Dan Hitchens

A great subject squandered: Golda reviewed

Golda’s waspishness is replaced by gloom, dynamism by inertia

She makes Gordon Brown look like Harry Hill: Helen Mirren as Golda Meir 
issue 07 October 2023

Born in Tsarist Kyiv in 1898, Golda Meir grew up with what she called a ‘pogrom complex’. That perhaps explained why later, as Israeli prime minister, she had such harsh words for Palestinians and Arabs. But then she had harsh words for a lot of people. Moses, she complained, ‘took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil’.

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