In September 1930, Ben-Gurion returned to Berlin, where he observed with alarm the rise of the Nazis. He called them “German Revisionists,” with reference to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement. “I read Hitler’s newspaper today and it was as if I were reading Jabotinsky in Doar Hayom,” he wrote. “The same words, the same style, the same spirit.” Jabotinsky spent most of his time in Europe, but a branch of the Revisionist movement he had founded operated in Palestine. In the latter part of the 1920s, he positioned himself as the leader of the Zionist opposition, rival of Chaim Weizmann and nemesis of the labor movement. As a popular journalist and much-admired poet, he excelled, unlike Ben-Gurion, at public speaking. In further contrast to Ben-Gurion, he exuded charisma and was considered an outstanding Jewish intellectual.
Since solidifying his control of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion had come to realize that the political arena of Palestine’s Jewish community had limited capacity for advancing Zionist goals. His routine work as Histadrut secretary no longer satisfied his ambitions. Weizmann, Katznelson, Tabenkin, and a number of other figures were more prominent and more admired. The older among them had worked personally with Herzl and had been Ben-Gurion’s own mentors in his youth. Menachem Ussishkin, who headed Keren Kayemet (the Jewish National Fund), the Zionist movement’s land-buying corporation, was a nearly legendary figure in right-wing circles. Ben-Gurion saw him as a nuisance, but treated him with respect. During this period, he also had dealings with Nahum Sokolow, who for a time replaced Weizmann as president of the Zionist Organization. “No one took him seriously,” Ben-Gurion remarked. It was Sokolow who, as editor of Hatzefirah three decades previously, had rejected the sixteen-year-old Ben-Gurion’s suggestion that the newspaper do a piece on his Ezra club.1 Then there was Moshe Smilansky, whose articles Ben-Gurion had read while he was still a teenager in Płońsk; in comparison, Ben-Gurion was still almost a neophyte. Even in his own party he hardly reigned supreme—the road to power was still a long one, and he wanted to shorten it.
*
The Shavuot holiday arrived on Friday, May 25, 1928. That morning Ben-Gurion met with the Jerusalem Workers Council’s board. That afternoon he took Paula, Geula, and Renana to spend the weekend in Ben Shemen, a farming village on the coastal plain, home to a new agricultural boarding school. Berl Katznelson joined them. Ben-Gurion acknowledged Katznelson’s preeminence and during his lifetime made no effort to take his place. He needed his backing and, often, his advice. In later years, he would say that he had had only three real friends his whole life; the names varied, but Katznelson was always one of them.*2
Katznelson was a politician, too, but in his own way. His speeches tended to be overly ideological, overly vague, and, especially, overly long. More than anything else, he needed to be loved. Ben-Gurion believed in power. Katznelson admired Ben-Gurion’s political abilities and generally supported him; unlike Ben-Gurion, Katznelson had many friends. The two went to Ben Shemen to attend a youth assembly. At the time, the negotiations between Ahdut Ha’avodah and Hapo’el Hatza’ir over the formation of a unified party were still under way. The impetus for a merger intensified as the Revisionists and the middle-class forces of the Fourth Aliyah gained strength.
The car taking them to Ben Shemen was crowded. Ben-Gurion did not know how to drive, and the driver of the car brought his wife and two daughters along. “When we came to a bend in the road, the car was unable to make the turn properly and I saw we were about to fall off the road,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “I felt my breathing stop for a moment, as if someone was choking me.” When he came to, he found himself sprawled in a field with the other passengers strewn around him. Paula and Renana were covered with blood. Katznelson was sitting in a ditch. Ben-Gurion asked how he was and Berl responded with a wince, indicating that he could not move. “Apparently his bones are broken,” Ben-Gurion thought to himself. He was wounded, too. “I felt pain in my foot and my head. Blood ran down from my forehead. All my clothes were full of blood,” he recounted. They received medical care and were sent home. Katznelson suffered severe injuries and required a long hospital stay.3
*
The accident delayed the unity negotiations, which had stretched on for a few years. The anguished discussions that both parties held gives today’s reader the impression that each of them was called on to bridge a deep ideological abyss. As was their wont, the members of each group clashed vehemently and passionately over ideas and isms. The issue of class struggle was one point of contention, but the principal issues were the wording of the united party’s manifesto and its name. Ben-Gurion employed all his political experience in the negotiations, and must have required nerves of steel to get through the logorrhea alive.
