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| Ben-Gurion in London c. 1960s (B.S. Archive) |
A State at Any Cost
The Life of David Ben-Gurion
By Tom Segev
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
816 pages. $40
As Israel marks 71 years of independence, a soon-to-be-published biography brings home the adage "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
David Ben-Gurion grappled with Arab opposition to Zionism, Jewish factionalism, the religious-secular schism and what to do about Gaza.
WHAT MAKES yet another biography of an already well-known historical figure worth reading? Newly discovered archival material? A fresh synthesis expertly crafted?
Tom Segev’s biography of Israel’s founding father and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) delivers a riveting story with pacing and color plus a sense of the setting against which Ben-Gurion’s life played out.
No dramatically new ground is broken, as far as I can tell.
Yet this is a worthwhile read because Ben-Gurion created the template for what Israel is. The more we understand about him, the more we comprehend how Israel has been shaped.
Segev is one of Israel’s so-called new historians who have punctured some of the country's founding myths by utilizing archival material not previously tapped. But I hasten to add that not all new historians are the same.
He and Benny Morris tell it like they believe it was not to destroy the Zionist enterprise but to illuminate its birth pangs. In contrast, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe have a more sinister agenda, Pappe’s being the more extreme.
As portrayed by Segev Ben-Gurion is a fallible, tetchy human being, conflicted, ruthless, insecure, humorless, and egotistical. He was also daring, single-minded and determined to establish a Jewish state. Who is to say there would have been a Jewish state without him?
I read about two-thirds of this book in the Hebrew original (over months) and the remainder in English (over a few days). The English edition, tentatively scheduled for publication in August 2019, is smoothly translated and sculpted by Haim Watzman.
Segev’s formula is to open each chapter with a stage-setting vignette: It is 1947 and Ben-Gurion is in London. Britain is experiencing its worst winter in memory. The empire, spent by two world wars, is in precipitous decline. BG is meeting with Oliver Stanley an influential Tory at the posh Dorchester Hotel. The heating is not working, and Stanley recommends that Ben-Gurion leave his coat on. It was there and then that BG realized Britain’s departure from Palestine was just a matter of time.
Plonsk to Palestine
David Ben-Gurion was born outside Warsaw in the town of Plonsk whose 8,000 denizens were divided almost evenly between Jews and non-Jews. His life was shattered at age 11 when David's mother Sheindel died from complications of childbirth. Her baby was stillborn. David’s relationship with his father Avigdor Gruen was neither warm nor close.
David fell in love for the first time at age 12 and over a long and full life conducted fleeting liaisons and several long-lasting extramarital relationships including when he was prime minister. His view was that leaders should not be judged by how they conduct their private lives.
David’s mother tongue was Yiddish. However, he attended a forward-looking Hebrew-language heder picking up secular subjects thanks to private tutoring.
In 1900, at age 14 he helped start a Zionist circle to promote spoken Hebrew.
Zionism & Palestine
Modern political Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. It “required its supporters to reconsider their Jewish identities and to position themselves between the values of Jewish tradition and a new Jewish nationalism,” writes Segev.
For BG making this calibration was the unfinished work of a lifetime.
He joined Po'alei Zion, a Marxist–Zionist Jewish workers party, and soon ran afoul of the Czarist authorities who ruled Poland.
He reached Turkish-controlled Palestine in September 1906. Ben-Gurion found jobs working in the orange groves of Petaḥ Tikvah and in the early wine industry in Rishon le-Zion. He resumed his Po'alei Zion political and editorial activities soon after arriving in Palestine and changed his name to Ben-Gurion after a first century AD Hebrew statesman, according to Segev.
Arab Antagonism
Life was lonely. Work was physically demanding. But for Ben-Gurion Zionism meant making aliya and settling in Israel. His socialism was a practical means toward building a national homeland for the Jewish people. And that could be achieved only by the agricultural settlement of the land. He did his bit as a laborer and watchman in Sejera – the first Jewish village in the Lower Galilee – where he encountered violent Arab opposition to the Jewish settlement enterprise.
He had little use for Jewish immigrants to Palestine who did not physically contribute to settlement building. And he had little respect for Jewish landowners who employed Arab instead of more pricy Jewish labor. The notion that the early Zionists were oblivious to the presence and aspirations of the Arabs is simplistic.
The problem was – and remains – reconciling the competing claims. The Arabs, perpetually aggrieved, have made it impossible to shift out of zero-sum conflict mode.
