Subject: JUICE Pioneers 12 - Golda Meir
Date:    Thu, 11 Jun 1998 00:26:29 +0000
To:      "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>

From:          JUICE Administration <juice@wzo.org.il>
To:            pioneers@wzo.org.il
Subject:       JUICE Pioneers 12

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                  World Zionist Organization
                Jewish University in CyberspacE
          juice@wzo.org.il         birnbaum@wzo.org.il 
                     http://www.wzo.org.il 
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Course: Pioneers of Israel
Lecture:  12/12
Lecturer: Doron Geller


Golda Meir


Golda Meir was an original woman who became a hero not only to a
generation of Israelis, but to the world at large looking for new roles
for women to play in positions of leadership and responsibility.  She
became Israel's first and only woman prime minister, in 1969, just 21
years after the establishment of the state.  Even the United States, a
center for feminism, has not had a woman president thus far.  She also
represented Israel (1969-1974) at a time when Israel was increasingly
viewed as an aggressive and racist state, which was only to get worse
after her retirement from public service.  But Golda Meir had fulfilled
her ambitions beyond her own expectations.  She was not only the only
American-raised woman to achieve high office in Israel at the time.  She
defied convention all her life, continuing to help out with her underlings
and assistants in cleaning and cooking, and often, even in highest office,
acting as a Jewish grandmother, forever offering tea and cookies to an
endless procession of visitors, while of course being a real grandmother
to her own five grandchildren.

Golda Meir was born in Pinsk, Russia, in 1898.  Like most Jews of the time
she was born in the Pale of Settlement, that area of Western Russia where
Jews were permitted to settle and work by a Russian government eager to
keep Jews out of the main cities and population centers.  Most Jews were
dirt-poor, barely eking out a living, and Goldie Mabowitz's (after
marriage she changed her name to Goldie Meyerson, and soon after the
establishment of Israel she hebraicized her name to Golda Meir) family was
no exception. Her earliest memories are of fear and terror of the dreaded
Russian Cossacks, fierce horsemen constantly threatening pogroms on Jewish
communities.  Powerless Jewish communities lived in fear of the intentions
of their neighbors.  The Czarist secret police were constantly ferreting
out and torturing suspected revolutionary sympathizers, of whom the
persecuted Jews provided an abundance in number.  Golda's own sister
Sheyna became very active in Poale Zion, a Socialist/Zionist movement
seeking to re-establish Jewish life in the land of Israel along socialist
lines.  

Their mother was petrified of Sheyna's illegal and dangerous activity,
often held at their own home.  Much of the discussion revolved around the
Bund, a Jewish workers movement dedicated to economic and social equality
for Jews in Russia, and Labor Zionists, who believed that the only
solution to the problem of the Jews was by settling in their own country.
Both movements were illegal, and Golda's mother was in constant fear of
her daughter being deported and tortured by the Czarist secret police.  It
was against this background that they left for America in 1905, joining
their father who had gone to live in New York and then in Milwaukee in
order to save money for his family.  

Golda was thus not part of the great Second Aliyah of 1904-1914, which
established roots in Palestine and instituted a socialist system of living
for many years to come.  Her family was part of the great emigration to
America, in which several million eastern European Jews sought refuge
between 1881-1924.

Golda's famous stubbornness on doing things her own way showed itself
early.  She got it in part from her sister, Sheyna, who refused to conform
to her father's wishes and soon married and moved to Denver, far from
parental supervision.  Golda herself constantly fought with her parents
over her ideas.  She wanted to be a teacher and be involved with public
life, and her parents wanted her to get married.  Things got so bad that
in 1912, at the age of 14, she ran away from home to live with her sister
and brother-in-law in Denver.  The idea was that there she would go to
high school and learn, which her sister and brother-in-law thought
important too.

But Golda wasn't as interested in school as in the constant stream of
visitors to her sister's home.  She stayed up late at nights hearing all
kinds of fascinating conversation - about the European situation, the role
of women in society, workers' rights, socialism, Zionism, and Yiddish
literature.  They drank glass after glass of tea, as Golda's guests were
later to do when she served as hostess to her many visitors and admirers.

