The word ‘actress’ used to be interchangeable with ‘prostitute’ and though it’s a good thing that this little misunderstanding was cleared up, it’s a pity that ‘living saint’ has been substituted for hooker. Modern actresses are variously ‘activists’ and ‘humanitarians’ – or whingeing nepo-babies mistaking themselves for the first two. But they are rarely ‘broads’ anymore, the way the great female stars (Taylor, Gardner, Mae West) used to be. Except, that is, for Helen Mirren.
The word, though originally meaning a woman of flexible sexual morality, has come to indicate an ultra-tough, good-humoured woman, the binary opposite of the non-binary cry-babies who now frequent the bazaars of Thespis. Mirren has gone from sultry Shakespearean starlet – of whom one wag said that she only kept her clothes on if the plot absolutely demanded it – to great character actress. Now she is playing the ultimate political broad, Golda Meir, in a new film.
David Ben-Gurion once gave Meir the backhanded compliment of being ‘the only man’ in his cabinet
When we consider female political leaders, they generally present themselves in one of three ways: Warrior Woman (Margaret Thatcher), Mother Of The Nation (Angela Merkel, often somewhat sickeningly called ‘Mutti’) and Irritating Older Sister (Theresa May.) Golda Meir, like Mrs Ghandi in India, pleasingly combined the first two. Male political leaders, on the other hand, aren’t so polarised in their presentation styles, and generally one size – vain and temperamental – fits all post-war party leaders from Heath to Davey.
Meir was both the fourth elected female head of government in the world and the fourth prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974 – a time when the re-created Jewish state was at its most imperilled but also its most impressive. She saw off the six-day war and the Yom Kippur war, teaching the shambolic Arab armies a lesson they’ve never truly forgotten, counterintuitively setting the scene for the rapprochement between the tiny democracy and its neighbours.
Only last year, Air Cairo made history by becoming the first Egyptian airline to operate a direct flight from Israel to Egypt, the first flight taking off to Sharm el-Sheikh one spring morning with 150 Israelis on board. Israelis are so good at fighting mostly because while Arab countries might lose a bit of territory if they don’t win a war, Israel would lose everything. After the Holocaust, and in recent years with the rise in anti-Semitic hate-crime throughout Europe, Israel is the safe-house of the diaspora, even for Jews who don’t approve of it.
Her premiership wasn’t the first time Meir had been involved in an existential battle; ‘When I was a child in Ukraine they would beat Jews to death in the street for fun,’ Mirren as Meir tells Liev Shreiber as Henry Kissinger. ‘I am not that little girl hiding in the cellar anymore.’
Meir’s family immigrated to that archetype blue-collar American city Milwaukee; by eight, she was minding the family store. She worked as a librarian and a shopgirl and was courted by a sign-painting socialist; her condition for marriage was that they settle in what was then known as British Palestine. The terror and excitement of fighting to establish a Jewish homeland while a third of the world’s Jewish population was being exterminated is unimaginable. When the state of Israel declared independence in 1948, Meir was one of the 25 signatories of the Israeli Declaration of Independence; she was still only 50.
Acting as envoy to the USSR that year Meir was mobbed by thousands of Muscovite Jews during Rosh Hashanah celebrations at the Choral Synagogue, as they chanted ‘Nasha Golda’ – Our Golda. But this notoriously blunt woman wasn’t suited to being a diplomat: when asked by a Russian ambassador how she traveled to Moscow, she told her interpreter ‘Tell His Excellency that we arrived riding on donkeys’.
Back in Israel, she became labour minister; she got a superhuman amount of work done between 1949 and 1956, especially in the arenas of construction and the absorption of immigrants. In 1951, Iraq expelled its large Jewish population, confiscating their assets in the hope that the new country would crumble under the weight of these penniless incomers.
While others in the Israeli government thought it wisest to ask other countries to accept them, Meir insisted that Israel welcome every last refugee. This was when modern Israel – and especially Tel Aviv, a city so electrifyingly full of life that it makes New York City look like York – began to look like itself. As Foreign Minister from 1956 to 1966 she convinced the USA to sell Israel missiles; the Soviet bloc had armed the infant Jewish state when Stalin allowed the Communist government in Czechoslovakia to sell weapons to it.
Her years as prime minister were interesting, to say the least. She was already 71, with arrhythmia and lymphoma, but she didn’t get much time to put her feet up. There were the wars and the Munich Olympic massacre. In 1973, Kissinger finally got her to accept his ‘security versus sovereignty’ peace proposal, in which Israel would accept Egyptian sovereignty over Sinai while Egypt would accept Israeli presence in some of Sinai’s strategic positions.
Meir still wasn’t a diplomat. In a Sunday Times interview in 1969, pushed on the ‘Palestine’ question, she said ‘when was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.’
This sounds harsh by today’s #BeKind standards, but strictly speaking, she was right. The invention of Palestine was the first example of magical thinking posing as politics, which flourishes today in the ‘identity’ industry. There can be few funnier sights than those photos of QUEERS FOR PALESTINE, a cross between Turkeys For Christmas and Elves For Ogres. Unless you believe that women can have penises, it’s hard to believe that a nation which existed in 850 BC and a ‘nation’ which has only had its own flag since 1964 have the same level of claim to that territory.
David Ben-Gurion once gave her the backhanded compliment of being ‘the only man’ in his cabinet. Her reaction was amusement that this was ‘the greatest possible compliment that could be paid to a woman – I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government’.
As with Margaret Thatcher, the Left liked to mansplain that she was a Bad Feminist, but when there was a serial rapist at large and one of her cabinet suggested bringing in a curfew for women, she answered: ‘Men are committing the rapes – let them be put under curfew.’ If that’s not feminism, I don’t know what is, and I’m certainly not going to be told what it is by left-wing men who want to put rapists in female jails.
Now Golda Meir is controversial all over again, though this time the brouhaha – suitably, for an age obsessed with the idiocy of identity politics – centres around a false nose rather than matters of life and death. The fact that Helen Mirren is a Gentile playing a Jew has been questioned by some Jewish entertainers, such as David Baddiel, though I’m not personally inclined to take seriously the opinion of someone who has dressed up in blackface to get a cheap laugh when they talk about respect for racial integrity.
A lifelong supporter of Israel, Mirren worked on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights just after the six-day war (‘The extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground – it was an amazing time to be here’) and received the Jerusalem Medal earlier this year.
Speaking of Meir, Mirren said that she had the ‘deepest of admiration’ for the ‘extremely brave’ leader: ‘In a weird way, it was a bit like playing Elizabeth I in the sense of her utter commitment to her country and to her nation. The absolute total dedication of her life to that and what she achieved without being the sort of mad dictatory-type character at all.’
In a world where Israel is uniquely demonised, it doesn’t speak well of her critics to behave so churlishly towards a woman who has all her life defied the boycott, divestment and sanctions threats which so many in her profession have prostrated themselves before. That Mirren is a Gentile isn’t important; that she is a terrific broad playing a terrific broad is all that matters. And as Israel once more fights for its existence against the ignorant armies who wish to destroy it, Golda Meir will be missed.
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