What were Golda Meirs most important achievements ?
Golda Meir, Israel’s only female prime minister, once commented on her fairly advanced years upon securing the country’s top job, saying “Being 70 is no sin, but it’s not a joke either.”
But Meir, was also renowned for her more xenophobic remarks, particularly at the expense of Palestinians.
“There were no such thing as Palestinians,” she was quoted as saying in the Sunday Times and Washington Post in June 1969.
“When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? … 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 away from them. They did not exist,”
She was incapable of contemplating that the creation of Israel had given Palestinians, who lost their homes in the wake of its rise, a different narrative of events.
it was her alliance with the US that many of her advocates see as her ultimate achievement as the state’s top diplomat. Her role in 1948 in raising millions of dollars in funds from the US to aid Israel’s evolution, had given her national clout like few others as the rise of Israel saw the rights of Palestinians become ever more superfluous.
In response to the 1973 October war Meir’s government was lambasted for its lack of preparedness. This remains the subject of fierce criticism from some in Israel for allegedly ignoring previous peace overtures from then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Meir’s attitude towards Palestinians was a macho, chauvinist, denialist attitude, which is intrinsically inherent in Zionism.