Grandma's army

Golda Meir was Prime Minister of Israel from February 1969 to June 1974:                                                                                                               “When in 1921 I came to Palestine – until the end of World War I a barren, sparsely inhabited Turkish province – we, the Jewish pioneers, were the avowed Palestinians. So we were named in the world. Arab nationalists, on the other hand, categorically rejected the name. Arab spokesmen continued to insist that the land we had cherished for centuries was, like Lebanon, merely a fragment of Syria. Until the 1960’s, attention was focused on the Arab refugees for whose plight the Arab...

  A DIFFERENT WAR The idea for “Grandma’s Army” began when I had seven grandchildren in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) at the same time.   However, my family’s participation in the IDF started off   much earlier - when Israel barely had an army and I was decidedly not a grandma!   The war, in which my husband   took part, is   usually known as the Suez Crisis. It took place only eight years after the Israeli Declaration of Independence, and had far-reaching consequences - at both global and regional levels.  On regional levels, the war gave an impetus to the spread of pan-Arabic ideology, leading to the unification of Syria and Egypt and creating the UAR (United Arab Republic). On global levels it marked, not only the end of the British and French influence in the Middle East, but also the decline of the two European powers. It’s outcome was arguably one of the most significant episodes in post-1945 British history, highlighting Br...