We saw the new film “Golda” with Helen Mirren playing the role of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I remember leaving the synagogue here in Washington on that day, and how beautiful a day it was. When I heard that Israel had been attacked by both Egypt and Syria, the day was no longer as beautiful.

(Quick digression: it was a beautiful day on September 11, 2001 when Al-Qaeda attacked the Trade Center and Pentagon, and it was a beautiful day in September 1939 when Nazi Germany entered Poland. Why always such beautiful days?)

The 1967 attack on Israel, as we know, was only a 6 day war and the end was never in doubt. In 1973, the war lasted about three times that long, and the end was in doubt through most of that period.

The Prime Minister was Golda Meir. As the first Israeli Prime Minister without any military experience, this was the last thing she was looking for. And although she had to rely on her military and intelligence advisors, she knew she was the final decision maker. As the old saying goes, the shekel stops here.

The film? I should say that Edie really liked the film. Not me.

It took a lot of makeup to turn Helen Mirren into Golda Meir, and it almost succeeded, but I never felt I was looking at the Israeli Prime Minister. And I think they really failed when they tried to turn Liev Schreiber into Henry Kissinger, or others into Moshe Dayan or Ariel Sharon. In the film, Sharon looked like he was 6’2″. In real life, he was about 5’3″.

Then they had Golda, who was born in Ukraine but raised in Milwaukee, talking in perfect English, while her advisors all spoke in Israel-accented English. This made no sense to me, and I decided that the only way this movie could possibly have worked for me is to have been filmed in Hebrew (Golda speaking with an American accent) with English subtitles.

In addition to this, there were a few homey scenes (Golda serving Kissinger borscht and insisting he eat it, for example) that I could have done without. And many of the other scenes were either repetitive, or too ordinary. After all, how many strategy discussions around a conference table with the same folks can you sit through? And how many cigarettes can you watch Helen Mirren smoke? How many maps can you watch on a screen.

I just didn’t think the film was very good. They took an important story and made it into a B-grade docudrama.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn a lot. I didn’t know (nor did many people, I don’t think) that Meir was suffering from lymphoma during this period, that she had lymphedema, causing her ankles and legs to swell and was undergoing extensive radiation therapy. I didn’t know that Moshe Dayan, hero of previous wars and Minister of Defense through this one, almost had, or did have, a nervous breakdown, rendering him useless through the early days of the conflict, when among other things, he threatened to unleash Israel’s nuclear power.

Finally, I had always thought that this attack was totally a surprise to the Israelis. I didn’t know that there had been a general feeling among the Israeli leadership that an attack was coming, and the only question was when. I did not know that Meir had promised Kissinger that Israel would not strike preemptively. I didn’t know (nor apparently did many others at the time) that Israel had bugged President Sadat’s office, but that the bugging equipment was turned off, explaining why Israel did not know about the attack in advance. Apparently, Meir too did not know that their bugging had been disconnected. I didn’t know that the chief of military intelligence (I think that was his title) had actually received advance intelligence that an attack was imminent, but didn’t pass it along; I don’t think the film gave a reason for this, if there was a reason.

All of those failures of intelligence were kept secret, even after the war, and Golda simply took responsibility for all the casualties and for not mobilizing troops sooner without deflecting the blame on her intelligence services. This helped galvanize Israeli popular sentiment against her, and she was long felt to have been a failed Prime Minister, who permitted an attack that should not have occurred, causing much death and turmoil.

The American role was filled with ambiguity. The United States hesitated in giving aid because it was afraid of encouraging Soviet involvement (so what else is new?), and because it was afraid of antagonizing Saudi Arabia who would cut off its oil from the U.S. (again, so what else is new?). Kissinger had told Meir that, if Israel attacked first, no American help would be forthcoming. But finally, Nixon and Kissinger did come through. And it was in large part, if the film can be believed, that Golda Meir was very tough in her dealings with Kissinger, and he caved.

In 1973, I was a 30 year old lawyer who had a secretary who was a young Egyptian woman who had recently relocated to the United States. She had a younger brother, who was in the army in Egypt (her family was all in Cairo), and a member of the Third Army, stationed in Sinai. Towards the end of the war, when it was clear that Israel was on top, the Third Army was trapped, surrounded by Israeli troops, in a location where there was no water. No one knew what was going to happen, except that it was clear that the entrapped Egyptian Third Army was clearly going to be used by Israel to gain leverage over the Egyptians in ceasefire negotiations and over the United States in the negotiations for more aircraft. Had these negotiations not been successful, the entire Egyptian Third Army could have starved to death. I remember how worried and upset my secretary was. She was certainly not anti-Israel or antisemitic. But she was very worried about her brother.

He came out of the war just fine, as the treaty between Israel and Egypt, which included representation of Israel by Egypt and return of Sinai to Egypt ended the precarious position of Egypt’s trapped soldiers.

Do I recommend you see the film? Why not? It is instructive. But I don’t think it is good cinema. And, by the way, it is certainly not fun.