Golda Meir

Biography

Golda Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev in 1898 and emigrated with her family to Milwaukee in 1906. She trained at the Milwaukee State Normal School, worked as a teacher, and became active in the Labor Zionist movement Poale Zion. In 1921 she and her husband Morris Meyerson moved to Mandatory Palestine and joined kibbutz Merhavia.

She rose through the Labor Zionist institutions: she joined the executive committee of the Histadrut labour federation in 1934 and headed its political department, observed the Évian refugee conference in 1938, and from 1946, after the British arrested the Yishuv's leaders, led the Jewish Agency's political department. In 1948 she raised large sums from American Jews for the coming war, signed Israel's Declaration of Independence, and became its first envoy to the Soviet Union.

Elected to the Knesset in 1949, she was minister of labour until 1956, when Ben-Gurion made her foreign minister, a post she held until 1966. After Levi Eshkol's death she became prime minister in March 1969, Israel's first woman to hold the office. After the 1972 Munich massacre she ordered the Mossad to hunt down those responsible.

Israel's lack of readiness for the Egyptian and Syrian attack in October 1973 damaged her standing. The Agranat Commission cleared her of direct responsibility, but she resigned in 1974 and was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin. She died of lymphoma in Jerusalem in 1978.