As the war with Hamas and Hezbollah enters its second year, a newly released recording of the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir offers a poignant reflection on the challenges of war and leadership.
In the recording, published by the Israel Defense Forces and the Defense Establishment Archive at the Ministry of Defense to mark 51 years since the Yom Kippur War, Meir speaks candidly during a closed Cabinet meeting held a month after the war.
“Many things will be forgiven, but one thing will not—weakness. The moment we are marked as weak—it is over,” she says in the tape, speaking to an audience that included Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and several senior IDF generals.
The weight of hostages
In Meir’s time, the issue of Israeli prisoners of war held in Egypt and Syria was a central concern. The recording reveals her frustration over the difficulty of negotiating their release, with Meir recalling how United Nations intermediaries told her that Arab countries knew how deeply Israelis valued their captives and were exploiting this as leverage.
“These people are like the apple of your eye, and they are taking advantage of that,” Meir was told.
She noted that, unlike Israel, the Arab states did not act in the same way to return their prisoners. On the recording, she told the others present that she responded to the U.N. official: “So what, should we stop caring about people?
‘But here we are definitely not equals, and I hope—I will accept that they will rise to our level, but God forbid we fall to theirs. This means that for them, when it is necessary [to make an effort to free prisoners of war], not for humanitarian reasons but for political reasons, they call it ‘face-saving,’” she said.
The toll on reservists and the homefront
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, thousands of reservists were called up, and Meir acknowledged the toll this took on their families and livelihoods. The generals said that life in the country had almost returned to normal, but Meir reminded them of the many reservists who had been at the front for weeks and could remain there for months.
“I don’t think we can come to the soldiers and tell them ‘One month, two months, six months, a year,’” she said. “I know there are family men, self-employed, students who rightly want to return to their universities. ... There is no alternative. I know what it means for the large number of people now on the front. And life in the country cannot go on. ...
“But we can’t have both war, and regular life and endurance. Somehow, all of this must come together,” she said. “The people need to know, and it’s the government’s role to tell the people clearly. We need to see ourselves as mobilized for a time, I don’t know how long. But this is not a matter of days.”
