first few days.
But, and this is the critical part, she held
it together in public. While her famous generals
were panicking, she was the one on the phone
to Nixon and Kissinger. Using the fact that they
hadn't struck first as leverage. Total leverage.
She basically said, we did what you asked. We
took the hit. Now, where is our stuff? And it
worked. Operation Nickel Grass, those giant American
C -5 Galaxy transport planes started landing
every 15 minutes, packed with tanks and ammunition.
And that's what turned the tide of the war. So
militarily, her gamble paid off. Israel pushed
back, crossed the Suez and won the war. But politically.
Politically, she was a dead woman walking. The
public could not forgive the surprise. They couldn't
forgive the arrogance, the lack of preparedness.
They looked at the 2 ,600 fresh graves and they
asked, where were you? Why didn't you see this
coming? Even though the official commission of
inquiry, the Agronaut Commission. It technically
cleared her. It placed the blame squarely on
the military intelligence chiefs. The report
actually praised her decision making on that
fateful morning. But the public didn't care about
technicalities. No. The trust was shattered.
The myth of competence was broken. She resigned
in April of 1974. She gave a speech where she
just said, it is beyond my strength to continue
carrying this burden. And she died just four
years later. The lymphoma she had kept secret
for so long finally caught up with her. A tragic
end to a titanic life. Before we wrap up, I do
want to touch on some of the more personal stuff
because the Golda brand was such a huge part
of her political power. The shoes, for instance.
Gold shoes. It's amazing. They became actual
Israeli army slang for those ugly, sturdy, orthopedic
lace -up shoes that they issued to female soldiers.
Because she just did not care about fashion at
all. Not in the slightest. She projected this
image of austere, grandmotherly simplicity. She
was famous for holding cabinet meetings in her
kitchen while serving cakes she'd baked herself.
The kitchen cabinet wasn't a metaphor. It was
a literal place. But there's a detail in the
sources about where she lived that I found really,
really unsettling. The story of the Villa Harun
al -Rashid. Ah, yes. This is the detail that,
for me, just perfectly captures the unresolved
tension of her life and of the state itself.
In the 1960s, as foreign minister, she lived
in this beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. But
it wasn't a house built by Jews. No. It was built
in 1926 by a prominent Christian Arab family,
the Bishrots, who fled during the 1948 war. And
the villa had its name, Villa Harun al -Rashid,
written in beautiful Arabic ceramic tiles on
the front. And the sources say Golda had the
tiles sandblasted off the wall. She had the Arabic
script removed, erased. She lived in the house,
but she erased its history. It's such a powerful
and painful metaphor for that entire generation's
attitude. It connects right back to the they
did not exist quote. It's the same impulse, this
desire to build a new future so intensely that
it required actively unseeing the past, unseeing
the people who were there before you. It's a
willful blindness that existed right alongside
her incredible creative nation building energy.
And what about her relationship with religion?
She was famously an atheist. A staunchly secular
cultural Zionist. She had that classic line,
which is just the perfect politician's answer.
When asked about her faith, she said, I believe
in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe
in God. It's brilliant. It sidesteps the question
completely. But it also reflects. her generation
of labor Zionists. They weren't religious. They
were socialists. But they were absolutely 100
percent committed to the history and the survival
of the Jewish people. So bringing this all together.
It is just so complicated. You have the woman
who raised $50 million to prevent a second Holocaust,
who built housing for hundreds of thousands of
immigrants, who shattered the glass ceiling for
women in global politics. And you have the woman
who erased the tiles from the front of her house
and who missed the most obvious warning signs
of a catastrophic war. It leaves us with a really
provocative question, I think. Which is? Are
the skills required to build a nation fundamentally
different from the skills required to lead one
in a time of crisis? Say more about that. Well,
Golda had the skills of a builder in spades.
She was stubborn. She was single -minded. She
had this absolute moral certainty. And you need
that when you're draining swamps or fighting
an independence war against impossible odds.
You need to see the world in black and white.
But when you're a prime minister trying to navigate
a complex diplomatic landscape, When you need
to read the subtle signals coming from Anwar
Sadat in Egypt or understand the nuances of an
emerging Palestinian identity. That black and
white vision makes you blind. Exactly. The very
stubbornness that made her a hero in 1948 helped
make her a failure in 1973. She was the Iron
Lady, but iron doesn't bend. And in politics,
if you can't bend, eventually you break. A heck
of a place to land. Golda Meir, the builder who
couldn't renovate her own worldview. A fascinating,
flawed, and unforgettable giant. Thank you all
for listening to this deep dive. If you enjoyed
it, pass it on to someone who might. There is
always more to uncover. Stay curious. We'll catch
you on the next one.