A state at any cost, p.76
A State at Any Cost, page 76
In the second letter, Ben-Gurion mentioned the letters that Zemach had sent to Płońsk from Palestine. They had been very precious for him; he had saved them all and taken them when he went to study in Salonica and Istanbul. He named the guesthouse where he had stayed. The letters had been left in the room with all his other belongings when he set out for a visit to Palestine in August 1914. World War I had broken out when he was on his way and he had been unable to return and the letters had been lost. “I was very sad about the loss of your letters, which were written in a very clear hand, in vibrant, fluent, picturesque style, offering vivid accounts of your early days in Palestine,” he wrote. He said that he had not thought then that Zemach would become “one of the pillars of contemporary Hebrew literature, of the generation of Bialik.” When he moved to Jerusalem to work on the staff of Ha’ahdut, Zemach was already a “famous author,” he wrote, and he had met other writers at his home. “I listened to the conversations without saying a word. I was very shy back then,” Ben-Gurion wrote. He wanted to hope that Zemach’s success as an author had its roots in their work together in Ezra. Then he repeated how much he regretted the loss of the letters, which were “living documents of the personal dawn of our lives and the lives of our generation, and also a turning point in Jewish history.” He recounted the political debates they had conducted in their twenties, one siding with Po’alei Zion and the other with Hapo’el Hatza’ir. “For many years—not just a few—it seemed to me that an ideological and political barrier had risen between us. I was an activist and you inclined more to Magnes’s way of thinking, and you did not look kindly on my political struggle.” It was important for him to say that he had tied his politics to those of Berl Katznelson and that he had remained at Sejera longer than Zemach had. “I stayed there for two years,” he claimed, almost doubling his time there, as he tended to do. His memory also misled him when he recorded the Hebrew date of his arrival in Palestine. He wrote that he had never dreamed in those days that he would see the State of Israel. It was a courteous letter, more personal than its predecessor, but its first three pages could leave no doubt that it had been written at the desk of the prime minister.
Then, on the fourth page of the five-page letter, Ben-Gurion was suddenly carried away by his youthful friendship. Zemach was once more the senior of the two. “In my memory, you live as the handsome youth of fifty-seven years ago, friend of my youth, beloved of my soul, a friend sharing the dreams and fantasies of adolescence,” he told him. “I do not know why I am writing you these things,” he continued, “but when I began to think about it, I was overwhelmed by memories of Płońsk and Warsaw.” He also mentioned Shmuel Fuchs and Shlomo Lavi, as well as Rachel Nelkin, later Beit Halahmi, the girl he had loved in Płońsk, and other childhood memories.
One memory was stronger than all the others. It was when Ben-Gurion had saved Zemach from his father, after Zemach had stolen several hundred rubles from his father’s money box to pay for his flight to Palestine. “You came to me in Warsaw, and I hid you with an acquaintance, because we feared that your father would quickly arrive and search for you,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “And the next day your father indeed appeared in the Pronbuk home at Novolowsky 12 and pleaded with me to bring the two of you together, but I was afraid to do that and he embraced my knees and wept and it seemed to me that I would burst with sorrow and shame. Father Zemach pleading with a boy like me. In the end I consented, when he promised me that he would not take you back, only see you before you trip to bid you farewell.”
