Word: premier
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...Labor, then Foreign Minister, a post in which she stoutly supported his policy of tough retaliation for every act of Arab sabotage or raid. Said Ben-Gurion: "She is the only man in my Cabinet." Overall, she had a love-hate relationship with Israel's blustery, impulsive first Premier. At his behest, she Hebraized her last name from Meyerson to Meir (meaning illumination). Privately she referred to Ben-Gurion as "that man." But he was indulgent of her tirades in closed Cabinet sessions. "You have to forgive her," he would say. "She had a very difficult childhood...
...mood of weariness, she decided to retire from foreign affairs, and became secretary general of Israel's Labor Party. When Premier Levi Eshkol died suddenly of a heart attack in 1969, the Labor Party asked her to succeed him, not only out of love but to avoid a split between factions loyal to the flamboyant Moshe Dayan and his archrival Yigal Allon. She duly burst into tears, expounded her devotion to her children and grandchildren, professed inadequacy-and accepted...
Golda took over as Israel's fourth Premier, more the autocrat than the mother comforter. But even in this dominating role, she injected a maternal element into the cold science of international relations. She assembled her senior cabinet members at supper in her kitchen to discuss affairs of state amid aromatic fumes of the chicken soup she loved to cook. She met Prime Ministers and Presidents at the grandest of diplomatic dinners wearing her severely cut suits and orthopedic shoes. She tolerated bodyguards with reluctance but would often brew tea for them in the morning's small hours...
...Premier, she was ruthlessly realistic throughout the so-called war of attrition; her response to any Arab raid or act of terrorism was to order even heavier counterviolence. "We are finished with gimmicks-with observers and emergency forces and demilitarized zones and armistices," she said. "It is a mistake to consider that the reason for the conflict between us is over some territory. We can compromise about that. They don't want us here. That's what it is all about. They don't want us, period...
...precedence, in time of conflict, over Egypt's obligations to other Arab countries. The more nagging question was Sadat's demand for linkage of the treaty and the proposed negotiations over the future of the West Bank and Gaza, linkage that he and President Carter believed Israeli Premier Menachem Begin had agreed to at the Camp David summit...