A state at any cost, p.60
A State at Any Cost, page 60
*
His historical lectures grew longer and became a central element of Cabinet debates. At times he seemed to be reliving his days as a laborer at Kfar Saba, and once he seemed to be arguing again for the principle of restraint he had championed in the 1930s. Sometimes he embarrassed his colleagues. He drew one of them into a long debate over Noah’s ark, and once voiced his skepticism that the Jews in the European ghettoes had ever rebelled against the Nazis, as was commonly told. In that case he corrected himself, but once he sent out a letter that his staff apparently did not intercept in time, including this reflection: “Hitler was not an anti-Semite. Hajj Amin al-Hussayni, who was no less a Semite than any of us, was one of Hitler’s friends and helpers.”‡46
It was a time when history, biography, and politics frequently mixed; Ben-Gurion had to explain again and again why Jerusalem’s Old City had not been conquered. He once tried to justify it with a detailed, emotional, and apologetic speech to the Knesset. It boiled down to the fact that the IDF did not have the needed forces, because it had to defend many settlements around the country. “It is impossible to hold Jerusalem if one does not hold the entire country,” he said, citing the conquest of Jerusalem by the Roman army. “The Romans deprived us of liberty and destroyed our land, but they knew how to make war, and we should learn from an enemy who knows how to run a war,” he said. “The Romans did not go to conquer Jerusalem first, the opposite is true. They left Jerusalem for last … and only after they had conquered the country did they besiege Jerusalem.” It was an issue that would keep rearing its head for years to come.47
In November 1952, Chaim Weizmann died. He had served as Israel’s first president. According to his diary, the news “devastated” Ben-Gurion. Yitzhak Navon wrote: “I am keen to know what he thought at that moment.”48
Golda Meir had attributed to Weizmann the statement that, unlike Ben-Gurion, he would be incapable of sending people into war.49 That may well have been true, but Weizmann had never faced such a dilemma, because he had been a statesman without a state. The top Zionist leadership had seen no other relationship that crumpled under such a heavy load of passions. Weizmann’s role in history ended shortly after Israel declared its independence. Ben-Gurion reached the height of his achievement at that same time. His gradual decline lasted for twenty-five years. Weizmann was blessed with a brief decline, less than five years, but during that time he was compelled to live like an exile in his own country.
He had a hard time getting used to the fact that he no longer led the Zionist movement, and tried to intervene in Israel’s foreign policy. Ben-Gurion reprimanded him. The country didn’t really even need a president, he said.50 He briefed Weizmann about government policy only rarely. President Weizmann was elderly and half-blind, and very weak, but Ben-Gurion humiliated him as if he still saw him as a political threat. It began when he didn’t invite Weizmann to add his name to the Declaration of Independence. Weizmann did not participate in the ceremony, because he was in the United States at the time. Ben-Gurion mentioned him in the speech he gave after the declaration, but rejected all appeals to leave a space for Weizmann to sign. He had no obligation to do so. Meyer Weisgal, Weizmann’s aide, proposed adding his name to the declaration, as a symbolic gesture, on the tenth anniversary of independence—five years after the president’s death. He reported that Ben-Gurion told him: “Weizmann doesn’t need it.”51
A few days after Weizmann’s death, Ben-Gurion again astonished the country and the rest of the world with an original and fantastical initiative. He offered Israel’s presidency to Albert Einstein, who did not even speak Hebrew. Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, recalled that Ben-Gurion told him of the idea by telephone and instructed him to call the professor. As Eban pondered how to address the absurd directive he had been given, the proposal was broadcast on the radio. A short while later, his phone rang again. Einstein was on the line. Would the ambassador please get the idea out of Ben-Gurion’s head? he asked. It was absolutely out of the question. Eban could tell from Einstein’s voice that he was dumbfounded.52
Einstein’s refusal did not lower Ben-Gurion’s spirits. According to Navon, he had not really expected him to agree. His next choice was Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. The two men had a long history, dating back to when Ben-Zvi excluded Ben-Gurion from Hashomer. Ben-Gurion now offered an honor that, as he saw it, was devoid of any real content. For Ben-Gurion, it was historical justice. “Ben-Zvi and Rachel arrived,” he wrote the next day, “overjoyed.”53
In May 1953, Ben-Gurion was back at Sde Boker, marveling as if it were his first time there. He had not seen a pioneering project anything like Sde Boker during his forty-seven years in the country, he wrote to its settlers after his return home. “I have never envied another person … but during my visit with you it was difficult to repress a feeling something like jealousy—why did I not have the opportunity to take part in such an endeavor?” Sde Boker “is the pinnacle of pioneering Zionism in our day,” he told the Cabinet.54 By now, his strength was running out. It was a rapid process; tension along the borders speeded it.