Zemach was deeply hurt by this story, which had also appeared in the Płońsk memorial book that Zemach had himself edited, as well as in Ben-Gurion’s memoirs. “I must say that Ben-Gurion is certainly not correct in his account of this event, when he relates that my father kneeled before him and kissed him and pleaded with him to tell where I was,” Zemach dictated to his daughter. “It is simply impossible to conceive that my father fell on his knees. A Jew does not fall on his knees, all the more so a Jew like my father.” He also denied that Ben-Gurion had arranged a proper farewell. “Such a thing never happened,” he asserted.†49
At the end of his letter, Ben-Gurion stated for the third time that he had lost Zemach’s letters; this time he sounded apologetic. He had carefully guarded them, he wrote, in that pension, the name of which, Tatar, he mentioned again, as if he were at a court hearing. He had left them in Istanbul when he departed for his summer vacation, not knowing that a world war would break out. He fondly recalled “the beauty and goodness” of their youth in Płońsk, and then mentioned Zemach’s letters for a fourth time, and for the second time wrote, “I remember you as a handsome and charming youth.” He signed off “Engulfed in love, longing, admiration, and the warmth of boyhood.” Zemach replied that true friendships are acquired only in youth, and that views and ideas cannot harm them. On the contrary, “the older a man gets, forces from deep within him take him back more and more into the world of his boyhood and youth.”50 Thus the two began to share their old age, just as they had shared their boyhoods and youth. And it reawakened the old jealousy that had tormented them almost their entire lives.
* Some of the information seems to have been obtained by the American embassy in Tel Aviv. Ambassador Ogden Reid was invited for a helicopter tour of the Negev; when he asked his escort what he saw there, not far from Dimona, he was told that it was a new textile factory. Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary that, at one meeting between them, the young ambassador had raised his voice; Ben-Gurion told him to leave the room at once. He had to remember that he was but an ambassador, and that when he spoke with the leader of a country, even a small one, he had to speak with all due civility. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, Jan. 5, 1961; Gris 2009, p. 90ff.)
† Ben-Gurion’s biographer Michael Bar-Zohar has noted the affront that Zemach felt and pointed to a letter from Ben-Gurion to Fuchs that offers a different account of Zemach’s father’s visit to his room. “He spoke with me calmly and with no sign of excitement,” Ben-Gurion wrote to Fuchs. This sentence does not prove that Ben-Gurion made up the other story; it might testify to an attempt to conceal the incident. According to Bar-Zohar, however, Ben-Gurion later apologized to Zemach. (Ben-Gurion to Shmuel Fuchs, Feb. 14, 1905, in Erez 1971, p. 49; Bar-Zohar 1977, p. 37.)
■ 24 ■
TWILIGHT
“WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF THE ATOM”
As 1960 approached, Ben-Gurion increasingly evinced signs of cognitive decline, and he gradually lost touch with reality. At the end of the summer of 1961, he responded to a request from Look magazine to forecast the state of humankind fifty years hence. He predicted that the Soviet Union would evolve into a democracy and that Europe would unite. He maintained that the world would be organized as a federation of autonomous polities united under a social-democratic regime, with a global police force that would resolve conflicts. Armies would be disbanded. The United Nations would establish a World Court with its seat in Jerusalem. Most of his other predictions had to do with scientific developments, in particular the enhancement of the human brain. New and powerful sources of energy would enable the desalinization of seawater and the “air-conditioning of the globe will grant all parts of the world a moderate climate.” Humanity would settle the moon and Mars. He also prophesied the development of an injection that could change the color of human skin from black to white or the other way around, which would end the practice of racial segregation in the United States. The United States would be revamped as a welfare state. Average life expectancy would reach one hundred. It took him six drafts to put his prediction of the future in final form.1
Despite this vast optimism, he continued to be troubled by visions of a dark future. At the end of 1962, he grew distressed, once again, about the concentration of Israel’s population in Tel Aviv, reiterating the fear he had felt since the 1930s that Tel Aviv would end up being a second Carthage. The danger had only grown since then, he said: “We live in the age of the atom—are we to mass everyone in one place so that the atom will annihilate them?”2
The compulsive behavior noted by Moshé Feldenkrais had always been part of his personality, central to his leadership style, along with his proclivity for provocative pronouncements, some of which were staged while others were uncontrolled.3 The boundaries between statesmanship and politics, realism and fantasy, courage and adventurism, originality and obstinacy, were often blurred in his character. Many of the initiatives and ideas he proposed over the years made his acquaintances’ jaws drop. But because he was such a venerated and powerful leader, a humorless one who often elicited awe, his pronouncements produced an impact that they did not always deserve. He once, out of the blue, proposed that Tel Aviv should be renamed Jaffa, or Jaffa–Tel Aviv.4 In January 1952, he told the Cabinet that the only way to resolve the conflict with the Arabs was to convert them to Judaism. He solicited an expert opinion on that idea.
