Lion of Zion

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

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

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.” 

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

http://www.bgh.org.il/Web/En/TimelineEnglish/Default.aspx

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

http://elliotjager.blogspot.com/2011/12/ben-gurion-political-life-by-shimon.html

The jury is still out

 

What Is History? by E.H. Carr
Palgrave.
151 pages

If there's anything we've learned from observing how the press covers Israel, it is that the facts don't speak for themselves and that a picture isn't always worth 1,000 words. The same is true for history.

The first thing to know about this book - a 40th anniversary edition of the original published in 2001 - is that its author wasn't a historian. The second thing to know is that What Is History remains required reading for anyone who takes history seriously. There is simply no point in talking about the principles and methodology of historical research without referring to E.H. Carr's seminal work.

Edward Hallet Carr (1892-1982) is famous mostly for his 14-volume sympathetic history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Consequently, it isn't for his politics that Carr is still admired. While not a card-carrying communist, he was enamored with the much-vaunted Bolshevik utopia - and to be fair, he comes off sounding more like a misguided liberal than a Marxist. In fact, those elements in this book that fail the test of time all involve Carr's "progressive" outlook, in which he expresses belief in "the expansion of reason." Like most liberals, he was an optimist.

Carr didn't start out as a historian. He read classics, worked in the British Foreign Office, wrote political and literary biographies, taught international relations, was a broadcaster, and even did a stint as assistant editor at The Times of London. Finally, in 1955, he became a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge - where, as historian Richard Evans writes in the introduction to this new edition, Carr remained until his death at age 90.

At his now-famous Macaulay Trevelyan lectures (the book is basically a transcript of his talks), which were given between January and March, 1961, Carr grappled with history's Big Questions: objectivity, truth, causation, the role of the individual, and morality.

HISTORIANS such as John Acton (1834-1902) believed that everything worth knowing about modern history would at some stage become known. Others argued there was no such thing as "objective historical truth." Carr was convinced that both these viewpoints were wrong.

"Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," he said. "It is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts."

This led him to conclude that history "is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts - an unending dialogue between the present and the past."

Carr concludes, then, that history involves moulding facts to interpretation and interpretation to facts.

He grappled with whether people matter, or if we are simply swept up in the changes that result from an ongoing conflict between opposing historical forces - what Marxists call dialectics. Of course, where communists see the hidden hand of Marx, religious true believers understand history to be determined by a Creator. To both these camps, Carr retorted - surprisingly - with one of Marx's witty asides: "History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights."

What that means, said Carr, is that people are both products and agents of changing social processes.

NEXT, CARR turned to the "lessons of history." Should Munich's lessons about conflict resolution in 1938 have headed off Yitzhak Rabin's 1993 embrace of Oslo? That's asking too much, Carr would say. "To learn about the present in the light of the past means also to learn about the past in light of the present. The function of history is to promote a profound understanding of both past and present through the interrelation between them." Bottom line: the goal of history isn't to predict, but to garner useful inferences.

What about morality? Should it matter to historians that Bill Clinton or John Kennedy were serial adulterers, or that Stalin was nasty to his second wife? As Carr saw it, "the historian does not turn aside to pronounce moral judgments on the private lives of individuals who appear in his pages. He has other things to do. He will not pass judgment on the individual slave owner. But this does not prevent him from condemning a slave-owning society."

Take the Industrial Revolution: it caused much suffering [as does globalization today], wrote Carr, but he never found a historian "who said that, in view of the cost, it would have been better to stay the hand of progress and not industrialize."

He assumed that the same would one day be said for forced collectivization in the Soviet Union. To be fair, Carr could not have known in 1961 what we know today - that between 1929 and 1933, some 14 million people died in the "dekulakization" and collectivization of agriculture - what historian Robert Conquest called the Soviet "harvest of sorrow."

WHAT ABOUT causation? Does history "just happen," or is everything more or less predetermined - by Marxist dialectics or the interventionist hand of God?

