'Golda': Israelis mull over the Helen Mirren-led movie

Golda Meir was the first female prime minister of Israel and, like the country she led, she was a mass of contradictions. Reportedly lauded by David Ben-Gurion as “the only man” or “the best man” in his cabinet, a statement most would find sexist today but which was unquestionably meant (and taken) as a compliment, Meir was an icon of female empowerment. 

When she became prime minister in 1969, her face appeared on posters all over the world with feminist slogans, but she was later vilified in Israel for her handling of the Yom Kippur War. The criticism against her was arguably more negative and intense than any other Israeli leader has ever weathered. While she was never forgotten, of course, she has not been talked about much for decades, but the release around the world of Guy Nattiv’s movie Golda, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, has brought her back to the forefront of public consciousness.

Golda is not a biopic about Meir but focuses on her handling of the Yom Kippur War. 

For this article, I spoke to a number of Israeli historians and commentators about the war, to hear their perceptions of the film’s accuracy and general authenticity, as well as to Nicholas Martin, who wrote the Golda screenplay. One fact that came up again and again was the negativity with which Meir is remembered. 

Several interviewees pointed out that while other former prime ministers such as David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin have had many public places and major thoroughfares named after them, there is hardly anything named for Meir. Very few Israelis would be able to tell you that Golda Meir Boulevard is a stretch of road near the Ramot neighborhood in Jerusalem. “Golda is an ice cream” is a phrase I heard from a number of those who spoke to me, as they made the point that this popular ice cream brand is better known among most young people today than Meir herself.

But this may change with the release of Golda. 

Changing the Israeli perception of Golda Meir

The movie stars Helen Mirren, wearing prosthetics and heavy makeup to make her look like the real Golda (a casting decision that was criticized in some quarters, and which has been heavily reported on elsewhere), who has won raves for her performance. The English-language movie itself has received mixed reviews and is playing now throughout Israel and America, the third movie this summer – the others are Oppenheimer and Barbie – to focus on an iconic figure. 

Golda tells the story of a war that has rarely been dramatized even in Israel, and that, in the run-up to its 50th anniversary, is also the subject of a new Israeli movie, Lior Chefetz’s The Stronghold (which will also be a television series next month on Kan), about an Israeli outpost near the Suez Canal during the war. Three years ago, the Kan series Valley of Tears told multiple stories of Israeli soldiers in the North during the war and was shown in the US on HBO, but Meir was not a character.

In Golda, which has no battlefield scenes, Meir and the top military brass are the sole focus. It opens as Israeli intelligence receives a warning that war is imminent, and follows Meir in the days before the war and throughout the course of the conflict, ending with a code in which she is glimpsed in newsreel footage with prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat around the time of the Camp David Accords. 

Except for a brief scene in which defense minister Moshe Dayan is flown north to observe the fighting from the air, the movie is a Golda’s-eye-view of the war, seen and heard through the communications she received when she was in the Israeli Defense Forces war room. There, she must decide which of her advisers to believe. The movie comes down heavily on the side of David “Dado” Elazar, the chief of staff, who counseled a large-scale mobilization, and is far less sympathetic to Dayan and his interpretation that the intelligence showed that nothing consequential was about to happen and who became dysfunctional when he realized the depth of his miscalculation.

In the end, it is Meir herself who makes the decisions and carries on the negotiations with US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, played by Liev Schreiber. The movie also makes use of recently declassified information about a listening device which was turned off when it was needed the most.

Golda uses a framing device showing Meir’s testimony to the Agranat Commission investigating her conduct, and that of the top military commanders, during the war. In these scenes, she speaks in a matter-of-fact manner about how she made her decisions, although the movie portrays her tracking the fallen soldiers in a notebook and showing great concern for a military stenographer whose son is a soldier in combat.

The movie is a drama and not a documentary, but it is the only movie that most international filmgoers will ever see about the Yom Kippur War, certainly the only feature-length English-language drama about it, so it makes sense that many Israelis and historians were concerned about its accuracy. 

There was a previous international film about Meir, A Woman Called Golda, a 1982 television movie for which Ingrid Bergman won an Emmy Award. While Bergman was a great actress and gave a fine performance, the movie was a conventional biopic that told the story of Meir’s life, with Judy Davis playing the young Golda and Leonard Nimoy, her husband. That film seems quite dated today. Mirren’s performance is far less mannered than Bergman’s and much truer to the Meir most of us remember from news clips.

