One night, in March 1926, Ben-Gurion had a nightmare about a lion; it was a few months before his fortieth birthday. His account of it, recorded in Berlin just a few days prior to another visit to Płońsk, makes for one of the most revealing entries in a diary full of color and feeling. In the dream, he wanted to go to a celebration that was being held on the other side of the garden belonging to the priest who lived next to his father’s house, but he had been warned not to go. His enemies were lying in wait for him on the way and might kill him. He did not remember who they were, but, he wrote, “I think they might have been Arabs.” He thus decided to go to a celebration closer by.
There were a lot of people there, but they “melted away,” leaving only Aharon Eisenberg of Rehovot, one of the leaders of the farmers there and a close associate of Chaim Weizmann. He and Eisenberg sat in a large automobile that was hitched up to a lion, tall as a horse and blind. When Ben-Gurion tried to drive, the car skidded from side to side. He suddenly found himself outside the vehicle but close by it, and then the lion pounced on him. Ben-Gurion shouted as loudly as he could, telling Eisenberg to move the car, but Eisenberg did not hear him. “I barely escaped the lion’s claws,” he wrote. He woke up, but when he fell asleep again he was back in the same dream. It was a strange one, he wrote. He consulted his copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams but found no explanation there.1
Four days before the night of that dream he had written: “My health has deteriorated to a great extent and my nerves are totally destroyed.” Two months previously, he had needed to spend a few days in a sanatorium, but his condition seems not to have improved. “My nerves have been destroyed and my ability to work has been depleted,” he wrote then.2 He was working hard; the two and a half years that had gone by since his visit to Soviet Russia had been full of crises and struggles, some of them turbulent in the extreme, and there had been scandals and confrontations, some of them violent. At their height, Ben-Gurion uncovered a plot to murder him. It was now nearly two decades since he had settled in Palestine and gone into politics. He fell ill frequently, his nerves weakened; he endured many disappointments and was often away from home. But by the end of the 1920s, he had become one of the most powerful people in the Zionist labor movement, and thus in the entire Jewish community in Palestine; he endeavored to run the Histadrut as if it were the government of a state-in-the-making. At its height, the Histadrut was responsible for the armed defense of Palestine’s Jews, the establishment of new settlements, and the provision of jobs, health services, and education to tens of thousands of workers.
*
The Histadrut was the national home’s first administrative institution; everyone wanted a piece of its power. Its leaders competed with one another, often hated and envied and thwarted one another. Some of them were salaried employees of the labor union, some activists in the two labor parties that were its principal components—Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hapo’el Hatza’ir. But Sprinzak and most of his colleagues were not persuaded. The “Histadrut government” was notoriously wasteful, rife with irregularities and cronyism.3
The rejection of his proposal for a Labor Army did not put an end to Ben-Gurion’s efforts to turn the Histadrut into the only workers’ organization in Palestine’s Jewish community and to gain it control of the community’s entire labor market. People’s willingness to join the Histadrut depended principally on its ability to provide them with employment through the Histadrut’s Labor Bureau. To this end, the organization set up an Office of Public Works that functioned as a contracting company; in 1924 it was given the name Solel Boneh (Paver Builder). The company employed laborers to pave roads and put up buildings, mostly in the service of the British administration and the local representatives of the Zionist Organization who replaced the Zionist Commission. Another reason people joined the Histadrut was to enjoy the medical services provided by Kupat Holim, a Histadrut subsidiary. At the end of October 1922, Ben-Gurion marveled at the large number of workers—some sixteen thousand—who had joined. About half of them were already registered as dues-paying members, twice as many as there had been two years previously. “I never believed such a large number was possible,” he wrote in his diary. “The Histadrut’s great era is beginning.”4
A short time after returning from Moscow, he proposed that the Histadrut expand its activities into industry. “The time has come to set up large factories belonging to and under the control of the workers,” he declared. He envisioned “hundreds and thousands” of new jobs. He also raised the possibility that the Histadrut might seek private investors for these ventures. He seems to have been concerned that the leftists in his movement would raise ideological objections, and declared that cooperation between private capital and “workers’ concerns” was accepted and successful practice in the Soviet Union.5 In 1924 he demanded that the Zionist Executive provide funding to construct housing for urban workers, warning that if it was not done quickly, the result would be a catastrophe—people would leave the country.6
His opponents accused him of turning the Histadrut into his personal bailiwick, as if “the Histadrut c’est moi.”7 There was something to that, but it wasn’t the whole story. No one else worked so assiduously, throughout the day and into the night. Ben-Gurion brought to his work for the Histadrut the same qualities that had been on display in his previous endeavors—passion and a capacity for learning, and unflagging, almost obsessive diligence. He boned up on issues that were to be discussed at meetings, where he generally did not speak much. When necessary, he lobbied for his position in advance of meetings to ensure that his proposals would pass.
During his first five years in the Histadrut, 158 strikes broke out, involving more than five thousand workers. He carefully categorized the strikes. Most of them, he claimed, succeeded; some ended in compromise; only a few failed.8 He promoted the Histadrut’s cultural activities, including its educational programs and its theater company. Soon there would also be a publishing house—he had strong opinions about which authors’ books ought to be translated into Hebrew.9 He edited Kontres, Ahdut Ha’avodah’s political and literary journal, himself.10 In February 1922, he hosted a visit to Palestine by Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the British Labour Party. “We have gained ourselves a friend,” he wrote. “He is full of admiration.” Not long after that it was important for him to drag Albert Einstein to a session of the Histadrut Convention, so as to offer brief greetings, apparently in German.11 But translating the works of thinkers, and gaining the approbation of foreign VIPs, did not help him maintain control of the Histadrut. He had never been responsible for an organization of such wide-ranging activities; there were too many interests, egos, intrigues, and deceptions, and too many fiefdoms whose chiefs did not accept his authority—Solel Boneh, Kupat Holim, Bank Hapoalim, to name a few. Ben-Gurion thus established his own power base, among the workers themselves. Once a week, sometimes daily, he visited workplaces in the cities, at agricultural settlements, and on the roads. The workers began to see the Histadrut in his image. To them, he was the Histadrut, said Berl Repetur, then a foreman at the Haifa port.12
In Repetur’s account of the visit, he described Ben-Gurion as a short man in a long leather coat and pants that looked like riding breeches, tucked into high boots. He paused by a few workers, asked them questions, and recorded their answers in a small notebook—who they were, where they were from, when they had arrived and in what framework. He took interest in their jobs—their crates, iron, wood—how many hours they worked, how much they earned. Most of the workers knew only Russian and Yiddish. Then Ben-Gurion asked to speak to the foreman. Repetur was eighteen years old and had come to Palestine from Russia about a year and a half previously. Ben-Gurion asked to be shown around the facility. He was disappointed; there were too many Arab workers, he complained. He then asked Repetur whether the Jewish workers were armed, and Repetur told him that there were four pistols, in case they were attacked. Ben-Gurion asked about the mood of the workers, how many of them would stay in Palestine, how many would return to Russia, and what their political inclinations were. He then sat himself down in a dry rowboat and the workers gathered around them. He let them talk, and listened carefully. “He sometimes liked to go into such detail that it drove you crazy,” Repetur related.13 He also went to kibbutzim to get updated, recording facts about the goats, eucalyptuses, and lentil crops.14
Sometimes he sat in a circle with the comrades; sometimes he got up on a crate to address them. His short stature did not keep him from radiating determination. He would throw his head back, his chin pointing forward, one hand closed into a fist, the other shoved into his pants pocket.15 His speech was decisive, his words incisive, sometimes blunt. When he could not promise work, he offered hope and faith in Zionism, one who had heard him speak then later related.16 His grassroots work was simply a continuation of the way he had campaigned prior to the elections for the Assembly of Representatives in 1920.
