Israel’s ‘Old Man’

The man at the center of one of the great dramas of the 20th century came into the world as the son of a petti-fogger from Plonsk, Poland. The teenage Ben-Gurion joined the Marxist Zionist party (Poale Zion) and left town at age 18 for Warsaw, where he discovered his life’s purpose. Unlike the devout Jews who placed their trust in God, or the assimilationists who put their trust in Europe’s enlightened hospitality, Ben-Gurion advocated self-trust. He resolved early on that emigration to Palestine was the only way to save imperiled Jewish life and achieve autonomy. This, in Shapira’s telling, remained the first of his lifelong imperatives, the fulcrum of his career in politics: “This state cannot exist without the Jewish people,” he said, “and the Jewish people cannot exist without the state.”

The short young man, though not favored with charisma, trusted mightily in his own destiny. “God or nature,” he wrote in 1904, “endows the genius with sublime talents, not out of love for him, but from a desire to bestow upon the world sublime creations. .  .  . I trust in the future ahead of me.”

In 1906, when he was not yet 20, Ben-Gurion acted on that trust and followed his convictions to Palestine. In his last letter to his father before embarking, he wrote: “A few more hours and I will have left the dark recesses of exile, and from the freedom of the high seas, on the way to the land of our rebirth, I shall send you my greetings.” 

But after several years working as a farm hand in agricultural settlements, the new immigrant became persuaded that the Jewish rebirth in Palestine, a country which had been under Ottoman rule for four centuries, would depend on the pashas’ favor. In 1912, he donned a fez and traveled to Istanbul with a forged matriculation diploma from a Russian gymnasium. He intended to acquire an Ottoman legal education and, ultimately, to join the Turkish parliament “so I shall be able to defend Zionism.” 

The second of Ben-Gurion’s un-wavering aims was to secure the support of a world power for the Zionist project. (Compared with this, he often said, reaching an agreement with the Arabs paled in significance.) The aim may have been unchanging, but at a time that saw the dissolution of three empires (Russian, Turkish, and British), the favor of great powers would prove fickle. Shortly after Ben-Gurion’s return to Palestine after three years of study in Istanbul, the Turks decided to deport Zionist activists. Ben-Gurion fled to New York. There, he met Paula Munweis, a nurse from Minsk who would be his wife for the next 51 years. 

After the Great War, Ben-Gurion returned to Palestine and devoted himself to courting British power. He toiled to exploit both the Balfour Declaration of 1917—which had pledged British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine—and Winston Churchill’s declaration, five years later, that Jews were in Palestine “of right, and not on sufferance.”

At the same time, Ben-Gurion, whose Zionism had been inflected early with Marxism, remained ever alert to the rise of Soviet power. As a young man, he had translated a book by the mercurial Marxist professor Werner Sombart, the first book on socialism to be published in Hebrew. Ben-Gurion expressed great admiration for Lenin’s ruthless will and regarded the October Revolution as a “sacred revolt.” He visited Moscow in 1923 in a failed bid to soften the Kremlin’s hostility toward Zionism and to forge ties with Soviet trade unions. 

Although his enthusiasm for Marxist teachings and their Soviet manifestations waned in the late 1920s, Ben-Gurion’s cast of mind remained fundamentally revolutionary in another sense. Zionism, he wrote in the following decade, “is a revolt against hundreds of years of tradition, the tradition of actual life in the diaspora and the feeble and barren longings for redemption. In place of sterile longing, bloodless, irresolute and ineffectual—the will to realization; in place of rootless diaspora life—efforts to build and be productive upon the soil of the homeland.” 

This man born of the diaspora came to call the diaspora “shameful” and “imitative.” The old religious longing for redemption, he insisted, would be replaced by secular action. Before 1948, at least, he seldom used biblical rhetoric or spoke of the land as an ancient patrimony. He had little intuition for the sacred. Instead, he talked of a productive labor that would enrich the land for all its inhabitants. Shapira describes a 1934 meeting in Jerusalem between Ben-Gurion and Musa Alami, a Cambridge-educated Arab legal adviser to the British Mandate.

Ben-Gurion opened his talk with Alami in the accepted Zionist manner by describing the development and economic growth the Jews had brought to Palestine. Alami responded that he would prefer the country to remain backward for another hundred years until the Arabs were capable of developing it themselves.

Ben-Gurion could not afford to wait. As the hour of conflagration drew close, his first aim—the immigration and ingathering of exiles—was no long-er a matter of mere Zionist theory. In 1933, Ben-Gurion bought a copy of Mein Kampf in the Munich train station. He took its menace seriously: “The disaster which has befallen German Jewry,” Ben-Gurion forecast a few months later, “is not limited to Germany alone. Hitler’s regime places the entire Jewish people in danger.” In 1937, he warned of an impending “world-war catastrophe [shoah].” 

The sense of crisis quickened Ben-Gurion’s unflinching resolve. Isaiah Berlin, having met Ben-Gurion, described him as a man “who prefers desperate situations in which he is with his back to the wall, defying all the storms of the world, dying in an agony of glory and violent resistance to everything and everybody, thus canceling many centuries of humiliating Jewish history.” 