Of all the conversations these passionate young Yiddish-speaking idealists
engaged in, Zionism made most sense to young Golda's mind.  Palestine was
the only place where Jews could really live a free and independent Jewish
life, free of fear, want, and exploitation.  She was most fascinated and
enthralled by the story of A.D. Gordon.  As she writes, "IÅremember how
fascinated I was by what (one of the guests) told us about that
middle-aged man with a long white beard, that made him look like Father
Time, a man who had never done any physical work before and who had come
to Palestine with his family to till its soil with his own hands and write
about the 'religion of labor', as his credo came to be known by his
disciples."  (Gordon didn't actually come with his family to Palestine;
his wife and daughter only arrived five years after he immigrated to
Palestine in 1904, just as Golda's parents were to follow her to Palestine
5 years after she arrived in 1921).  But Gordon's legendary haze deeply
influenced her as it did many other young Jews.  "I think that of all the
world's great thinkers and revolutionaries about whom I heard so much at
Sheyna's, he is perhaps the one I would have most wanted to know myself
and - and would most like my grandchildren to meet."  She never did meet
A.D. Gordon, although as a pioneer he remained a model and inspiration to
her.

Golda's social nature and interest in meeting people was not what her
sister expected from her.  Although Golda had planned to go to high school
in Denver, her main interest was in people and a developing romance with a
young man named Morris Meyerson.  This led to friction with her sister and
brother-in-law, who were just as strict in their insistence that she go to
school as her parents were that she not do so.  She soon left her sister's
house as well.

She went to work as a seamstress and lived by herself until she got an
urgent letter from her father, telling her to come home because her mother
was ill.  It was the first time he had written to her in the two years
since she had left, proud and hurt as he was at his feeling of unjustified
abandonment.  Golda did return home at 16, profoundly independent, and
sure she could do things her own way.

Her parents sensed this too, and were much more lenient with her upon her
return.  They didn't pressure her when she returned to school and even
when she entered the Teachers Training College in Milwaukee, which they
had previously fiercely opposed.  (In Milwaukee at that time married women
could not teach).  But Golda herself was less interested in school by her
return from Denver in 1914, and she never regained her interest in it -
although she always valued teaching itself as the most noble of 
professions.  

Golda's parents had stabilized economically and their house had become a
meeting-place for Jewish activists and thinkers from all over the country.
Her parents, once they had the means, were very generous, had an open
house, and people stayed on sometimes for weeks at a time, using their
living room couch as their quarters.  Their home bustled with activity and
life, as did her sister's house in Denver.  Golda loved the stimulation of
meeting new people and crystallizing new ideas under the influence of
others, and labor Zionism remained the most deeply influential idea on her
imagination.  She was greatly impressed with the Zionist thinker and
orator Nachman Syrkin, who urged a mass emigration of Jews to Palestine.
Syrkin's daughter Marie was later to become Golda Meir's biographer.
Shmaryahu Levin was another Zionist thinker who greatly influenced her on
his cross-country tours.  But it was the Palestinian Jews, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi
and David Ben-Gurion, who perhaps influenced her most when she was in
Milwaukee.  They talked about the 50 or so settlements that had been
established in the Land of Israel, A.D. Gordon^Os settlement of Deganya,
and Ha-Shomer, which she says both Ben-Zvi and Ben-Gurion were active in.
(Actually, Ben-Gurion, as we learned several weeks ago, was not active in
Ha-Shomer, and remained deeply offended by this exclusion all his life).
Ben-Zvi talked a lot about Rachel Yanait, a pioneer woman who was later to
become his wife.  Golda recounts; "As I listened to him I began to think
of her as typical of the women of the yishuv, who were proving that it was
possible to function as wives, mothers, and comrades-in-arms, enduring
constant danger and hardship, not only without complaining, but with a
sense of enormous fulfillment; and it seems to me that she, and women like
her, were doing more to further the cause of our sex - without the benefit
of publicity - than even the most militant of suffragettes in the United
States or England."

As her relationship by mail with Morris deepened, so did her belief in and
commitment to the Zionist cause.  She started giving soap-box speeches,
which made her father furious.  As usual, however, she persisted in doing
things her own way.  Eventually her parents gave in to her social
activism, and in fact she collaborated with her father on Jewish relief
work during World War I.  Her Zionism really crystallized when news of
Petlyura's murderous outrages on Jews in Eastern Europe became known in
the immediate aftermath of the war.  Tens of thousands of Eastern European
Jews were slaughtered, a fact sometimes forgotten in the shadow of the
Holocaust which was to occur a mere two decades later.

