Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Will Fight with Stones in Our Hands’
Months before Israel achieved independence in 1948, Golda Meir came to America, asking for help in the battle for survival.
April 21, 2024
Last Saturday, Iran launched 300 missiles and drones at the Jewish state. With help from the United States, France, Britain, and importantly, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Israel destroyed almost all of them; and on Thursday, the Jewish state struck back.
It was a reminder that Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel was not an isolated act of terrorism, and that it was most certainly not part of a Marxist-inspired campaign to “decolonize” the Middle East, as so many Hamas apologists in the West insist on believing.
Instead, it was part of a broader Arab, and really, Muslim inability to recognize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in the land that they had first inhabited more than 3,000 years ago, been kicked out of, returned to, been kicked out of again—and then started to return to en masse in the late 1800s.
A half-century after the rebirth of the Zionist movement, Israel finally gained its independence, and in 1948, when the United Nations announced the creation of the State of Israel in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, there was dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv.
But the new state’s neighbors didn’t allow the party to go on long. As most readers will know, no sooner was the state created than it was assailed by its Arab neighbors, who hoped to kill it at birth.
Much of what is going on today—including Iran’s recent failed attack on Israel—can be traced to that catastrophic decision by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and others not to accept the Jewish state.
Today, it seems almost unimaginable that, in 1948, after so many years of struggle, the Israeli public had to go through yet another war. I frequently marvel that they had the energy and courage to do so, though I suppose that many were impelled by that all-important truth that Golda Meir imparted to then-Senator Biden: “We have nowhere else to go.”
At the time—1973—Meir was the Israeli prime minister and a towering figure in world politics with an almost mythological story: she had been born in Kiev in what was then the Russian Empire at the end of the previous century, then she had immigrated with her family to the United States, where she had grown up in Milwaukee, and she had made aliyah—immigrated to—the Jewish homeland years before it achieved statehood.
By early 1948, when Israel was on the cusp of becoming a state, she was known for being a powerful orator—someone who could articulate clearly and plainly why Jewish self-determination was so important. But she was not well-known in America.
In January of that year, Meir, who was then the head of the Jewish Agency, traveled to the United States to raise money in preparation for Israel’s war of independence. (The Jews knew the UN might give them the green light, but the Arabs would not.)
She had not planned to go to Chicago, but while in New York City, her sister Clara persuaded her to go—to speak to the annual conference of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds.
Meir arrived in Chicago in the middle of a freezing cold winter “without a dime in her pocketbook even to take a taxi.” Wealthy and influential Jews in Chicago were not especially keen on meeting with her. As Henry Montor, the executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal, a Zionist organization, recalled, Meir was, to his mind, “an impecunious, unimportant representative, a schnorrer—Yiddish for beggar or layabout.
Meir, for her part, was terrified. On the one hand, she knew that war in the Middle East was imminent, and she had no choice but to bring home money for much-needed weapons—or there wouldn’t be any Israel. On the other hand, she understood all too well that there was, among some upper-crust American Jews, a wariness of the idea of a Jewish state—a desire, often unstated, not to appear too Jewish.
In any event, Montor managed to carve out a little time for Meir to speak at the Council’s luncheon on January 25, 1948, at the Sheraton.
She later recalled: “I was terribly afraid of going to these people who didn’t know me from Adam. I admit I was shaking. I had no idea what was going to happen.”
But providence, or something like it, called her that day. And the effect was historic. The audience was on its feet immediately after she finished. Her goal had been to raise $25 million in America. She came away with $50 million—aid that would prove critical in the months ahead.
According to those present, Meir went to the stage with her hair severely parted, absolutely no makeup, and with no notes to speak from—her preferred habit. The pauses in her speech seem to have been as important as the words themselves. She seemed to be feeling the words, weighing up the words, and judging, by the second, their effect on her audience.
She spoke for some 35 minutes.
Friends was the term she chose to address her audience.
“The mufti and his people have declared war upon us,” she said. “We have no alternative but. . . to fight for our lives.”
She told the audience about the thirty-five Jews who “fought to the very end” on the road to Kfar Etzion and of the last one killed. He had run out of ammunition but died with a stone in his hand, prepared to continue fighting.
And she paraphrased the famous words of Winston Churchill: “We will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end.”
She added: “I want you to believe me when I say that I came on this special mission to the United States today not to save 700,000 Jews. During the last few years the Jewish people lost six million Jews, and it would be audacity on our part to worry the Jewish people throughout the world because a few hundred thousand more Jews were in danger. That is not the issue.”
The issue, she explained, “is that if these 700,000 Jews in Palestine can remain alive, then the Jewish people, as such, is alive and Jewish independence is assured. If these 700,000 people are killed off, then for many centuries, we are through with this dream of a Jewish people and a Jewish homeland.”
This was the spirit—the moral vision—that compelled Golda Meir, like so many Israelis after her, to do what other people thought could not be done.
To be sure, Meir had her blind spots. Not long after Senator Biden, then 30, visited Israel along with other U.S. officials, in 1973, Egypt and Syria simultaneously attacked Israel—in what became known as the Yom Kippur War.
Israel was nearly destroyed, and Meir’s reputation for being Israel’s Iron Lady was badly undermined (and Israeli politics were transformed forever, laying the groundwork for many of today’s thornier issues). But the Jewish state fought back, and it accomplished what appeared, for a while, impossible: victory.
That victory was critical not simply because it restored Israel’s territorial integrity, but because it was part of a much bigger effort to force the surrounding Arab states—however reluctantly, however glacially—to come around to accepting that Israel was not going anywhere.
Iran, as we know, is still learning that lesson.
The mullahs in Tehran, if they are wise, will take a look at Meir’s 1948 speech in Chicago, when she did what no one thought could be done—and inspired so many Israelis, present and future, to follow in her footsteps.
“Much must be prepared now so that we can hold out,” Meir told her audience on that snowy day in Chicago. “There are unlimited opportunities, but are we going to get the necessary means?”
She went on: “Is it possible that time should decide the issue not because Palestinian Jews are cowards, not because they are incapable, but merely because they lack the material means to carry on?”
Then, she said: “I have come to the United States, and I hope you will understand me if I say that it is not an easy matter for any of us to leave home at present. To my sorrow, I am not in the front line. I am not with my daughter in the Negev or with other sons and daughters in the trenches. But I have a job to do.”
To listen to Douglas read parts of Golda Meir’s 1948 speech, click below:
Go to link to find audio at the end...
https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-remembering-golda-meir?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=143770598&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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