Document: Golda Meir’s meeting with the Newspaper Editors after the Yom Kippur War
Keywords:
Golda Meir, The Yom Kippur Wa, The Press in Israel, Government–Press Relations in IsraelAbstract
One month after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Golda Meir met with Israel’s newspaper editors in a closed-door meeting. Such meetings had been the custom ever since David Ben-Gurion instituted them on November 29, 1947. Ben-Gurion shared state secrets with the editors on the basis of an unspoken agreement that they were pledged not to publish what was conveyed to them.
In their meeting with Golda Meir after the guns silenced, the editors expressed the need for establishing an investigating commission of the recent events. None of the editors dared to remind the prime minister of the basic truth: The role of the press is to report the government’s shortcomings to the citizens, and by doing so, it may, on occasion, have to demand that those responsible for catastrophes draw the necessary personal conclusions.
Despite the editors’ exhortations to set up a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the arrogance that characterized the government before and during the war, Prime Minister Meir insinuated that the failures were in the realm of military operations. Nothing she said reveals her acknowledgement at this stage that the responsibility war’s fiasco lay at the political level.
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