*
His close connection to what was happening in the field, the same proclivity that was on display during his youth in Płońsk, made him a popular and authentic labor leader. He was unable to tame the horde of politicians and bureaucrats who walked the corridors of the Histadrut’s offices, but his standing in Ahdut Ha’avodah grew as he gained ever more support among the workers.17 He also sought out power struggles outside the labor movement, the noisier the better. Such was the fight over the home of one of Tel Aviv’s founders, Shmuel David.
In June 1923, about a dozen workers were employed in building the house. They belonged to the religious workers’ organization, Hapo’el Hamizrahi. The Histadrut demanded to be allotted some of the work and sent protestors to the site. Ben-Gurion made it into a cause célèbre, depicting it as a matter of life or death. There were also private contractors who competed with the Histadrut’s Labor Bureau and Solel Boneh. It was a struggle between the “labor left” and the “bourgeois right”; many of the latter supported Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement.
The struggle needed a recognizable enemy, which Ben-Gurion found in a businessman named David Izmozhik, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. When the battle over the construction of Shmuel David’s house grew worse, Izmozhik called in the police. British policemen who had been transferred to Palestine from Ireland, supplemented by mounted Arabs, surrounded the Histadrut protestors and used clubs to disperse them. Some of the demonstrators were wounded and others arrested. A few were convicted and sentenced to prison terms. Ben-Gurion responded as if summoning the British police were an act of treason against the Jewish nation. As a Zionist elected official, Ben-Gurion maintained, Izmozhik should have referred the disagreement to internal arbitration, or taken it to the Jewish magistrate’s court. He demanded, of course, an investigation.
The Histadrut called for a protest demonstration. Thousands participated. Ben-Gurion was the major speaker. He denounced Izmozhik as a villain, over and over again. Then the two men met and reached an agreement. Hapo’el Hamizrahi would carry on building Shmuel David’s home, but 27 percent of the work hours would be allotted to the Histadrut. Politically, it was an effective compromise—a bit less than a year later, the religious labor union decided to become part of the Histadrut. It was another compromise with the religious camp in which Ben-Gurion gave way on a matter of principle in order to reduce tensions between religious and nonreligious Jews and maintain unity in the Jewish community.18
His personal standing as Histadrut secretary did not mean that he did not face the everyday tribulations of the average person. When his baby daughter Renana, one and a half years old, suddenly fell victim to a choking fit, he had to set off on a desperate search for a doctor, just like the most ordinary of citizens. He still did not have a telephone at home. His diary relates: “I ran over to [Dr. Aharon] Binyamini, but he wasn’t home. I rushed to the Histadrut Executive’s offices and telephoned Kupat Holim. No one answered. I went to Eliyahu [Golomb] and found [his wife] Adah and with her ran to search for a doctor. We first got to [Dr. David] Deutsch. But he did not want to come. I said, the girl is dying—but he had to go somewhere else and recommended going to a different doctor. In a rage, I ran with Adah to Dr. [Moshe] Cohen, he also refused at first, but when he saw what a state I was in he came with me immediately.” By the time they reached Ben-Gurion’s home, the attack was over. “I wasn’t sure I would still find her alive,” Ben-Gurion confessed. The next day, Renana suffered another attack and developed a high fever. Her father again ran to find a doctor. “I was desperate,” he wrote. Paula succeeded in lowering the fever with cold compresses.19
In December 1924, Ben-Gurion demanded to be given enhanced and more centralized powers, and a few months later again announced that he was resigning. It was part of the way the political game was played then, and according to the usual routine his resignation was not accepted. Bowing to his colleagues’ demand that he rescind his resignation was an almost ritual part of the political culture of the time. He remained the man who called the shots.20 At the same time, he hounded the Communists, the Labor Brigade, and especially the veterans of Hashomer and their secret Kibbutz, or the Circle, as it was also called. He saw them as a separatist military cabal. That wasn’t far from the truth. His efforts to counter them amounted to a purge—this was Ben-Gurion as a non-Communist Zionist Bolshevik. That’s what his entire generation was, Isser Harel, the all-powerful head of Israel’s security services, later related. “I told them—when it comes down to it, you are Bolsheviks. Not in the Communist sense, but in the sense of the dictatorship of the party … you are Zionists, but in your outlook, that is, your mentality, you are Bolsheviks.”21
In May 1923, a member of the Circle murdered an Arab policeman, Tewfiq Bey, whom many Jews held responsible for the attack on the immigrants’ hostel in Jaffa two years previously. The Haganah History Book states that the Haganah’s national coordinator, Yosef Hecht, had been briefed in advance about this “first political murder.” The next victim was a Jew, Jacob Israël de Haan. He was one of the eccentric adventurers, dreamers, and zealots whom Jerusalem has always attracted. A jurist, poet, and journalist, he had come to the Holy City from Holland. He made friends with Arab boys and wrote homosexual poetry. At first he was respected as a Zionist intellectual; he represented European newspapers and taught law. But he then grew closer to the Haredi community, adopted its opposition to Zionism, and became one of its spokesmen. The Zionist establishment condemned him as an anti-Semitic rogue; nearly everyone agreed he was insane. Ben-Gurion accused him of “betrayal and deception, talebearing and slander.”
