Golda Meir has always been my favorite among Israeli leaders. Not for being one of Israel’s founders, though she was that — Present At the Creation on May 14, 1948, Certainly not for her role as Prime Minister. presiding over the Jewish state at the time of its greatest peril, during the Yom Kippur War, for Meir was partly to blame for Israel being caught unawares. Not for her grandmotherly frumpy self, so wonderfully no-nonsensical — no Circumlocution Office for her — as when she dismissed the fiction of a “Palestinian people,” first in a Sunday Times interview in 1969 and then in a 1970 interview with Thames TV.
The interview entitled “Who can blame Israel?” was published in The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, and included the following exchange:
Frank Giles: Do you think the emergence of the Palestinian fighting forces, the Fedayeen, is an important new factor in the Middle East?
Golda Meir: Important, no. A new factor, yes. There was 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 from them. They did not exist.
The 1970 interview with Thames TV included this:
Golda Meir: When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. East and West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 and 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians. There were Jews and Arabs. I don’t say there are no Palestinians, but I say there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people.
No, what most endears her to me — and I hope to you, too — is her remark, made I presume to someone who had been given some kind of promotion and was explaining how honored he felt, and how he didn’t deserve it, and so on and so bloody forth, when she cut him short and said “Don’t be so humble — you’re not that great.”
Now a movie about this remarkable woman has just been made, with British actress Helen Mirren playing Meir. And it was satisfying to discover that Mirren is, and has been for more than half a century, a strong supporter of Israel. More on Helen Mirren and her love affair with Israel can be found here: “Helen Mirren Explains Why She Ignores BDS Pressure, Praises Israel,” by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, August 29, 2023:
“ritish actress Dame Helen Mirren has faced pressure from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel throughout her career but prefers instead to support Israeli artists and the Jewish state as a whole, the famed Academy Award winner explained in a new interview.
“I’ve met great artists in Israel. To abandon those artists didn’t seem the right thing to me,” Mirren, 78, told the Israeli media outlet N12. “On the contrary, work with the artists of Israel. It’s the artistic community that I believe will carry Israel forward.”
The actress added that she’s been told in the past not to go to Israel or participate in Israeli projects but chooses to ignore those requests because she’s “met such extraordinary people” in the country.
There are a group of British actresses, headed by the odious salon Bolshevik Vanessa Redgrave, who in her Oscar acceptance speech in 1978 chose to denounce, out of the blue, “Zionist hoodlums.” They include the Jewish leftist Miriam Margolyes, the credulous Emma Watson, the fetching political nitwit Emma Thompson, and others, whose ignorance of Israel and of the Palestinians is matched only by their arrogance. Helen Mirren is different. She has visited Israel often over fifty years; she has seen how Israelis, both Jews and Arabs live, as Redgrave, Thompson, and Watson have never bothered to do. She is also far more intelligent than any of them. That always helps.
Mirren again:
“I know that there is a foundation of deep intelligence, thoughtfulness, commitment [and] poetry even in Israel that is very, very special,” she explained.
The BDS movement, which seeks to isolate the Jewish state from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination, tries to pressure individuals, companies, and other entities not to travel to or associate with Israel.
Mirren plays former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the recently released film Golda from Israeli director Guy Nattiv. The movie tells the true story of Meir’s leadership during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Mirren came to Israel for the first time after the war and worked as a volunteer at Kibbutz Ha’on by the Sea of Galilee. She told N12 about being in Israel during that time: “The extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground — it was an amazing time to be here.”
The actress has played a few Jewish roles in the past, including in the 2010 film The Debut. Five years later in the movie Woman in Gold, she starred as a real elderly Jewish refugee living in California named Maria Altmann, who fought the government of Austria to reclaim a painting of her aunt by famed Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.
Mirren most recently starred in the 2023 film White Bird as a Jewish woman who survived Nazi-occupied France as a youngster with the help of a non-Jewish boy from her school and his family who sheltered her.
“It is something that I do feel strongly about,” Mirren said when asked about the number of Jewish characters she has played.
The actress added: “I believe in the existence of Israel, and I believe Israel has to go forward into the future for the rest of eternity. And I believe in Israel because of the Holocaust.”
That’s the kind of voice one wants to hear more often. We won’t allow you to be humble, Helen; you are that great.
I just ran across a story about another supporter of Israel from the world of entertainment, Frank Sinatra, who gave lavishly to support many institutions in Israel, including the Frank Sinatra International Student Center at Hebrew University, and also helped raise millions of dollars for Israel.
Sinatra raised large sums for Jewish causes. In the wake of the Six-Day War, in June 1967, he and other Hollywood entertainers pledged a total of $2.5 million ($23 million in 2023 dollars) to Israel; Sinatra personally contributed $25,000. In 1972, Sinatra raised $6.5 million in bond pledges for Israel, and in 1975 announced that he was donating $250,000 ($1.5 million in 2023 dollars) to Israel Bonds “in memory of my parents’ neighbor, Mrs. Golden, in Hoboken.” He also raised large amounts of money for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Sinatra met Simon Wiesenthal for the first time in 1979, telling him that he “had been his hero for many years.” Sinatra told the Simon Wiesenthal Center: “Although I’m not Jewish, the Holocaust is important to me.” He offered $100,000 to help produce the film Genocide. Sinatra also raised $400,000 for the film in appearances for the Center, and became a member of its Board of Trustees.
But the story I like best about Sinatra and his help to the soon-to-be-born state of Israel took place in March 1948, when the future mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek was in New York on a clandestine mission for the Haganah, to smuggle weapons from the U.S. to the fledgling state, which the Jews of Israel feared — with reason — would soon be under attack from at least five Arab nations, while a US arms embargo “imposed on all sides” would remain in effect.
A ship full of munitions, and phony bills of lading, was waiting at the New York docks to sail outside the three-mile territorial waters, where those munitions would be transferred to another ship that would then take them all the way to Israel, for delivery to the Haganah. But how could Kollek transfer the cash needed to pay the ship’s captain when federal agents were tailing him?
Spontaneously, he shared his secret dilemma with Sinatra, whom he met one night at the Copacabana bar in his hotel.
“And in the early hours of the following morning I walked out the front door of the building with a satchel, and the Feds followed me,” Kollek told the authors of the biography Sinatra: The Life: “Out the back door went Frank Sinatra, carrying a paper bag filled with cash [estimated at $1 million]. He went down to the pier, handed it over, and watched the ship sail.”
It’s a true story, and a good one.
Emmanuel says
Positive information is good for morality; Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
Eva says
I’ve kno n about Helen Mirren’s support of Israel for years, but I had absolutely no idea about Frank Sinatra’s.
What a wonderful man!!!
James Lincoln says
I did not know about Frank Sinatra’s very significant support for Israel.
An immense talent, his stock just surged in my book.
bill says
I used not to have a good opinion of Frankie although he was my favourite in my late teens ( when there was nobody else) but I have now revised it dramatically.
Jeff Ford says
Mirren also performed an act of astonishing grace when, when a young mentally-disabled kid was dying he stated his dying wish was to meet the Queen. Elizabeth couldn’t do it, but Mirren was playing the Queen on stage and agreed to get into costume and meet him. The child thought she was the real queen and Mirren did not disabuse him of that. She got a couple of angel’s wings at a minimum.
Barry Goldberg says
“I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him.
Twiz says
Not going to see much support like Mirren and Sinatra coming out of the Hollywood bunch today. They have all been deceived, and support Arab crybaby’s claiming to be Palestinians.