WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Yesterday, my son Jon and I went to see Golda, the moving movie about the Yom Kippur War from Israel’s Prime Minister’s perspective. Go see it. And then think, not just about PM Meir and the War on their own, but about what that Jewish homeland in the balance moment, a half-century ago to the year, should mean today to us Diaspora Jews.
Golda, The War of Atonement and Us
Go see it – Golda, starring Helen Mirren in, by me, a masterful performance in both physical appearance and acting. And, by me, the takeaway for us American Jews is not [a] smoking is bad for you, [b] the actress hired to play PM Meir should have been Jewish, and [c] the makeup enlarging her nose is racist and anti-Semitic.
The movie grippingly depicts, from Prime Minister Meir’s perspective, the agonizing days of surprise and deep despair, then indecision and mistake, and ultimately military recovery and outcome reversal that confronted the Jewish state’s leaders over those hellish three weeks of again war for survival. It was among military history’s astonishingly quick complete turn-arounds by a taken-by-surprise vastly inferior in weaponry and manpower force, but it left Israelis more with a sense of shock at the unpreparedness and cost than of victory.
Israel’s vaunted intelligence services had failed to correctly interpret the increasingly ominous war warning signs, but deeper than that, intoxicated still by their lightning victory seven years earlier in the Six Day War, Israelis had arrogantly underestimated their Arab opponents’ military capabilities, not least in surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank infantry weapons, and fighting ability, causing them to grossly underman their regular border forces to hold back enemy invaders until the reserves could be mobilized and brought to the fronts. Chaim Herzog aptly titled his quite good book on the Yom Kippur War “The War of Atonement.”
What I would have us grassroots American Jews focus upon after seeing Golda is the Yom Kippur War not in itself but in the context of our ties to our people’s homeland. “We just came this close,” Helen Mirren, putting her finger close to her thumb, tells the actor playing Henry Kissinger, “to being destroyed.” And she reminds him that it was Russia [through the Czechs], not the U.S., which had imposed an arms embargo, that had provided key arms [including, ironically, ME-109s, while Britain supplied Spitfires to Egypt] to struggling Israel in 1948. And in the darkest days of this Yom Kippur War, America’s European allies refused refueling of American transport planes bringing arms to Israel to match Russians’ resupply of Egypt and Syria, forcing the U.S. to lean hard on Portugal to allow it in the Azores.
In her discussions with Kissinger leading to ceasefire talks, Meir demands that Egypt address Israel as “Israel,” no longer as “the Zionist entity.” Egypt began, as it had after the Six Day War, by demanding Israeli retreat to the 1949 ceasefire lines. And that is just what
*** the world, in UNSC 2334 [“Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” and that the UNSC “will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations”],
*** backed by the United States [with a Democratic Party, boasting, what, an 80% alignment of American Jews, “consensus policy” of “two-states along the 1967 lines, save for mutually agreed territorial adjustments”],
*** and the U.S. Jewish Reform and Conservative religious movements [two-states with borders that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders [sic, just military ceasefire lines],” save for mutually agreed “territorial adjustments” thereto, and no “annexation” [taking over territory belonging to others] in “the West Bank”]
demand of Israel today.
I wrote last week that if Israel’s deadliest enemies could pick two areas to rip from Israel that would do the most harm to our people’s homeland, they’d pick the historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland of “the two-state solution.”
Golda is structured around the post-Yom Kippur War commission charged with assessing blame for what had happened. It exonerated Meir and blamed Chief of Staff Elazar and others. By me, both had acted with guts and sound decision-making in the extreme tension-filled most critical moments, as in their past service to our people’s homeland, and there was enough blame on all the leaders and ordinary Israelis themselves to go around. The place isn’t perfect and never has or ever will be. It needs the United States, which also benefits militarily and otherwise from the relationship, and it needs friends in the world. First Friend to Israel must be Diaspora Jewry, in today’s world meaning mostly us American Jews. We grassroots have to be there.