The lustiest cheers at the vast military parade marking Israel’s 25th anniversary in Jerusalem last May were neither for tanks and paratroopers passing the reviewing stand nor Phantoms whooshing overhead. Instead, the crowds cheered loudest for a slight, aging, white-thatched man being helped to a seat of honor among the dignitaries. He was David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s longtime leader, first Prime Minister and, in a sense, its George Washington. Out of the Prime Minister’s office for ten years and in complete retirement for three, Ben-Gurion, in that appearance, gave Israelis a fitting chance to acclaim his role in the birth, growth and maturity of their country.
As it turned out, the independence-day parade was their last chance. Even then, Ben-Gurion’s health had begun to fail. Too feeble to stay at the Sde Boker kibbutz in the red-roofed bungalow he had occupied alone since Wife Paula’s death five years before, he returned two months ago to his other home in Tel Aviv. He was working there on the third volume of his collected letters when he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage two weeks ago that left him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak. He was rushed to Tel Hashomer hospital, where he died last weekend at 87.
A Jew First. Even though his political influence had waned, Ben-Gurion was mourned all over Israel. He was the realist and visionary who had dreamed of and worked for a Jewish state through half a century of Turkish, British and international rule in Palestine. He had suggested the name for the new country. He had carried out hard or unpopular decisions in the state’s early days and inevitably left on Israel the strength of his own personality.
It was quite a personality. Ben-Gurion’s moods covered the full range from stormy to stoical. He was at times arbitrary, vindictive and magnanimous. He had a disarming smile, but the deep-set brown eyes under the delta-like shock of white hair always burned. He believed in direct answers to direct questions, and his allegiance was unquestioning. “I am a Jew first and an Israeli afterward,” invariably said the man who came from a nonobservant family.
He was born David Gryn, and that was his name when he set out from Russia in 1906 and landed illegally at Jaffa to begin a new life as a Zionist pioneer. Once in Palestine, Gryn followed a practice of the early settlers and changed his name to Ben-Gurion, which in Hebrew means “Son of a Lion Cub.” The new arrival was anxious to work the land (“That was the ideal life I wanted for myself,” he would recall. “I saw in that the renewal of the Jewish nation”). He settled in the Galilean village of Sejera and insisted in later years that farming there had been his greatest joy. Friends, however, said that he was a less than expert plowman because he spent most of his time reading and studying.
Ben-Gurion soon left the land for the labor movement. He started out organizing Jewish workers and wrote for a small labor weekly. Eventually his political activities on behalf of Zionism so angered Turkish authorities that they exiled Ben-Gurion and forbade him ever “to set foot on Palestinian soil.” He went to the U.S., met and married a Polish-born Brooklyn nurse named Paula Munweiss. After he became famous, she liked to tease him by saying that he had spent part of their wedding night at a Zionist meeting.
When the British replaced the Turks in Palestine, Ben-Gurion returned. His work gradually shifted from labor activities to Zionist planning. By 1920 he was helping to found the Jewish Labor Federation, which would become the all-encompassing Histadrut (labor federation) of modern Israel. He was elected chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, political arm of the World Zionist Organization. At one point in his career, Ben-Gurion believed that Jews and Arabs could live side by side in peace; but extremist passions on both sides made such a plan impossible, and he soon sensed it. After 1935 he thought only in terms of Palestine as a Jewish state rather than as a homeland for both Jews and Arabs, and devoted himself to planning the immigration and armed strength necessary to accomplish it. “Without a Jewish army,” he insisted, “there would never be a Jewish state.”
It was Ben-Gurion who created the Haganah, the underground Jewish army. In 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, he was able to get unqualified financial support for it from Jews abroad. Under Ben-Gurion, the Jews of Palestine following World War II developed a double strategy to end the British mandate over the territory that had been granted by the League of Nations. They stepped up the illegal immigration of Jews from Europe in the face of stern British measures to prevent it. Meanwhile, Jewish terrorists carried out a continuous assault on British personnel and bases. This desperate strategy succeeded, and “a Jewish state in the land of Israel” was proclaimed by Ben-Gurion at the Tel Aviv museum on May 14,1948, the same day on which the last British soldier left the territory.