In the meantime, Arab terror once more loomed.
*
The attack on the Jews of Jaffa in 1921 was followed by several relatively peaceful years. The number of Jews killed by Arabs each year reverted to an average of two a year; in 1928, apparently, none were killed at all.4 This seemed to provide a foundation for the Jewish-Arab workers’ alliance that Ben-Gurion spoke of. It was, however, an illusion that could last only for as long as the Arabs did not shatter it, which they did in September 1928. The trigger was a dispute over prayer arrangements at the Western Wall. On Yom Kippur eve a curtain was placed at the site, to separate women and men, as is customary in Orthodox synagogues. It was not the first time this had been done, but this time the Muslim religious authorities, who exercised control over the site, demanded that the curtain be removed. British policemen showed up on Yom Kippur morning and told the Jews to remove the curtain. Some of the worshippers refused and a fight broke out between them and the police. The incident made the Western Wall the focal point of tensions in the city. From time to time violent clashes between Jews and Arabs broke out there. Internal conflicts on each side also exacerbated tensions. Arab and Jewish leaders accused their political rivals of weakness and defeatism; people on both sides were swept along by nationalist demagoguery and religious fanaticism.
A few days after the curtain incident, Ussishkin spoke out at a meeting of the National Council, the executive board of the Assembly of Representatives. He said that the Jews should demand of the British administration that it expropriate the Western Wall from the Muslims who were in charge of it. Doar Hayom reported that the meeting was a stormy one, of “great fury.” Ben-Gurion responded with restraint: every Jew, including nonreligious ones, had been shocked by what happened at the Wall, he said. He added that the Zionist movement had missed several opportunities to purchase the site. Those efforts should be continued, he maintained. Only if the “Arab nation” refused to sell, he said, should the Jews demand expropriation. “Redemption” of the Western Wall needed to proceed with caution and moderation, he advised. “If we don’t succeed today,” he said, “we’ll do so half a year from now.” He seems not to have been caught up in the rage the incident set off; he saw the Wall as an issue that did not require an immediate resolution. The problem was not who controlled the Wall, he maintained, but rather the fact that there were not enough Jews in Palestine.
Exceptionally, Jabotinsky himself took part in the discussions—he was a rare guest in Palestine and everyone waited in suspense for his speech. He had arrived in Jerusalem a few days before the confrontation, and would soon take over as editor of Doar Hayom, a daily newspaper that had for years conducted a strident campaign against the labor movement. Charging that the country’s Jewish leadership was not standing up sufficiently to the British administration, he voiced his fear that it would not be long before the Arabs staged a “bloody onslaught” against the Jews. “We cannot dream of a willing agreement between us and the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future,” he declared, quoting words he had written in 1923. He reiterated his opinion that the Arabs needed to be told the truth: the Zionist movement aspired to a Jewish majority in Palestine. No fool would believe any attempt to conceal that. His speech evinced prudence and leadership; the Zionist project required time and patience, he said. He made no mention at all of the labor movement.
Ben-Gurion sounded angry. He did not believe that peace with the Arabs was possible, any more than Jabotinsky did, and could give no less grim a speech, as he had done ten years previously. He, too, had always insisted that the Arabs should be told the truth about Zionism’s aims. But that was now a privilege available only to the opposition. As secretary of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion bore a share of national responsibility, and he was also committed to the socialist value of the brotherhood of nations. He attacked Jabotinsky personally, recalling his opposition to the defense of Tel Hai.5
As the summer of 1929 approached, tensions in Jerusalem increased. Rumors once more spread among the Arabs that the Jews were plotting to destroy the Islamic shrines on al-Haram al-Sharif, and rebuild their Temple on the site, which for the Jews is the Temple Mount. At the same time, hostility was on the rise between the Revisionists and the members of the labor movement, including slanders, threats, fistfights, and stone throwing. It was mostly a struggle over power and control. A worker who did not join the Histadrut was virtually unable to find a job; furthermore, the labor movement controlled nearly all the funds that the Zionist Organization allocated to development in Palestine, and also the distribution of immigration certificates. The Revisionists fought to obtain a share of these. Jabotinsky encouraged his supporters to break strikes. The Revisionists carried out their campaign in part with the help of their paramilitary youth movement, Betar. The Histadrut deployed its Workers’ Squads.6
In August 1929, on the eve of the fast of the Ninth of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Jewish Temples, the police permitted three hundred young Jews to stage a procession to the Western Wall; the police also provided protection to the thousands of Jewish worshippers who went to pray there that night. On the following day, Friday, the Muslims celebrated the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. When the prayer service at the al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount ended, thousands of Arabs streamed toward the Wall, drove away the Jews, and put several Torah scrolls to the torch. There were other incidents in the city as well, and over the next two days the entire country erupted in bloody clashes, and dozens of Jews were murdered in Hebron.
