Word: golda
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...Golda Meir...
...last name was Meir, but few Israelis ever thought of her as anything but Golda. To many people, her face was an appropriate symbol of Israel itself: strong, disarmingly homely, above all tough. It was a face that inspired love but also demanded respect-and the operative word was "demanded." Golda was of that generation of pioneers who built the Jewish state; she served as its Prime Minister through five years and one war. When she died last week at the age of 80, from the complications of lymphoma, an illness she had kept secret for twelve years, she still...
...with so many legends, the private personality did not totally correspond to the public image. Golda came on, for instance, as the classic Jewish mother: hectoring, fond, overwhelmingly concerned, vulnerable to slights, demanding affection as a duty, offering sacrifice as emotional blackmail, but basically all heart. Still, she was also a fierce Zionist revolutionary, a driving organizer, a persuasive advocate who made up for her lack of stylish eloquence with a peasant shrewdness and a gift for using simplistic anecdotes to convey home truths. In 1969, for example, when Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser kept stating that another Arab...
...Golda made much of her humble beginnings, and humility was a trait she often professed. In real life she rarely practiced it. "Nobody crosses Golda," a former aide once said. She never forgot a slight. Yet she was willing to listen to almost anybody who asked for an audience, even though her listening could be a form of stonewalling. At the end, the coffee cups empty, the ashtrays full, the air staled in the close room, Golda would show her interlocutors into the thin dawn light-red-eyed, hoarse, exasperated, exhausted, knowing themselves defeated by the unshakable conviction of this...
...following her death, it is difficult to find much room for criticism. Even those with no great love for her Zionist goals respect Meir as a human being of unusual strength, vitality and conviction, As an unassuming champion of women's rights, she led by example, not by rhetoric. Golda Meir will be greatly missed...