A State at Any Cost Read online

  A

  S T A T E

  A T A N Y

  C O S T

  Also by Tom Segev

  1949: The First Israelis

  Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps

  The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust

  One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

  Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel

  1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East

  Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends

  A

  S T A T E

  A T A N Y

  C O S T

  T H E L I F E O F

  D A V I D B E N - G U R I O N

  T O M S E G E V

  T R A N S L A T E D B Y H A I M W A T Z M A N

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  Originally published in Hebrew in 2018 by Keter Books, Israel.

  English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  First published in the UK in 2019 by Apollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd.

  Copyright © 2019 by Tom Segev

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Haim Watzman

  The moral right of Tom Segev to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  Cartoon on page 15: Illustration by the cartoonist Yosef Bass, courtesy of the heirs of his estate: Yona Spiegelman, Yael Chen, Rafael Bass.

  Cartoon on page 363: Illustration by the cartoonist Dosh (Kariel Gardosh), originally published in Ma’ariv, November 13, 1964, courtesy of the Gardosh family.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781789544626

  ISBN (E): 9781789544640

  Jacket design: Na Kim

  Jacket photograph: Ricarda Schwerin and Alfred Bernheim (1963), courtesy The Israel Museum

  Author photograph: Dan Porges

  Head of Zeus Ltd

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  5–8 Hardwick Street

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  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For my grandchildren, Liya, Ben, Lior, and Amit

  And their parents, Shira and Itay

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY TOM SEGEV

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HISTORY

  PART I: THE ROAD TO POWER

  1. The Vow

  2. Scroll of Fire

  3. Birds

  4. Foreign Labor

  5. Sejera

  6. Deportation

  7. New World

  8. Authority

  9. Scandals

  10. Unification

  11. Conversations

  12. Winds of War

  13. Zionist Alertness

  14. Holocaust and Schism

  PART II: THE LIMITS OF POWER

  15. Maps

  16. Partition

  17. War

  18. New Israelis

  19. Anxieties

  20. The Nasty Business

  21. The Second Round

  22. Yes to the Old Man

  23. The Lavon Affair

  24. Twilight

  25. Another Kind of Jew

  PLATE SECTION

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  AN INVITATION FROM THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION:

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS

  OF HISTORY

  On a cold January day in 1940, David Ben-Gurion rode down to the Kalia Hotel by the Dead Sea, where, at the lowest land point on the globe, he devoted some thought to the way he would appear in the book that some future biographer would eventually write about him and his colleagues, founders of the State of Israel. He imagined a “young, intelligent, and good biographer.” Obviously, that biographer would discern the founders’ “weaknesses, flaws, and shortcomings”: none of them had been “ministering angels and seraphs and cherubs,” Ben-Gurion wrote. But would he be able also to respect them and grasp the historic significance of their achievements? Would he perhaps even realize how much he’d missed by coming to know them only after their deaths?1 Ben-Gurion was often preoccupied with death.

  Like national leaders in other countries, Ben-Gurion worked diligently to shape the historical narrative of his time and of himself. When Israel was ten years old, he imagined an archaeologist excavating the country’s artifacts three thousand years hence. The archaeologist might uncover a chronicle of the War of Independence of 1948 and learn from it about Israel’s victory. But what if he instead found scraps of newspapers from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, telling of an Arab victory? Who would the archaeologist of the year 4958 believe, Ben-Gurion wondered?2

  Ben-Gurion’s diaries, articles, books, letters, and speeches comprise millions of words; he spent many hours writing nearly every day. “Sometimes I’m amazed by how much I have written,” he once remarked.3 Much of what he wrote was aimed at gaining the sympathy of future generations. He also tried to influence what others would write. When Israel’s Ministry of Defense decided to publish an official history of the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion demanded that the book underline his efforts to obtain the arms that made victory possible. “Guns didn’t fall from heaven,” he told the author. Of another book, written and edited by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers who were no great admirers of his, he wrote: “The editors desecrated the War of Independence and thousands of the fallen.”4

  An avid reader of biographies, he often tried to piece together the motives of their authors. “Plutarch apparently did not like Marius,” Ben-Gurion wrote regarding one of the books he took with him to Kalia, “and did not stint at humiliating and vilifying him, but for all that was unable to obscure his admirable manly character.”5 Gaius Marius was a Roman general and statesman who could have aroused Ben-Gurion’s interests because of the inner contradictions of his character, with its frequent and sudden upswings and downturns.