De Haan received death threats and meditated on the possibility that he would be murdered: “As a fledgling flies / take wing, my song / until the gun fires at my heart,” he wrote. It happened on June 30, 1924. He set out for the evening service at a synagogue; three bullets hit him, one of them piercing his heart. The murderer was twenty-one-year-old Avraham Zilberg, who later changed his name to Tehomi. Born in Odessa, he arrived in Palestine in 1923 and took part in some of the Haganah’s first operations in Jerusalem. There seem to have been several people plotting to murder de Haan; Tehomi later claimed he had been given the go-ahead by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.*
Ben-Gurion went to watch the funeral. He estimated that there were about two hundred people in attendance. “I did not see among the mourners any profound anger,” he reported. “Apparently most of the Jews accepted it without getting much exercised about it.” The question of whether Ben-Gurion had been involved in the murder would soon arise; in other words, the question was whether Ben-Zvi would have taken upon himself to approve such a deed without informing Ben-Gurion. Perhaps he would have. It was a Jerusalem story, with all the delirium and extremism that Jerusalem can offer. And Jerusalem was Ben-Zvi’s fiefdom; he was the senior public authority with regard to the Haganah’s activity in the city. Probably nothing irked him more than having to recognize Ben-Gurion’s seniority. There is no reason to believe that Ben-Gurion saw any need to liquidate de Haan.
Ben-Zvi maintained contact with Hashomer’s veterans, among them Israel and Manya Shohat. She was arrested after the murder, but was released without being charged. The question of who gave the order continues to be debated by historians to this day.22
*
De Haan’s death left Ben-Gurion unmoved, but he likely saw the assassination as just one more in a series of subversive acts carried out without the authority of the Histadrut, and that was intolerable.
A few months prior to the murder, several Hashomer veterans from Kfar Giladi attacked a gang of cash smugglers who had come from Lebanon and robbed them of fifteen thousand pounds sterling, in gold coins. The money had apparently been set aside to fund the purchase of arms to be used in attacks on Arabs. Ben-Gurion suspected that the arms would be used not just for defense of the kibbutz but also by a Communist underground militia that was plotting to take control of the Galilee and maybe all of Palestine.23
Hashomer’s veterans were not a real danger to the Histadrut. Their sedition was mostly that of nostalgia and fantasy, longing for their impetuous youthful days in the Galilee. It seems unlikely that they could have carried out even a small putsch, especially given that they were embroiled in internal conflicts in which they accused one another of transgressions that no outsider could possibly understand; the cords of pioneering camaraderie of past years were severed and replaced by insults and blows. Many tears were shed. Against this background, Ben-Gurion had no trouble breaking up the Circle and the Labor Battalion. He related that, as he was involved in this, Ben-Zvi relayed to him a threat on his life; Ben-Zvi confirmed doing so. In April 1924, the Communists would have a similar fate. The Workers’ Faction of the Communist Party was a loud and sometimes violent opposition, but, given that its members were a tiny minority, they were no threat to the parties that controlled the Histadrut. Ben-Gurion fought them as if they were a clear and present threat to the future of Zionism; among other things, he accused them of inciting Arab workers against Jews.24 The Histadrut Council branded the Workers’ Faction “the enemy of the Hebrew nation and the working class in Palestine.” A few months later, Ben-Gurion explained: “The Faction betrayed the working class and as such the Council decided to expel them from the Histadrut as traitors.”25 Once expelled from the Histadrut as such, the Communists faced many hardships in finding employment and were not able to receive medical care from Kupat Holim.
As in the first round of the Ein Harod conflict, Ben-Gurion’s conduct was roundly criticized by Yosef Sprinzak, the Hapo’el Hatza’ir leader. “It was hard for me to listen to Ben-Gurion’s tone when he spoke of the members of the Faction,” he said. “It was an incendiary speech against all those who are not members of Ahdut Ha’avodah.” He censured Ben-Gurion for stirring up hatred and accused him of imposing a “spiritual inquisition.” Ben-Gurion responded that he was not one of the bleeding hearts who knew how the Faction needed to be dealt with but balked at doing so with a display of “Christian patience,” as Sprinzak was. “We have to fight them,” he declared. He humbly suggested that he be tried by his comrades—if they found that he had not spoken the truth, he would accept any sanction they imposed on him.26
*
Ben-Gurion did not oppose the use of force in principle. He eventually instructed Yosef Hecht to establish, alongside the Haganah, a Histadrut militia that would later become known as Plugot Hapo’el, the Workers’ Squads, which engaged in fistfights with opponents of the labor movement. Yet there were many times when he opposed acts of violence, especially when he was afraid that his men would lose their self-control. His principle was that the Histadrut had to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.27
Ben-Gurion could have filed a lawsuit to dissolve the Circle, but he preferred a surer method that had proven itself in the past—a commission of inquiry. He appointed its members and drafted five simple questions for it to answer, ostensibly with a simple yes or no: Was there a clandestine society within the Labor Battalion? Had its members stolen weapons? Had they stolen gold? Had they operated outside the Haganah command? Had they had contact with the Soviet Union?
The whole sensational story was supposed to be kept top secret, as it involved arms smuggling and robbery. But, as usual, there were leaks and rumors and half-truths spread by word of mouth, in agitated whispers. When Manya Shohat heard what Ben-Gurion was saying, she wrote to him: “I never thought you would be capable of using such means to harm the Labor Battalion. I had too much personal respect for you. The path you have chosen will destroy us and you. I have no forgiveness in my heart. And I am severing all personal relations between us.” Ben-Gurion sent her a chilly response, saying that her letter had not changed anything in his attitude toward her.28 His suspicions grew when Israel Shohat made a trip to the Soviet Union along with the Labor Battalion chief Menachem Elkind. Shohat seems to have been checking out the possibility of establishing a new political axis with Moscow. The Soviet Union would issue a new “Balfour Declaration” stating that it viewed with favor the establishment of a Communist Jewish state in Palestine. He hoped to receive arms and asked the Soviets to give flight training to young men from Palestine so that the Jewish state could have an air force.29
As expected, the committee found that the Circle of Hashomer veterans had operated as an armed underground. Ben-Gurion came out looking like the person who had saved the authority of the Labor movement.30 But by the time the committee submitted its findings, the incident had lost almost all its importance, as the Labor Battalion had already been dissolved.31 Elkind and a few other members moved back to the Soviet Union.†
In the meantime, the country had changed.
