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A Golda Meir biopic starring Helen Mirren avoids politics. It premiered as Israel’s government faces widespread scrutiny.
(JTA) — When a film about a group of Israeli youths who visit former concentration camps in Poland premiered on Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival, its Israeli producer took the microphone after the screening to decry the state of his nation.
“The new far-right government that is in power is pushing fascist and racist laws,” said Yoav Roeh, a producer of “Ha’Mishlahat” (“Delegation”) on stage after the film’s premiere. He was referring to lawmakers in Israel’s government who have long histories of anti-Arab rhetoric and their new proposals to limit the power of the country’s Supreme Court, which critics at home and around the world deem a blow to Israel’s status as a democracy.
“Israel is committing suicide after 75 years of existence,” Roeh added.
The next day brought the premiere of “Golda,” a highly-anticipated Golda Meir biopic starring Oscar winner Helen Mirren about the former Israeli prime minister and her decisions during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Hours earlier, Israel’s government took another step closer to passing its controversial judicial reforms, and when asked about the political situation, Mirren didn’t mince words.
“I think [Meir] would have been utterly horrified,” she told AFP. “It’s the rise of dictatorship and dictatorship was what has always been the enemy of people all over the world and she would recognize it as that.”
That was the heated backdrop for the debut of “Golda,” which will not hit U.S. theaters until August. But an onlooker wouldn’t know that from the film’s own introductory press conference with Mirren, director Guy Nattiv and other stars from the film. The headlines that have emerged from it have been dominated by the film’s place in the “Jewface” debate, about who should play Jewish characters on screen. Mirren is not Israeli or Jewish.
“Let’s say that we’re making a movie about Jesus Christ. Who’s going to play him?” Mirren’s co-star Lior Ashkenazi stepped in to answer in response to a journalist, eliciting laughter from the press corps.
The film is framed by Meir’s testimony to the Agranat Commission, which investigated the lead-up to the war. As the film shows through flashbacks, Meir appears to have not acted quickly enough on Mossad intelligence about a possible attack from Egyptian and Syrian forces. Israeli forces were surprised on the holiday and initially lost ground; both sides lost thousands of troops, and the war is seen as a major trauma in Israeli history — the moment when the state’s conception of its military superiority over its Arab neighbors was shattered. The film is claustrophobic, shot mostly indoors — in bunkers, hospital rooms and government offices — and offers an apt visual encapsulation of the loss the war would bring.
Mirren walks the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 20, 2023. She spent time on a kibbutz in 1967. (Courtesy of Berlinale)
Though Meir has historically been lionized as a tough female hero in the United States and in Jewish communities around the world (even non-Jewish soldiers in Ukraine took inspiration from her in the early days of the Russian invasion last year), her legacy is more complicated in Israel and the Palestinian territories. In addition to being associated with the trauma of the war for many Jewish Israelis, she is remembered as an inveterate enemy by Palestinians.
In recent years, the representation of Meir has shifted more favorably in Israel, said Meron Medzini, Meir’s former press secretary and one of her biographers. He said that historians have begun to view her favorably in comparison to some of the political leaders who followed her.
“I consider the film [‘Golda’] part of this effort to rehabilitate her name,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think she is now gaining her rightful place in the history.”
“Golda” fits into Medzini’s narrative by emphasizing the intractability and pride of her Cabinet ministers as the prime reasons for Israel’s surprise. It affirms Meir’s honor by portraying her as attempting to protect the ministers from criticism — all men — and to promote national unity.
At the press conference, Nattiv gave the briefest of nods to Meir’s complex legacy but like Medzini compared her to Israel’s current slate of leaders, who he reserved brief criticism for.
“Golda is not a super clean character in this movie,” said Nattiv, who is best known for directing “Skin,” a 2018 film about a neo-Nazi. “She had her faults. She made mistakes. And she took responsibility, which leaders are not doing today.”
Meir has long enjoyed a kind of star status in the United States. She was interviewed by Barbra Streisand in 1978, close to the Israeli leader’s death from cancer, for a TV special on Israel’s 30th anniversary.
“She clearly is the great-grandmother of the Jewish people [in the special] and Streisand is very reverential toward her,” Tony Shaw, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of “Hollywood and Israel: A History,” said about the Streisand interview. “She just comes across as very humble, slightly out-of-date, out-of-time.”