Both before and after the British White Paper of 1939, which closed Palestine’s shores to Jewish refugees, Ben-Gurion vigorously advocated for immigration, legal or otherwise. “We must assist the English in their war as if there were no White Paper,” he announced, “and resist the White Paper as if there were no war.” In sketching Ben-Gurion’s deep engagement in promoting mass migration to Palestine, Shapira refutes the charges brought by Tom Segev, in The Seventh Million (1993), that Ben-Gurion’s state-building monomania rendered him indifferent to the plight of European Jews. 

During a trip to Germany in October 1945, Ben-Gurion was the first Jewish leader to visit the displaced persons camps, where he was greeted rapturously, and the former death camps of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. The chief Jewish chaplain of the U.S. Army in Europe accompanied him to a camp in Zeilsheim, near Frankfurt. The camp’s streets were named Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Bialik (after the national Hebrew poet). Shapira gives us the chaplain’s account:

With the British grip on Palestine loosening, Ben-Gurion tightened the focus and the tempo of his second aim: to recruit international legitimacy and cultivate allies. Unlike his rival Chaim Weizmann, who was still dedicated to backroom diplomacy with Britain, Ben-Gurion forecast the significance of friendship with the United States. “[Ben-Gurion] attaches a decisive importance to America,” Weizmann said in 1943, “in contradistinction to Great Britain, repeating the slogans which one hears occasionally here that the British Empire is doomed, that the greatest force which will emerge out of the war is America.” 

(Ben-Gurion’s search for allies continued through the 1950s, when he confronted the threat posed by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and to the eve of the 1967 war, when he reproached Israeli chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin for putting the country in danger of war in the absence of a powerful ally.)

In May 1948, against Secretary of State George Marshall’s cautions, Ben-Gurion declared independence. As Shapira shows, he succeeded not only in imposing a single political authority over a nation that had never, in its long and fragmented dispersal, enjoyed such a thing; he also brought the various militias (Haganah, Palmach, Irgun) under a unified command. He presided over the procurement of military surplus from the United States, directed the yearlong war of independence against the invading armies of four Arab states, and determined the state’s defensible borders. (He rejected the proposal from his commander, Yigal Allon, the subject of a previous biography by Shapira, to conquer the West Bank.) Later, he oversaw the construction of Israel’s nuclear program at Dimona. 

Ben-Gurion saw political independence as a means “to cement the unity of the Jewish people .  .  . and to become a source of dignity and pride for all the Jews of the world.” So, too, he regarded the fledgling Israel Defense Forces as an instrument in forging the national ethos. In 1948, a colleague asked him why the government had not set up a ministry of culture. In fact, Ben-Gurion replied, such a ministry already existed: “Today the ministry of culture is the ministry of defense. A hundred thousand Jews are fighting for their people’s freedom—that is the greatest human creation in our era. It will serve as a source for literature and art for generations to come.”

In 1963, the Old Man, as he was affectionately known, at last abdicated and retired to a modest kibbutz in the wilderness of the Negev. He died a decade later, just after the 1973 war. On his instructions, his simple gravestone overlooking a desert wadi bears three dates: that of his birth, his death, and his arrival in the Land of Israel. 

Ever since, David Ben-Gurion has threatened to drown his biographers in detail. He saved every letter he wrote. He left 750,000 items in his posthumous papers, including his diaries—50 volumes of them—dating from 1915 until nearly his dying day.

Anita Shapira, who met Ben-Gurion, manages to stay afloat while navigating some treacherous currents. Drawing on the work of biographers Michael Bar-Zohar and Shabtai Teveth, as well as on recently declassified archives, she steers well clear both of hagiography and of the contempt with which Israeli “new historians” regard the father of a country they argue was conceived in sin.

Unlike other writers, and against the grain of her subject’s self-perception, Shapira also paints Ben-Gurion in personal, rather than world-historical, terms. Though she uses a large canvas, she does not merely give us a larger-than-life embodiment of a nation’s aspiration. She shades in a more intimate portrait: an introverted lover of books who would browse incognito in the bookshops of Charing Cross Road; a son and husband beset by loneliness. And by depletion. 

When he retired, the Old Man placed the memoirs of Churchill and Charles de Gaulle on his desk and sat down to pen an autobiography for those generations to come. He had published more than 30 books—many of them collections of his pronouncements and speeches—but he now found himself incapable of writing his own life.

In a sense, however, a memoir would have been a superfluity, and not only because Ben-Gurion remains in the marrow of a country impossible to imagine without his fatherhood. As befits the People of Ben-Gurion, Israel’s political game still follows his rules. If, today, his successors at once play up the country’s defiant self-reliance (we can only count on ourselves), anxiously gauge its international support (can we still count on them?), and pragmatically cultivate alliances (we must count on them)—they are, for better or worse, largely playing the hand that Ben-Gurion dealt.

Benjamin Balint is a writer in Jerusalem.