In the spring of 1924, the United States instituted a new immigration policy that, among other things, made it more difficult for Jews to enter the country.32 Zionism had not had such an opportunity since the Balfour Declaration. At the same time the new American policy went into force, Poland was hit by an economic crisis, of which the country’s Jews were also victims. With America no longer an option, tens of thousands of Polish Jews settled in Palestine; in 1924 more than thirteen thousand arrived and in 1925 more than thirty-four thousand.33 They made up the bulk of the Fourth Aliyah. To enter Palestine they needed permits from the British authority; quotas for Jewish immigration were set from time to time, in keeping with availability of employment in the country. While the Zionists never stopped protesting the quotas, the Jewish national leadership largely acceded to them. That was the deliberate and cautious aspect of Zionist messianism. In general the authorities approved the immigration requests submitted through the Zionist movement.‡
As secretary of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion abhorred this wave of immigration of “kiosk owners,” as he termed the new residents of Tel Aviv, even though there were also manual laborers who arrived during this period. The kiosk owners, as small businessmen rather than workers, were liable to align with the opponents of his movement and thus weaken it. “Promotion of the immigration of workers is now a central and vital need of our movement,” he declared.34 It was one of the tasks he set for the Histadrut, even though it had practically no influence over the decisions of Jews to settle in Palestine.
In April 1924, the Mandate authorities issued twenty-four hundred immigration certificates, including three hundred for young women. The Histadrut informed several Jewish communities, most of them in Eastern Europe. Ben-Gurion hoped to bring in at least two thousand workers on the grounds that they were needed for a new venture, the cultivation of tobacco. But “Palestine called for workers, and they did not come,” he said. He assumed that Jews might come from the Soviet Union, but the Soviet government severely restricted all emigration. Ben-Gurion wanted to go there to address the problem, but this time a visa was denied.35 His failure irked him; his inability to extricate Jews from the “destruction, fear of death, and terror” they suffered in the Soviet Union humiliated him as a Zionist and was detrimental to his standing as Histadrut secretary.36
*
The initial immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah belonged to the middle class.37 They brought with them their urban culture and expected to carry on living as they had lived in Poland. One out of every two of these settled in Tel Aviv; the city’s population doubled in the space of a year. At the end of 1925, it had a population of forty thousand. Kiosks selling gazoz, a blend of fruit juice and soda water, sprouted on every corner. Gazoz, and the kiosks that sold them, became emblematic of Tel Aviv’s middle-class culture, the antithesis of the pioneer ethos.38
Ben-Gurion sometimes liked to equate agricultural settlement with Zionism and to proclaim that working the land was the ultimate consummation of its ideals. The movement from city to country was unique to Zionism and had not been done in almost any other country, he asserted: “The return to the land is first of all a return to the soil.”39 He also depicted his move to Palestine as a result of his desire to work the land. But other than his brief experience as a farmhand, Ben-Gurion was a man of the city who lived a manifestly bourgeois lifestyle and had middle-class tastes. He wrote to his sister Tzipora, who had considered joining a kibbutz, that the members of the commune in question “are not our element,” as they came from Transylvania. Better, he advised, to make your home in the city.40
Rents were rising in Tel Aviv, he complained in 1921. Nevertheless, its expansion excited him. It would soon be a large Jewish metropolis, he wrote to his father, and a Jewish port would be built there as well.41 He paid ten pounds a month in rent, the equivalent of a month’s wages for close to 40 percent of the Histadrut’s membership in Tel Aviv. The family bought a piano and the children took lessons. Geula did well at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium high school. An entire room in their apartment was set aside for the library. A photograph from 1927 shows Ben-Gurion in his apartment wearing a tie and jacket.42
Yigael Yadin, the son of a well-known professor and later a well-known archaeologist in his own right, suggested that Ben-Gurion’s passion for books grew out of a “very strong sense of inferiority toward people with college educations.” One such was Chaim Weizmann, the chemist whose contribution to the British war effort helped him obtain the Balfour Declaration. Arthur Ruppin and Haim Arlosoroff had doctorates in economics. Berl Katznelson and Ze’ev Jabotinsky were men of letters. The thousands of books with which Ben-Gurion surrounded himself, those he read and those he merely collected, may have been intended to raise himself up, at least in his own eyes, to the level of better-educated Zionist leaders.43 The books could also take the place of the friends he did not have and satisfy his urge for power, standing erect on his shelves in exemplary order, like soldiers. He always expected to find each one in its place, just like the columns of statistical data in his diary. He read the Bible and the ancient Greeks largely as political documents, almost as guidebooks for rulers.44
He appreciated the power of the written word. Even though he did not read much fiction, he was well aware that its authors wielded political influence. From time to time he summoned novelists and poets for what might be called national guidance talks, as a philosopher-king might do. His broad-mindedness was limited to the bounds of the Zionist discourse, as he once demonstrated when Martin Buber skeptically remarked: “We said we would redeem the land, and we meant to make it Jewish land. Why does it have to be Jewish land?” Ben-Gurion interrupted. “To bring forth bread from the earth!” Buber retorted: “Why?” “To eat!” Ben-Gurion replied. “Why?” Buber insisted. “That’s enough,” said Ben-Gurion. He thought that the question “Why?” was out of place. The correct question was “How?”45
As a member of the first generation of the twentieth century, he believed that humankind was destined to “dominate the forces of nature,” as he put it, including the desert and the sea. “There in particular, faced with these turbulent expanses, man divines his full power and ability, his great capacity to smooth a path through the sea and cut a safe way through great waters, as much as the fearless human spirit desires.”46 With childlike excitement, he decided to take his first passenger flight, in September 1924.
He wanted to fly from Danzig to Berlin, but was only able to get a seat to a town along the way. The journalist in him compelled him to write it up—he told how he arrived at the airport, was searched, had to pay for excess baggage; the ticket cost eleven marks. “We ascended very slowly … I saw the sun in front of me, in front of my face. As if it and the airplane were both hung in the firmament … Birds fly under us … and on the road a horse-drawn carriage sways—little children’s toys … and the plane slowly proceeds through the atmosphere; it is actually flying at a speed of 130 kilometers per hour. We are at an altitude of 300 meters … and here we touch earth again, it rolls a bit more on the ground—whistling, creaking, roaring—and falls silent. We flew for half an hour.” Ben-Gurion recorded the plane’s make and model: Elberfeld D-24. As it happened, the plane crashed seven weeks later, killing its three passengers and the same pilot from his flight, he reported.47 When he returned, he threw himself into a new controversy, or as they said then, a “scandal.”
