Forward.com

Will of Iron, Heart of Stone: Book Shines Light on Golda Meir’s Harder SideMy moment of eye-openng disillusion with Golda Meir came early on in Elinor Burkett’s new biography of the female premier, titled simply “Golda.” The year was 1950, and Golda Meyerson, as she was then known, was nearing 60 and had just returned from her stint as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Her son, Menachem, off studying the cello in Yugoslavia, was having marital problems with his new wife. She was pregnant and insisted the couple return to Jeru-salem to have the baby. Meir assumed her daughter-in-law was trying to sabotage her son’s promising music career, so she decided that, as punishment, she would ignore her first grandchild. The baby girl that was born that year, Meira Meyerson, had a mild case of Down syndrome. Meir refused to see her. The child, she demanded, should be institutionalized. “Golda was like a stone,” an old friend confessed to Burkett.…Read more

Hostage to HistoryThe Palestinian fedayeen who hijacked David Raab’s plane on September 6, 1970, surely thought they had hit the jackpot. Seventeen-year-old, baby-faced Raab was still so excited from his summer vacation in Israel that he boarded his TWA flight wearing a souvenir Israel Defense Forces uniform complete with enough general’s stars to outrank Moshe Dayan. As the group quickly found out, the boy was just a boy, and not even an Israeli — only an American teenager from the suburbs of Trenton, N.J., who wore a knitted yarmulke and would make a valiant effort, during the three weeks of his captivity, to keep kosher.…Read more

Kissinger, UnearthedHenry Kissinger is probably going to regret the day in 1979 when he said this: “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.” It’s not a particularly earth-shattering observation. The implication being, of course, that a leader’s past — his family background, the socioeconomic and political realities that shaped his formative years — offers a key to understanding why he acts in a certain way, and ultimately to why he holds one worldview as opposed to another. But coming out of the mouth of Kissinger, someone who has always self-consciously wrapped his past in enigma, denying that his Jewishness, his German-ness, his status as an immigrant in America ever had anything to do with the formation of his famously idiosyncratic and influential foreign policy views, it is a rare invitation — and one from a man who has always loved attention, but not scrutiny.…Read more

Six Days, 40 Years of ControversyThe weeks following the Six Day War found Israelis not sure if they were awake or dreaming. Everyone spoke of miracles, of the supernatural forces that had guided the Jewish army to such overwhelming victory. The names of the generals — Rabin, Hod, Sharon, Peled — resounded like the names of gods. The people once again felt chosen. The whole country seemed to pinch itself again and again, like Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, not quite sure that it had really so suddenly, scarily, exhilaratingly grown to three times its size.…Read more

One Man’s Persistent EmpathyOne day, at the end of 1987, Sari Nusseibeh was walking out of a lecture hall at Birzeit University, just having taught his students John Locke’s concepts of liberalism and tolerance, when he was set upon by five young men in kaffiyehs who pummeled him with their fists, a broken bottle and penknives. Word had gotten out that the absentminded Palestinian philosophy professor — “luftmensch,” he sometimes called himself, using the Yiddish unselfconsciously — had engaged in shocking and ultimately failed secret peace negotiations with members of Israel’s right-wing Likud party. Just as young Palestinians were collecting rocks to wage the first intifada, Nusseibeh was sitting with Israelis and working out a draft for a two-state solution.…Read more