“I CAN’T GO ON”
Soon after the end of the War of Independence, Ben-Gurion set down in his diary a strategic assessment he had heard from Ambassador Abba Eban. “He sees no need to run after peace. The armistice is enough for us. If we run after peace, the Arabs will demand a price—borders or refugees or both. We will wait a few years.”55 They waited. On a few occasions, Ben-Gurion had to defend his position in the Cabinet. “On what basis do you propose that we conduct negotiations?” Ben-Gurion asked one of his ministers. “Should we bring back the refugees, the 1947 borders, should we give up Jerusalem, give up the Negev? Egypt will no doubt demand vehemently that we give up the Negev.” A few months later, Ben-Gurion reiterated that he always favored peace, but that “there are limits to our desire for peace with the Arabs.” He had used almost those same words more than thirty years previously. As in the past, he was piqued by claims that Israel was missing chances for peace.56
Other governments and individuals sometimes tried to further contacts between Israel and its neighbors, officially and openly in Lausanne, Switzerland, and secretly on other occasions. It was not hard to make such contact; the problem was the price. For a short time, Israel agreed to discuss the possibility that one hundred thousand refugees would be allowed to return.57 There was also talk of a corridor through the Negev that would connect Egypt and Jordan, and that Jordan would receive free access to Haifa’s port. The assassination of Jordan’s King Abdullah I in July 1951 made it difficult to continue the talks with that country.58
Ben-Gurion did not rush to respond to a proposal from the president of Syria, Husni al-Za’im, that the two leaders meet. One thing Syria offered to talk about was the possibility that it would take in up to 350,000 Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion preferred to sign an armistice agreement first. Za’im was assassinated soon thereafter and his offer was forgotten.59 Such events confirmed the basic assumption about the conflict that Ben-Gurion had long adhered to: “The people who make Arab policy today will agree to make peace with us if we go to Madagascar or some other place and leave their country.” Madagascar, an island off Africa, occurred to him because of an early Nazi proposal to send Germany’s Jews there. And, as many times in the past, he did not forget to cite the lesson he had learned from Musa al-Alami.60
It was not by chance that he again mentioned this Palestinian leader. While Israel signed armistice agreements with its Arab neighbors, it did not do so with the Palestinian people. Tens of thousands of them, uprooted during the war, were trying to return to their homes. Like after the partition decision of 1947, it was not always possible to distinguish between acts of theft, robbery, sabotage, and murder committed with criminal intent and the acts of national resistance. As the Haganah had done in the 1930s and 1940s, the IDF staged operations meant to punish, avenge, and deter.