Mordechai Mottel Makov was one of the well-off citrus farmers of Rehovot and one of the founders of the Kupat Am bank. In 1925 he hired Arab workers to build his home. Jewish workers tried to disperse the Arabs and Makov called the police. It came to blows, and the conflict extended far beyond the moshavah. Makov received the backing of the Farmers’ Association, which was headed by Moshe Smilansky. The Histadrut supported the Jewish workers.
It was a political dispute, grounded in the traditional rivalry between farmers and workers. As an opponent of the employment of Arabs, Ben-Gurion not only came off looking like a workers’ advocate but also as the greater Zionist patriot. In practice, the campaign against Arab labor had not achieved much, but it was still the banner he raised.
In December 1925, the British governor of Jaffa brought together representatives of both sides, including Ben-Gurion and Smilansky. A farmers’ representative read for the governor a memorandum that Ben-Gurion described as “venomous talebearing.” Smilansky expressed no reservations.48 Speaking in the Assembly of Representatives, Smilansky criticized Makov, but also roundly condemned what he called the “terror” committed by Jewish workers. In a private letter he complained about Ben-Gurion’s “demagogic politics.”49 Incensed by Makov’s appeal to the British authorities rather than to the Jewish autonomous leadership, Ben-Gurion called Makov an informer and Smilansky filed a libel suit against Ben-Gurion in the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court. A leading figure in the Histadrut tried to mediate between the two, employing Ben-Gurion’s friend Shlomo Zemach, who was then married to a niece of Smilansky’s.
*
Five years after settling in Palestine, Zemach was also sick of being a laborer. In 1909 he went to France to study agronomy. Before doing that, he had married and gotten divorced. When he completed his studies, he went to visit his father in Płońsk. The day after he arrived, a German zeppelin passed over the town and the war broke out.
Over the next six years, Zemach and his partner, Hannah Smilansky, drifted from one city to another. He barely made a living by working as a teacher; he also published some stories. Sometimes he stayed with Bialik or with another famous Hebrew poet, Shaul Tchernikovsky. While they were in Odessa, Shlomo and Hannah married, and they soon had a daughter. The civil war between the Bolshevik Reds and the counterrevolutionary Whites raged around them. A mounted Cossack relented at the last minute after intending to run Zemach through with his sword. “Don’t ask what we endured,” Zemach wrote to Ben-Gurion. “The shadow of death is a constant companion in my life these seven years.”
He accepted the revolution wholeheartedly, he wrote. His life had been saved when the Red forces entered his wife’s hometown, where the family was hiding in her parents’ house. After further vicissitudes, they finally made it to Jaffa. “Here I live,” he informed “my cherished brother” Ben-Gurion. “How much I want to see you!” He assured his friend that the political differences that used to divide them had vanished. Ben-Gurion was in Vienna at the time. When he returned, he tried to persuade Zemach to switch to Ahdut Ha’avodah, but Zemach refused. In the meantime, he asked Ben-Gurion for a bit of money. Uncle Moshe Smilansky also helped. Zemach and Hannah were hired as teachers at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school, which paid a good salary and also provided an apartment for them to live in. He wrote and published and began to realize the dream of his youth by becoming a Hebrew writer.50
*
Zemach tried to mediate the dispute between Ben-Gurion and Smilansky, and as one might expect, he got into trouble. Ben-Gurion had no interest in resolution—he wanted a political trial, as public as possible, in which he would take the role of the shining knight defending the workers against the farmers, against Arab labor, against “informers.” He got his way but lost the trial. The judges ruled that he had no grounds for calling Smilansky a talebearer.51
In the months that followed, Ben-Gurion sought publicity in a series of further fights of this sort. In one case he even joined the defense counsel for Jewish workers who had tried by force to prevent the entry of Arab laborers into a citrus grove owned by a farmer from Petah Tikvah. The trial was a citywide sensation, according to Ha’aretz. Large crowds massed around the courthouse, but only journalists were allowed to enter.52
The struggle against the employment of Arab laborers patently contradicted the Zionist claim that the movement would develop Palestine for the benefit of all its inhabitants. But Ben-Gurion continued to promise, as he had since he began writing articles, that the establishment of a Jewish national home would not hurt the Arabs. On the contrary, he insisted, Zionism did not claim that the Jews were a master race and did not seek to establish an aristocratic society. It was all about national and human values. He vowed again and again that “only an anti-Semite would see our war for our right to work in the moshavah as detrimental to the Arab laborer.”53 Sometimes Ben-Gurion even claimed that one of the goals of the campaign for Hebrew labor was to extricate the Arab laborer from his backwardness, as if it were a moral and socialist mission. Perhaps he was thinking in terms of the “white man’s burden” that British colonialism claimed to take on its shoulders when he mentioned that the British refrained from bringing Indian laborers to England, so as to preserve their country’s national character.54
He did not relent on his claim that the conflict in Palestine did not permit compromise with the Arabs, but in his search for the best way to manage the conflict, he considered the idea of a “compact” between Jewish and Arab labor organizations.55 It seemed like an advantageous thesis. It accorded with the socialist thinking of the labor movement and spoke to Zionism’s supporters in Palestine and overseas. Most Jews in Palestine had not lived there for a long time, and for them to stay they needed at least a smidgen of hope and a dash of belief in peace. “Every Jew who intends or will intend to move to Palestine must ask himself if his life and property are secure in this country,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “The feeling that the Jews here sit atop a volcano is liable to subvert the foundation of the Zionist movement.” Neither could wealthy Jews be expected to contribute their money to a national project that was doomed to eternal conflict. Advocating coexistence also furthered Zionist diplomacy as it sought to gain friends and public support.