For Edward Gibbon (1737-94), the Roman empire declined because of the triumph of barbarism on the one hand and the rise of a new religion on the other. Gibbon said: "History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

As Carr saw it, "the historian deals in a multiplicity of causes." Events don't have to happen, though they do have antecedents. Moreover, historians need to look ahead and imagine how the past will be perceived in the future. Accidents - which teach no grand lessons - also happen. Carr could be droll: "When King Alexander of Greece died in the autumn of 1920 from the bite of a pet monkey, this accident touched off a train of events which led Sir Winston Churchill to remark that 'a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite.' "

WHERE IS history heading? Toward "progress?" Toward a messianic era?

"It was the Jews," said Carr, "and after them the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal toward which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose."

But for Carr, there is no master plan. Nonetheless, as a liberal, he believed in "the progressive development of human potentialities."

Carr's approach strives to find a balance between ideologically - or theologically - driven determinism and relativism, between history as mysticism and history as cynicism, between a history that offers an infinite number of possible explanations and a history that is without discernible pattern.

The more we think about it, the more we realize that glib aphorisms about history - that it is a march of progress, that it repeats itself, that it unfolds inexorably, that it follows a discernible moral purpose, that it is linear - don't take us anywhere. We are left with the realization that even a historian who sets out to get the facts straight before offering interpretation remains incapable of producing anything but a work flawed by human frailty and bias.

Does the name Ben Hecht ring a bell?

Two new biographies tell the story of the brilliant but near-forgotten wordsmith and rebel.

 

  

My Hecht collection

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach. (Purdue University Press, 403 pages, $32.95)

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman. 

(Yale: Jewish Lives, 264 pages, $26)

“There will always be Jews who imagine that if they are seen as crawling on their bellies among their enemies, they will be mistaken for non-Jews or at least for high-class Jews. I’m thinking of a white Christmas named Arthur Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times. Mr. Sulzberger’s stomach-tour among Anglo-Saxons is not a new spectacle in Jewish history. It is one of the few authentic bases for anti-Semitism. Looking on the immemorial Sulzberger’s the anti-Semite says, ‘If a Jew is so ashamed of his cause and his people what a shameful cause and people they must be.’”

-   ­Ben Hecht

Yes. He could be belligerent. 

But consider who might hypothetically turn up at a Ben Hecht dinner party. Anyone from Alfred Hitchcock and Marilyn Monroe to Menachem Begin and Mickey Cohen. Hecht associated with gangsters, journalists, poets, Hollywood types (from the silent movie era onwards), Jewish machers and Zionist troublemakers. 

When I was 17 and working at Biegeleisen’s bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I was handed a "required reading" list by my Jewish Defense League chapter chairman. It listed Perfidy by Ben Hecht. When I asked one of the Biegeleisen brothers if they could get me a copy, it was explained to me that not only was Perfidy out-of-print its author had been twice blacklisted – by the Jewish establishment and by the British film industry.

In the end, I was able to borrow the book, and my mother ע״ה photocopied Perfidy in its entirety since I had to give it back sooner than I could finish reading it. Over several early mornings, before her workmates arrived, she xeroxed the book two pages at a time on legal size paper.

I devoured Perfidy. Style-wise Hecht reminded me of Pete Hamill whose column I read addictively in The New York Post. I found myself appalled by the events surrounding the Kastner case as depicted by Hecht. 

For a long time afterward, I kept an eye out for all things Hecht. I eventually accumulated two volumes of Perfidy (to be sure - to be sure) and collected a dozen other books by Hecht from old-school book-finders. 

From the Lower East Side to Racine

Hecht was born in 1893 in New York City and lived on the Lower East Side. He went to school on Broome Street (but not to my Yeshiva Chasen Sofer which had yet to be transplanted from Europe) and (like me) spoke Yiddish before uttering a word in English. His family moved to Racine, Wisconsin around 1903 in search of a better life. 

He grew up in a haltingly upward mobile family. Went off to college. Quit college in a flash. And immediately, providentially, found work at the Chicago Journal. 

Ponder this: in 1910 Chicago had ten (!) daily newspapers. It was there that Hecht honed his gift for "breaking and entering" so that he could, by hook or by crook, gather photographs to go with news stories.
More importantly, he developed his craft. He learned how to write for newspapers, the stage, and cinema. He became streetwise about crime, the mob, women, and the dark side of human nature. 

His obsession with Jews and Zionism would come later.

