STEPHEN POLLARD: This autumn marks 50 years since the 19-day Yom Kippur War. Capturing this pivotal period in world history, a feted new biopic - called simply Golda.
To the south-west, across the Suez Canal, a terrifying horde of 600,000 Egyptian soldiers, supported by 550 aircraft and a further 2,000 tanks, stood ready to massacre fewer than 500 Israeli troops stationed on the Sinai Peninsula, sharing a pitiful three tanks between them.’s leader, Anwar Sadat, had declared that he was willing to ‘sacrifice a million Egyptian soldiers’ to recover Sinai, a territory that his country, like Syria and the Golan Heights, had lost to Israel six years earlier.
On two fronts, the fledgling state of Israel had been caught unawares by a combined Egyptian-Syrian army – lavishly funded by Soviet roubles – and collectively the size of Nato’s entire European forces. The plot will focus on the high-stakes responsibilities and decisions that Golda Meir, also known as the 'Iron Lady of Israel, played by Helen Mirren
So who was this trailblazing, epoch-defining Zionist, the third woman to lead a country in the 20th Century and still the only female ever to have run a Middle Eastern nation? An early example of her extraordinary self-belief came when she flouted her parents’ command to leave school at 14, begin working and find a husband. She had graduated middle school as her class valedictorian but parents Moshe and Bluma were unimpressed.Following a furious row, the teenage Golda took a train across the US to live with her married sister, Sheyna Korngold, nine years her senior, in Denver, Colorado. There she enrolled in high school.
Initially Golda worked as a teacher in Milwaukee until, in 1921 and electrified with visions of building a free Jewish state, she and Morris moved to live on a kibbutz , in what was then known as Mandatory Palestine. Since Israel’s state officials were required to adopt Hebrew surnames, she abandoned her married surname, Meyerson, and took up the Hebrew ‘Meir’, which means ‘one who shines’.
The murderous siege lasted 20 hours and ended only when West German police attempted a botched rescue. The terrorists realised they were under attack, and although the police killed five plotters, all the hostages were slaughtered at point-blank range. As prime minister she met such world leaders as President Richard Nixon and Pope Paul VI in pursuit of peace, and in 1973 she hosted a hugely symbolic meeting with the West German chancellor, Willy Brandt, in Jerusalem – the first visit by a German Chancellor in office to Israel.
But all her military advisers, including Israel’s intelligence services, had believed the operations at the border were a false alarm. Surely the Arab states would not risk another war so soon after the 1967 rout? And so, against her better instincts, Meir did not immediately mobilise the army.
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