  On a few occasions he cooperated with biographers who acclaimed him as the founder of Israel. But there were others as well. At the beginning of 1967, a controversy broke out over the entry devoted to him in the Hebrew Encyclopedia. The author was the work’s editor in chief, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a professor at the Hebrew University and an old adversary. “I think that [Ben-Gurion] is the biggest catastrophe that ever happened to the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” Leibowitz told the daily newspaper Ma’ariv; the entry he wrote took this view. Ben-Gurion put on a show of equanimity. “I don’t care what Professor Leibowitz wrote,” he responded, “but I care what I do, whether it’s good or bad.” But, in fact, he was furious. “Leibowitz is consumed by hatred,” he wrote to the encyclopedia’s publisher; he was Gaius Marius and Leibowitz Plutarch. He was quite naturally pleased when, a few years later, a sculptor told him about plans to erect a “Pantheon” in Haifa that would display busts of the great men of the nation: statesmen, writers, artists, military leaders, scientists, athletes, and others. “I told him that I liked the idea,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “But I’ll say no more than that.”6

  According to Golda Meir: “It was our heartfelt
prayer that this man enter history in all his splendor, and it is painful that that is not coming to pass. Sad for him and sad for us.”7 Biographers of Ben-Gurion find themselves confronted with a huge amount of archival material that can affect their evaluation of the man, for good and for bad. As a whole this material demonstrates Ben-Gurion’s forcefulness, merits, and achievements, but also his limitations, weaknesses, and failures.

  “Ben-Gurion was a man who did not change,” said one of his acquaintances. From the start, he exhibited ideological devotion and awed those around him.8 The Zionist dream was the quintessence of his identity and the core of his personality, and its fulfillment his greatest desire. “The revival demands human sacrifices of us,” he wrote in Hebrew when he was eighteen years old. “And if we, the young people who suffer the pain of our nation’s ruin, are not swift to sacrifice ourselves, we are lost.”9 He believed that to the end of his life. He saw himself, and was seen by others, as an incarnation of history. His thinking was systematic and methodical, and even when he contradicted himself, the impression was that his pronouncements reflected extended, profound, consistent, unwavering, and considered judgment. He presumed to know what to do in almost every situation.

  He very much wanted to be a leader and aspired to everything that leadership offers: the realization of a dream that was for him self-fulfillment, responsibility, power, and a place in history. He frequently evoked the Bible and Jewish destiny, but realized that achieving the dream of a Jewish state required exhausting labor and tiny, often exasperating steps forward. Many shared his vision, but few of his colleagues were as addicted to politics as he was, and from such a young age. Few of them were as diligent as he, or as able to grasp details. These characteristics made him an indispensable leader, although not an omnipotent one.

  The drama of his life included threatening Jewish capitalists in his Polish hometown with a pistol, spending hours in the basement of a bookstore in Oxford, herding sheep in the desert, imbibing the scent of power in the White House, and waiting for Lenin to appear in Moscow’s Red Square. He engaged in politics, made fateful decisions, sent people into war, stood over the bodies of fallen paratroopers, was captivated by the magic of Niagara Falls, and sought peace under the oldest oak tree in Palestine. He wrote fine accounts of all these episodes, often revealing a poetic emotionalism that few associate with him.

  But of all the thousands of images that record his life, none captures its essence and gives better expression to his personality than that filmed on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv on the afternoon of Friday, May 14, 1948. It shows a short man with a mane of white hair bounding out of an official-looking black Lincoln. His wife, Paula, who had gotten out of the car before him, precedes him toward the stairs leading up to the municipal art museum. A crowd surrounds the building. Ben-Gurion wears a dark suit and a tie held in place with a silver pin. In his left hand he bears a homburg and a thin briefcase is under his arm. He looks more like a seasoned attorney than a daring revolutionary. Upon exiting the car he slams its door shut. An anonymous young man in the uniform of a country that does not yet exist stands by the car, but seems to have trouble deciding what he ought to do. Ben-Gurion halts in front of the young man and suddenly arches his back and shoots his right hand to his forehead in an energetic and stately salute. For a second he seems to identify the confused boy with the heroes of Jewish history.

  Sixty-two years old at the time, he looks older, and a bit roly-poly. A few minutes later, he would proclaim the establishment of the State of Israel and oversee the signing of its Declaration of Independence. He was soon to become the new country’s first prime minister and to lead it through the challenges of its initial period, for close to fifteen years. He runs up the stairs as if to make sure that the historic moment would not slip away from him.

  *

  The week before the declaration of the state had been a busy one. He’d worked hard, worried much, and slept little. He’d spent most of his time in the company of army commanders. Some of them were dissatisfied and even voiced political rebellion. The ongoing war for Palestine had begun half a year previously and taken a heavy toll. Jerusalem had long been under siege, with its approaches blocked; several Jewish settlements had been compelled to surrender to Arab forces. Some military operations had failed; there were already fifteen hundred Jewish dead, most of them soldiers.10 Ben-Gurion jotted down a long list of questions that awaited his decision, among which was “Should the Arabs be expelled?”11

  By this time, tens of thousands of Arabs from all over the country had become homeless. Many Arab houses in a number of cities, among them Haifa and Jaffa, stood empty. It was the first stage of the Nakba. Ben-Gurion had never been closer to achieving his life’s goal—a Jewish majority in an independent state in Palestine.