On February 5, 1951, a thirty-nine-year-old immigrant from Hungary who lived in a house on the edge of the abandoned Arab village of Malha, next to Jerusalem, was murdered. The assailants raped his wife and ransacked their home. The IDF proposed a retaliation aimed at the Jordanian army; Ben-Gurion opposed that and ordered the army “to blow up the adjacent village responsible for the crime,” as he wrote. The name of the village was Sharafat, where he had once sat under the oldest oak tree in Palestine with Musa al-Alami. An IDF force penetrated the village and attacked several houses. The Jordanians reported a dozen dead, including three women and five children, and several wounded. This became the standard Israeli method of operation, meant, according to Moshe Dayan, “to set a high price on our blood.” Alongside its punitive and deterrent rationale, the price tag was in keeping with the biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye.”61
The army, the police, and later the Border Guard, a force established specifically for this purpose, tried to halt the return of refugees and expelled many of those who managed to infiltrate Israel.62 It was a major mission for the security forces. A related mission was the expulsion of large numbers of Bedouin from the Negev. These efforts were only partially successful; in the five years following the War of Independence, about twenty thousand Arabs managed to return to their homes.§63
At the end of 1952, Ben-Gurion asked to be excused from chairing a Cabinet meeting. “I have no strength left,” he explained. His load was beyond anything a human being could bear, he said. “I do not know how many more days I can go on like this,” he wrote in his diary. He received another two-month leave from his responsibilities as prime minister, and suggested that Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol fill in for him.64 The next evening, he went to see a show at the Cameri Theatre, resuming his youthful hobby of drama criticism. The play was good, and the production nice and appropriate for the material, he said of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan. He went to the Tiberias hot springs; the members of the Cabinet came to have dinner with him.65 But this time also the vacation did not last long. At the beginning of February 1953, he appeared at a Cabinet meeting and proposed an invasion of Jordan, with the purpose of conquering or destroying the town of Qalqilya.
The day before, a cargo train on its way from Haifa to Lod was attacked. A mine knocked three cars off the tracks, after which assailants fired on the train. No one was hurt, and the train was back on its way a few hours later.66 Several of the ministers opposed the proposed action. One said that it was not worthwhile conquering Qalqilya, because Israel would have to withdraw afterward, which would be a humiliation. Ben-Gurion said that the town did not have to be captured, only destroyed. The inhabitants would flee and they would have nowhere to come back to. The minister without portfolio Pinhas Lavon (Mapai) expressed concern that women and children might be killed. As in the past, Ben-Gurion responded that there was no way to prevent women and children from being hurt when an Arab village was attacked. He spoke vehemently: “If I were to act according to Pinhas Lavon’s logic,” he charged, “I could reach the point of saying that people should not have children because children can turn into criminals, a boy can be an idiot, a child could come down with polio, there are any number of such cases … If we were to work according to that logic, we would not have a country.”
As he often did, he stressed the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. “When I send a platoon of soldiers to guard the border, there is risk involved, and when, unfortunately and painfully, I receive a report that a person has been killed, I feel responsible for that loss of life.” The Cabinet authorized him to plan a major military action, but to his chagrin it required him to bring it to the Cabinet for approval before carrying it out. As a result of the tension, he did not resume his vacation. He went back to work for, in his words, “as long as my strength lasts.”67 This time he had enough strength for five months. Then, at the end of a long monologue advocating a resumption of work in King Solomon’s copper mines, he said: “I must have a vacation. I can’t go on.” He proposed that Moshe Sharett fill in for him as prime minister and Pinhas Lavon as defense minister. He promised to make himself available to the chief of staff and ministers, on condition that they allow him at least two weeks of rest. The Cabinet approved a vacation of “about” eight weeks.68
A few months later, he again took a trip to Sde Boker. This time it was to look into what sort of work he could do there. “They had already heard rumors that I wanted to come,” he noted. He asked about the water problem and grazing, and gave them IL 1,200 for the purchase of two camels; the sum was equivalent to almost five months of a Knesset member’s salary.69 He asked if the crater could be filled with water.70
“EVERY WORD IS TRUE!”
During the vacations he took in 1953, Ben-Gurion again devoted his time to studying the state of the IDF. “The inquiries lasted for more than six weeks,” he later said. “I not only looked into the Defense Ministry, but also went from place to place, to every army camp. I made a thorough investigation. Mordechai Maklef managed to make some improvements during his single year as chief of staff. He also upgraded the national security conception that had guided Ben-Gurion since the 1930s, “aggressive defense” or, as it was termed in the 1950s, “preventative war and preemptive strike.”71 But the reports received might have reminded him of his seminar of 1947, when he learned about the Haganah’s sorry state. There was an ominous disparity between the IDF’s strength and that of the Arab armies.