*
At the time, Ben-Gurion was in Nice on the French Riviera, resting after his travails at a recent Zionist Congress. The reports he received from Palestine were fragmentary at first, among them a telegram from Paula telling him that she and the children had not been injured. Her message may well have helped him internalize the horrors of what had happened. “The catastrophe is far greater than I thought,” he wrote in his diary. He quickly returned home. While still on board his ship, he formulated the central question: would the riots hinder or help the Zionist enterprise? He was not certain what the answer was. They might dishearten the public, cause despair, deter immigration, stymie capital investment, and destroy Zionism. But they might also reveal “hidden strengths” and bolster determination to succeed.
On board, Ben-Gurion met several members of his movement; they, too, were returning from the Zionist Congress. He convened them for a consultation. They made note of one of the fundamental characteristics that enabled him to establish his standing—he was able to respond to nearly every situation immediately, precisely, decisively, and with confidence that he was right. His practical approach, almost devoid of sentiment, reflected the fact, perhaps, that in 1929, as in 1921, he had not experienced the horrors himself.†
Shlomo Lavi, of Ein Harod, recalled sixty children suffering from whooping cough, three of his own among them, packed into one of the kibbutz’s two barns. “The enemy lies in wait and you do not know where he will appear,” he wrote. “There was no fear at all that one of the defenders would fall. But there was great fear that a bullet coming from afar would hit one of the youngsters.” None of Ein Harod’s children were hurt.7 According to official figures, 130 Jews were killed and more than 300 wounded. More than 100 Arabs were killed and more than 200 wounded, most of them by British security forces.8 It was the harshest blow dealt to the Jews of Palestine since World War I.
The mass murder ostensibly corroborated the view of the Arabs that Ben-Gurion had always held—they were “primitive,” he maintained. “We were faced with an outbreak of the worst instincts of savage masses—enflamed religious extremism, a compulsion for robbery and looting, and a thirst for blood,” he said. He offered a psychological explanation for Arab hatred, attributing it to the envy of the “son of the desert” who viewed Tel Aviv from his “shack”; even the Jews’ barns looked to him like royal mansions. An alliance of Jewish and Arab workers now seemed to him far off and less relevant than ever, but Ben-Gurion nevertheless tried to maintain the possibility, at least as a fiction.
He opposed any form of revenge, including a boycott of Arab merchandise. “Let us not forget even at this hour that we must live with the Arabs in this land,” he declared. He also noted that there had been cases in Tel Aviv in which Jews attacked Arabs, and there were Arabs who had saved Jews. Saying this was important for the Zionist movement’s public image. “We must stress the positive,” he said. “It is not good for us to stand in the light of ‘the whole world is against us.’”