Golda is a movie that is sympathetic to Meir; and while some historians and commentators have found fault with its presentation of her, it has received surprisingly high marks for its accuracy, given how divisive a subject Meir still is in Israel.

While most of those who knew Golda are no longer alive, Avner Shalev, the former chairman of Yad Vashem and brigadier general in the IDF, served as the head of the bureau for Elazar and actually saw Meir in action during the war. While he was not crazy about the film, saying, “It was reasonable and appropriate” but not great, he described Mirren’s acting as “genius, she deserves every honor that she can get. She got into the character, and you see Golda. You see her body language and her face and her expressions; she did exceptional acting.”

IN TERMS of the film’s portrayal of the history of the war, he said, “It was relatively exact and faithful about Golda’s behavior and functioning during the war. I emphasize, ‘during the war.’ I know because I was there all the way. During the course of the war, Golda was very much OK. She was alert and made focused decisions; she didn’t try to hide behind Dayan or Dado.” 

The movie may exaggerate slightly how critical the situation was in terms of how much military aid Israel needed from the US, he said. He recalled that the Egyptians requested a meeting towards the end of the war that did not work out and that Meir called him, wanting to know what had gone wrong and saying that US president Richard Nixon had yelled at her, “but she handled it.” 

The movie’s portrayal of her as a very heavy smoker was absolutely correct, he said, although he questioned some scenes when she went to the roof of the military headquarters to gaze out over Tel Aviv as “over-drama.” While he characterized Dayan’s conduct during the war as “problematic,” he said that the movie may have somewhat exaggerated how dysfunctional he became. A few other details were off in the movie, he said, “But ultimately it paints an accurate picture of Golda during the war.”

Historian and former Jerusalem Post reporter Abraham Rabinovich, who is the author of The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East, agreed with Shalev, saying, “I went prepared not to like it, knowing the absurdity of trying to fit the Yom Kippur War into a film less than two hours long and without a real battle scene or even a clear description on maps of what is going on.” While Rabinovich was not impressed by the acting, he noted, “The producers were honest; they called the movie Golda, not ‘The Yom Kippur War.’ As such, it passes muster and is even, here and there, touching. Thanks to Helen Mirren, we get a feel for what the experience must have been like for a real-life 75-year-old prime minister, a party politician, who suddenly finds herself in charge of a terrible war and makes decisions about life and death in real time. The story strays from reality periodically – it’s hard to imagine the real Golda talking tough to Kissinger as she does in one scene before hanging up on him.

“And there’s too much flag waving: ‘Our boys will fight for their country,’ etc. I’m not sure how non-Jewish audiences will relate to the film. The historical part goes by too fast and with too much left out to be recognized as history. So what’s left? The Yom Kippur War itself. It is the most dramatic war I know of. Dramatic as in real drama. What scriptwriter would make up a mobilization scene where the nation’s young men, and the not so young, rise from their synagogue seats on Yom Kippur morning, when prayers are halted by the arrival of military couriers, and head for their bases?”

In spite of his reservations, Rabinovich said, “I tip my hat to Golda.” 

Uri Kaufman, the author of the recently published book Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East, also praised Golda, calling it “accurate in its main points, although it takes a lot of license with the details of what happened... It gives a good feel for just how desperate the situation was and how dangerous it was and how they turned it around and turned it into an unbelievable victory... For a major motion picture, it’s remarkably accurate.”

Tom Segev, a historian and columnist for Haaretz, complimented Mirren’s performance, while expressing some reservations about the film.  

“I understand the decision not to do a biopic of Golda, to focus on one moment in her life... but I think she was a more interesting woman that just looking at this one incident would suggest... She was fine in her handling of the war, she didn’t break down... Dayan fell apart, she didn’t fall apart. It shows that she managed the generals, she didn’t let them manage her.”

He added, “She was emotional and uncompromising, and the movie shows this.”

While Meir deferred to her generals on certain issues both during the war and in the run-up, Segev said, “It was her responsibility to know if Israel was ready for the war. And that’s still very controversial.”

The crucial point about the movie with which Segev takes issue, however, is that it presents the war “as if it were a natural disaster. She gets off the plane, and her advisers tell her, ‘It looks like there’s going to be a war.’” Segev felt that the movie did not emphasize the overtures made by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel, overseen by the Romanian government, in the year preceding the war; and that she did not try seriously to reach an agreement with the Egyptians. 