Golda organized a march and demonstration in order to raise public
awareness of what was happening in eastern Europe.  She was joined by many
gentiles.  She in fact never experienced anti-semitism herself in
Milwaukee, but she was strongly aware of the pernicious nature and effects
it could and did have on many non-Jews.  This did not diminish her ability
to relate to non-Jews, however.  As she writes: "Although I lived in a
Jewish district and mingled almost entirely with Jews, both in school and
out of it, I had non-Jewish friends, of course - as I was to have all my
life.  But even though they were never quite as close to me as were the
Jews, I felt entirely free and at home with them."

But Petlyura's mobs determined her future, as the Kishinev massacres in
1903 had decided the future of many Second Aliyah immigrants to
Eretz-Israel.  She decided she would have to help build the land of
Israel herself by living and working there.

Golda first joined Poale Zion in Milwaukee, and did a lot of traveling on
behalf of the Zionist labor movement.  She wanted to move to Palestine,
but the war and then her marriage caused a delay in her plans.  Golda
married Morris Meyerson on November 24, 1917, a few weeks after the
Balfour Declaration was issued.  Morris didn't want to move to Palestine.
He felt that it didn^Ot make much difference if Jews were to suffer in
Eastern Europe or in the Middle East - a fact which was difficult to
refute after the widely-publicized Arab riots in Palestine in 1920 and
again in 1921.  
 
Golda and Morris lived in Chicago and then in New York, until she finally
decided she had to go to Palestine.  Once her decision was irrevocable,
Morris agreed.  It was May 1921, the same month violent Arab riots had
broken out in Palestine.  But she was determined.  It was heartrending for
her parents, but it was what she believed in.  As usual, she did what she
felt was right.  After some famous misadventures on the 1 ½ - 2 month
journey, they reached Palestine in July 1921 and settled in Tel-Aviv.
They stayed on in Tel-Aviv for a few months and although they all found
work, things weren't easy.  Prices were high, salaries meager.  But she
loved it anyway.  Although there were many American niceties she lacked,
there were "all kinds of compensation for these small hardships, like
walking down the street on our first Friday evening in Tel Aviv and
feeling that life could hold no greater joy for me than to be where I was
- in the only all-Jewish town in the world, where everyone from the bus
driver to our landlady shared, in the deepest sense, not only a common
past but also common goals for the future.  These people hurrying home for
the Sabbath, each one carrying a few flowers for the table, were really
brothers and sisters of mine, and I knew we would remain bound to
each other all our lives..we were alike in our belief that only here could
Jews be masters, not victims, of their own fate."  Although many new
immigrants left, she always felt, she wrote in 1975, that it was their
loss.

Golda had not come to Palestine, however, in order to live in Tel-Aviv,
but to participate in the great communal experiments that were springing
up all over Palestine.  Her dream was to live in the wilderness among
idealistic Jews enthusiastic about the kind of life A.D. Gordon led and
advocated.  Golda and her husband Morris chose Merhavia, in the Jezreel
Valley.

The kibbutz actually turned them down at first.  Firstly, they were
married, and the kibbutz, at the time (it would soon change) saw marriage
as a bourgeois institution, a distraction from full and unreserved
participation in communal life.  Some of the older bachelors were jealous
as well, in that they had given up marriage and children for the sake of
devoting themselves to a communal ideal.  