Weimar Germany

Newspapers were evolving to the point that by 1922 accuracy and fair play in reporting began to matter. 

With the end of World War, I (1914-1918) and the creation of Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1919, Hecht arrived in Berlin as a novice foreign correspondent (for what turned out to be a six-month stint). 

He witnessed factions across the political spectrum violently vying for power. He reported on a massacre of radical Spartacists (Lenin-leaning reds) by soldiers loyal to the social democratic government. He picked up on the canard that Germany lost the Great War because of a traitorous Fifth column. And he observed that the military high command was scheming to blame the democratic socialists for the country’s post-war travails. This German episode would offer fodder for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921). 

How Hecht got from Eric Dorn to Perfidy and from being an uncomfortable Jew to a Holocaust-era hero and Irgun operative is part of what makes him a sufficiently compelling figure to have inspired two new biographies: The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach and Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman.

Hard to label

Gorbach, a reporter turned media studies professor offers a biography that is sprawling, contextual and detailed. What made Hecht “notorious” in his view is that after WWII he partnered with American Jewish gangsters and Palestinian Jewish terrorists – Hecht did not shy away from the word – and penned incendiary denunciations of the Jewish establishment. 

Still, “Labels like conservative or right-wing would be inaccurate for Hecht,” writes Gorbach.

Hecht’s life offers a huge canvas which allows Gorbach to pause and contextualize the Chicago scene, the evolution of newspapers in the 20^th century, Hollywood (Jews, scripts, personalities), and the gangster world. That’s just for starters.

Hoffman’s elegantly written short book necessarily telescopes Hecht’s life story. She focuses laser-like on what’s essential to know about Hecht. Gorbach’s less-rushed biography will give you more about the Chicago newspaper scene, the early days of cinema and the lay of the Zionist land. 

Hoffman is perhaps best known for her Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza which she wrote with her husband, Peter Cole. 

Both writers know and admire their subject; neither is oblivious to his faults. And neither has much sympathy for today’s Israeli right. But then neither would Hecht, I suppose.

Hecht’s Judaism

Ben Hecht was a cardiac Jew – Jewish in his heart and by osmosis; like a non-kosher delicatessen that serves Jewish-style cuisine. 

During WWII he would become Jewish also in his kishkes.

His parents spoke Yiddish of course. His mother and her sister Tante (aunt) Chasha “molded him into a hard-nosed realist and iconoclast,” Gorbach informs. 

Hoffman’s take is that “Hecht’s Americanness was arguably his true religion.” He must have remained attached to his parents for they moved to be closer to his California home. 

About his not unreasonable dark view of human nature: Ben Hecht was as skeptical of the man in the street as he was of the man in the White House. No one could be reasoned with. You might be able to sway public opinion by manipulation but not by appealing to “the better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s phrase.

This pragmatic ethos informed his thinking about Chicago racketeers, villainous Nazis, and (l'havdil) Roosevelt-era court Jews.

From Marie to Rose

For relationships, Hecht was attracted to smart women. He was twice married. In 1915, an Episcopalian priest officiated at his nuptials to Marie Armstrong, a fetching fellow reporter. They had a daughter Edwina or Teddy who became an actress and died tragically in 1971.

I don’t imagine Hecht was much of a presence as a father (which is not to say he didn’t genuinely love his children Edwina, Jackson, and Jenny). He divorced Marie and married the comely and Jewish Rose Caylor in 1926. His serial adultery notwithstanding theirs was an enduring 38-year-long partnership. He died in her arms.

Gorbach puts it this way, “Hecht would commit many infidelities and maintain two long-term affairs. Nevertheless, for the rest of their lives, Rose would remain his muse, confidante, collaborator, editor, and, on occasion, fierce interlocutor.”

He would leave the actress Mary “Mimsy” Taylor Zimbalist who was the love of his life to return to Rose, Gorbach writes.

Hoffman’s slim volume contains stunning evocative photographs. There is one of Hecht at 13 as well as pictures of Marie and Rose looking beautiful.

Like some of the characters he created, Hoffman writes that Hecht was "quick-witted, sexed-up, verbally carbonated – and it came naturally to him to bring that air of frenetic, suggestive japery he so enjoyed to the page, bound for the screen."