THE FILM’S portrayal of how she handled the war is not necessarily as important as the fact that it could have been prevented through diplomacy, he said. “The movie cleanses her of all responsibility for the war.” This point of view was sharply challenged by Kaufman, who said that Sadat made so many unrealistic conditions, that he was clearly not interested in a real negotiation with Israel before the war.

One dissenter who does not feel that the movie’s portrayal of Meir is accurate or well observed is Yonatan Gat, a lecturer in communications at Tel Aviv University, who teaches about cultural history.

“The true character of Golda is not to be found in the movie; there is no connection...  What we see in the movie is Helen Mirren with lots of makeup. Golda was a woman with an outstanding, sarcastic, cynical sense of humor... a very difficult woman, bitter... easily angered, a charismatic leader who thought she was always right.” 

He noted that “People were scared to death of her. That didn’t come through at all.” He also criticized the film for not taking a stand on her culpability. “Was she guilty? Was she not guilty? The movie wants to have the best of both worlds. If someone wants to, they can think she was guilty; and if they don’t, they don’t. What is left is a movie with a parve point of view.” The filmmakers should have taken a firmer stand one way or the other, he said.

In spite of these criticisms, the general praise for the film’s accuracy is very gratifying for Nicholas Martin, the British screenwriter who wrote the movie. Martin is best known for the Meryl Streep movie Florence Foster Jenkins, also a period piece about a strong woman. But Martin had no previous connection to Israel and had to learn the whole subject from scratch.

“It started off with me feeling I didn’t know enough about Israel to join any discussion, and you can imagine that any discussion about Israel becomes heated very quickly and people take very partisan, angry positions; and generally speaking, most people know virtually nothing about the history of Israel... I’ve never researched anything so thoroughly before,” said Martin, adding that he had never gone to university and that the praise for the film “did come as a bit of a surprise. I thought there was going to be far more upset about the facts of the film. But having said that, the fact that I didn’t know anything about the subject at all and about Israel did sort of force me to work much harder than I would have done if I’d known a bit because I just thought, ‘I have to get this absolutely right because if it’s attacked on the credibility of the story, then the whole thing falls apart like a cheap umbrella.””

To continue his metaphor, Martin managed to stay dry because he got the best umbrella he could find. 

He spoke to everyone he could who knew Meir and worked with several leading academics, among them Uri Bar-Joseph, a historian who wrote the book The Watchmen Fell Asleep, a detailed study of the Yom Kippur War; and The Angel, about Egyptian spy Ashraf Marwan. 

Hagai Zoref, who was head of the National Archives and author of a biography of Meir, “who probably knows more about Golda than anyone on Earth,” also helped, and Martin is grateful to them for their time and patience. He started work on the script in 2016 and made spreadsheets of time lines of historical events and of Meir’s life to help him tell the story, constantly getting input from historians.

“She’s seen in the West as a pretty positive figure,” he said, recalling how his father would stand up and applaud whenever she appeared on the news.

BUT WHEN Martin arrived in Israel and met Meir’s grandson Shaul Rahabi, he learned, to his surprise, that she was a controversial and much-criticized figure in Israel. Feeling out of his depth, he tried to hire an Israeli researcher. Someone was highly recommended to him, “But when she got on the phone, she was very angry with me... I’m offering a job, and this person is attacking me, saying, ‘Why are you making a film about that terrible woman?’ After that, I thought I should just do it on my own, and everyone wanted to talk about it and help me... Overwhelmingly, the people who were there, in that room, in ‘the pit’ [slang for the IDF war room] had very positive things to say, and it was an extraordinary privilege to talk to these men who were there... They spoke about Golda with, I won’t say a hushed reverence, but with a quiet appreciation: ‘Oh, she was like a rock, she was so strong’... I think collectively, those men knew there had been a tremendous mistake in not being better prepared... But she was making rational decisions under intense pressure.”

Speaking appreciatively of Golda’s dry sense of humor, which he highlighted in the movie in her exchanges with Kissinger, he admitted, “I would have liked to have known her as an old lady. If I’d met her when she was 23 and I was 23, she would have seemed very obnoxious – you know, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ I wouldn’t have been able to cope with her if she’d been a peer.”

But he knows that there is more to be discovered about Meir, and even on his recent visit to Israel to attend Golda’s premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival, he heard about more declassified documents that shed light on the war. At the end of the day, he said, the movie “shows the truth that I have found... How could I possibly understand everything that has taken place, and how could I say that this is the truth? But this is what I found, I went in sincerely, with an open mind... And the movie will inevitably change the story as well.” 

Given the discussions it has already provoked, it’s clear that Martin is right about that. 