*
When the British began to employ Jews and Arabs in joint workplaces, the Zionist leadership was concerned that the wages and work conditions in services such as the trains and post office would not reflect Jewish needs and culture, but rather the lesser needs and inferior culture of the Arabs, as Ben-Gurion put it.56 It thus became imperative to organize Arab workers as well and to demand that they receive wages and conditions equal to that of Jews. About a decade before, Ben-Zvi had explained this position—if Arab workers were not less expensive than Jews, the major incentive to hire them would end.57 Ben-Gurion hoped to look after Arab workers without having them join the Histadrut, and firmly rejected the demand that the word “Hebrew” be stricken from the union’s full name, the General Organization of Hebrew Workers in Palestine. In lieu of that, he tried to persuade the Arabs that it was in their interest to support Zionism.58 According to a report he received, many Arabs were wrestling with the issue of whether to remain under the protection of the Histadrut or to reject it.59 The attempts at cooperation were not successful; Ben-Gurion made a list in his diary of violent clashes between Jewish and Arab workers, some of them deadly.60 Repetur noted another problem—some Jewish railway workers used their work facilities to manufacture bombs for the Haganah.61
Avigdor Gruen was now sixty-eight years old. The economic crisis in Poland destroyed the credit business he had built up before the war. In his memoirs he claimed that the authorities had revoked his license to work as a “private attorney” because he was a Jew, and that as a result he had no choice but to take the job of secretary of the Płońsk Jewish community.62 Some ten years after Ben-Gurion sought to persuade his family to leave Płońsk, they were now prepared to go, but Ben-Gurion did not hurry to arrange for them to do so. He said he would help them only if they brought sufficient means to support themselves.63 His sister Rivka, now a widow, sent him what he called a “heartbreaking” letter. She described the plight of the Jews of Płońsk and her own personal distress, asking whether her brother could expedite her arrival. “I feel with every bone of my body her horrible situation,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his father, but he could not bring himself to advise her to come. Rivka wrote that she was prepared to perform any kind of work, and her brother believed she was sincere, as he wrote, “but I don’t believe that she will be able to work or that work can be found that she is capable of.” He cited how much of an income a family of two would require to live in Palestine—fifteen pounds a month—and asked whether “the sum you have will thus suffice for even a year?” He was traveling again and advised putting off the question until after his return. In the meantime, he sent her a copy of his book.64
Ben-Gurion’s attitude infuriated his father. The son tried to apologize: “I am very sorry that you think it’s my fault that you have not yet come to Palestine,” he wrote. He had wanted to bring him over that very winter, but unfortunately he could not do so, he explained, because of his political work. As for Rivka, it was not sufficient for her to be able to support herself for a year—she needed enough money to be able to live off the interest, not her capital, meaning at least three thousand pounds.65 Another year went by. Meanwhile, his sister Tzipora’s husband also died, leaving her with two small children. “My heart bleeds, it is as if I had been struck by lightning,” Ben-Gurion wrote to his father. The very next morning, he promised, he would try to obtain an immigration certificate for Tzipora and her children. “I will share my bread with her and I will adopt her children as my own and be a father to them,” he promised.
Several months went by. His sister asked if he had forgotten her. Ben-Gurion quickly informed her that the subject disturbed him profoundly. “Is not your hope my hope, your plight my plight, your future my future, and your children mine?” he wrote. He said that the certificates had been delayed for so long because he did not know the name of one of her children and had thus not been able to apply for a certificate for him. Tzipora finally arrived in May 1923, a year and a half after he began, so he said, to make the arrangements.66
While he was dealing with Tzipora’s immigration, Ben-Gurion again promised to bring his father, “perhaps at the middle of next year.”67 His brother Avraham also wanted to come; in the meantime, Ben-Gurion tried to obtain a certificate at least for his son Binyamin. That did not take long. In August 1923, Ben-Gurion reported to his father that his nephew Binyamin was working in Tel Aviv and that he was a fine young man. Avraham, for his part, lacked a profession; Ben-Gurion opposed his coming until he first sent his other children, son Israelik and daughter Sheindele. The daughter, he said, could come on condition that she had a mastery of Hebrew. She needed to learn typing before she arrived, and if possible bookkeeping as well. Only after the children came and were on their own feet economically would it be possible to talk about Avraham’s arrival. He underlined the words: but not before that. If Rivka could obtain a sum of five hundred to six hundred pounds, she would be able to manage “one way or another,” but he would send the necessary paperwork only when she notified him that she was ready for the trip. He then addressed the case of his father.
It sounds as if his father refused to believe that the secretary of the Histadrut could not arrange for the entire family to come. Ben-Gurion did not rush to respond. “I was overloaded with work,” he explained, noting that, among his other duties, he had been conducting talks with Britain’s Labour government. “I know that you are already treating me with a bit of suspicion,” he wrote, promising again that his public activities were keeping him from dealing with the matter. He was also neglecting his duties to his wife and children, he noted. When he traveled overseas, he missed the children and longed to be with them again, but at this point in his life, clearly, his family, including his father and wife, and even his children, were less important to him than his work.
His father wrote that he could now sell his house and get between three hundred and four hundred pounds for it. Ben-Gurion agreed that he could come. He could manage even with a smaller sum, he assured him. “I hope that you will also be able to find work befitting your abilities and your knowledge,” he wrote. But to avoid any further misunderstandings, he stated explicitly that he had no intention of helping his father find work. Yes, the doors of every one of the Palestinian Jewish community’s institutions was open to him, and any of them would gladly agree to his request to employ someone, but precisely for that reason he would not help his father. “I would not want anyone in Palestine to think, when you are working for some institution, that you are working there not because you are qualified for the job, but rather because you received it thanks to me.” The letter made no mention of the “aunt”—that is, his stepmother. In contrast with most of his letters to his father, in this one he did not even send her greetings. On the other hand, he suggested that “perhaps you might also be able to build a house together with Rivka.”68 Another year went by.
Gruen presumably could have settled in Palestine with his wife even without his son’s connections, just as tens of thousands of other Jews did. But Gruen wanted to make use of that influence, and in the end he may well have been right to insist on it. Despite his advanced age, he immediately landed a job in the offices of Solel Boneh, the Histadrut construction company. He arrived without his wife. Ben-Gurion brought him to his house in Jerusalem; four days later, he set out on another overseas trip.69 The job Gruen found was in Haifa, where he lived with Tzipora. He changed his name to Ben-Gurion. When he sold the house in Płońsk, his wife had no choice but to move in with relatives in Łódź. David Ben-Gurion went to visit her in 1926. “She is old and weak and bedridden,” he noted in his diary. She arrived in Palestine a year later.§70
They arrived during one of the worst years of Ben-Gurion’s life. The Histadrut faced the most serious crisis of its history; Ben-Gurion himself had never before faced such disconcerting accusations.
In the months that preceded his fortieth birthday, his mood was grim, almost suicidal. He gazed out from the deck of the boat that was taking him home after a long stay in Paris and jotted down a few lines about the meaninglessness of life. “It will all pass, end, everlasting cold, devastation, oblivion, endless nothingness. What is the meaning of our entire miserable, momentary, pointless existence, which will leave nothing behind. Who can answer? Who can say? The one answer is the grave. The only endpoint.”71 Prior to his stay in Paris, he had participated in a convention of some sort in Germany and had also visited Płońsk. A few hours after he got home, he was already back at work. Then Solel Boneh collapsed and threatened to drag down the entire Histadrut.