  The previous night he had worked on the final version of the Declaration of Independence. There had been several drafts. Moshe Sharett (then still Shertok), Israel’s foreign minister–designate, had collated them into a single version. “I composed a perfect draft,” Sharett later related. “I cast the Declaration in the form ‘whereas this and whereas that and whereas the other thing,’ and then came the conclusion: therefore!” He thought that such a structure created “inner suspense.” But Ben-Gurion didn’t want a rental contract—he wanted an impressive and powerful historical declaration that would ring for generations to come. He took it home and pretty much completely rewrote it. Sharett never forgave him.12

  Ben-Gurion’s version put an emphasis on the Zionist narrative of Jewish history. The first two sentences diminished the contribution of Diaspora Jewry: “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped.” Sharett’s version had begun with the Jewish exile; Ben-Gurion’s rewrite stressed the independence that had preceded the destruction. He underlined the identity of the Jews who had settled in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century, himself among them: “pioneers and ma’apilim [immigrants who entered Palestine in defiance of restrictive British legislation].” This closely tied the Zionist enterprise to the labor movement. Sharett had cited the United Nations resolution on Palestine of November 29, 1947, which called for the creation of Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. Ben-Gurion suppressed the fact that the resolution stipulated a partition of Palestine between the two peoples. The Declaration promised equal rights for all and a constitution. The new country was to be a “Jewish state,” but no one really knew what that meant, Ben-Gurion included.

  The ceremony was organized hastily, so that it could end before the Sabbath began. The whole thing was almost canceled at the last minute because of a disagreement over whether God should be mentioned in the text. The representatives of the religious parties insisted on it; several members of the left opposed it. Ben-Gurion persuaded everyone to agree to the words “Rock of Israel.” The calligraphy could not be done in time for the ceremony, so the signatories inscribed their names on the bottom of a blank piece of parchment.13 Ben-Gurion viewed the declaration as a step toward a time two thousand years in the past, reestablishing Hebrew independence. He had good reason for optimism in signing the document, but in his diary he wrote that he felt like a mourner among celebrants—the state had not yet been assured. “States are not served to peoples on golden platters,” he said, using a Talmudic expression. Ben-Gurion could also put it in simpler words: “The State of Israel will be no picnic.”14 His pessimism was a defense against illusion. “I have discerned the worst case that can happen,” he once said. “I have done that all these years. If it doesn’t happen, that’s fine, but you need to be prepared for the worst. A human being is not a rational creature; you don’t know what forces are impelling him, what might arise at certain moments.”15 He expected the armies of the surrounding Arab countries to invade Israel in order to destroy it. He believed that the Israelis could win; he also believed in his ability to lead them to victory. And he believed that the cost would be worth it. He termed
the establishment of the state “recompense for the slaughter of the millions” in the Holocaust.16

  After the ceremony, he returned to the Red House, as military headquarters were called, not far from the beach. He was handed disturbing bulletins from several fronts. During the night he was woken twice, once to be told that President Harry Truman had recognized the state and once to be taken to a radio studio so that he could broadcast a speech to the United States. Egyptian planes appeared in Tel Aviv’s skies during the broadcast and explosions could be heard. “At this moment they are bombing Tel Aviv,” Ben-Gurion told America. When he went home, he wrote this in his diary: “People in pajamas and nightgowns peered out of every house, but there was no evidence of disproportional fear.” He recalled his time in London during the Blitz, and seems to have expected that Tel Aviv would also live through its finest hour. Cognizant of the power of words to make history, he sought twenty years later to correct the impression that Tel Aviv’s inhabitants were not sufficiently brave by inserting into the original diary entry the words “I felt: they will endure.”17

  He did not take credit for founding the state, justifiably so. Israel came into existence at the end of a process that had begun thirty years previously, when the British resolved to assist the Zionist movement in establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Ben-Gurion led this process for a generation, in particular during the decade preceding independence. He had been in politics for forty years, beginning at almost the moment that he arrived in Palestine. He was involved in nearly every aspect of its Jewish community’s life. His first political article, published when he was twenty-four years old, placed him in the ranks of the struggle. From that point he strove to achieve and maintain a position of national leadership. Those who were his seniors, first and foremost Berl Katznelson, in addition to several possible rivals, died one after the other. The death of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, his great nemesis on the right, and the decline of Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization, whose mantle as the senior Jewish statesman Ben-Gurion sought to inherit, left him almost unopposed in the worldwide Zionist movement as well.