“Of course, it’s very different from what we now know Golda Meir was really like,” he added, referring to her strong character and political pragmatism, which the film seeks to convey.
Since William Gibson’s critically-panned 1977 play also titled “Golda,” there have been a number of representations of Meir. Most famous among them is Ingrid Bergman’s final performance in “Golda Meir,” a four-hour-long television biopic from 1982. That production “was very much in keeping with Hollywood’s treatment of Israel in that period,” said Shaw, “which was very sympathetic towards Golda Meir, towards Israel and the troubles it was having in the first 30 years of its life.” More recently, Meir appears in Steven Spielberg’s more ambivalent 2005 film “Munich,” in which she helps to recruit the film’s protagonist to track down the figures behind the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks.
Golda Meir meets with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and troops on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, Oct. 21, 1973. (Ron Frenkel/GPO/Getty Images)
Nattiv’s work, which has received mixed early reviews, focuses on the war as reflected in Meir’s character, forgoing engagement with broader politics or history.
“My inspiration was ‘Das Boot,’ in the way that she is in the trenches,” said Nattiv, referencing the revered World War II movie from 1981 set in a German U-boat. “She is very alone in the mayhem of war around these men.”
“This is the Vietnam of Israel,” he explained. “It is a very tough and hard look at the war and every soldier that died…Golda takes it to her heart.”
Despite the “Jewface” questioning, Nattiv compared Mirren to an “aunt” figure who, for him, had the “Jewish chops to portray Golda.” Mirren explained to the AFP that she has long felt a connection to Israel and to Meir, especially after a stay on a kibbutz in 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, with a Jewish boyfriend.
“She was at her happiest on the kibbutz actually,” Mirren said. “Their idealism, their dream of the perfect world. And I did experience that which was great.”
Sanders Isaac Bernstein contributed reporting from Berlin.
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Iran Was Never Just Israel’s Problem
Iranians take to the streets during nationwide rallies on Nov. 4, 2025, marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy by waving flags and chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Photo: Screenshot
Some criticism of this war is justified.
If leaders want Americans to support military action against Iran, they must explain clearly why the threat is not merely Israeli, but American. They must define the objectives honestly and explain why the costs are worth bearing.
When they fail to do that, skepticism is not a vice. It is common sense.
But much of the commentary around this war has not been serious skepticism. It has been historical amnesia.
Too many Americans now speak as though Iran were chiefly Israel’s problem, and that the legitimate threat from Tehran was mainly the product of lobbying, hawkish paranoia, or another foreign entanglement sold under false pretenses.
This view appears on parts of the Left and on parts of the Right alike. It is a genuine horseshoe: one side speaks in the language of anti-colonial grievance, the other in the language of “America First” suspicion, but both often arrive at the same lazy conclusion — that Israel is the primary author of the crisis and Iran’s own record is somehow secondary.
That is not realism. It is illiteracy (or anti-Jewish bias) masquerading as restraint.
The Islamic Republic of Iran introduced itself to the United States in 1979 not through diplomacy, but through humiliation and hostage-taking. The seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis were not a misunderstanding. They were an opening statement.
From the beginning, the Iranian regime announced that ideological confrontation with America was not incidental to its identity. It was central.
What followed only confirmed this. For decades, the regime paired annihilative rhetoric with action: terrorism, proxy warfare, hostage-taking, intimidation, and subversion across the region and beyond. Iran did not merely talk like a revolutionary power. It behaved like one.
Americans should remember what that looked like in practice. Some of us knew it through Iraq.
I remember the explosively formed penetrators used in catastrophic IED attacks against American forces. Those weapons were not an abstraction. They were part of the same Iranian model of deniable warfare that allowed the regime to bleed its enemies while pretending to stand one step removed from the violence.
Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. That’s not an Israeli “talking point” — it’s something that Americans need to hear.
Nor was Iran’s model of violence confined to one battlefield. Its partnership with Hezbollah, and the operatives who helped turn that relationship into a durable instrument of terror, showed that Iran’s strategy was never simply defensive. It was regional, ideological, and expansionist.
The nuclear issue tells the same story of denial colliding with evidence. Iran has insisted for years that its nuclear program is peaceful and civilian. But enrichment at levels far beyond normal civilian requirements tells a different story. Americans do not need a degree in nuclear physics to understand that.
