Golda vs. Golda
It’s not at all clear to me why the Guy Nattiv biopic about Golda Meir at the time of the Yom Kippur War, Golda (2023), collected so many unhappy reviews. Its reception in Britain was probably influenced by the “Jewface” criticism around Helen Mirren in the title role, though the international Tomatometer shows a respectably high audience score of 91% next to the more modest critical at 53%. Politically, it has something to outrage everyone (Haaretz hated it). Perhaps the movie critics expected spectacular scenes of warfare? There was clearly no budget for that; it’s a chamber, almost theatre-tailored drama with a really solid script (Nicholas Martin) and decent performances all around, especially Camille Cottin as her PA (probably completely invented) and Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger. Mirren is perfectly serviceable in the role; she’s an actor who’s never particularly great with accents and here she had to make the Midwest American her own, to mixed results. (While her early years were spent in Kiev, Golda more or less grew up in Milwaukee before moving to the then-Mandatory Palestine under the League of Nations in anticipation of the creation of the Jewish state and immediately jumped into socialist politics and kibbutz life).
After doing a little poll on Twitter/X if I should see the movie – I collected more jokes about smoking in it than recommendations to see it – I almost decided to skip. I thought I’d watch the 2019 documentary instead, but then the doc ended up being the final nudge that made me go to Carlton Cinema. It’s a good one – and it’s available in entirety on YT. Trailer below:
It’s built around the previously unreleased hot mic footage of Meir after an Israeli TV interview honestly discussing various issues of the day and it pulls no punches. Israel having a pluralistic culture (sharpest criticism of the ADL that I’ve ever seen comes from this Israeli filmmaker, for instance), many opposing voices on the topic of Golda are aired in the film, including multiple Golda skeptics. Or should I say, haters? One of them, near the end, after being highly critical of her intransigence regarding the ceasefire and Egypt during the Yom Kippur War, describes her as a small-minded grandma, politically a dinosaur, who thinks Israel's history is the war of 1948 over and over, and who never should have become PM. Mythologizing, this documentary ain’t.
One of Golda's defenders in the doc was the then-head of the Mossad, but his contributions are bullshit-free (or the self-aggrandizing stuff was edited out). He effectively says in the film, that after the Munich Olympics massacre, Mossad had licence to seek out and murder the suspected anti-Israeli terrorists abroad. There are things I would never admit we’ve done, the old man says, and he doesn’t appear to be entirely proud of the record. (He appears in the fictional Golda too in a few scenes, but doesn’t have a lot of key lines until the end.) Another highly critical part of the doc was how Meir the avowed socialist handled the economical and physical ghettoization of the Mizrahi Israelis, when they came to her with their demands, as a sort of inner Israeli Black liberation movement. Golda the Ur-Ashkenazi, several people say in the doc, just didn’t get it. Work ethic? Education? There are no jobs and no universities where we have been settled, was what she heard from the young Mizrahim in response.
Thanks to the diligent stenographic record-keeping, a lot of the Israeli government’s decision-making process during her time is preserved for posterity and the documentary liberally borrows from those archives. The feature film Golda made use of this fact and created the character of a stenographer whose son is conscripted during the Yom Kippur War whose fate you can guess. Where the feature beats the doc, though, is in its use of IDF audio archives. Multiple scenes of combat which Meir follows from the underground IDF HQ by listening to the live audio transmissions use real audio tapes. It’s a horrific listening, male voices screaming amid explosions and gunfire, the director insisting we stay in those scenes longer than anybody would want. The choppy, chromatic original music for the film, as well as the choice to film it in a couple of rooms where the major decisions were being made, adds to the claustrophobic feel. Golda’s home is in same colours as her workplace, suggesting there is no respite. In the doc, she talks about having a nightmare in which all the phones in her house are ringing with bad news, which she cannot hear well - and this is made into a scene in the feature film.
Another bit of info that appears only as an aside in the documentary that the feature film took and ran with was the fact that during her tenure as PM, Meir suffered from blood cancer and underwent multiple rounds of chemo and radiation, all of which she kept secret. So: war and cancer, and keeping the cancer under wraps. I don’t think our age can understand, let alone compare to, that kind of mettle. Imagine any number of current Canadian government ministers… actually, nevermind. Let’s not even attempt.
She also apparently did her own cooking and did live in her old age, as the feature film suggests, completely alone, just the guard outside the house for protection. After I came home from Carlton, I dug out Oriana Fallaci’s Interview with History, a collection of conversations with various statesmen that the famous Italian journalist conducted from the late sixties to late seventies, and re-read the one with Golda. I forgot how much she liked the old woman, even while disagreeing with her. She found Golda physically endearing - reminding her of her old mother in manner, hairstyle and clothes. This is something I totally get: GM looks like at least two of my now very elderly aunts, including the mega-cankles and the sensible-feminine “Golda” shoes. And then there’s her old-lady handbag. Now, Thatcher did use the handbag and the bouffant and feminine dress to visually brand herself but I think Meir ended up being an iconic image without much calculated planning.
(It’s not about gender, I can hear the Haaretz movie critic screaming; it’s about Zionism and dragging Israel into its most avoidable and terrible war etc etc. - okay, okay.)
Fallaci throws geopolitical and philosophical questions at Meir: “Do you still believe in socialism, to the same degree as forty years ago?” “Do you not feel sorry for the Palestinians at all, Mrs. Meir?” “Do you really think that bombing Lebanese villages will root out Arab terrorism?” and at one point Meir says in this 1972 interview, “it’s possible that the war between the Arab states and Israel will repeat itself. Many claim that the Arabs are willing to sign the agreement with us. But in those dictatorial regimes who will guarantee us that the agreement will be respected? Let’s presume that Sadat signs it, and then his own people kill him. Or simply depose him. Who can guarantee that his replacement will respect the agreement?” This is pretty much what happened, in 1981. Fallaci also asks her about her private life and the husband she parted ways with (Meir never forgave him for his insistence that their family leave the kibbutz and move to a large city) and her other social and political and union activism, all of which falls somewhere on the social-democratic spectrum.
Now, I know a number of historians read this newsletter and also a number of people with connections in the Middle Eastern region, so I’d like to know if on following, the feature film was taking liberties with facts:
Meir was depicted in the film as alternatively begging for and demanding weapons from the reluctant Americans, especially the F-4 Phantom planes. According to the movie, the US insists on being perceived as not taking sides in the Yom Kippur War because 1) the Saudis would cut off the oil supply, 2) the Soviets would come all out for the Arabs. Is this true? Wikipedia says the US poured arms to Israel without hesitation. As the war spread and allyships formed, the film in one scene says that the Saudis actually did use their influence on OPEC to squeeze the supply and that the prices jumped. That all of the Egyptian weaponry came from the Soviets is I expect accurate
Meir is shown as writing down all the Israeli casualties in a notebook, as she learns of them. Could this be true? Fallaci asks her in her interview, “Mrs. Meir, have you ever killed anyone” to which she says that naturally she was trained to use a rifle, but never personally killed anyone though she did “give orders that put others in a position to kill and get killed, which is even worse”.
What can I say - I remain intrigued by GM and wonder why she wasn’t put in more films and plays. Deb (hi Deb!) told me about the Ingrid Bergman Golda Meir, which I thought is an idea so contradictory, I’m still grappling with it. Bergman is apparently her own glamorous, thin self in the film, except for the Groucho Marx eyebrows, which get their own postal code.
