Western Civilization Proposal, I Would Like to

¶ … Western Civilization proposal, I would like to research Golda Meir. Meir's life is interesting not only in and of itself, but is also remarkable altogether for its astonishing symbolic associations. Meir shows us (as we perhaps already knew) that the historical bias within Western Civilization that stereotypes women as "the weaker sex" has never really been accurate.

There is a long history both mythographically and historically which does permit women a role in both warcraft and statecraft: the Classical tradition offers warrior goddesses such as the Greek Athene and the Roman Bellona, while the Old Testament includes enough vignettes of tough and bloodthirsty women, such as Jael, who assassinates the enemy general Sisera by hammering a tent-peg through his skull.

Historically there have been a number of female war leaders as well: Boadicea in Roman-era Britain and Zenobia in the Roman-era Middle East both led successful military uprisings against a centralized imperial power; Saint Joan of Arc would lead a similar military uprising almost a thousand years later; and to use an example whom Golda Meir resembles in certain crucial and fascinating respects, we have the example of Elizabeth the First of England as both political and war leader.

Elizabeth the First and Golda Meir were both political (and ultimately military) leaders in countries that had only recently established their independence and were trying to bolster that independence ideologically and symbolically. If we were to date the existence of the modern British state not to the Magna Carta but to Henry VIII's break with Roman Catholicism, then Elizabeth's reign falls about the same length of time after Henry's that Golda Meir's leadership of Israel did in history of the Israeli state (founded in 1948).

Both Elizabeth I and Golda Meir would end up taking on a tremendous symbolic importance within their own nascent states, partly as actual leaders, but partly with a symbolic afterlife that outlasted their own tenures as female heads of state.

Yet Meir was also important in terms of the political traditions of Western Civiliation -- those Greek and Roman ideals of representative government, which would be picked up again in the West in the Englightenment, and were an influence on the nascent state of Israel emerging from the long period of Zionist agitation and struggle.

Meir would re-enact the same dramas that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the American colonies or the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen in revolutionary France when she was one of the original twenty-four signatories (and only two women) who would sign Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence. The symbolism was greater because Meir had come to Israel originally from America.

To some extent Meir's American identity increased her value as an Israeli politician, because Israel is well aware that American Jews represent one of the great success stories in the history of American immigration such that it might be possible to imagine that America was a sort of Promised Land, which -- in the words written by President George Washington to the Jewish Synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island -- offers "to bigotry no sanction." For an American Jew to feel sufficiently strong about her identity as a Jew that she would choose to emigrate from the United States to the fledgling Jewish state indicates a remarkable sort of faith in the long-term prospects of the great Zionist dream.

But there is another reason, I think, why Meir was such a resonant symbolic figurehead. The chief antagonists of the Israeli state during the time of Meir's premiership were largely the surrounding countries, predominantly Arab and overwhelmingly Muslim.

(The Arab identity is made problematic largely by Iran: a very large neighbor of Israel whose population are not Arabs and whose language is not Arabic, but whose Shi'a Islam is Islam nonetheless; the Muslim identity is made problematic by Lebanon and Syria, or even Egypt, which have large Christian populations, including ones which underwent their schism with the Western church almost as long ago as Islam did -- these include the Coptic, Maronite, and Nestorian sects.) But it is no secret that both Arab and Islamic cultures have in common a largely repressive or antiquated attitude towards the social role of women -- something which Judaism lacks.

Judaism is (interestingly) a matrilineal religion: the accepted rabbinic law.