Implementing the Zionist Dream
Israeli journalist/historian Tom Segev
has written a very detailed and somewhat biased biography of Israel’s first
prime minister. He tells the story of how David Gruen, born in Plonsk, Poland,
in 1886 becomes David Ben-Gurion the labor leader and for a time Israel’s
leading politician after his arrival in Palestine in 1906.
Segev’s Ben-Gurion has a single minded
focus on bringing the Israeli state into being. He analogizes him to Lenin, but
there is also the all consummate Stalinist bureaucrat in him as he first gains
control the Histadrut labor union and ultimately the Mapai (Socialist Labor)
Party, Israel’s largest political party until 1977.
Ben-Gurion is a complete bibliophile as
he reads voraciously and with his autodidact style become learned on science
and military affairs. After the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 he
immediately recognizes that it would bring a revolution in military affairs and
in 1956 he starts the Israeli nuclear program.
We see him as a very lonely man subject
to severe depression and although he was married to his wife Paula for over 50
years he undertook a series of affairs and he was far from a doting father to
his children. His life was totally enmeshed in the politics necessary to bring
into being the Zionist state.
Where Segev and his fellow “revisionist”
historians go astray is when they argue that there was defined plan to uproot
the Palestinians from 1948 Israel thereby creating the refugee problem. There
was no central order given and while many Palestinians were forced to leave
more of them left on their own accord. Segev pays little heed to Israel’s
geopolitical reality of 1948 where there was no strategic depth. Hence it is
unfair to characterize Defense Minister Dyan a warmonger in the 1956 War
against Egypt. The strategic reality facing Israel is that it had to win
quickly or lose a war of attrition. That lesson was learned in 1973 War, where
Egypt attacked first and almost won.
Although Segev gives us a great deal of discussion
on Ben-Gurion hot and cold relationship with Chaim Weitzman, there is far too
little discussion on why Ben-Gurion’s relationship with Vladimir Jabotinsky,
his political rival in the 1920’s and 30’s was so vitriolic. It had to be more
than politics. That vitriol extended to Jabotinsky’s successor Menachem Begin.
To me Segev’s book is way too filled
with minutia. Nevertheless, given the caveats mentioned above, he offers great
insight into the life of Ben-Gurion and the creation of the Israeli state.
For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1LLSNFVJT73TD/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
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