Golda Meir

But first, we have this matter that we are following with alert interest and great concern as part of an occasional series that we like to call the Promised Podcast Probes and Plumbs Preconceptions of a Poison-Penned Pugnacious Poet-Politician Penetrating the Persona and Pinpointing Probity Previously Unperceived.

Last week at the Matula Poetry Festival in Mishkanot Sha'ananim in Jerusalem, there was a session to mark ten years since the passing of a great lion of the Israeli left, Yossi Sarid, who was a young member of Knesset for the old Labor Party starting when Golda Meir was prime minister, and who was eventually the leader of the Meretz Party when it was at its strongest during the years just after Oslo.

And he was briefly Minister of Education, increasing the budget of schools for Arab and Druze kids by a quarter of a billion shekels.

And at the session last week, Dorit Sarid, who was Yossi Sarid's wife, whom he famously loved prodigiously and is now his widow.

And we will discuss some of these strange new couplings and wonder what, if anything, we learn from them about the incipient elections.

And our second discussion being to the very last one, as recently high-up officials in the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad all acknowledged for the first time the existence of a task force called Nili, established in the week after October seventh, and well-tasked with the job of arresting or killing every last one of the Palestinian fighters and joiners-in who went through the busted barriers surrounding Gaza on October seventh and participated in the massacre.

Which task force is maybe reminiscent of the one authorized by then Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down all the terrorists involved in the massacre at the Munich Olympics in nineteen seventy-two.

Only today's Nili's task now is many, many, many times bigger than the one undertaken almost fifty-five years ago.

He just didn't.

And neither did Golda Meir in 1973. or her defense minister or anyone in the IDF general command when Egypt caught Israel with its pants down and did the Great Crossing across the Sinai and wound up taking the Sinai Peninsula back.

This isn't the first time Israel's been caught with its pants down.

I don't believe this has worked out for Israel or Netanyahu as well as some people think.

But there is a man in the Kremlin who has claimed for years that this country is not real and wants to erase every last person that is fighting to prevent that.

There is a line that circulates popularly attributed to Golda Meir, born in Kiev, later Israel's fourth prime minister, that you cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.

Well, whether she said it or not, there is some truth in the idea and the phrase, you cannot negotiate or trade your way out if somebody intends to destroy you and will be satisfied with nothing less than than this wickhoff and kushner have no experience of war between them they have remarkably little experience of politics while outside of the grifting that seems to drive them what experience have they got at all What they have is a career in transactions, real estate transactions specifically, and a transactional mind will always seek a deal because finding the deal is the only thing that it knows how to do.

Genocidal war aims of a dictator for spurious historical reasons and self-preservation of that same dictator is beyond their framework of experience and so they blunder around being deceived and manipulated.

Well, Monica.

And said they would love to know more about Golda Meir.

Now, I'm not familiar with Golda Meir.

Are you? Mm-mm.

Okay.

It's one of the worst intelligence affairs.

Now interestingly, after the 73 Yom Kippur War, where Israel was unprepared and Egypt and Syria almost ended the Jewish state right there, but for Nixon and Kissinger's help, there was a commission of inquiry that Golda Meir, the prime minister, allowed.

And based on their criticism, she resigned.

There will not be a commission of inquiry now, as long as the prime minister is in.

And there's a movie.

Have you seen the movie about Golda Meir?

No.

Who Helen Mirren plays beautifully.

Which to a lot of Israelis, this will have a familiarity to it.

Because in 73, King Hussein of Jordan did warn Golda Meir ahead of time.

And then we know now, nobody understood it at the time.

And also