During my sophomore year of university in the US, I remember sitting through an International Relations lecture where the professor was discussing the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

At one point he was interrupted by a student — let’s call her Emily — who asked with indignation, “Isn’t it a huge faux pas to invade on such an important holiday?” I looked back to see who spoke and I saw a white student with an “I’m with Her” sticker showing her support for Hillary Clinton on her Macbook.

I wanted to ask whether "Israel" ever considered Christmas or Eid when it routinely ruined the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but was silenced by the positivity with which Emily's comment was received by the professor and fellow students in the lecture hall.

Although littered with scenes of unappealing cheap prosthetics, and a nauseating amount of cigarette smoking, Guy Nattiv’s Golda is meant for an audience of ‘Emilies,’ Americans who want to believe that they’re progressive in their stances on civil rights and gender identity while being completely unwilling to question an Israeli narrative that has systematically propagandized them.

Their role pertaining to Bleecker Street’s new feature is to show up, sympathize with "Israel’s" right to exist and to defend itself, and then leave the theater without further contemplation of a deeper contextual narrative or history. After all, the film knows who its audience is, as it only premiered in the United States and "Israel."

The narrative the movie sold, although long discredited by any person willing to delve deeper into the Palestinian cause, is marketed behind a smokescreen of appealing motifs that are meant to sell "Israel" as an idea to unquestioning Americans. Motifs that require but a light winnow to show their true fraudulence. Here are a few.

Golda’s Story

The 1h 40m movie spans the 19-day long Yom Kippur war and follows the ailing lymphoma-riddled prime minister as she smokes her way through back-to-back meetings with generals, diplomats, and the bereaved. Interweaving through scenes of war room meetings, we get a depiction of the Grandmother of "Israel" as a firebrand politician who is witty and unwavering in her resolve. We also hear about her upbringing in Ukraine and the religious persecution her family escaped in late 1890’s Kiev. The movie uses this moment in the film to sprinkle a hearty dose of Russophobia into the mix.

However, much is left on the table that could add context to the character of Meir. She left Ukraine at the age of 2, and arrived in "Israel" at the age of 23. The inter years during which she grew up in Milwaukee, married Morris Meyerson (later Hebraized to Meir), and became a zionist are not mentioned nor alluded to in the movie. In 1921, the young Meir arrived in British Mandate Palestine and immediately joined a Kibbutz, the early version of a settlement.

Later in the movie, through scenes where she’s awakened by ringing telephones informing her of casualties, she’s depicted as the one person who could care for and think of every single Israeli all at once. However, her clash with the Mizrahi Black Panther movement in 1971 during which she made racist claims against the stock and upbringing of Jews of Arab descent, context that counters her caring image, is never mentioned.

Fake Guilt

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children…” This ultimate “I did not want to hit you,” line came from Meir herself. The sentiment of this heinous victim-blaming quote is plastered over every scene in the movie.

Golda is constantly seen as a tortured figure captive by her guilt for not doing more to save one additional Israeli life. However, the irony that escapes the uninformed viewer is that Golda had every opportunity to avoid the bloodshed of the Yom Kippur War which claimed some 2600 Israelis and 15,000 Arabs. Golda was courted to no end by Sadat, Nasser, and Al-Assad to find ways to return territories that "Israel" forcibly occupied during the Naksa of 1967. It is widely understood that her hardline approach in dealing with Egypt and Syria led to the eventual confrontation in October.

Exaggerating Threats, Downplaying Support

The movie kept falsely claiming that the Syrian and Egyptian armies were marching on "Tel Aviv" and "Jerusalem" to “push the Jews to the sea,” while all declarations by both Egyptian and Syrian sides made it clear that they were only focused on the short term goals of retrieving territories lost during the 1967 war. The territories were slowly getting infested with illegal Israeli settlements and the more time passed, the more likely "Israel" was to annex them. (Today 50,000 Israeli settlers occupy the Syrian Golan Heights, which "Israel" has officially annexed).

While much of the world was affected by the Saudi oil embargo, "Israel" at the time was still receiving roughly two-thirds of its energy needs from pre-revolutionary Iran, all while refusing to allow the US to trade with Iran. Therefore, all the hand-wringing and consternation about blockades and boycotts were heavily exaggerated in the film.

One scene in particular shows Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (tastefully played by Liev Schreiber) as an unwilling partner and a neutral observer of the war. During the scene, Kissinger reminds Meir that he is above all an American and will always focus on America’s interests, not "Israel’s". For the ‘Emily’ in the audience, an image is built, once again, of the David ("Israel") barely getting any support as he faces the Goliath (Arabs) in an existential war.

What many don’t realize, though, is that before Kissinger came to the helm in 1969, "Israel" received 30 million dollars in aid from the American taxpayer, while after his arrival, in 1971, that number soared to 545 million dollars annually. During the years leading up to the war, America funded 28 to 42 percent of the Israeli military budget, and after the war started in 1973, Kissinger approved an aid package of 2.2 billion dollars to "Israel" to wage war against the Arabs. Knowing these figures clarifies the fact that the US was hardly a neutral observer in the conflict.

A Candidate of Peace

The movie ends with an in-memoriam that reads, “Her legacy of saving her country from annihilation leading to peace serves as her memorial.”

This claim is a reminder of the fanatical reality of Israeli politics where a figure like Meir, when compared to her homologs, does indeed seem like the driver for peace that this delusional director depicts her as. However, one does not need to look deep to realize that Meir was not unlike the others in her genocidal Zionism that denied the existence of Palestinians.

In 1969, Meir was quoted saying: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” She added, “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”

Meir’s negation of factual history and her denial of Palestinian existence does not qualify her to be seen as a candidate for peace, not even when she’s compared to savage genocidal killers like Menachim Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

History

My maternal grandfather was a decorated Air Force Engineer in the Syrian Arab Army. During the Yom Kippur War, he served in Aleppo airport repairing Mig 17s and 21s under heavy Israeli raids. One such raid damaged the airport’s tarmac, rendering the fighter jets immobile, sitting-ducks. At that point, my paternal grandfather showed up with his company’s workers, and they volunteered to fix the tarmac for free. Within the hour, the Migs rejoined the dogfight above Syria’s Golan heights.

Now, as I am writing this article, I received a push notification informing me that Aleppo airport has once more been put out of service after an Israeli strike.

That’s exactly why liberation and justice come to mind when I think of the 1973 war. Not the rubbish narrative that’s being pushed down the throats of oblivious Americans throughout the US this week. I think of heroic battles fought by the Syrian and Egyptian people to liberate lands occupied by an arrogant settler colonial entity that understands nothing but force.

That being said, I must admit that I also feel pride as a Syrian when I see Golda in the movie order Moshe Daian to personally handle the North theater of war and not to worry about the South.