The Iron Lady

I really admire her. Goldas Meir's ( z"l) face and look fascinate me, a woman out of the common, with a life out of common.

She was born in the beginning of the century in Kiev, according to her biography one of her first memories were of her father boarding up the front door in response to rumors of an imminent pogrom, I guess that kind of childhood harden your personality...

The Family left Russia for the US but Golda, together with her husband and sister decided to settle in Palestine in 1921 when Golda was 23.

Imagine what a step to take, today we can study a country's economy, follow its political life daily and even learn the language before taking the step, I doubt they could 87 years ago.

Golda started her new life picking almonds in a kibbutz and became the first female primeminister in Israel and the third in the world (after India and Sri Lanka) in 1969.

I love reading quotes, here are some of Golda's best;

"Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us."

"Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here"

"We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel."

"I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively"

"There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist"

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Have a nice day!