With 20/20 hindsight Zionists should have handled themselves differently in relating to Arab labor and identity. In 1907 Yitzhak Epstein published an article, “The Hidden Question” based on a lecture he delivered at the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905.
He warned that his fellow Zionists were making “a crude psychological blunder… in our relationship” with the Arabs.
"At a time when we are feeling the love of the homeland with all our might [in] the land of our forefathers, we are forgetting that the people who live there now also have a sensitive heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like any man, has a strong bond with his homeland; the lower his level of development and the narrower his perspective, the stronger his bond to the land and to the region, and the harder it is for him to part from his village and his field.”
Epstein predicted, “The Muslim will not abandon his country, will not wander far…. I can still hear the dirge of the Arab women on the day their families left their village of Ja'una, today Rosh Pina, to settle in Hawran, east of the Jordan. The men rode asses, and the women walked behind them, bitterly weeping, and the valley was filled with their keening.
“From time to time, they would stop to kiss the stones and the earth. Even when the fellahin themselves sell some of the village lands, the issue of acquisition is not resolved. The fellah, in anguish from the burden of heavy taxes, may decide in a moment of despair and sometimes with the encouragement of the village elders, who receive a hefty sum for this to sell the field; but the sale leaves him with a festering wound that reminds him of the cursed day that his land fell into the hands of strangers….”
Tragically for both sides, Arab leaders who were willing to find a modus vivendi with the returning Jewish people were silenced or killed. That has left Palestinian Arab fortunes in the hands of intransigent warlords. No less lamentable, Arab fanaticism has catalyzed Jewish fanaticism in some Zionist orthodox quarters.
The Great War
In 1911 Ben-Gurion attended the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna. His next big step was to study law in Constantinople so that he could better lobby for Jewish autonomy in Turkish-controlled Palestine.
The Turks proved unsympathetic to Zionist aspirations.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Ben-Gurion was in Palestine on semester break. He was nominally a citizen of Czarist Russia which was at war with Turkey. There was little choice but to leave for British-controlled Egypt where he encountered Joseph Trumpeldor then pressing for a Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British in the liberation of Palestine.
But Ben-Gurion spent WWI in the US making a name for himself as a Zionist activist and honing his skills as a polemicist and politician. After the November 1917 Balfour Declaration, he sought to persuade Jewish youth to volunteer for the British Army. In April 1918 he signed up and left for training in Canada. By August 1918 his unit was in Europe.
In the meantime, he had married Paula Munweis in New York City in 1917, and they were expecting their first child.
Segev encapsulates the story so far: “Thanks to the Turks, he’d gone to America, an introverted, clueless guy. He didn’t want to be a laborer, and couldn’t be a lawyer. During the three years he spent in New York, his youth came to an end; he married and acquired self-confidence. In the process, he came to understand the huge power of the capitalist United States….”
Labor Politics
With the war over in December 1918 and the British Mandate for Palestine in the cards, there was no question that Ben-Gurion would devote himself to Zionist politics.
In 1919 he split with Poale Zion and founded the Ahdut Ha'Avoda Party which captured 70 out of 314 seats in the Assembly of Representatives. The Zionists were well on their way to building political institutions for the Jewish national homeland promised by the Balfour Declaration -- a promise enshrined by the League of Nations.
In 1920 he and Paula along with children Amos and Geula (Renana would come along in 1925) left for London where BG was to raise money for Ahdut Ha'Avoda. London was Chaim Weizmann’s turf; it was not big enough to contain both men’s egos. Weizmann had engineered the Balfour Declaration and was at the height of his influence. BG was viscerally envious.
In April 1921, BG and Paula traveled to his hometown of Plonsk which she found an abysmal backwater. Yet that’s where he left the family when he rushed back to Palestine after the Arab riots of May 1921 that claimed 30 Jewish lives. She was able to return to Palestine only in April 1922.
Ben-Gurion did not create the Histadrut workers labor federation, but in 1921 he became its secretary-general, and it became one more institution he could use to exert control over the Zionist polity in Palestine.
The Histadrut was more than a union; it was a conglomerate that included the Solel Boneh construction company and Bank Hapoalim. It became hard for BG to resist the temptation of dipping into the Histadrut treasury to cover personal expenses, according to Segev.
Ben-Gurion’s nemesis Ze’ev Jabotinsky tried to break the Histadrut stranglehold on the yishuv to little avail. There would come a time when the Histadrut, in tandem with the Labor-dominated government, owned most of Israel’s economy.
Enemies
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| Katznelson |
Ben-Gurion despised any Zionist luminary who had more charisma (Jabotinsky), prestige (Weizmann) or influence especially within his own socialist camp (Berl Katznelson) than he did.