One need not endorse every tactical choice made in this war to recognize that Tehran’s claims about its intentions have repeatedly collided with the evidence.
The missile issue is similar. For years, Iran presented supposed limits on its missile range as though they reflected meaningful restraint. Yet its actual capabilities and behavior have repeatedly revealed a larger reach and a more aggressive intent than its public narratives suggested.
This is why the old Waltz-Sagan political science debate still matters. Kenneth Waltz argued that nuclear weapons can stabilize rivalries because states fear annihilation and therefore behave more cautiously.
Scott Sagan warned that proliferation can make catastrophe more likely through accidents, weak controls, organizational failures, and the conduct of dangerous regimes.
In the Iranian case, Sagan’s warning is plainly the more relevant one.
The problem is not that Iranian leaders are cartoonishly irrational. The problem is that too many Western analysts assume every regime calculates risk, death, survival, and martyrdom in roughly the same way. They do not.
A revolutionary regime that has spent decades pairing annihilative rhetoric with proxy warfare, terror sponsorship, nuclear deceit, and regional coercion should not be analyzed as though it were simply another status quo state with ordinary preferences and ordinary inhibitions.
That is also why the phrase “regime change” should not be treated as morally disqualifying in itself.
Everything depends on the regime in question. When a government has spent nearly half a century brutalizing its own people, threatening its neighbors, sponsoring terrorism, and lying about capabilities that could turn regional war into mass destruction, its removal is not inherently a dark or reckless aspiration.
There is nothing morally sophisticated about treating the survival of such a regime as the default prudent outcome. This is not merely an external menace. It is a regime that terrorizes its own population as well.
At the same time, serious people should say plainly what force can and cannot do. Decapitation strikes and threat-reduction operations are not a political end state. They are, at most, an opening salvo. They can degrade command structures, reduce immediate dangers, and create opportunities that did not previously exist. They cannot by themselves produce legitimacy, restore sovereignty, or build a stable successor order.
That harder phase, if it ever comes, will depend above all on Iranians themselves — on brave people willing to reclaim their country from a regime that has held it hostage for nearly half a century.
This is the point too many critics still miss. Yes, there has been a communications failure. Americans were not told clearly enough, consistently enough, or persuasively enough why Iran is not just Israel’s problem but America’s problem too. And that failure created space for the horseshoe. On the Left and on the Right, anti-Israel fixation has too often displaced sober analysis of the regime itself. The language differs, but the impulse is similar: minimize Iran’s agency, magnify Israel’s, and collapse strategy into slogans.
But the communications failure does not make the danger unreal.
Nor does the war’s messiness. If the war had gone better — if it had produced a cleaner strategic result, a more visible collapse in regime capacity, or even the early signs of a successful internal uprising — some of today’s criticism would undoubtedly be quieter. That much is true. But it does not follow that the underlying threat was invented. It means only that strategic disappointment always gives selective memory more room to operate.
Iran was never just Israel’s problem. It has been an American problem since 1979. It has been a regional problem for decades. And it remains a wider strategic problem wherever revolutionary terror, nuclear deceit, long-range coercion, and genocidal rhetoric are treated as tolerable, so long as they are aimed at someone else first.
This was not only a failure of statecraft. It was a failure of recognition. Too many Americans looked at the crisis and somehow forgot they were dealing with a regime that has spent decades announcing itself through terror, deceit, and exterminationist intent.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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Shabbat HaGadol and the Story of Elijah
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
“Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great awesome Day of God, and he will reconcile fathers to children and children to fathers” (Malachi 3:24).
This is part of the Haftorah for Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. But who exactly was Elijah? It is true that in terms of stature and his place in our tradition, he was the greatest of the prophets, even if no book is attributed to him. His public victory over the prophets of Baal during the reign of Ahab and Jezebel was his most famous triumph. But just as significant was the Chariot of Fire that took him up to Heaven when he died, which became the symbol of mysticism with which he was always associated.
In the Talmud, Elijah figures prominently in the debates about messianism and whether he was to be the messiah, or the pathfinder and precursor. Eventually, it was settled that Elijah would pave the way for a messianic era and instruct us what to do and what parts of our tradition would be revived or survive when it came about.
In the Talmud, there are many episodes in which Elijah is said to appear to rabbis and guide them, and he is associated with solving unresolved halachic issues.