*
The immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah needed places to live. The result was that, in 1925, a full 64 percent of all Jewish investment in Palestine went into housing. The construction boom benefited a large range of factories and businesses. People also built homes to rent. The assumption was that the immigrants would continue to settle in Tel Aviv and that the city would continue to flourish. The immigrants flowed in, but then it looked like everything was going to crash. One reason was that the capital that many of the newcomers brought with them was in the form of Polish currency. As inflation rose in Poland, the value of the currency plummeted; people who had made down payments on new homes could not pay the remaining cost and stopped building. Construction companies and the associated industries collapsed one after another. Workers lost their jobs. In June 1924, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “The job shortage is growing steadily. Yesterday people lost consciousness in the labor bureau.” He often had to speak to angry jobless workers—because the Histadrut was not just a labor union but also owned a construction company, Solel Boneh, and other concerns, they saw him not only as their representative but also as their employer. As unemployment rose, each job seeker was allotted just a few days of work a week. Resentment grew. Repetur recalled that at one point it became necessary to assign Ben-Gurion a bodyguard.72
At the height of the crisis, the Jewish unemployment rate reached 35 percent of the labor force; one out of every two of the jobless lived in Tel Aviv.73 Many left the country; in 1926 half as many emigrated as immigrated, and in 1927 there were more emigrants than immigrants.74 The Histadrut was not prepared to handle such a major crisis. The British administration expanded its public works, but only reluctantly and in a limited way.
Politicians took the crisis as an opportunity to assail one another. Ben-Gurion claimed that the blame for the crisis lay on members of the middle class, who had wanted to make their livelihoods in the same occupations that Jews in the Diaspora pursued. He depicted the bourgeoisie in almost anti-Semitic terms. They were, he said, “sellers of gazoz and land speculators and usurers and those who live off the labor of others.” They were “luft-masses, eager to speculate, living in the air,” as well as “dangling, sterile, and parasitic.” In his memoirs he referred to them in the third-person male form, which is often used to label something sordid, such as “the Jew” and “the Arab.”**
The Zionist movement had not reached such a low point in the last twenty years, he maintained. He quoted Hayim Nahman Bialik, who said that the crisis was the result of the great and horrible failure of the nation as a whole. Ben-Gurion translated the poet’s words into political terms: “the nation as a whole” became the Zionist Executive, with its seat in London, where it obeyed Chaim Weizmann and “was estranged from the working class.” What he meant was that it had not restricted middle-class immigration and not given enough certificates to workers. He demanded a much higher investment in developing Palestine and a huge wave of labor Zionist immigration that would revitalize the Zionist enterprise.75
His attacks on the Zionist movement received a lot of attention. The local and American press began to watch him. His stance, with his hands stuck in his pockets, intensified the sense of power he radiated, Ha’aretz wrote. “He feels always that he has a large party behind him … in his own words, there is weight.” He copied into his diary a complimentary description of his strong personality and character published by the Forverts in New York.76 He had supporters and opponents, admirers and haters—but very few friends.
Since the company’s principal goal was not to earn a profit but rather to supply jobs for Jews, Solel Boneh offered its clients generous credit. It then took loans and issued bonds to fund the projects in the interim. In 1926 it began to have trouble collecting its debts from its customers, and thus to meet its loan payments. In June 1927, the company shut down.77 Like other companies, it was a victim of the economic crisis. But it seems to have been hit particularly hard as a result of poor management, including the high salaries it paid to its executives. Its ideological commitment to organized Jewish labor led it to disregard labor productivity. As secretary of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion bore overall responsibility; as a devotee of details, he had intimate knowledge of the state of affairs at Solel Boneh.78
It was not just an economic story. First and foremost, it was a political and even more so a personal drama. The director of Solel Boneh was David Remez, one of Ahdut Ha’avodah’s leaders. The party’s rivals, most notably Hapo’el Hatza’ir, tried to use the company’s collapse as a springboard for a reorganization of the Histadrut as a whole. They demanded Remez’s dismissal, but it was Ben-Gurion who was really in their sights. Ben-Gurion backed Remez almost unreservedly, seeking to protect himself. In January 1927, his party passed a resolution demanding that the Zionist Executive provide, within two weeks, at least three thousand jobs; if not, the Histadrut would abdicate responsibility for labor, cease to assist the unemployed, and instruct its representatives on the Zionist Executive to resign. It would then organize a workers’ struggle. “We are like a dead man rolling down a hill, with an abyss yawning underneath,” he said. As in the past, his colleagues did not rush to line up behind his belligerent position. The Histadrut Council rejected his proposal to resign from the Zionist Executive.79
A rumor that had been going around Jerusalem for some time would soon be proven true. The Zionist Executive had signed contracts to build three large public buildings in Jerusalem. One of the agreements was made with a private contractor who submitted a bid lower than that proffered by Solel Boneh, but the contract did not require him to employ workers according to the conditions set by the Histadrut. The Zionist Executive also excused him from the obligation to employ only Jewish workers.
It was a scandal waiting to be exploited. Hundreds of unemployed workers surrounded the Zionist Executive offices, breaking down doors and shattering windows. Tensions rose by the day; a mother of three killed herself. The story spread that she was driven to it because she and her family were starving. The Jerusalem Workers Council called on all members of the Histadrut to attend her funeral. Instead of taking her body to the cemetery, they took it to the offices of the Zionist Executive. Ostensibly it was not the Histadrut that had told the workers to take to the streets; technically the call came from the Workers Council. In fact, Ben-Gurion was behind it. In the end, the two sides agreed to new negotiations between the contractor and the Workers Council.80 The outcome burnished Ben-Gurion’s image as the workers’ tribune. In the meantime, everyone was gossiping about what quickly turned into the next scandal.
*
It was even more embarrassing than Solel Boneh. At its center was money that several senior Histadrut officials, Ben-Gurion among them, had taken from the Histadrut treasury. Ben-Gurion’s regular income did not cover his lifestyle, in particular his book-buying addiction. He thus frequently took loans from acquaintances and from his movement’s institutions.81 His monthly salary as Histadrut secretary was at first nineteen and then reduced to seventeen pounds. A Histadrut census showed that nine out of every ten workers in the country earned less than he did.††
He was also one of the senior figures in the Histadrut’s top tier who received advances and generous loans. According to his diary, he received a loan from Bank Hapoalim to pay off his debt to the Histadrut. His archives preserve documents that point to an ongoing debt equivalent to about two monthly salaries.82 At one point, a Histadrut committee decided to wipe out the debts of its senior officials. The highest debt owed was that of Ben-Gurion, a full 283.50 Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of about sixteen monthly salaries.
