A state at any cost, p.78
A State at Any Cost, page 78
“NASSER WON’T DO ANYTHING”
He did not go often to the Knesset, spending most of his time at Sde Boker. He wrote articles, worked on his memoirs, and received visitors, including the foreign press. He continued to receive dozens of letters each week from people who thought he could help them with all sorts of questions and personal problems. It was a medium that he continued to enjoy; he devoted several hours a day to answering his correspondence. His prestige far exceeded the ten seats his party had received. His successor was his greatest enemy now; in fact, his hostility toward Eshkol swelled to the point where he viewed the new prime minister as the people’s enemy. When he was holding himself back, he limited himself to saying that Eshkol lacked “the moral and national qualities required of a prime minister.” At more unbridled moments, he called him a liar, fraud, and coward. Zemach asked himself where his friend’s “criminal vulgarity” toward Eshkol could possibly come from. As one might expect, he came up with a psychological explanation dating back to Płońsk. “The root and the source from which it derives,” Zemach wrote, “is the empty heart that, seeking recompense for the insults of youth, finds them in the troubles of others and self-promotion.”34
On the holiday of Sukkot, in the fall of 1966, some ten thousand people came to Sde Boker to celebrate Ben-Gurion’s birthday. He told everyone that he was sixty years old—the number of years he had lived in the country. Israel marked the event as if it were a national holiday. The IDF organized a huge ceremony at Sde Boker’s amphitheater, with speeches and an audiovisual display. Aharon Meskin, Habima theater’s leading actor, pronounced just two sentences: “The nation loves you, Ben-Gurion. Thank you for all you have done and remain in good health in the future.” He received thousands of congratulatory telegrams from all over the world. The Cabinet also offered its felicitations, after a debate over the wording. Eshkol forbade commending Ben-Gurion for the “development of the country,” because he maintained that his own contribution to the country’s development was greater.35
*
In June 1967, tensions between Israel and Jordan worsened, largely because of terror attacks committed by young Palestinian Arabs, many of them the children of refugees displaced in 1948. At that same time, the questions of why Israel had not conquered the West Bank in the War of Independence and why the Old City of Jerusalem had been allowed to remain in Arab hands were again being debated in Israel. The Ma’ariv correspondent Geula Cohen, interviewing Ben-Gurion for Independence Day, posed a question that his grandson might ask him: “Grandpa, what are the borders of my homeland?” Ben-Gurion replied that the borders of the homeland corresponded to the Green Line, but did not rule out that those might change, just as borders had often moved during history. “We are interested in peace based on the status quo,” he said, “but if the Arabs are not interested in peace, but rather in war, then we will fight, and then perhaps the status quo will be otherwise.” It was the same answer he gave to Israeli citizens who posed the question to him, time and again. Cohen asked him if he would encourage an Israeli child to write a song of yearning for a united Jerusalem. “If he wants to write one, he can write one,” Ben-Gurion replied, adding: “I will not write one.” Ma’ariv also interviewed the former chief of staff Yigael Yadin on the same occasion. Yadin intimated that Ben-Gurion had not wanted to conquer the Old City. A military correspondent for Ha’aretz recalled that the attempt to take Jenin had failed.36 The renewed preoccupation with the borders established by the victory of 1948 may have grown out of the gloomy atmosphere of the time.
When, in May 1967, Egypt announced that it was blocking the Straits of Tiran to Israeli traffic, Ben-Gurion was not alarmed. “In my opinion, Nasser won’t do anything, because he’s satisfied with having closed the Straits. That will enhance his stature,” he wrote. He proposed a limited operation to open shipping to Eilat. Neither did he think that such an operation was urgent. “The army is wonderful, but in this age one shouldn’t fight like David fought Goliath,” he wrote.37 He was presumably acquainted with the current strategy planned by the IDF—a surprise aerial attack to destroy the Egyptian air force. That, as he recalled, was how Egypt had been defeated in the War of Independence: “At the first moment, we defeated their air force,” he once told the Cabinet; a few years later, he repeated that this was the way to defeat Egypt.38 But, contrary to the opinion of the IDF’s generals, and most politicians and pundits, and in particular unlike the frightened public, Ben-Gurion opposed an Israeli first strike. He feared that war against Egypt and Syria would lead to the conquest of the West Bank from Jordan—and with it the acquisition of more Arabs.
