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Rabat – Recently, many netizens have been sharing and reposting videos of Golda Meir’s past statements that summarize Zionist and Israeli policies against Palestine and Palestinians’ struggle for an independent state.
The sharing of the video comes in the midst of Israel’s ongoing campaign of punitive aggression and vindictive war on the besieged and increasingly asphyxiated Gaza Strip.
Of Meir’s past comments that netizens have shared in recent days, the one that appears to have stood out is a 1970 interview in which the first and only female Prime Minister of Israel (1969-1974) in which she downplayed Palestinian identity, history and history.
In the interview, which Meir gave to British Thames TV, she sarcastically called herself a Palestinian. In so doing, she was essentially trying to emphasize that there is no separate community or people called Palestinians.
“What was all this area before the First World War? Palestine was the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraia n border… East and West Bank was Palestine; I am a Palestinian,” Meir said.
She also admitted that she obtained a Palestinian passport under the British Mandate, which was created in 1923 to facilitate the mass Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Mandate was established six years after the Balfour Declaration was issued.
The declaration took its name from Arthus James Balfour, a former British foreign secretary, who created the idea of supporting the establishment in Palestine of a home for Jewish people.
While Meir is positively portrayed in Israel and is widely and affectionately referred to as the “Iron Lady,” she is remembered in the Arab world as a zealous Zionist and a glorifier of the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.
Read also: ‘It Wasn’t Israel Yet’: Activists Repost Videos of Holocaust Survivor Admitting Israeli Occupation
She harbored deep-rooted anti-Palestinian sentiments, as documented by different interviews that shed light on her instructions urging war crimes against Palestinians.
Meir’s anti-Arab and Palestinians policies are being brought to light following a controversial biographical film depicting her life as the fourth prime minister of Israel.
The controversial movie sparked outrage from pro-palestinian activists as well as from media, with many slamming the propaganda carried in the scenario to promote the long propagated narrative and victimization.
Reviewing the movie earlier this month, the Middle East Monitor (MEMO) drew attention to one of Meir’s infamous statements that says: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
As the MEMO review went on to argue, this statement “encapsulates both the victim-blaming and victimhood narrative that have played a pivotal role in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the displacement of its indigenous non-Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities.”
According to Nasim Ahmed, the author of the MEMO article, the controversial movie sought to rehabilitate Meir both in the West and in Israel, where many still admire her as a strong leader. As Nasim put it, “a more intellectually honest depiction would interrogate the way the Meir’s racism and rhetoric dehumanized Palestinians and justified their oppression by the settler-colonial state.”
In a similar review of the movie, also published earlier this month, Saudi outlet The Arab News described the movie as “typical Israeli propaganda,” rebuking the Israeli attempt to depict Meir as a hero.
“The movie is typical Israeli propaganda,” the Saudi outlet wrote, stressing that the movie director tried to whitewash the former Israeli PM’s legacy of violence and anti-Arab racism by portraying her as an admired Israeli lionesse and Iron lady.
“Meir’s utter hatred for Palestinians and Arabs generally was, therefore, formulated long before she had met a single Palestinians,” the Arab News article concluded.