That said, Jabotinsky and his Revisionist movement had a special place on Ben-Gurion’s enemies list. On a visit to Berlin in 1930, he observed a Nazi march and characterized the stormtroopers as “German Revisionists” and referred to Jabotinsky as “Vladimir Hitler,” according to Segev.
In reality, writes Segev, “Jabotinsky was not a fascist any more than Ben-Gurion was a Marxist, Ben-Gurion was no less a nationalist or militarist than Jabotinsky. The right-left divide in the Zionist movement was largely a matter of style and modes of operation, not of fundamental values,” according to Segev.
Ben-Gurion was inclined to make a united front with Jabotinsky in 1934-35 but was blocked by his own Histadrut functionaries.
Though the British backtracked on their Balfour Declaration pledges and Arab violence accelerated, Ben-Gurion took no initiative to build the Yishuv’s capacity for self-defense.
“Arab terror swelled and waned and became a part of life,” writes Segev.
In contrast, Jabotinsky led the resistance to the April 1920 Arab riots. Only much later, on the cusp of the War of Independence, did BG immerse himself in the challenges facing the Haganah - a force under the control of his own Ahdut Ha'Avoda.
That party morphed into Mapai in 1931 and traces of its political DNA can be found in today’s enfeebled Labor Party.
Ben-Gurion became the top Zionist official in Palestine in 1935 controlling the Jewish Agency and Histadrut and Mapai.
“Between 1927 and 1933 he was absent from Palestine for more than two years, cumulatively. He always went for political reasons, but he enjoyed the travel – the tourist sites, views, city centers, museums, and bookstores. He also delighted in the cuisines that Tel Aviv did not offer. His expenses were paid by his movement or his hosts… He went without Paula; in the thirteen years since she gave birth to Amos in London, she did not leave the country,” writes Segev.
Family
Being absent so much of the time affected family dynamics. He was generally disinterested in what Amos was up to. When he was around, Paula tried to protect him from being disturbed by the children. That led to bad feelings between her and daughter Geula. As portrayed by Segev, Paula comes off as an enabler for her husband’s lifestyle. I wonder what choice she had?
Partition
In 1937, British Mandate authorities decided that Arab-Jewish coexistence was impossible (they had helped make it so) and with the Peel Commission recommended the (further) partition of Palestine.
In 1921, the British had already lopped off Eastern Palestine to establish the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. Nonetheless, against the wishes of many in his own party and over Jabotinsky’s strenuous objections, Ben-Gurion pragmatically accepted the partition of Western Palestine.
In general, Ben-Gurion was resistant to ideas that he did not originate. Thus in 1937, he opposed Haganah calls to set up an apparatus for illegal mass immigration to Palestine. Eventually, he would make the idea his own and champion it.
With Hitler in power in Germany since 1933, the British incrementally cut off Palestine as a haven for persecuted European Jews. Then, on May 17, 1939, Britain formerly reneged on the Balfour Declaration by issuing the MacDonald White Paper: Jews would not, after all, be permitted to establish a national homeland or become a majority in Palestine.
WWII & the Shoah
When war broke out in September 1939, BG made his famous declaration: “We must aid the English in their war as if there were no White Paper, and we must stand against the White Paper as if there were no war.”
The British turned away shiploads of Jewish refugees seeking asylum in Palestine.
Along with the Haganah, the Irgun took no action against the British until roughly February 1944 when its new leader Menachem Begin declared a revolt. And the Stern Gang, a small militant faction which viewed the British as no less an enemy than the Germans, was mostly inactive between 1942-1944 after its commander Avraham Stern was shot dead in a British ambush.
War or no war, Ben-Gurion traveled to London and New York. He remained in the US for 10 months before returning to Palestine. He solidified his relations with US Jewish leaders. (Meanwhile, Jabotinsky, barred by the British from returning to Palestine, had died of a heart attack in New York in 1940.)
When the supercilious Weizmann arrived in the US in April 1942, Ben-Gurion was incensed that doors that had been closed to him would open to Weizmann. “The differences between Ben-Gurion and Weizmann were not fundamental,” writes Segev. They related mostly to the wisdom of an-out-and-out break with Britain which Weizmann feared.
Weizmann did not oppose the Biltmore Program which, in the face of Britain’s about-face on the Balfour Declaration, called for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. However, it was Ben-Gurion who actively championed the idea.