Neither did he see any immediate need to conquer Sinai or the Gaza Strip, nor did he think it would be worthwhile to capture East Jerusalem. He apparently knew that, six months hence, Israel’s deterrent capability would improve dramatically, averting war.39 In the meantime, Israel commenced a massive reserve call-up. Ben-Gurion thought it was a mistake. When he said as much to the chief of staff, Rabin panicked. He suffered a breakdown and required medical treatment.
Most Israelis had no clue that this was Ben-Gurion’s opinion, as he did not state it publicly. They believed that the war was being delayed because Eshkol was waffling and weak. Ben-Gurion offered the prime minister no backing, and did nothing to cool down the bellicose atmosphere. When he heard that the world’s socialist parties had issued a statement of support for Mapai, his comment was: “Mapai does not support the State of Israel.”40
Neither did he use his influence to restrain the army, with the exception of that grim conversation with Rabin. When calls for Eshkol’s replacement increased, Ben-Gurion agreed to receive in his home the most dangerous and repulsive man he had known before he decided that Eshkol was even more dangerous and repulsive—namely, Menachem Begin. Begin had first tried to pressure Eshkol to bring Ben-Gurion back into the Cabinet, but when Eshkol refused, he proposed that Ben-Gurion return as prime minister and lead the country into war. Only when they met did Begin learn, to his astonishment, that Ben-Gurion opposed going to war, in part because he feared it would lead to Israeli conquest of territories populated by Arabs.41 Four days before the war began, Ben-Gurion copied into his diary numbers he found in a news clipping from nineteen years previously, according to which everyone was exaggerating the number of Palestinian refugees. Even the best binoculars would not be able to discern more than three hundred thousand of them, the clipping said. He himself generally spoke of six hundred thousand refugees.42
He supported replacing Eshkol, suggesting that Dayan serve as prime minister and defense minister; he also hinted that he would agree to reassume the post of prime minister if Dayan were to serve as defense minister. “As long as Eshkol is prime minister, we will descend into perdition,” he wrote. Perhaps he thought that Dayan would operate under his guidance, or at least in coordination with him. But Dayan favored war and Ben-Gurion knew it. The attraction of getting rid of Eshkol seems, however, to have been irresistible. When Eshkol agreed, reluctantly, that Dayan could join the government as defense minister, Ben-Gurion gave his consent to this arrangement on condition that Peres tell Eshkol that Rafi did not consider him to be the right man to head the government.43 Eshkol was now backed by a broad coalition, including Begin, who was appointed minister without portfolio.
The Six-Day War broke out as a result of repeated Palestinian attacks on Israel, and Israel’s reprisals against Syria and Jordan. Nasser ostensibly acted in their support by mobilizing the Egyptian army. Israel’s attack on Egypt on June 5, 1967, reflected the army’s pressure on the Eshkol government to act, as well as widespread panic created by Nasser’s threats to eliminate Israel.