Secondly, they were Americans - a rare enough feature of the Third Aliyah
(1919-1923).  The overwhelming majority of the Jewish immigrants of this
period hailed from eastern Europe.  American Jews were thought to be too
soft, too used to American refinements, to last in the kibbutz.  But the
kibbutz took them on a trial basis, and then accepted them in September
1921.  Golda loved Merhavia.  She loved the social atmosphere, the
communal bonding, the shared "problems, rewards, responsibilities, and
satisfactions."  She helped drain the Valley of Jezreel along with other
kibbutzniks from the area, she planted trees for the Jewish National fund,
she worked in the fields in the blazing sun for 8 hours a day.  She even
liked kitchen work, which drove the other women crazy; they saw it as
demeaning (they were quite feminist).  Golda, however, was not a fanatic
feminist, and she enjoyed cooking.  She didn't understand why the women
were so eager to feed the cows (men's work) - but not their comrades.  In
fact, Golda decided to revamp the kibbutz's dreadfully spartan diet with a
few additions of her own.  She decided to include oatmeal in their diet -
and at first there was a general outcry.  "'It's food for babies,'
everyone said.  'One of her American ideas.'"  But she was determined to
serve oatmeal, and eat it they did.  She introduced many other novelties,
and in fact she was widely liked and admired in the kibbutz.  She was
always the last to leave the unending conversations at the communal dining
table, she drank tea and stayed up late into the night with the guards on
the night shift; she danced the hora on Friday nights long after everyone
else had dropped out.  She was chosen to learn poultry farming, and became
quite successful at raising all kinds of fowl.  She was consumed by the
pleasure and joy of being among her own people, fulfilling a dream, living
and rebuilding the ancient and future land of her people.

Her exuberance and enthusiasm was not shared by Morris.  He was often sick
and despondent, and did not appreciate the communal intrusion on their
private life.  They left Merhavia after 2 ½ years, in 1924.  It was not
what she wanted.  But it was necessary for the preservation of her
marriage.  They lived again in Tel Aviv for a while, and then moved to
Jerusalem.  They lived there for the next four years.  Although they had
two children there, Sarah and Menachem, these were still an unhappy four
years for Golda.  She didn't take to Jerusalem and longed for the
beautiful days and silent nights of Merhavia.  Even the Western Wall
didn't seem to make an overwhelming impression on her.  Although she was
more traditional than her labor counterparts, she was still a labor
Zionist and had no intention of returning to the religious observance of
her immediate forbearers.  As opposed to the liveliness and communal
bonding of the kibbutz, Golda felt extremely lonely in Jerusalem. She felt
a "sense of isolation to which I was so unaccustomed and the constant
feeling that I was being deprived of just those things for which I had
come to Palestine in the first place."  They were extremely poor, even
with her work with Solel Boneh and later the Histadrut in Jerusalem.  They
could hardly make ends meet, and they lacked the supportive environment of
the kibbutz.  The marriage ended up a failure.  When in 1928 she was
offered a full-time job in the women's Labor Council of the Histadrut in
Tel-Aviv, she jumped at it.  From there, she never really stepped down
from public service until after she relinquished the premiership in 1974
at the age of 76.  Although she never returned to live her life on a
kibbutz as she so longed to do - a feeling which never left her - she had
an adequate replacement by taking a major part in labor party politics,
engineering the creation and growth of a labor community in Eretz-Israel.

She knew and became one of the bigwigs in the labor movement apparatus.
She was known as a very determined character.  In her photographs, one can
see almost a manly look of hardness which, with family and friends, could
easily dissolve into grandmotherly tenderness.  But she was a very tough
politician - so much so that Ben-Gurion reportedly later said that she was
"the only man" in his cabinet!  Whether it was a backhanded compliment or
not (they were never very close and fought quite often, although they
mutually admired one another), Golda doubted very much that "any man would
have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in
the governmentÅ"

In her memoirs Golda recounts several of the people she worked closely
with over the years, and for us two of the most interesting impressions
are of Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion, two people we have discussed
in this course.  Her impressions of Berl Katznelson are full of the awe
and reverence which he inspired in almost everyone he came in contact
with. As she relates, he was a tremendously magnetic and giving and loving
person.  Sometimes they walked around Tel-Aviv for hours, just talking and
commenting on their hopes and dreams.  He refused to keep to a schedule,
feeling it was much more important to be with people, and Golda loved him
for that.  He was the spiritual guide and mentor of his generation and
people hung on his words.  He was not decisive like Ben-Gurion, and Berl
revered Ben-Gurion for this quality that he lacked.  Ben-Gurion, on the
other hand, revered Berl for his incisiveness and human qualities.

