Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
—Psalms 121:4
On the wall of his unpretentious office in infant Israel's ancient capital of Jerusalem, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion keeps a huge map. It is a map of the Moslem world; and in the midst of it the New Jersey-sized state of Israel, heavily outlined in black, looks like a jagged, tiny black arrowhead. "This is to remind me always," he says, "how small we are."
In the nine years since David Ben-Gurion founded the New Jerusalem by the force of a fanatical vision and the shrewdness of a gun-toting prophet, there have been times when much of the world has wondered just how big the tiny republic thinks it is. For one peaceful spell, Israel's unsleeping sentinel retired, full of years and honors, to Sde Boker, a pioneer desert settlement, to plough fields, search the writings of the philosophers for "universal truth" and ponder the mission of man—and of Israel. Then, white of mane but wearing the familiar khaki battle dress of his wartime leadership, the hard, headlong man of decision came back to power in 1955.
"There is too much chasing after comfort, profits and riches," he thundered in the accents of an Old Testament patriarch. Israel, he proclaimed, was in danger. Israel's youth must gird itself, man new settlements along the threatened border, stand ready to repel the merciless Arab. Last October, at 70, he risked all on a bold and cunning "preventive war" to knock out Nasser's new, Soviet-supplied army.*
"We Never Despaired." From that moment on, Israel and its impassioned lawgiver have defied the whole world. Condemned as an aggressor for the Sinai attack, Israel flouted six successive U.N. Assembly orders to get out of Egypt. Israel defied President Eisenhower's publicly pronounced warnings of "pressure" and the U.N. Assembly's well-publicized moves for "military, economic or financial" sanctions. Israel balked at the U.S. President's insistence that no nation invading another in the face of U.N. disapproval should set conditions for its withdrawal. Unlike its fellow preventive warriors, Britain and France, who completed their unconditional withdrawal within 27 days, Israel held out.
Even in yielding last week, the un-slumbering caretaker of the reconstituted Zion breathed defiance and, with his Old Testament as ever to hand, proclaimed that Israel would fight on more fiercely than before. "I believe in our future," he said in an interview with TIME Correspondent George de Carvalho. "Absolutely. I know we can survive and flourish. We must survive, and we will survive. We have a history of 4,000 years. We were driven out and dispersed about the world for 2,000 years, often hated and persecuted. Our people were tortured and burned at the stake by the thousands. We were expelled from England in the 14th century, we were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, we were expelled from many lands. There were laws against us, pogroms, persecutions of every kind. Hitler exterminated 6,000,000 of us. We never despaired.