Moshe Dayan, then chief of the IDF’s operations branch, told the Cabinet that tensions along the border with Jordan had not been as high since the War of Independence. He was concerned not only by the incidents of murder and robbery, but also by the failure of all efforts to prevent them. The army had deployed fourteen hundred ambushes to capture infiltrators, but most of them failed because, Dayan said, the soldiers were insufficiently trained. Most ambushes and hot pursuits had failed—only thirteen of the forty-two offensive missions assigned to the IDF that year had achieved their objectives. An IDF study in 1954 again found that “the high percentage of backward immigrants in the IDF has a negative effect on the quality of the army in comparison with the War of Independence.”72
One report contended that if revolutionary changes were not made, the Arabs would surely win the next war. “The picture is appalling,” it stated. Before conveying his findings to the Cabinet, Ben-Gurion warned the ministers that they should prepare to be stunned. The report he would make included terrifying information that would shock them. They should “gird their loins,” he told them, because they would need to make heroic efforts to see the situation as it was. Of himself, he said: “While I am no coward, my eyes went dark.” Two days later, he offered a similar survey of the army to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The educational level of a large proportion of the IDF’s soldiers was, he said, “almost like that of the Arabs.” Once again, and even more so than in the past, the ministerial responsibility for this state of affairs was entirely his, but instead of addressing it, the Cabinet debate detoured into an elucidation of the fundamentals of Zionism’s attitudes toward the Arabs. Ben-Gurion again harked back to his early days in Palestine. The question had not bothered him until two Jews were killed right by him, he said, but “since then it has pursued me.”73
One Cabinet minister demanded a clear answer to the question of whether Israel would win the next war. Ben-Gurion first responded that the country was “prepared” for war, but subsequently merely offered one of those convoluted statements that always left him an opening for claiming that everything that happened had been anticipated. “Only a giant fighting a dwarf, or an idiot, can say with one hundred percent certainty that he will win … but to the extent that probabilities need to be considered, in a matter of this sort about which there is nothing other than probabilistic computation, I am more or less certain that in a wartime confrontation between us and the Arab world, we will win.”74 A few weeks later, he coined names for two air force jets, calling them Sa’ar and Sufah, two Hebrew words meaning “storm” or “tempest.” He took the names from Psalm 83:16: “Pursue them with your tempest, terrify them with your storm.” The entire psalm “matches our situation today,” he noted. It is indeed a psalm replete with fear, implying that the Jewish people can do nothing to save themselves; everything is in God’s hands.75
Before the year was out, Ben-Gurion made more proposals to capture Jordanian territory, including the town of Tulkarem and East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. When he was told that three Israeli soldiers had been killed, he proposed “an aggressive action by a large force on the other side” of the border. He told Sharett that what he meant by that was the conquest of Hebron. He termed it “a means of defense.”76 These ideas were not carried out.
His willingness to invade Jordan reflected his contempt for the armistice lines. “When I look at this strange and ridiculous map … I see it not as a Jew but also as an Arab. He, too, cannot accept it.” By 1951 at the latest, the IDF completed a plan to conquer the West Bank, should Iraq invade Jordan. But during one of his historical lectures to the Cabinet, Ben-Gurion contested the thesis that the IDF had missed an opportunity to conquer the West Bank during the War of Independence, and argued that not doing so had given Israel a major advantage. Had all the Arab territories to the west of the Jordan River been captured, he argued, the number of refugees would have risen from 800,000 to 1.5 million. “That would not add to our strength and would not bolster our position in the world.” As in the past, it was important for him to stress, over and over again, that the Arabs had fled and had not been expelled, but this time he suddenly added: “This small country, which has many enemies in the world, will suffer greatly from these refugees in the future. The world is not easily adjusting to the fact that hundreds of thousands of refugees have been expelled from their homes. It is a fact that hundreds of thousands of people were expelled from their homes. The world has still not come to terms with that.”77