New York

Ben and Rose were back in New York by 1924 but despite trying could not stomach life on the teeming Lower East Side. They moved uptown.

Hecht formed intense and lasting friendships: There was the down and out poet Maxwell Bodenheim and his playwright buddy Charles MacArthur with whom he wrote The Front Page. Hecht had the most creative fun when he could enjoy “the camaraderie of collaboration,” in Hoffman’s words.

The Front Page, first performed in 1928, is set in the press room of a Chicago courthouse. 

Hollywood

By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929 Hecht was well ensconced in Hollywood writing for the likes of Alfred Zucker Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner brothers. 

A randy, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, workaholic, he was good at writing for every genre from newspapers and books to the stage and film. There were times that Hecht felt like a literary whore for producing lowbrow fare; and he held his interventionist, wrong-headed, movie mogul bosses in contempt. 

Money-wise, though, he was raking it in, according to Hoffman.

For the most part, it is his movies not books that have withstood the test of time. Hoffman concludes that “Screenwriting was Hecht's calling, whether he liked it or not.”

If a script, think Gone with the Wind, needed fixing Hecht was the man to do it – fast. His talent was in demand so he could live well – at times recklessly beyond his means. He kept homes in Nyack (Rockland County, NY), on Manhattan’s West Side, and in Oceanside, California. 

Hecht’s Complaint

In 1931 he published the self-loathing bestseller A Jew in Love which was received with the kind of disdain in Jewish circles that would greet Philip Roth’s Portnoy's Complaint 38 years later. Hecht dedicated the book to Hollywood producer Walter Wagner (born Feuchtwanger) with whom he would then collaborate on the 1963 film, Cleopatra. What motivated all this is anyone’s guess.

Purpose and prophecy

Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws came along in 1935. Hecht undoubtedly took Hitler seriously though perhaps not literally. 

Then in November 1938 came Kristallnacht. 

Hecht reported that that’s when he became a Jew. 

For Europe, the Second World War began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. Three months earlier, in June 1939, Hecht brought out A Book of Miracles a collection of stories.

The second one “The Little Candle” is ghastly. 

It imagines “that Europe decided to kill off the Jews – not many of them but all of them,” according to the Associated Press book review Gorbach tracked down. 

The only glimmer of hope was that in Hecht’s imagination, not all the candles would be extinguished.

Gorbach writes, “From late 1938 onward, Hecht seemed to know what was about to happen and was willing to do whatever he could to help stop it.” 

He began writing a column “1001 Afternoons in New York” in the city’s liberal-oriented PM newspaper. That became his bully pulpit. In 1941 he used the column to attack US ambassador to the Court of St James's Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father) for advocating the appeasement of Hitler.

90 Miles off Collins Avenue

In the summer of 1939, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt refused a last-resort appeal to allow 937 Jewish refugees to find refuge in Florida. They had set sail on the St. Louis from Hamburg bound for Cuba, but the Havana government of Federico Laredo Brú would not allow them in. Both Washington and Ottawa rebuffed Jewish pleas to make an exception to their closed-door policies. 

The St. Louis Jews were sent back to Europe where ultimately 254 were stranded and, eventually, murdered by the Nazis. 

FDR: Beloved by the Jews

Roosevelt

The US was hauled into WWII on December 7, 1941, by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. 

By then the destruction of European Jewry was well underway although the Germans had not at that point yet perfected systematic and industrialized genocide. 

Hecht worked feverishly to put pressure on the Roosevelt administration to do something, anything, to help Europe’s Jews. With Peter Bergson, he crafted publicity campaigns – pageants, stage shows, films, newspaper advertisements, and wrote scathing newspaper and magazine articles. 

His most vehement opposition came from the alphabet soup of Jewish organizations – in 1943 from the ADL but more typically from Stephen Weiss’s American Jewish Congress. 

During the dark days of the Holocaust having failed to get Jewish organizations to sit in the same room without turning on each other, Bergson told a disconsolate Hecht, "Jews must always battle Jews. It's the only politics open to a stateless people. The only victories they can hope to enjoy are victories over each other."

Of course, it turns out that even with a Jewish state the various Jewish tribes relish their intramural battles too much to give them up.

