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Comment and Opinion

Fathom Journal: Book Review | Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel, by Colin Shindler

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Berl Katznelson, one of Labour Zionism’s ideological founders described David Ben-Gurion as ‘history’s gift to the Jewish people.’ Anita Shapira rightly describes Israel’s first Prime Minister as a Jacobin – a product of revolutionary fin de siècle Eastern Europe, a cold enigmatic figure lacking charisma who changed the flow of Jewish history and redirected it into a national channel. As Shapira remarks, ‘people admired Ben-Gurion, but did not really like him.’

Ben-Gurion’s story began as David Gruen (Green) in the township of Plonsk, marooned on the highway between Warsaw and Gdansk. Over 60 per cent of its inhabitants were Jews and many of them were Gerer Hassidim. Ben-Gurion’s father was a mitnaged, an opponent of Hassidism and a member of the early Zionist group, Hibbat Zion. An outsider from the very beginning, he grew up imbibing the writings of the founders of Zionism. He joined Poale Zion at a founding meeting in the Warsaw home of the Marxist Zionist, Yitzhak Tabenkin and influenced by the 1905 Russian revolution went off to Palestine to build socialism. There, he Hebraised his name to Ben-Gurion – a resistance fighter featured in Flavius Josephus’s War of the Jews.

Shapira argues that Ben-Gurion was less enamoured by the projections of inverted socio-economic pyramids to describe the situation of the Jews by the Marxist Ber Borokhov than by Micha Berdyczewski’s concept of will. Ben-Gurion’s hard, often unemotional, approach – harder than his nemesis, Menachem Begin and certainly less emotional – was cemented in his perception of the reality. For this reason, he related to Churchill’s resolve and rhetoric in the dark days of 1940 and the response of the British to his defiant speeches. In May 1940 Ben-Gurion wrote from London to his wife, describing his wonder at British determination – ‘the level-headedness and inner confidence of this wonderful nation.’ Just as Churchill, despite his sympathy for Zionism, placed British national interests above concern for the Jews, Ben-Gurion similarly did the same for Jewish national interests with regard to the British.

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.