New Biopic Starring Helen Mirren Whitewashes Golda Meir’s Racism & Israel’s Apartheid
By Valerie Bisharat
When I heard Golda — the new biopic about Israel’s fourth Prime Minister Golda Meir — would be entering theaters recently, my stomach dropped. Heralded as a feminist icon for her rule spanning from 1969–1974, I know Meir as someone else: a former occupier of my family’s stolen Jerusalem home and denier of my people’s very existence.
The film, from Israeli director Guy Nattiv, traces a 19-day snapshot of Meir’s prime ministership: the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt/Syria. Meir navigates political and military decisions, often decisively rallying her male subordinates and even delivering American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger an ultimatum.
What the film doesn’t show is the impact Meir — and other early Israeli leaders — had on Palestinians, including my family.
This year marks 75 years since the Nakba, when Zionist militias and the new Israeli army drove 750,000–1,000,000 Palestinians from their homes or terrorized them into flight by committing dozens of massacres — all to establish a Jewish majority state. Later, Israel razed over 400 Palestinian towns.
My great-grandparents built a home in West Jerusalem and called it Villa Harun ar-Rashid. Zionist forces seized it on May 14th, 1948, as part of a program to depopulate the Palestinian neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. Eventually, ownership of our home was transferred to the new state of Israel, like the properties of hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who’d been exiled.
The Absentee Property Law, passed in 1950, made this possible. It allowed the state of Israel to seize Palestinian property, including land, homes, and bank accounts, if the Palestinians had been expelled, fled, or left the country after November 29th, 1947 (about six months before Israel declared itself a state). Palestinian property owners would not have fled except for the war and destruction being inflicted upon them.
Our home has since been occupied by Israelis, including by Meir, who lived there during her tenure as Labor Minister in the 1950s. I wonder how she reconciled living in a Palestinian home, especially while working to secure housing for Israeli Jews. By one account, expecting a visit from the United Nations Secretary General, she ordered tiles painted with “Villa Harun ar-Rashid” in Arabic be obscured to hide the home’s origins. If you gaze up at our home’s cream stone facade and find the blue tilework, you can see the faded lettering, apparently sandblasted, still peeking through.
Meir’s impact wasn’t only suffered in the past. Under Meir as Prime Minister, Israel entrenched its illegal settlement enterprise on occupied Palestinian land. More than half a century later, Israel still manipulates laws to seize Palestinian land for settlements or turns a blind eye to violent Israeli settlers who seize Palestinian land by force, sabotaging U.S. and international efforts to make peace.
So, one asks: Golda Meir as an inspirational figure in the eyes of whom? Admirers cite Meir’s rise from poverty to politics and bravery operating as the only woman in rooms filled with male politicians. But what this neglects is what she chose to do with her power. Meir made conditions for many women of color — she was as contemptuous of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as she was of Palestinians — immeasurably worse. This dynamic is a reminder that settler-colonialism is fundamentally incompatible with feminism that uplifts all people.
Notoriously, Meir also claimed in an interview: “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” To her, my family, as my entire people, were invisible.
While filmmakers and the American political establishment have long glorified Israeli leaders like Meir, and as Israel devolves into overtly racist right-wing extremism, my hope lies in this: ordinary Americans are increasingly recognizing Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. It can only be hidden for so long.
It’s time for the film industry and the American political establishment to stop whitewashing Israeli leaders like Meir and the apartheid system they constructed. Just as the fight against racism in the United States must start from an honest confrontation with the history of slavery, the fight for genuine justice in Palestine/Israel begins with an honest confrontation with the system of Jewish supremacy that has been established from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Holding up Meir as an icon of feminism while obscuring her role in oppressing Palestinians and erasing our history — literally, in the case of the tiles identifying our home — hinders that just cause.
Valerie Bisharat is a Palestinian-Iranian-American writer living in Los Angeles, CA.