FDR was beloved among the Jews. To this day the Jew-haters claim he was Jewish. FDR must have intimated to Rabbi Stephen Wise that it would be unwise to make WWII into a Jewish issue. That would only make things worse. 

In going up against FDR and Wise, the most influential Jewish leader of the day, Hecht was not without resources. From Hollywood, he could field the likes of Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, and Groucho Marx. From his newspaper perch, he could do battle with the Jewish establishment as he did in a 1941 column called “My Tribe is Called Israel.” 

Here is Hecht without restraint:

“I write of Jews today, I who never knew himself as one before, because that part of me which is Jewish is under a violent and apelike attack. My way of defending myself is to answer as a Jew…

My angry critics all write that they are proud of being Americans and of wearing carnations and that they are sick to death of such efforts as mine to Judaize them and increase generally the Jew-consciousness of the world… I don’t advise you to take off your carnations. I only suggest that you don’t hide behind them too much. They conceal very little.”

Gevalt

A deserved chunk of Gorbach’s The Notorious Ben Hecht encompasses the Holocaust-era and the struggle to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had promised it. The League of Nations had given Britain the Palestine mandate precisely so it could fulfill the declaration. At the brink of WWII Britain cravenly reneged on the letter to appease the Arabs. It also barred Europe’s Jews from finding refuge in Palestine.

If ever there was a time to yell gevalt this was it – against Roosevelt and Churchill (who did not, to my knowledge, reverse Chamberlain’s May 1939 White Paper barring the doors of Palestine even if only to telegraph his moral outrage to Hitler).

The Bergson Group

In April/May 1941, Hecht began coordinating with The Bergson Group led by twenty-six-year-old Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) and including Samuel Merlin, Yitshaq Ben-Ami, Arieh Ben-Eliezer, Eri Jabotinsky, and Alexander Rafaeli. 

Hoffman portrays Bergson-Hecht as an odd couple: "It was a most unlikely meeting of the minds. Here he was – a middle-aged, pork-chop-eating, Christmas-tree-lighting dyed-in-the-American-wool wise guy who 'disliked causes...disliked public speaking...never attended meetings of any sort ...had no interest in Palestine and had always bolted any conversation about a Jewish homeland.' Moreover, there was Bergson, a dashing young Lithuanian-born Palestinian activist, passionately committed to the cause of national Jewish liberation as conceived by the intellectual and ideological firebrand Ze'ev Jabotinsky."

Speaking of Jabotinsky, his followers had arrived in the US planning to carry out his instructions. However, on August 4, 1940, this towering, charismatic and prophetic Zionist personality died unexpectedly at age 59 in upstate New York. 

Mission(s)

The Bergson Group then made it their mission to facilitate “illegal” immigration to Palestine. When WWII broke out, the mission expanded to creating a Jewish army to help fight the Nazis. As news of Nazi genocide became known the mission expanded further to rescue of European Jewry.

Nazi leaders were determined to systematize the destruction of Europe's Jewish people bringing the relevant players together at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference. After this point, US officials could no longer spike the genocide story or string Stephen Wise along. 

On November 25, 1942, The New York Times reported: “HIMMLER PROGRAM KILLS POLISH JEWS; Slaughter of 250,000 in Plan to Wipe Out Half in Country This Year Is Reported REGIME IN LONDON ACTS Officials of Poland Publish Data – Dr. Wise Gets Check Here by State Department.

That same day, The Washington Post carried a dispatch from AP: “Half of Jews Ordered Slain, Poles Report.” 

Both newspapers were owned by assimilated Jews who like Rabbi Wise did not want the war to become a Jewish issue.

Fascists?

In their efforts to spotlight the genocide Hecht and Bergson faced strident opposition from the US Jewish establishment and the David Ben-Gurion-led Jewish Agency in Palestine. 

Stephen  Weiss

Ben-Gurion (like Chaim Weizmann) was conflicted about what to do on behalf of the European Jews, but both knew with full certainty that if Jabotinsky’s people were pursuing a strategy, they needed to be against it. Ben-Gurion pressed Stephen Weiss to follow his lead.

  

This antipathy was real before, during, and after the war (when the Bergson/Hecht mission became expelling the British from Palestine).   

