The universal problem of leadership: "Golda"

The real Holy Land is flavor country

It’s a known fact that cigarette smuggling is an incredibly lucrative racket. It is also a known fact that Hollywood is a fractally nested series of money laundering arrangements. If you combine these two facts, the first act of “Golda” makes more sense. At some point a producer ended up needing to justify the purchase of ten thousand cartons of Albanian cigarettes, and rather than sheepishly concede that they had been driven to Paris and flee to a non-extradition country, decided to claim they were all smoked on the set of this film.

This is more plausible than it seems at first glance. As a technical exercise, it’s akin to the zombies in a zombie movie. It’s never about the zombies, they’re always a metaphor, and everyone is so familiar with the concept that you want the first one on screen in under five minutes because dammit, I paid my fifteen dollars and I want to see where the budget went. You don’t stop seeing them until the final scene. The goal of the movie is to build the story, with its included metaphorical and symbolic aspects, set pieces, etc, around the zombies - it’s not like you happened upon some novel construction that would necessitate their invention if they didn’t exist already. Similarly with the Albanian heaters.

So we smoke a lot. We smoke in hearings, we smoke in meetings, we smoke on the battlefield, we smoke when woken up, we smoke while undergoing radiation therapy. The idea is that the smoke symbolizes blindness - we’re talking about a film that dramatizes the Yom Kippur war, the last time before the October 7th attacks when Israel was surprised, or at least managed to blind itself into surprise.

Despite the subject matter, and the fact that it is an Israeli production, the film does avoid the “protagonist country” effect where the story is sidelined in service of puffing up the national ethos. It’s actually astonishing how well it is conveyed that for half the film, no one really knows what is going on. As a pseudo-omniscient audience, when you see a battle scene, generally speaking you are expected to see how the battle is going, or what’s the point? But the experience of actual command is different - you’re relying on staff reports that themselves are relying on reports, while holed up in a bunker trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes the guy you send to the front to puzzle out the situation has a nervous breakdown and turns out to be completely useless when he’s not executing an immediate curbstomp like the preceding Six Day War. The stress is near unbearable precisely because of the lack of direct stimulus.

And minus a few references and a couple of scenes that come off mostly as comedy (“you have to eat the borscht, Henry [Kissinger]. My cook is a survivor”) you could basically set this in the context of any fictional 20th century European war (shameful lack of diversity in the 1973 Israeli cabinet) and it would still ring true, because these are fundamental problems of leadership. You are the head hebrew in charge who got popular essentially via managing refugee settlement (“refugee” being in this case the ones you actually want), and your war hero minister of defense starts babbling about how we’re all screwed and it’s time to load up the nukes - how do you actually handle this? Is he maybe correct and it’s time to start planning how you’re going to avoid being vaporized in response? Do you immediately sack him because he’s a danger to himself and others if he retains authority - and can you even get away with sacking him in the middle of a war? Or do you try to give him a personal pep talk, sideline him, and try to use your limited expertise in military matters to find a de facto replacement? Who can you talk to about this without causing a panic? A Lucky Strike would sure take the edge off right about now.

Fortunately for the Israelis, Golda Meir is able to exploit a series of political-military mistakes in Act II and get into a winnable position. Putting yourself in the shoes of your political opponent in the context of a military conflict is easier said than done - it’s easy to focus on “winning the war” while ignoring the political incentives actually driving the action in the first place. Even in a “total war” with existential implications, accommodating your opponent’s desire to save face, or taking advantage of their own disconnect between political goals and military instrumentalities, can often be the driving consideration. So bidding for time in hopes that Anwar Sadat would push his advantage too far and leave them an opportunity pays off, and the Israelis end up with an Egyptian army held hostage during a ceasefire as their water runs out. “Knowing when you’ve lost is easy, it’s knowing when you’ve won that’s hard”, she intones.

And it’s this potent quotable that brings us to the present day. Sadat’s military “defeat” was a political victory merely because he was the one Arab leader ever able to put up table stakes, and he translated that victory into a fundamental repositioning of Egyptian foreign policy that has been the basis of its security ever since. Had he “won”, his reward might very well have been a mushroom cloud over Cairo. It’s tempting to analogize the situation to the Israeli’s present conflict with the Palestinians - Israel loses by winning, and the Palestinians win by losing.

Israel is a high international mobility state with a barbell economy. Cheap Palestinian labor and a high tech sector both rely on a certain amount of stability to function - I can personally attest that in principle you can do electronics design in a bathrobe from anywhere your passport is valid, but it helps if you aren’t being shot at. They are presently writing a cash-out mortgage on that stability, and for what? To “eliminate Hamas”? Just like Sadat, Hamas’ “loss” has resulted in a sustained increase in popularity. It seems unclear at the moment, even to the Israelis themselves, whether they will settle for imposing (and subsidizing) Judenrat-style collaborator governance, or finally solving at least one geographic component of their Palestinian problem. Neither particularly helps relations with their neighbors, trade partners, or low end labor pool.

Meanwhile it has been likely since 2005 that this is how the Gazans end - borders sealed and a plague or famine wiping out enough of their population to permanently affect their relative demography. Their only chance has been to make their situation cinematic enough to trigger the World War II memetic antibodies in an ironic autoimmune spasm of Western sympathy. Certainly the sheer volume of orphaned, dead, and maimed children, and the gleeful endorsement of war crimes by significant sections of the Israeli elite, is their most plausible avenue to that support.

Unfortunately, for now Bibi and the rest of the Israeli political class seem content to ride the tiger. “All political careers end in failure”, Golda informs us, just as all nations end in fire and blood.