Golda recounts that Ben-Gurion was never one whom one could get close to.
"The rest of us - Berl, Shazar, Remez, Eshkol - were not only
comrades-in-arms, we also liked each other's company, and we used to drop
in on one another and talk about all sorts of things - not just the big
political or economic issues, but about people, about ourselves and our
families.  But not Ben-Gurion."  He was much more self-sufficient and
single-minded than the rest.  He was not one for small talk.  "I remember
him telling me", Golda recounts, "that when he first came to Palestine in
1906 he once walked the streets of Jerusalem for almost an entire night
with Rachel Yanait without saying a single word to her."  For all of his
impersonal qualities, however, Golda had no doubt about his greatness.  He
was above all single-mindedly devoted to the building and establishment of
the state, perhaps even more than the others, and nothing swerved him from
this purpose.  In 1946, for example, he asked for leave from the Jewish
Agency, of which he was acting head, so that he could find out exactly
what the Haganah had at its disposal.  In a few months he was back, and
"he knew more about the real strength of the Haganah than all of us put
together."  Ultimately, she felt, he was more responsible than anyone else
for the establishment of the Jewish state, and he will be remembered as
synonymous with Israel long after others have been forgotten.

Beginning in 1929 Golda was sent to the United States and England as a
speaker and fund-raiser.  Women in particular loved her, especially at
those Hadassah meetings she would invariably go to.  Golda's
hard-headedness did sometimes seem almost masculine, as Ben-Gurion's
previously quoted comment revealingly indicates. He was not the only
one, evidently, to feel that way.  On one of her speaking tours in the
United States, one woman harangued her; "'Look, Golda,' she said firmly,
'you speak very well but you don't talk like a woman.  When Rachel Yanait
Ben-Zvi was here, she wept and we all wept with her.  But you talk like a
man and no one weeps.'  Golda responded "I'm sorry, but I really can't
talk any other way.'"  But she was tremendously effective. She
was sent to the U.S. again and again.  She was there from 1932-1934, and
from 1934 until 1948 she held various positions in the Histadrut in
Palestine.

During the Arab riots of 1936-1939, Golda approved of the Haganah's policy
of havlaga or self-restraint.  Firstly, she found the Irgun's retaliatory
responses morally abhorrent, and secondly, she was afraid a strong Jewish
response would encourage the British to slash the number of immigrants
they allowed in every month.  Also, because the Jews and Arabs would
eventually have to live together, she didn't think it wise to aggravate
the situation more than necessary.  Later, she was of the opinion that
there were irreconcilable differences between the Jews and the Arabs, but
she still held out hope for an eventual peaceful solution to the Middle
Eastern conflict.  

The British did slash the number of immigrants allowed into Palestine each
month in the form of the White Paper issued in 1939, but that had little
to do with the Jewish response to Arab riots.  It was the British
response, or appeasement if you will, of Arab violence.  The gates were
suddenly locked, and Golda was frantic.  The British and the rest of the
world, with all their expressions of sympathy, would not allow the Jews
into their countries.  "It was then that we all knew what many of us had
always suspected: no foreign government could or would ever feel our
agonies as we felt them, and no foreign government would ever put the same
value on Jewish lives that we did."  But little was done during the war to
oppose the British, due to the war effort, and the labor establishment,
including Golda, was ecstatic when a Labor government came to power in
Britain in 1945.  She believed they would carry out their pro-Zionist
promises and she admits she was wrong for thinking so.  Perhaps she was
wrong too about the policy of havlagah, but she never gave the Irgun,
Stern Gang, or the Right even an inch of support, and even omits some
pertinent facts when discussing them to brighten the case for the labor
Zionist point of view.  For example, she writes of the necessity for
stepping up illegal immigration and civil disobedience after the war.
Otherwise,she feared that the Irgun and Stern Gang would step in and fill
the vacuum left by the Jewish Agency's inaction.  The Irgun did step in,
and she writes; "When the British began flogging members of the Irgun or
Sternists whom they caught, the two dissident organizations responded by
kidnapping and even executing two British soldiers - and all this while
our battle for free immigration and land settlement was in full force."
Of course the Irgun, as we learned last week, did not hang the British
soldiers after floggings alone, but after the British hanged three of
their own.  At the same time she could later quote herself using very
tough language towards the British, seemingly with the promise of serious
action; "And to Britain we must say: it is a great illusion to believe us
to be weak.  Let Great Britain with her mighty fleet and her many guns and
planes know that this people is not so weak and that its strength will
stand it in good stead'". But it wasn't her organization which showed
Great Britain the Jewish people was not so weak: it was principally the
Irgun which did that. Golda, however, was notoriously self-righteous and
free from doubts about the assumptions of the Left, and thus it is not
surprising to see these inconsistencies.