But the riots of 1929 again reinforced, as the ones in 1921 had done, his appraisal that the conflict was not amenable to compromise. Huge numbers of Arabs had attacked Jews, he noted, and their purpose had been clear: “annihilation of the entire Jewish community and the destruction of our enterprise in Palestine.” That being the case, there was no point in debating whether there was or was not an Arab national movement. “The movement is a mass movement and that is the principal fact. We do not see a national revival movement, and its moral value is questionable, but in political terms it is a national movement.” As Ben-Gurion saw it, the Arabs were not interested in an agreement with the Zionists because they constituted a majority in the country. “They are fighting to preserve the status quo and to do that they have no need of an agreement of any sort,” he wrote. He did not know whether the Arab masses answered the call to fight the Jews because that was what they wanted or because they were afraid not to. Either way, it seemed unlikely that they would respond with the same alacrity if their leaders were to call for peace. “The Arab worker, too, is not just a worker. He belongs to his people,” he asserted, adding, “Every nation gets the national movement it deserves.”9
*
Against this backdrop, Ben-Gurion needed to engage in a measure of verbal acrobatics so as to distinguish his movement from its rivals to the right and left; he needed to sound no less patriotic than the Revisionists and no less peace-loving than Brit Shalom, a small organization that offered an alternative to Zionist policy. He feared that the Revisionists would grow stronger, and as such he accused them of feeding the flames of violence. They constituted the “black wing” of Zionism, he claimed, and depicted them as nationalist, chauvinist, and fascist fanatics.10 Jabotinsky had previously published an article against the Histadrut’s control of Palestine with the title “The Red Swastika.” And he was not the most extreme figure on the right. A journalist, Abba Ahimeir, founded a tiny society called Brit Habiryonim (the word biryonim means “strongmen,” or “thugs”), and put out a small newspaper called Hazit Ha’am (The People’s Front). In April 1933, the paper carried an article with the headline “The Stalin–Ben-Gurion–Hitler pact.”11
Brit Shalom had no more than a hundred members, and unlike the Revisionists, they were no threat to Ben-Gurion’s political standing. As such, he treated them politely. Among them were a number of prominent intellectuals. They advocated a binational Jewish-Arab state. As a corollary of that position, they opposed the goal of creating a Jewish majority in Palestine and consented only to the creation of parity between the two communities.‡
Judah Leon Magnes, chancellor of the Hebrew University, did not officially belong to Brit Shalom, but he worked to promote a peace plan that involved an Arab-Jewish agreement on a Jewish national home in Palestine, with the Jews giving up their demands for a Jewish majority and an independent state. Ben-Gurion apparently saw this simply as harmless and deluded naïveté, divorced from the political realities. He spent many hours in conversation with supporters of Brit Shalom. It bothered him that they believed that their Zionism was more just than his, so he spoke to them mostly about morality. “According to my moral outlook, we do not have the right to discriminate against even one Arab child, even if such discrimination would obtain for us all that we seek,” he declared.12
At this point, no concrete decisions had to be made. The Arabs had not submitted a peace proposal. The choice between Zionism and peace was at best a theoretical issue, as was his debate with Magnes and Brit Shalom. But Ben-Gurion believed that the question required an answer. His choice was unambiguous—he gave Zionism preference over peace, just as he had given it preference over socialism. The Histadrut Executive was not prepared to sacrifice even 1 percent of it for “‘peace,’” he wrote, putting the word between quotation marks.13 Against this background, and in order to position himself and his movement in the center of Zionist discourse, Ben-Gurion proposed a partition plan.
He worked hard and feverishly, and in November 1929, he had in hand a six-page plan for the establishment of two autonomous administrations under British suzerainty. His idea was a federation of cantons that would develop gradually, over a long period, after parity of the Jewish and Arab populations was achieved. It would separate Jews and Arabs and divide rule over the country. The plan included a precise scheme of governing and representative bodies; it gave the impression that all was ready to put into practice.14 He also proposed two things for immediate implementation—the establishment of a Jewish military force and the immigration of forty-five thousand pioneers.15
Willingness to divide the country into Jewish and Arab cantons was meant to guarantee not only the security and livelihood of the Jews but also their fundamental values. If they were not a majority in Palestine, the Jews would fall into “the claws of the fate that pursues them in the lands of their Exile” and would assimilate among the gentiles, in this case the Arabs.16
He could not assume that the Arabs would accept his federal plan, and it hardly seems that he could have seen it as a final status arrangement. It was a staged plan—every achievement was, in his view, one more step along a long road.17 But the plan provided a platform to stand on and to present to political rivals at home, on the right and the left, as well as to foreigners, including the Mandate administration.