“DEMOLISH THE WALL”
Ben-Gurion spent the first day of the war at his home in Tel Aviv. Dayan promised to visit and brief him. While waiting for him, Ben-Gurion started reading the new issue of a literary magazine, Molad, which had published a selection of the letters he had sent to Shmuel Fuchs in his youth. He read them avidly, as if encountering them for the first time. So his day passed, with his memories, cut off from everything that was happening, and Dayan did not show up. “He is bad-hearted,” he once told Navon about Dayan.44 The next day, Dayan sent a General Staff officer to inform him that the operation in the south had begun, in the air and on land. “I believe that it is a grave mistake,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “The great thing that took place in the past week is Levi Eshkol’s removal,” he wrote.45 He also opposed capturing the Golan Heights. But soon he, too, was swept up by that ecstasy produced by the victory and conquests.46
Journalists from around the world peppered him with questions about what should happen next. Ben-Gurion issued a public statement: he advocated withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a peace treaty with Egypt that would guarantee free passage of ships coming to Eilat through the Tiran Straits and the Suez Canal. The Gaza Strip should remain under Israeli control. Israel should withdraw from the Golan Heights as part of a peace treaty with Syria. The government should negotiate with representatives of the inhabitants of the West Bank to establish an autonomous entity tied to Israel economically, with an outlet to the sea through Haifa, Ashdod, or Gaza. Palestinian refugees should be moved from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, with the refugees’ consent and Israeli assistance. All the Jews who had once lived in Hebron should be permitted to return. Israel would protect the holy sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere that were now under its control; the IDF would deploy on the western bank of the Jordan River to guarantee the West Bank’s independence from Jordan. There would be no negotiations over the future of the Old City of Jerusalem and its environs. From the time of King David it had been the capital of Israel, and so it would remain forever.47
The majority of Israelis thus moved, quite suddenly, from fear of another Holocaust to the verge of the messianic era. Ben-Gurion had gone through no few such sudden shifts in his personal life; he recalled one from the end of the War of Independence. “The entire Jewish population is drunk with victory,” he wrote then. “A year ago, every Jew would have said that we have no chance, and today everyone is saying that no one can stand in our way.”48 He placed himself at the head of those who were demanding to move Jews into the Old City, as if he were seeking atonement for what he had decided not to do during the War of Independence. Less than two weeks after the war, he proposed demolishing the Old City wall. “It will unify Jerusalem and make it easier for it to expand to the east, south, north, and west,” he argued. It was the most notable testimony yet to the weakness of mind that had, for several years, produced any number of fantastical proposals of this sort. As always, he held fast to his idea, reiterating it over and over again: “Demolish the wall.” He claimed that the wall had no historical value, as it had been built only in the sixteenth century at the order of the Ottoman sultan.49 It was not easy for him to live with the fact that the Old City had been taken under a government led by Eshkol, in which Begin served, in a war that he himself had opposed.
The conquest of the Old City corrected what many Israelis saw as the major shortcoming of the political order that Ben-Gurion had bestowed on the Jewish state nineteen years earlier; up until a few days before, Ben-Gurion had viewed the borders set in 1949 an acceptable basis for a final status arrangement with the Arabs. In this sense, the Six-Day War was the second round in the battle for Palestine; the Sinai Campaign now seemed like but an interim episode. The new situation sent him back to the dawn of Zionism. He was overwhelmed by a “profound and joyous experience,” he wrote. “I experienced something so profound only on my first night after arriving in Petah Tikvah, when I heard the howling of the jackals and the neighing of the donkeys and I felt that I was in our nation’s renewed homeland, not in exile in a foreign land.”50
The sense that history was beginning again from the start led him to renew his acquaintance with Musa al-Alami, the man he had so often quoted over the intervening thirty years as proof of his contention that the Arabs did not want peace. Ten years before, he had told Navon that he missed Alami. He asked that he be found. Alami was in London; Ben-Gurion’s attempt to speak to him by telephone seemed to be a metaphorical confirmation of his opinion on the chances for dialogue with the Palestinian Arabs, because the connection was bad. “He didn’t hear me, although I heard him. It got a little better afterward, he heard me but I didn’t hear him,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.51
*