But this does not detract from her enormous talents and contributions to
the state of Israel.  Once it was clear that there would be war between
the Jews and Arabs following the U.N. partition resolution on November 29,
1947, Golda was sent by Ben-Gurion on a fund-raising mission to the U.S.
The Haganah was desperately short of arms, they had no money to purchase
them, and time was running short.  The goal was, for those days, an
enormous sum; 25-30 million dollars had to be raised immediately from
American Jewry.  Golda's speeches on the eve of battle made a tremendous
impression on the American Jews.  And the American Jews responded; "they
pledged money in amounts that no community has ever given before."  They
gave 50 million dollars to the Jewish state in a matter of weeks.
Ben-Gurion said to her; "'some day when history will be written, it will
be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the
state possible.'" 

Her mission didn't end there.  She secretly went disguised as an Arab
woman to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan in order to persuade him not to
join the concerted Arab attack on the Jewish state that was to come into
being on May 14, 1948.  He made promises, but he was to break them due to
Arab pressure.  When she left from her last meeting with him on May 10,
1948, she saw Iraqi troops ominously massing on the banks of the Jordan.
Egyptian troops were massing in the south.  In the north, Syrian and
Lebanese troops were massing and preparing for invasion.  One million two
hundred thousand Arabs in Palestine were already fighting the yishuv and
certain to join in the concerted Arab attack.  At zero hour Yisrael
Galili, de facto commander-in-chief of the Haganah, and Yigael Yadin, the
Haganah's chief of operations were called in for their assessments.  Yadin
said "'the best we can tell you is that we have a fifty-fifty chance.  We
are as likely to win as we are to be defeated.'"  

On this grim note the Jewish state came into being.  She wept openly when
Ben-Gurion proclaimed that the state of Israel had come into being after
19 centuries of exile, persecution, and homelessness.  The Jewish state
was a reality!  "As Ben-Gurion read, I thought again about my children and
the children that they would have, how different their lives would be from
mine and how different my own life would be from what it had been in the
past."  Ben-Gurion continued reading Israel's Declaration of Independence;
"'The State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and the
ingathering of exiles.'  This was the very heart of the proclamation, the
reason for the state and the point of it all.  I remember sobbing out loud
when I heard those words spoken'"  

The next day the tiny state of Israel was attacked from every conceivable
direction save the sea - and survived. Afterwards, Golda became minister
to Moscow, then minister of labor, then foreign minister and in 1969,
unexpectedly for her, she was nominated and then elected prime minister of
the state of Israel. Golda was prime minister when the Egyptian and Syrian
armies united to launch a surprise attack on an unprepared Israel on the
afternoon of October 6, 1973.  The war was a disaster, but Israel
survived, like so many other crises during the short existence of the
state.  When she heard the malaise that began characterizing some Israelis
in the aftermath of the war, she responded that things had been far
worse when she arrived in Palestine in 1921.  Palestine had been a malaria
infested swampland under the control of a foreign power, the Arabs far
outnumbered the Jews, and the Jews could do nothing for their threatened
brothers and sisters overseas.  That would never again be true.  Israel
became the refuge for hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries,
and for the first time Russian Jews were allowed out of the Soviet Union
in significant numbers in the 1970's. Golda lived to see these watershed
events as a minister, and later as the Prime Minister, of a country she
had dreamed of from the time she was a little girl. It is certain she
would have been thrilled beyond recognition by the arrival of Ethiopian
Jews in Operation Moses in 1984 and then Operation Solomon in 1991.  It is
equally as certain that had she seen the trickle of Soviet Jews allowed to
emigrate to Israel in the 1970's turn into a torrent and then a flood with
the advent of perestroika in the late 1980's, she would have felt
vindicated once again in the necessity and happiness in having a Jewish
state to receive them.  Israel, as she and so many others had dreamed, had
become the refuge and dwelling place for Jews from all over the world.
Jews knew, too, that they had one country that would always care for them,
do anything for them, so that suffering and persecution should never again
be their lot as it had so often been in the long history of the Jewish
people.