Segev lets Ben-Gurion’s activities during the Holocaust speak for themselves. In July 1942, he heard for the first time from a non-Jewish source about Nazi plans to exterminate Poland’s Jews. Still, Ben-Gurion chose not to serve on the Jewish Agency’s rescue committee. He did not view publicizing what was happening as his responsibility. The Jewish Agency under BG did not advocate bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. When longshot opportunities for rescue arose – like those put forth by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl or Joel Brand – BG did not rise to the occasion.
Ousting the British
In 1945, only after WWII and the destruction of European Jewry, did he give up on the British, though still not publicly. Crucially, he became more involved with the Haganah immersing himself in planning and logistics.
For a short splendid moment during late 1945-1946 all Jewish factions united in the aim of forcing the British to quit Palestine.
Then on July 22, 1946, the Irgun, believing it had a green light from Haganah commander Moshe Sneh, dynamited the military wing of the King David Hotel. Some 91 people were killed, and 46 were injured. Ben-Gurion dissociated himself from the operation and denounced the Irgun.
Power
What comes across from Segev’s book is Ben-Gurion's unease with political power being concentrated anywhere but in his own hands. When he could, he humiliated Chaim Weizmann offering him Israel’s presidency shorn of power. He distrusted Yitzhak Sadeh and the Palmach leadership because they aligned with the Mapam Party. He feared and detested Menachem Begin. He made himself supreme commander of the Haganah and would not rest easy until the fledgling IDF military command was dominated by his Mapai Party.
He could be cold-hearted. In 1947, he took no steps to discourage the British from hanging Irgun operative Dov Gruner. And in 1948, he authorized an attack on the Irgun arms ship Altalena because he told himself, Begin was planning a coup.
“The smoke that rose over the Altalena had not dispersed when Ben-Gurion went back to subduing the Palmach,” writes Segev. Why look for enemies on your own side during wartime? Segev's retort is that “Ben-Gurion tended to become addicted to his hatreds.”
He reluctantly accepted the Partition Plan outlined in UN Resolution 181 of 1947. But the Arabs rejected the two-state solution formula. So BG with trepidation prepared to counter the anticipated Arab military onslaught.
With the Arabs bent on aggression, BG planned to fight any War of Independence to win – collateral damage be dammed. If military necessity dictated, he agreed to the uprooting of strategically located Arab villages.
His “principal goal was to defend the partition boundaries against the invasion of Arab regular and semiregular forces,” writes Segev.
He was not bereft when Haifa Arabs began departing the city on their own volition presumably planning to return when the Jews were vanquished.
At the end of the war up to 750,000 Arabs had been displaced (including many who left in anticipation of the British departure). Afterward, “He wanted to believe that the Arab refugees would be absorbed by the neighboring countries so that the refugee problem would disappear of its own accord,” writes Segev.
Prime Minister
The final third of A State at Any Cost covers Ben-Gurion’s premierships, self-exiles and slow demise culminating in his death on December 1, 1973, while the nation was yet traumatized by the surprise Arab attack that ignited the Yom Kippur War.
When the state came into being Jewish survivors from Europe flooded the country. Ben-Gurion was concerned that the “human material” arriving was not up to par. To his mind, the best and the brightest of European Jewry had been killed by Hitler. On top of that, as the Jews of Islam arrived from the Arab countries, BG saw them as almost hopelessly backward in how they behaved and in their religious ways.
The newcomers facing unusually cold winters were put up in
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| Immigrants in makeshift housing |
ma’abarot camps. At one point, nearly ten percent of the population was in the ma’abarot.
TB and polio threatened. Financially, Israel was close to destitute.
Against the odds, he navigated the ship of state through these and other travails.
Security and religion dominated his attention.
Ben-Gurion’s biggest mistake was coupling religion and state. “I will never agree [to] separate religion from the state. I want the state to keep religion in a grip.” However, it is the rabbis who have had the last laugh.
He met with a top Haredi rabbi, Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz known as the Hazon Ish, in October 1952 to begin a dialogue about religion and state.
His stance Segev tells us was that “‘There should be no religious coercion and no anti-religious coercion, each person should live as he sees fit.’ But the rabbi could not accept that.”
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Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz
known as the Chazon Ish |
Not much has changed in the intervening 67 years.
BG opposed a constitution for Israel partly due to the religion-state conundrum but also because he was no champion of civil liberties.
As prime minister Ben-Gurion micromanaged the government almost beyond what was humanly possible. He was his own defense minister to boot. He worked to the point of exhaustion (catnaps kept him going as did Feldenkrais)
Even Ben-Gurion had his limits becoming less resilient with age and prone to melancholy. It seemed as if there were enemies everywhere. He suffered his first stroke at the end of 1955.
