Prime Minister

Institutional context

The Prime Minister of Israel is the head of government, established at the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Three male predecessors held the office between 1948 and 1969: David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett (in two short stints), and Levi Eshkol. Yigal Allon served as Acting Prime Minister briefly in early 1969 following Eshkol's death.

Career path

Meir (born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev, 1898; emigrated to Milwaukee as a child and later to Mandatory Palestine in 1921) was a founding signatory of Israel's Declaration of Independence. She served as Israeli Minister of Labour (1949–1956) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (1956–1966) before retiring to lead the Mapai party organisation in 1966.

Appointment

Following Eshkol's death in February 1969, the Labour Alignment selected Meir as leader and she was sworn in as Prime Minister on 17 March 1969. She was the world's fourth woman to lead a country (after Bandaranaike, Gandhi, and the briefly-tenured Khertek Anchimaa of the Tuvan People's Republic in 1940).

Tenure

Five years and three months. Her tenure was dominated by the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 and its political aftermath. She announced her resignation on 11 April 1974 following the Agranat Commission's preliminary report on the war's intelligence failures, and Yitzhak Rabin succeeded her on 3 June 1974.

Cluster context

Meir's 1969 appointment is the dataset's third-earliest entry. Her ten-year predecedence over Thatcher reinforces the point that the dataset's pre-2010 baseline is non-Western and geographically scattered (Sri Lanka 1960, India 1966, Israel 1969), in contrast to the Western institutional cluster that begins four decades later.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Golda Meir
• Wikipedia — Prime Minister of Israel