*
Ben-Gurion’s stress on expediting Zionist activity saved him from a more vexed topic: the neglect of the Haganah. In August 1929, most Jews in Palestine had lacked any real defense against their Arab attackers. Ben-Gurion rightly condemned the British authorities’ feeble response. They had not taken action against Arab incitement and had not taken the steps necessary to ensure the security of the country’s Jews.18 But since Hashomer had been dismantled, the Histadrut had taken responsibility for self-defense. And the Haganah was ill prepared. The organization had a few hundred members, nearly all of them young volunteers. They were too few, had not received proper training, and were not armed with the right weapons. The lack of arms was especially scandalous given that at this time it was not difficult to obtain them and smuggle them into the country. The Arab offensive of August 1929 came as a total surprise to the militia.19
Ben-Gurion knew that the Haganah was in a bad state; its national coordinator, Yosef Hecht, had alerted him to this from time to time, and he recorded the details in his diary. In doing so, he used coded language, as if the subject were farm equipment—instead of “rifles” he wrote “plows,” instead of “pistols” he wrote “hoes,” and he referred to machine guns as “tractors.” Hecht told him that there was a shortage of all these. For the last six years the Haganah had not received funds from the Zionist Executive, he noted. Three months before the August disturbances, he told Ben-Gurion that even existing weapons were not being cared for properly. He needed an armorer to maintain them, he said. Ben-Gurion was more interested in the ties between the Haganah and the Histadrut. “We need to reinforce the Histadrut’s influence and responsibility,” he said, remarking that what really needed attention was the Workers’ Squads. By the summer of 1928, the Haganah central command was but a fiction. Hecht asked the Histadrut Executive to release him from his position, but no one else was prepared to accept this thankless job.20
As secretary of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion bore responsibility for the fiasco of the Haganah’s lack of preparedness. But he evaded the blame, just as he had avoided accountability for Solel Boneh. At that time, he had stood by David Remez, the man in charge of the company; this time he stood by Eliyahu Golomb, who was a prominent activist in the Haganah, and regarded by many as its official commander. The two of them claimed that Hecht had not been loyal to the Histadrut and sought his dismissal.21
It was another struggle for the control of the Zionist movement’s first security forces, with the same passions and some of the same antagonists. When Hecht sought to maintain control of the organization, he was accused of staging a “commanders’ revolt.” Investigation followed inquiry followed paralegal proceedings, among them a Committee of Five whose members were unable to resolve the dispute.22 As it grew ever more convoluted, the Jerusalem branch of the Haganah split, with Avraham Tehomi, the man who had admitted to murdering Jacob de Haan, founding, in 1931, a new militia tied to the Revisionist opposition. It was first called Haganah Bet and then Etzel, the acronym of its Hebrew name, Irgun Tzva’i Le’umi, meaning National Military Organization. Ben-Gurion wrote many years later about the “organizational deficiencies” of the Haganah in 1929. “Up to that point,” he wrote, “the Haganah had been in practice headed by a single man, Yosef Hecht, who refused to accept the involvement of any public institution.” As he depicted it, the problem was political and involved in part “hatred of the left.”23 The Hecht affair reflected Ben-Gurion’s guiding instincts and the compulsion he had developed since the days of Bar Giora to destroy every armed force that he did not control. As the scandal grew, Ben-Gurion’s role in it was forgotten. Hecht was dismissed.
The events of August provided the final push for the unification talks between the two labor parties. The denouement finally came in January 1930, in Tel Aviv’s Beit Ha’am hall, festooned with the red banners of socialism and the blue-and-white flags of Zionism, as well as portraits of the movement’s spiritual progenitors, among them Karl Marx and Joseph Trumpeldor. At the end of three days of speeches, Ben-Gurion announced the new party’s name: the Palestinian Workers’ Party, soon known by its Hebrew acronym, Mapai.§ And he led the crowd in singing the anthem of the first immigrants of the Second Aliyah, “God Will Build the Galilee.”
At that point, according to Davar, “it was as if a blocked spring suddenly spurted forth, jets of enthusiasm and fraternal joy shot upward … the fire spread to all four corners of the hall and the entire assembly turned into a raucous brew … hand was extended to hand and shoulder to shoulder.” They sang “The Internationale” and “Tehezaknah,” the labor movement’s unofficial anthem, also “Hatikvah.” Then Ben-Gurion went home. But once again, as following the Histadrut’s third convention, his comrades did not let him rest. According to Davar, this time, too, they marched to his house and, at almost three in the morning, in the rain, they sang, danced, and “cheered as one,” with Ben-Gurion leading.24 The establishment of Mapai was the most important political development in Palestine’s Jewish community since the inception of the Zionist project. Ben-Gurion had been present at the birth of the idea of unification, in Berl Katznelson’s tent in the Egyptian desert, after World War I, and he played a central role in establishing Mapai. It was, at that point, his major political achievement: Mapai would be the ruling party for decades, and it became the organizational embodiment of his power.
