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Golda Meir was Israel’s first and only female prime minister. She held important positions in the Jewish Agency before the creation of the state, and she was an effective minister of labor in Israel’s first government.

She was also one of Israel’s worst prime ministers, and her failures of leadership are still affecting Israeli politics today.

As prime minister from 1969 to 1974, she presided over the greatest failure of any Israeli leader — the Yom Kippur War.

With the 50th anniversary of the 19-day war coming up on Oct. 6 — and with Helen Mirren playing Meir in the recently released movie “Golda” — it’s a good time to consider Meir’s actions and impact.

Her refusal to engage Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in diplomatic negotiations in the leadup to the war, combined with her failure to prepare the country for war despite ample warnings, led to the greatest disaster in Israeli history.

She was also decisively responsible for alienating large constituencies of the Israeli electorate, leading to the political demise of the Labor Party, which she led for five years.

Of course, the failure of the Israeli leadership in 1973 does not lay solely at the feet of Meir. Many others failed the country, as well.

Chief among them was the charismatic defense minister, Moshe Dayan. The hero of Israel’s previous major military campaigns in 1956 and 1967, he led a hawkish faction that rejected many diplomatic overtures from the Egyptian leadership.

Dayan famously declared in 1971 that he would prefer holding onto Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than have peace without Sharm el-Sheikh. This rejectionist line has come to define the overall policy of Meir’s cabinet: preferring maximum territorial control over seriously exploring the possibility of peace.

As later events have made painfully clear, Sadat was very serious in his intentions to engage with Israel. When Prime Minister Menachem Begin indicated in 1977 that he was willing to withdraw from the Sinai, Sadat made an official visit to Israel that was quickly followed by a peace treaty between the two states.

Dayan also presided over a strategy of defending against Egyptian invasion by building small, isolated outposts on the Eastern shore of the Suez Canal. Many, in real time, criticized the strategy and called for the deployment of much larger forces near the canal. But Dayan’s position reflected the government’s overall attitude toward the Egyptians (and the Syrians): total dismissal of the Arab armies’ ability to attack Israel and cause substantial harm.

In 1972, a new chief of army intelligence was appointed: General Eli Zeira. Overly confident and myopic, he created what came to be known as “The Concept” — an official position of the intelligence establishment that claimed that Egypt and Syria were making idle threats and would not dare attack Israel.

There are efforts today, in historical research and in artistic depictions of Golda Meir’s life, to portray her as a victim, a woman held captive by strong men.

Zeira and others ignored credible intelligence that suggested that an attack from both countries was imminent. Instead, he reassured civilian leaders that there was no need to declare a state of emergency and call up the reserves.

Meir also appointed David Elazar as Israel Defense Forces chief in 1972. He proved to be a weak leader in the lead up to the war, unable or unwilling to counter Dayan and Zeira and call up the reserves in time.

Nearly 3,000 Israeli soldiers died in the Yom Kippur War. Nearly 10,000 were injured and hundreds were taken captive.

There are efforts today, in historical research and in artistic depictions of Golda Meir’s life, to portray her as a victim, a woman held captive by strong men.

But ultimately, she was the leader. At any moment she could have replaced some or all of the key figures in the defense establishment. And the defense establishment reflected her overall vision, a vision that she articulated again and again: rejection of meaningful peace negotiations and refusal to address credible intelligence that suggested an imminent attack by armies that had learned the lessons of the Six-Day War in 1967 and posed a real threat to Israel’s security.

Meir was reelected after the war, in December 1973. But with the findings of the Agranat Commission, which investigated the Yom Kippur War and the failure of both the military and civilian leadership, Meir, Dayan and the rest of the military leadership resigned.

The elections revealed the strengthening of the Gahal (soon to be renamed the Likud, now the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) at the expense of Labor. In 1977, Labor lost to Likud and Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Today, Labor is a small party on the verge of political extinction.

Meir, who died in 1978 at age 80, also contributed to another factor in Labor’s demise: the shift of Mizrahi Jewish voters away from Labor to Begin and the political right.

In the early 1970s, various Mizrahi protest movements, most notable among them being the Israeli Black Panthers, called on the Labor government to invest in underprivileged Mizrahi populations, which were the victims of decades of social and economic neglect at the hands of successive Labor administrations.

In 1971, the Black Panthers demanded a meeting with Meir. She initially refused, but as tensions across the country intensified, she relented. No concrete policies came from the meeting. But Meir was later quoted saying in a closed party meeting that the Black Panthers were “not nice boys.”

The line became a symbol of the disconnect between Labor and Mizrahim in Israel — and it reflected Golda’s dismissive attitude toward the Arab world.

This disconnect exists until this very day.

It is also a lasting part of Meir’s legacy — a legacy of shortsightedness and failure of leadership.

‘Golda and the Price of Collective Hubris’

Eran Kaplan will discuss Meir and the Yom Kippur War at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette on Oct. 23, 8-9 p.m.