Elijah has multiple associations with Pesach. The most obvious being when towards the end of the Seder, we dedicate the fifth cup of wine to Elijah, and we invoke his presence in asking God to remove our enemies.
Why is this fifth cup specifically Eliyahu’s?
Explanations range from the rational to the mystical. According to Maimonides, the coming of the messiah is a time in which oppression and hatred are removed, and we are free to explore our spiritual lives unimpeded. That’s the mystical.
Practically, there is a debate about if we should drink four or five cups of wine at the Seder. Those who advocate for four cups say it is done for the four terms used in the Torah to describe the process that gave us our freedom from slavery — “I freed you, I saved you, I redeemed you, I took you out.” But others believe “I brought you” counts as a fifth.
Are there four or five words, and should there be four or five cups?
The debate is left unanswered. Although we are obliged to have four cups of wine, we add an extra one just in case — and our tradition happened to dedicate that one to Elijah.
This year we have much to be sad about. So many beautiful young and not-so-young lives have been killed by our enemies. So many more lives have been injured or ruined. And yet there have been so many examples of deliverance, self-sacrifice, and heroism.
Is this the year the messiah will come? We can hope. But in the meantime, we have to do our best to reconcile and heal the chasms amongst us, and to come together to go forward united with pride and joy. Thank you, Eliyahu.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.
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Unreported: Palestinian Authority Brags It Killed More Jews in Second Intifada Than Hamas
Palestinians, including children, celebrating the Second Intifada. Photo: Screenshot.
The Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) had the largest number of terrorists in the Second Intifada, boasted a senior PA official.
PA Tulkarem District Governor Abdallah Kmeil bragged how the number of PASF members killed fighting Israel far exceeded the number killed by other terror organizations combined during the PA-led terror campaign of 2000-2005:
“Tulkarem District Governor Abdallah Kmeil: Let’s speak in a scientific language, in the language of numbers, which is the strongest language. There were 2,089 Martyrs from the [PA] Security Forces in the second Intifada … The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades of Fatah had 632 Martyrs, the Al-Quds Brigades of the [Islamic] Jihad had 415 Martyrs, and the [Izz A-Din] Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas had 378 Martyrs.”
[Tulkarem Governorate, Facebook page, Feb. 13, 2026]
By comparing PASF casualties to those of recognized terror groups, Kmeil showed that the PA Security Forces — who were trained and funded by the West to fight terror — were actually the leaders of Palestinian terror.
The Second Intifada was the PA-directed and controlled terror campaign, during which Palestinians carried out thousands of terror attacks, including suicide bombings on buses, in shopping malls, and on main streets, murdering more than 1,100 Israelis.
Last year, PA TV aired an interview with a PASF member jailed by Israel for terror offenses during the Second Intifada, who explained that the PASF “responded to this call” — to join the terror organizations in fighting Israel:
Released PA Security Forces terrorist prisoner Naji Arar: “I was a member of the Security Forces, of the security establishment. When we responded to the call of the homeland – we responded to this call through the Security Forces.
Do you remember the Al-Aqsa Intifada? The ones who resisted there were the Security Forces members, of course, in cooperation with our people and the factions.
I was arrested in Ramallah and sentenced to 18 years… It was shocking. But for Palestine, everything is insignificant. We were released… and met the security establishment through which we launched [our activity back then]. It welcomed us.”
[Official PA TV, Giants of Endurance, May 30, 2025 and Sept. 20, 2025]
Most importantly, the PASF leadership role in terror continues today unabated, as exposed in the June 2025 report by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) titled “Terrorists in Uniform.”
In 2023, after calling the killing of 12 Israelis that year “acts of resistance,” Fatah-run Adwah TV reported that “the members of Fatah and the Security Forces form the core and the arms of the resistance [i.e., terror] groups in the West Bank, together with the other Palestinian factions.”
PMW has likewise documented Fatah honoring dead PASF members who were terrorists killed while attacking Israelis.
Therefore, Kmeil’s words were surely no slip of the tongue. They were a public expression of what the PA and Fatah know: that PA Security Forces members take a leading role in Palestinian terror, a role that is a source of pride, to be celebrated.
This is all the more reason why any talk of parts of Gaza being handed over to the PASF to police the Strip is misguided and unacceptable, since it would be simply replacing one terror group, Hamas, with another — PA Security Forces.
Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Ahron Shapiro is a contributor to PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.