It was difficult to assess these and other proposals, because he presented them with great conviction and often vehemence, as if they were vital to the future of the country and society. That was the case when he tried to prove that Jewish religious law did not in fact prohibit the consumption of pork, or when he announced, on the basis of his own research, that the number of Israelites who participated in the Exodus from Egypt was not six hundred thousand, as the Bible says, but only six hundred or a bit more.5 On any number of occasions he was carried away by his passion for disputation and victory and veered off into eccentricity. He thus invested an enormous amount of energy and time in skirmishes over what he thought was proper Hebrew usage.
*
Soon after his failed attempt, in 1956, to establish a new Middle East, he embarked on further political initiatives that seemed fantastical even at the time. One of these had been brought back from Paris by Shimon Peres, according to which France would grant Israel control over French Guiana, turning that French territory on the southern shore of the Caribbean Sea, north of Brazil, into an Israeli colony. A team of Israeli experts were sent to Guiana to look into the matter. A few months later, he presented President Charles de Gaulle with a plan to solve the Algerian problem without ending French rule. It involved partitioning the area between the French and the Arabs and settling another million French nationals there.6
At around that time, the Mossad director, Isser Harel, claimed that Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had recruited German scientists for a project to build missiles that would be able to strike targets anywhere south of Beirut. Harel saw the project as a major threat to Israel. The press soon began publishing reports that presented the work of the German scientists as a continuation of the extermination of the Jews under Hitler. Ben-Gurion suspected that Harel was exaggerating, and replaced him with the chief of military intelligence, Meir Amit. Harel’s dismissal set off a storm in Mapai, with some demanding Ben-Gurion’s ouster. “Isser is going from one person to another and Golda is putting together a conspiracy,” Navon wrote. He noted that Golda Meir opposed both military ties with Germany and the Dimona project; furthermore, she hated Shimon Peres, whom she saw as a threat.7 Navon tried unsuccessfully to make sense of what he termed the “hidden psychological recesses” in the relations between Ben-Gurion and Meir. “When he seeks her favor, she thinks he is insincere; when he doesn’t, he’s ignoring her, and there’s no end to it. Love, admiration, hatred, and jealousy merge one into the other, and the wretched romance of this couple has no remedy.”8
His treatment of the hysteria regarding the German scientists showed that he was still capable of reasonable and pragmatic decisions. But Ben-Gurion also feared that the Adenauer era was coming to an end. He repeatedly inquired into the chancellor’s health, fearing that his death would take with it the agreements with Israel. In 1961 he allowed Shimon Peres to propose a secret pact to Germany, according to which, in time of need, Israel would entertain a German request to establish military bases in Israel.9 Just as the affair of the German scientists in Egypt was reaching its climax, a political crisis in Germany led to the resignation of Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss. Ben-Gurion feared the future of the Dimona project was in jeopardy. Simultaneously, President John Kennedy was demonstrating ever more determination to prevent nuclear proliferation, and demanded that the Dimona reactor be placed under outside oversight.10
On April 17, 1963, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq declared the establishment of a United Arab Republic. Its goals included “the liberation of Palestine.” Two days later, Chief of Staff Tzur offered the Cabinet a survey of the development’s significance, focusing on the danger it presented to the stability of the regime in Jordan, whose King Hussein was, Tzur maintained, in danger of assassination. He told the ministers that the IDF could, with a lead time of twelve hours, capture all of East Jerusalem with the exception of the Old City. With forty-eight-hour advance notice it could take the entire West Bank, in an operation that would last twenty-four hours. Ben-Gurion had pondered such plans any number of times over the years; he opposed the idea this time for the same reason he had in the past: “This time the Arabs won’t run away,” he feared.11
Golda Meir was in the hospital at the time, meaning that Ben-Gurion was also acting as foreign minister. In that capacity, he ordered that letters be drafted to several dozen prime ministers and presidents. The text was more or less identical, condemning the Arab intention of destroying Israel and demanding that the United Nations require the Arabs to make peace. The Foreign Ministry’s staff wondered why Ben-Gurion had suddenly decided that this was necessary, but did not see it as a major deviation from diplomatic routine. In fact, Ben-Gurion was in a frenzy, firing off two letters—a total of sixteen pages—to President Kennedy. A Foreign Ministry official referred to the second of these as “sick.”12 The meaning of the letters was that Ben-Gurion might be prepared to compromise with the United States regarding the Dimona project.