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In the spring of 1939 (before the war broke out though after the British White Paper) the Bergson Group sought to lease ten dilapidated ships which were to deliver 10,000 Jews from Europe to Palestine per voyage. 

While Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann despised each other, they were united in their animosity toward The Bergson Group – denigrating them as “fascists” and extremists. 

Weizmann dissuaded wealthy Jews from donating funds for the ships while Stephen Weiss cautioned that conditions on board such ships were likely to be “revolting.”

Fascists? If Jabotinsky’s followers did business with gangsters, Mussolini’s henchmen or Polish anti-Semites it was because the ends justified the means. Moreover, as Gorbach takes pains to point out far from being a fascist Jabotinsky was a humanist and classical liberal. He cites Jabotinsky declaring before a Warsaw audience: “I belong to that old-fashioned school who still believe that in every civilized community there must be some respect of man for man, class for class, and race for race.”

Stephen Wise

Gorbach’s book has the added value of providing a capsule history of Jewish and Zionist politics in the first half of the 20^th century. The one constant – infuriatingly typical of Jewish history throughout millennia – is the infighting, backbiting and self-destructive behavior, the petty personality squabbles cloaked in ideology. 

Wise, whom Hecht slugged as “a pitiful Shtadlan,” was said to have reported Bergson to the FBI as a communist. The supercilious Nahum Goldmann, a global macher, urged American authorities to either draft or expel Bergson. 

Gorbach emphasizes that the Wise-Bergson struggle was not all black and white. Indeed, what would any one of us have done – without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – if the president of the United States, popular beyond all measure in the Jewish community, urged us to trust him to do the right thing? I also try to keep in mind that during WWI Wise went against the grain and was a leading Zionist working for the Balfour Declaration while the Reform movement was staunchly anti-Zionist. 

1943 We Will Never Die event California

Hecht’s inadequacies

Hoffman quotes Norman Mailer as saying that Hecht was "never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose." Something to, perhaps, keep in mind when reading A Child of the Century his autobiography. 

Hecht was full of himself – one of those people who never grow up. He got by with help from his friends. At the same time, he stayed loyal (imperfectly) to them even when his fortunes soared, and theirs nosedived. 

He made enemies of friends and friends of enemies. The rabbi who once denounced him as a self-hating Jew tearfully officiated at his funeral.

Hecht was imperfect. He never visited Israel. The rebel was forever grappling with what it meant to be a Jew. If he was a hack, it was so that he could pay the bills. So what? However, his prodigious talent was undeniable; and politically he was mostly on the right side when it mattered most.

Which book is for you?

Gorbach makes a minor stumble, or so it seems to me. I don't see historian Lucy Dawidowicz and the Commentary of her time as “neoconservative.” He takes too seriously for my taste the scholarship of Ben Halpern and Zeev Sternhell. As the pages run out, the author tags on a tendentious kvetch about (a) Israeli settlements and the death of (b) peace process (c) liberal Zionism and (d) two-state solution. None of this should detract from the value of the book. 

Gorbach and Hoffman (who are politically, I think, on the same page) are writing for slightly different audiences. 

Gorbach’s book is more comprehensive and scholarly – it is based on the author’s 2013 doctoral dissertation, but it is jargon-free and accessible. 

Hoffman’s book is succinct, and her writing is remarkably graceful. 

Indulge yourself, if you can, and read both.

The End

When Hecht died suddenly at age 70 on April 18, 1964, in Manhattan, Menachem Begin the leader of the Herut Knesset opposition flew in to eulogize him. 

The actor Luther Adler and entertainer George Jessel also spoke.

Peter Bergson, who by this point probably barely spoke to Begin,  also delivered a eulogy, of course.

Hecht's obituary in The New York Times – of all places – concludes by quoting Hecht himself: "To retell anecdotes of a witty man is like staging a play without scenery or footlights. And the wrong cast. A man dies, and his anecdotes hang in the air like lessening echoes. It is like watching a soul vanish."

Further Reading

D. Fetherling, The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (1977)

W. MacAdams, Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend

The Snickersnee Press - Devoted to Rediscovering Ben Hecht Biography & Works

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