There was no choice but to appoint an internal committee to investigate the Solel Boneh crisis; Ben-Gurion and his colleagues agreed to cancel the elimination of their debts. The only remaining question was whether the committee’s findings should be published. Ben-Gurion was adamantly opposed, claiming that publication would be detrimental to the Histadrut. Everyone knew everything about it, and Ben-Gurion promised to take steps to rationalize and “purge” the Histadrut. He used the latter word twice, in Hebrew and in Russian. In the end, no one was held responsible. And there is no evidence that Ben-Gurion repaid all the money he had received.83
In Ben-Gurion’s memory, this period remained a profound trauma. He spoke of panic, despair, ideological confusion, impotence, of people deserting the battlefield. For the first time in his life he voiced real doubts about the Zionist vision’s chances of being realized, given that everything seemed to be on the verge of falling apart because of “internal infirmity.” He claimed that “most” of the immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah had left Palestine. That was not true. Neither had this wave of immigration been a failure, as he claimed.84 The economic crisis did not last long; soon the citrus industry would begin to flourish, primarily thanks to new export opportunities and industrial advances. The recovery was largely the result of private enterprise. A man named Simcha Whitman won a place in history by being the first to make ice cream in Tel Aviv. His kiosk became famous as a meeting place for people on their way to or from Brenner House, as the offices of the Tel Aviv Workers Council were called.85
*
More than seventeen thousand voters took part in the elections to the Histadrut Convention at the end of 1926. Ben-Gurion was the big victor; for the first time, Ahdut Ha’avodah received an absolute majority, 53 percent of the vote.86 But when the Convention met, the leadership found itself facing withering criticism. In his diary, Ben-Gurion wrote: “The working public is resentful. The anger is especially strong regarding the matter of salaries and advances and the lack of contact with the public.”87 That was an understatement, given the record of the proceedings. One of the delegates shouted: “There is terror in the Histadrut and the workers are afraid to open their mouths.”88
One Hapo’el Hatza’ir delegate angered Ben-Gurion in particular. He was a twenty-eight-year-old with a Ph.D. whose star was rising, named Haim Arlosoroff. He offered what he termed a merciless analysis of the fundamental mistakes Ben-Gurion had made, the first of them being haste. It was a debate over principles—Arlosoroff used the Solel Boneh scandal as a metaphor. “Had Solel Boneh known its limits and had not entered into fantasies of unrestricted growth, it would have expanded gradually, in a healthy way, and served its purpose,” he said. Instead, “we leapt fifty years ahead.” The damn advances kept coming up again and again; Berl Katznelson himself called them “a moral failing.”‡‡89
Ben-Gurion told the Convention that he felt like an accused man defending himself against “the basest libels.” He did not have much to say regarding the substance of the criticism. He reverted to cliché, sounding almost pathetic. “Only a person who has done nothing can be unerringly wise; a person who manages something can be allowed to make mistakes.” If he were to be in the same circumstances again, he would do exactly what he had done with Solel Boneh, he said. After all, the goal was to promote the Zionist cause. “If we don’t milk the cow with Zionist intention, then the cow will be milked by Mustafa and not one of our cooperatives,” he asserted. At this point, his tone turned sentimental, conciliatory, comforting, flattering, almost prophetic. “We are a small group of people who have great needs and a huge desire for redemption,” he said. Sovereignty had not yet been achieved, but they were not like the Jews of the ghetto. “For the first time, we have a Jewish worker with national consciousness who sees before him, in the Land of Israel, a historic destiny—to be the ruler and builder who decides his people’s fate.” From his vantage point at the heights of history, his critics looked like irritating quibblers. He did not mention the advances. And the Convention was his.
*
After his speech, Ben-Gurion fell ill and stayed home. The Convention’s final session stretched into the night and was adjourned only at dawn. At a quarter to six in the morning, the delegates sang “The Internationale” followed by “Hatikvah.” Behind the scenes, contacts were already underway regarding a hitherto unlikely merger between Hapo’el Hatza’ir and Ahdut Ha’avodah. A united Party of the Workers of Palestine, or Mapai as it came to be called by its Hebrew acronym, began to look like a real possibility. The delegates formed circles and danced the hora to wake up, and then set out in procession to Ben-Gurion’s home. He could not have wished himself a more enjoyable morning. In a conciliatory and unifying gesture, one of his opponents ascended to his apartment and pulled him out to the balcony, dressed in a bathrobe. At least one participant reported that he saw tears glistening in Ben-Gurion’s eyes.90
* According to the Haganah’s official version, the order came from the Haganah’s commander, Yosef Hecht, who himself confirmed giving it.
† Elkind founded a farming commune in the Soviet Union. He was executed during Stalin’s purges. (Tzachor 1990, p. 128ff; Tzachor 1994, p. 57ff; Kantrovitz 2007, p. 217ff.)
‡ The authorities generally refused to allow in the mentally ill and tubercular, or prostitutes and sex offenders. The law also provided for refusing immigration permits for political reasons. Britain feared the massive immigration of Communist Jews. Weizmann promised to do all he could to keep such undesirables from coming. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, June 4, 1929, July 30, 1924, BGA; Avraham Tarshish, interview transcript, BGA.; Segev 2000, p. 228.)
§ Ben-Gurion’s two sisters, Rivka and Tzipora, both married opera singers in Palestine. His brother Michel was long the proprietor of a kiosk in Tel Aviv. His brother Avraham’s daughter, Sheindele, remained in Poland. (Giladi 1973, p. 47; Hagani 2010, p. 174ff.)
** On another occasion, Ben-Gurion spoke in this way of the “sick mind of the ghetto Jew.” (Ben-Gurion 1971a, pp. 546, 333, 334; Ben-Gurion to the Fourth Convention of Ahdut Ha’avodah, May 13, 1924, in Ben-Gurion 1971a, p. 275.)
†† At the apex of the Histadrut pyramid, there were some who received more. The director-general of Bank Hapoalim, a Histadrut subsidiary, received thirty pounds. (Giladi 1971, p. 131ff; Ben-Gurion Diary, June 14, 1927, BGA.)
‡‡ Remez termed the criticism of the advances “a miniature pogrom.” The advances had been justified, he said, and had been given to only seven or eight of Solel Boneh’s employees. “They could have earned their living elsewhere,” he maintained. “But we rode these beasts of burden day and night. They did not hide the sums they owed and their debts were not canceled.” (Ben-Gurion and Remez at the Third Histadrut Convention, July 10, 1927, Ben-Gurion, minutes, pp. 74ff., 72.)