ISRAEL'S NEW PREMIER

"I have always carried out the missions the state placed on me, but they have always been accompanied by a feeling of terror. The terror exists now."

SO said the 70-year-old grandmother that the Israelis last week chose to serve as Premier at least until elections next October. For Golda Meir, the statement was an unusual admission of human frailty. Far more characteristic was her tart reply to those critics who murmured that she might be too old for the demanding task before her: "Seventy is not a sin."

Golda Shelanu, or "our Golda," as she is called, has seemed like a permanent institution of the Israel Labor Party and Israeli life for 40 years. Granite-willed, forceful and disconcertingly direct, she is more respected than popular, and as uncompromising in public policy as she is in private principle. While it is a byword in government offices that "no one ever crosses Golda," no one who knows her is surprised at her egalitarian insistence, in the privacy of her home, of having her maid and chauffeur share her table, kibbutz-style. An opposition gibe that "all government decisions are cooked in Golda's kitchen" is obviously overbaked, but she does shift easily between home and state, breaking off from preparing a gefilte fish to salute an army courier or, as she did on one occasion, startling other guests by showing up with a cake for a party at the foreign ministry.

A Talk with King Abdullah. "Never throughout my life," she once said, "have I planned what position I would like to have. That ambitious I haven't been." Born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev, she was eight when her family emigrated to Milwaukee and a willful 14 when she ran away to join a sister in Denver, until her parents surrendered and agreed to let her study to be a schoolteacher. Except for a stint of teaching in folk schulen, or Yiddish folk schools, she never fulfilled that ambition. Instead, she joined the Labor Zionist movement as an enthusiastic, full-time worker. At 23, she embarked for riot-torn Palestine with a reluctant non-Zionist husband, Morris Myerson, spent two years on a kibbutz and four in grinding poverty in Jerusalem. He returned to the U.S., later went back to Tel Aviv, where he was employed as a bookkeeper, and died in 1951. She remained in Israel with a daughter Sara, who now lives on a kibbutz in the Negev, and a son Menachem, a cellist who studied with Pablo Casals and is now teaching music in New Haven, Conn.

Mrs. Myerson, as she was known until 1956, when on Premier Ben-Gurion's insistence she Hebraized her name to Meir ["illuminates"], joined the Histadrut, the Jewish Labor Federation, and swiftly rose to its executive committee. When the first Arab-Israeli war loomed in 1948, she undertook her first major diplomatic mission: crossing the border disguised as an Arab woman to meet with Jordan's King Abdullah in Amman. The mission failed, and on the way back her Arab driver refused to take her to the border. Accompanied by an aide, she walked by night two miles to the Jewish lines.

Essence of Morality. Her second major diplomatic assignment was as the new state's first minister to Moscow, where she organized the legation on kibbutz lines, taking her turn at washing dishes. Recalled to be Minister of Labor in 1949, she began a crash program of building housing for immigrants and goldene wegen, as Israelis then called their new roads. In 1956 she was promoted to Foreign Minister, a post she held for a decade that was marked by at least one violent disagreement with Ben-Gurion over recognizing West Germany; she still refuses to ride in a German-made car. More constructively, she began a quiet and highly successful campaign to win diplomatic allies among the new nations of Africa, offering them "friends" instead of "experts" and "shared goods" instead of aid.

As Israel's first woman Premier, Mrs. Meir will, if past performance is a guide, be more decisive than her predecessor and no less unyielding on Israel's twin demands of a negotiated peace settlement with the Arabs and permanent annexation of parts of the territories occupied in the 1967 war. "I oppose anyone who speaks of morality on the territories issues," she has declared. "It is the essence of morality to ensure the survival of the Jewish people in the Jewish state."

No Retreat. As a strong supporter of Acting Premier Yigal Allon and his plan to set up fortified villages along the frontiers of the occupied territories, adopted by the Cabinet early this year (TIME, Feb. 7), she recently stated: "It is inconceivable that there should be any return to the pre-June cease-fire lines. We can never agree to a redivision of Jerusalem. We cannot give up the Golan Heights. We can never agree to Gaza becoming a revolver aimed at us. We will not once more make the mistake of depending on the U.N. for our security or our shipping rights."

Last week, in the first interview she has granted since Eshkol's death, Mrs. Meir added: "As long as the Arabs won't sit down with us, that means they don't accept our existence. Nasser must conclude that peace is not something he can give to Israel as a luxury or fulfillment of its need, but as something at least as necessary for his people as for the Israelis. It's not a present for him to give to us. It's something that his children, the children in the Nile valley, need as much as we."

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