One People. The Jews of this newly created nation of Israel danced for joy. Ben-Gurion knew that five Arab armies were massed against his people, and he realized that the proclamation he had read was their call to war. Ben-Gurion acted as Defense Minister as well as Prime Minister and shrewdly defended his fledgling country on four fronts. At the same time, he prevented civil war by ordering Israeli soldiers to fire if the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) attempted to land weapons for itself from the freighter Altalena in defiance of a Ben-Gurion order that “there shall be one army, one nation, one people.” The Urgun, headed by present Knesset Opposition Leader Menahem Begin, backed down and obeyed Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion stamped his own indelible mark on the new state. It was egalitarian, as he was, and his open-necked sports shirt became a kind of national costume that many Israeli leaders still feature today. The army had a favored place in his heart and it was Ben-Gurion who developed the Israeli warfare strategy based on pre-emptive strikes. With the 6,000 Israeli casualties of the War of Independence on his mind, he decided that Israel’s urban centers were too near its borders and that fighting ought to take place on enemy soil with as few losses to Israel as possible.
Politically, Ben-Gurion engineered rapprochement with Germany despite strong protests at home. He also approved the capture and public trial of Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann, so that young Sabras (native-born Israelis) would have a better understanding of what the Holocaust had meant.
“That Man.” Ben-Gurion retired as Prime Minister in 1953, turning over the job to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett. He returned to power in 1955, largely on the strength of a spy scandal that became known as “the Lavon affair,” after Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon. For the next 15 years, as Prime Minister and then as a member of Israel’s parliament, Ben-Gurion acted as a kind of political conscience. To make peace with the Arabs, he said he would return captured territories, “not because we have no right to them, but because we have room in the land that we had before the Six-Day War for all the Jews of the world.” He recalled that his greatest wish in 1906 had been to see 500,000 Jews in Palestine, whereas by 1971 he considered that 8,000,000 was an acceptable figure (present population 3,000,000). Although he was not religious himself, Ben-Gurion argued that “every religious Jew has daily violated the precepts of Judaism and the Torah of Israel by remaining in the Diaspora.”
Ben-Gurion founded a new party, Rafi, in 1965, but it never attracted the attention he had hoped for. In 1970 he withdrew from politics. From his outspoken political forays he left behind some bitter colleagues (Golda Meir would only refer to him as “that man”) who were not reconciled until the public ceremonies two years ago that marked Ben-Gurion’s 85th birthday.
At Sde Boker once more, Ben-Gurion spent his time furiously writing his memoirs — he was up to 1938 when he died — reading philosophy, and watching trees that he had planted swaying in the desert wind. He frequently urged the youth of Israel to try the same sort of pioneering that he had. “We have always been a small people,” he would say, and then urge “the creation of a model society and the institution of revolutionary changes.” He did not drink or smoke, rarely went to concerts, disliked movies. The only novel he had ever read, he said, was Leon Uris’ Exodus, and that because “I wanted to know what influences the Jews of America. I forced myself to read it.”
Ben-Gurion was adored by Israelis in general, disliked by some political adversaries. But he was loved by only a few who knew him intimately, and of these the most loving was his wife Paula. She gave him three children, cooked for him even when he was Prime Minister, and acted as a buffer against outsiders, including his colleagues in the government. “Anyone can be Prime Minister of Israel,” she liked to say, “but there is only one man who can be Ben-Gurion.” Paula’s death in 1968 was a shock from which Ben-Gurion never recovered. Thus his final wish, which was granted last week: to be buried, after the unavoidable panoply of a state funeral, at her side at Sde Boker.
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