“IT MAY NOT HAPPEN IN MY LIFETIME”
His first letter to Kennedy evinced anxiety and a state of emergency. He took the words “liberation of Palestine” that had been included in the declaration of the new Arab state as if they were an actual plan for an immediate attack on Israel aimed at destroying it.
“The ‘liberation of Palestine’ is impossible without the total destruction of the people in Israel,” he declared. He quoted at length from one of Hitler’s pronouncements about the extermination of the Jewish people. The nations of the world had treated Hitler’s declaration “with indifference and equanimity, enabling the Holocaust,” he wrote. “Six million Jews in all the countries under Nazi occupation (except Bulgaria), men and women, old and young, infants and babies, were burnt, strangled, buried alive.”
To avert the catastrophe that the liberation of Palestine would bring on, Ben-Gurion demanded that Kennedy and Khrushchev issue a joint statement guaranteeing the integrity of all the countries of the Middle East, withdrawing aid from any country that threatened to attack any other, that maintained a state of war against another country, or that refused to recognize another country. He stressed that the declaration needed also to threaten sanctions for noncompliance. He noted that the Soviet Union was providing arms to Egypt and that the United States was giving economic aid. He knew the chances for such a declaration were not great, but he felt it was incumbent on him to tell the president that the situation in the Middle East had grown inestimably grim. He thus asked Kennedy to free up an hour or two of his time for a conversation about a possible way out of the situation. He would come to Washington on whatever day the president liked, “without publicity.”13 He drafted the Hebrew version of the letter himself and corrected it by hand. The Foreign Ministry staff was stunned, but prepared an English version for him and dispatched it to Washington.
At the next Cabinet meeting, Ben-Gurion focused on how the Arabs could be deterred from attacking Israel. Such a discussion would seem to have been mandated by the declaration of a new united Arab state, but Ben-Gurion intended a discussion of fundamentals that would produce a long-term road map, for a time when he would no longer lead the country. In other words, he wanted to establish his legacy in the area of Israel’s security. He offered four alternatives for ensuring Israel’s survival: public guarantees in the form of a joint Kennedy–Khrushchev statement; a military alliance between Israel and the United States, or alternatively a military alliance with France; full Israeli membership in NATO; or the development of a deterrent weapon of which Ben-Gurion was willing to say only that it required missiles. He stressed that his second alternative referred to an alliance, ratified by Congress, providing that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on the United States. He had sought American guarantees since the 1950s, and had dreamed then of a military alliance with America as well. It was the only thing of any value, Ben-Gurion said in 1955. The military alliance he was speaking of at this point needed, by the nature of things, to include a provision about Dimona. It made Dimona out to be a sort of atonement for the sin that the Jewish people had committed over two millennia, the “sin of weakness,” as Ben-Gurion had put it many years previously.14
In the meantime, Peres returned from Washington and reported to the Cabinet on his talk with Kennedy. The president asked him what he could tell him about Israel’s nuclear plans, and Peres responded that Israel was not going to manufacture atomic weapons and would certainly not be the first country to introduce nuclear arms into the region. Kennedy also took an interest in why Harel was replaced, and in the work of the German scientists in Egypt. It was an official meeting, with Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Avraham Harman, in attendance. “Kennedy looked less handsome than in his photographs,” Peres told the ministers.15