Keeping control of his Mapai Party took up precious energies. He also had to keep Begin in check. And then there was Levi Eshkol whom he despised no less than Begin, Segev tells us. He would come to depend on the mercurial Moshe Dayan who, Segev informs, would ultimately betray him.
BG's decision in 1952 for Israel to accept war reparations from West Germany (blood money opponents called it) tore at the fabric of the polity. The Nazi trauma was still raw, and the Kastner trial tared at the scab. By then Ben-Gurion was temporarily out of office, though the affair besmirched his Mapai Party.
He had tried to quit the game by moving to desolate Sde Boker in the Negev desert at the end of 1953. But like Michael Corleone in Godfather III, just when he thought he was out, he was pulled back in. The country was addicted to Ben-Gurion. He was addicted to being in control.
Always Religion and Security
I was surprised to learn from A State at Any Cost that Israel’s bifurcated educational system which compels parents (starting with elementary school) to send their children to either a religious or a secular school – a form of religio-cultural segregation that does neither group good – replaced something probably even worse: schools organized along political party lines (though parochial schools still exist in the Haredi sector).
Security was BG’s constant burden. The IDF was not born overnight. Today’s Israel has strategic depth and a fine-tuned security apparatus. In BG’s day, the Armistice Line was porous. Fedayeen attacks from Gaza (sometimes instigated by Egypt) struck at settlements from the Negev to Kfar Chabad near what is today Ben-Gurion Airport. Attacks against Israeli civilians led to large-scale reprisals. Debate over how to bolster deterrence seemed endless.
There were the ill-conceived and poorly executed spy and sabotage missions (the Lavon Affair) that boomeranged against Israel’s interests. Some BG knew about some he didn’t though presumably should have.
The 1956 Sinai Campaign was intended to change the rules of the game, topple the intransigent Egyptian ruler Gamal Nasser, and provide Israel with lasting security. But Israeli military gains were rolled back by diplomatic maneuvering. In Segev’s telling, it was Soviet intimidation more than pressure from the Eisenhower administration that forced an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai.
Principal founder
Ben-Gurion was not merely present at Israel’s creation; he was arguably its foremost founding father. Under his watch, Israel harnessed atomic energy and experienced a national catharsis in the Eichmann trial. He established the framework for Israel’s subsequent relations with the Diaspora.
As the end of his political career drew near “he turned spiteful and cantankerous and insufferable,” writes Segev. On June 16, 1963 (like his arch nemesis Menachem Begin would do in 1983) he suddenly stepped down telling the cabinet that he could not carry on.
Segev wisely leaves Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward Judaism for the end. “He worked on Yom Kippur and ate pork,” Segev informs. Yet he was beside himself when he learned that his son had married a non-Jewish woman. He grappled with what it meant to be Jewish and the perennial “who is a Jew” issue.
He had no snap answer to “who is a Jew” – nor do most of us today.
He was closer to Spinoza than to atheism, writes Segev.
One of Ben-Gurion’s contemporaneous and more admiring biographers, the Philo-Semite Robert St. John, was wont to refer to Ben-Gurion as the “Lion of Zionism.” Toward the end of his 1959 book, he quoted Ben-Gurion as (now famously) saying, “A state is not created by a declaration; it is built day after day, by endless toil and the labor of years, even generations.”
As to the lion’s hardball approach, St. John gives Ben-Gurion the last word: “If you offer me a choice between all the ideals in the world, glorious as they may be, and the security of Israel, I will unhesitatingly choose the latter.”
In St. John’s eyes Ben-Gurion could hardly do wrong. Segev, with the
benefit of hindsight begs to defer. In the end the reader is left to
balance Ben-Gurion's immense accomplishments against his colossal
misjudgements.
FOR FURTHER READING
The Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute
Ben-Gurion: The Biography of an Extraordinary Man by Robert St. John.
Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust by Shabtai Teveth
Apologia for Ben-Gurion: Ben-Gurion: a political life by Shimon Peres in conversation with David Landau
Years ago, I suspected I wasn't a "conservative" because I did not share the animosity toward Barack Obama that my fellows on the right did. I recognized that Obama’s policies were antagonistic toward Israel; that his Jewish advisors were wrong-headed. I knew that he torpedoed hope for useful negotiations by calling for a settlement freeze on day-one of his administration. I knew that he mis-read the fundamentals of the Arab-Israel conflict.