The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip suddenly confronted Israelis with the truth about the conflict over Palestine, including the suffering of the refugees and their yearning to undo their national catastrophe and take back the parts of the homeland, the homes, and the property they had lost, beginning in 1947. Many Israelis felt that they had reached a historical crossroads that required them to make a choice. While the war was still in progress, an impassioned debate over the fundamental values of Zionist identity reignited. Few of the people involved offered real alternatives. One who did was Shlomo Zemach. The war made his views more extreme, as it did for many Israelis, both those on the left and, even more so, those of the center and right. Many longed for a new start, as Zemach did. “To go to the Arabs and say to them—we have been going the wrong way all these years … and now we have come to you, tribes of Arabia, to live under your protection.”52
Ensuring a Jewish majority in a democratic Israel required the immediate immigration of two million Jews from other countries, or expelling the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or giving up the captured territories, including East Jerusalem, even without a peace treaty. The idea of resettling in the West Bank the 1947–49 refugees living in Gaza was not carried out and in retrospect was the single greatest mistake of those years.53 One Cabinet meeting also raised the possibility of asking Canada and Brazil to take in the Gaza refugees. Israeli Jews soon started settling in Judea and Samaria, as they called the northern and southern parts of the West Bank, just as they had settled in the central and northern parts of Palestine during the sixty years since Ben-Gurion’s arrival, “village by village.” In that sense, the Six-Day War propelled the Zionist project forward, in the Ben-Gurion spirit. After visiting the Golan Heights in August 1967, he changed his mind and declared that Israel should never leave it, even in exchange for a peace treaty. In the months that followed, he began to voice a vague version of a formulation he had used in the past: “If I had to choose between a small Israel with peace and a large Israel without peace, I would prefer a small Israel.” Those who were impressed by this statement did not know that he had never believed that peace was really possible. He had always dreamed of possessing the entire Land of Israel, and that continued to be his ultimate wish. “If only the government had the strength and will to hold fast to the occupied territories when our neighbors refuse to discuss peace with us,” he wrote in July 1967. He maintained, as he always had, that Israel’s survival depended on bringing in millions of Jewish immigrants. “If the Zionist movement had not made do with words, and instead every Zionist had come here, we would long since have become the majority on both banks of the Jordan, and Israel would have come into being prior to World War I and certainly before World War II,” he wrote. “We must now principally see to a large wave of immigration from the prosperous world—the danger of war has still not passed.”54 He spent some three months in Tel Aviv, caught up in politics, the war, and the connection between them. Then he returned to Sde Boker, to write.
“MY PAULA ADMIRED YOU”
Paula died in January 1968 of a stroke. Israel’s president and many Cabinet ministers and members of the Knesset attended the funeral. Prime Minister Eshkol was notably absent, but issued a statement of mourning; Menachem Begin was notably in attendance. The German ambassador also came. Ben-Gurion decided that she should be buried on the site that he had chosen for himself, on the top of a cliff overlooking a breathtaking desert view of the Zin riverbed. “I was always sure that I would die first,” he said again.
He immediately returned to his work routine. “I did not notice that he was badly shaken after Paula’s death,” one of his bodyguards said. Yehoshua Cohen of Sde Boker also received the impression that her death was not, for Ben-Gurion, a “geological fault line” in his life.*55
For the first time in his life, he was irrelevant, cut off from public life. Rafi turned out to be a passing episode. Most of its members voted to merge with Mapai and Ahdut Ha’avodah to form the Labor Party. Ben-Gurion led the rump that remained, under a new name, into the next election, winning only four seats, one of which went to Isser Harel. In 1970 Ben-Gurion finally resigned from the Knesset. On occasion he still received distinguished guests, among them the former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He continued to lash out at Prime Minister Eshkol, including in a thirty-three-page letter he sent to Golda Meir.56 In addition to accusing him of lies and corruption, he now added “idiocy.” At the Six-Day War victory parade, he sat in the audience instead of on the dais, apparently so as to avoid shaking Eshkol’s hand. That seems to also have been the reason that he refused to accept the Israel Prize he had been awarded, at a ceremony that evening. Eshkol died a few months later, while Ben-Gurion was vacationing at the Tiberias hot springs. He refused to leave the resort to attend the funeral.57