*
In the meantime, a commission of inquiry arrived from London. Its report led, in 1930, to what the British call a White Paper, an official declaration of government policy. It reinterpreted the Balfour Declaration as a dual and equal commitment to both Jews and Arabs. From this point onward, Jews would be allowed to settle in Palestine only on condition that they did not cause Arab unemployment. The new policy also placed restrictions on the purchase of land for Jewish settlement.25
Up until this point, Ben-Gurion had taken care not to upset the British, and with good reason—the Zionist enterprise was advancing quickly under the sponsorship and with the assistance of the British authorities. During the first decade of British rule in Palestine, about one hundred thousand Jews had settled there and dozens of new settlements had been established.**
The commission’s report roused a storm of protest among the Zionists. Ben-Gurion at first chided his colleagues: “A commission of inquiry comes out against us—and we are overcome by panic … An important newspaper publishes an article in our favor—we celebrate. Such hysterical mood swings are not to our credit and we need to fight them with all our strength.” It was an accurate depiction of the psychological dynamic that had frequently, since his youth, determined his own responses and positions. And indeed, he soon saw that the White Paper seemed to demolish his entire political worldview; the Devil himself could not invent crueler tricks, he said.26 In October 1930, he proposed declaring war on the British Empire.
It was his wildest outburst up to that point. After accusing the Labour government of hostility, treason, anti-Semitism, murder, and theft, he suddenly shouted: “Fear, O British Empire!” And he demanded going to war against it. There is no boulder that cannot be blown up with a small amount of explosive powder, he promised. He knew that such a war would be, for the Jews, a catastrophe no less than that of the destruction of the Second Temple, but that was what needed to be done. At this point, his speech became even more hallucinatory. The Jews would not fight the empire alone, but rather in alliance with the Arabs of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq. “If we can make use of the demon, we will use the demon,” he added.
The speech was to Mapai’s governing Council; the members of his party were in shock. Some of them rose to protest his call for war. Ben-Gurion stood his ground but tried to reassure his colleagues. Before war with the British all political channels should be exhausted, he acknowledged. That would take at least twenty years. He did not repeat the idea of allying with the Arabs.27
*
About half a year previously, Ben-Gurion visited a famous physician in Paris. He was experiencing, not for the first time, an attack of severe pain in his legs; he also noticed blue spots on his shins. He was forty-four years old. The doctor said that, physically, he was completely healthy, including his heart and kidneys, but that his nervous system was “fundamentally shaken” and “on the verge of collapse.” He attributed this to tension and fatigue.
Ben-Gurion at times complained of exhaustion during these months. “All my strength is gone,” he wrote to his father, “and I was not able to work.” And in a letter to Golomb he said: “I have no strength, and contact with people is especially difficult, even a simple exchange.” The doctor ordered him to go to a sanatorium outside the city and to disengage from his work “for at least” two months.28 He thus made his “declaration of war” against the British Empire during a period in which his mental condition required him to receive extended treatment. Ben-Gurion thought that the doctor in Paris was correct, but did not obey him. His condition did not improve. “I am so weary that I can only with difficulty get my thoughts together,” he wrote to Paula. Weizmann soon succeeded in getting the new White Paper policy revoked, and everyone forgot Ben-Gurion’s outburst.29
*
Ben-Gurion spent much time in Europe and the United States during this period; he traveled at least once a year and often more. Sometimes he spent more months outside Palestine than in it. Between 1927 and 1933, he was absent from Palestine for more than two years, cumulatively.30 He always went for political reasons, but he enjoyed the travel—the tourist sites, views, city centers, museums, and bookstores. He also delighted in cuisines that Tel Aviv did not offer.31 His expenses were paid by his movement or his hosts, and he generally traveled third or second class; on ships he would crowd into a berth with other travelers. He generally did not stay in the most expensive hotels, and at times had no choice but to make do with uncomfortable lodgings. He went without Paula; in the thirteen years since she gave birth to Amos in London, she did not leave the country. The long months he spent alone overseas gave him the chance to meet other women. Paula suspected, and in fact knew about it. “Your letters come more seldom. What is the matter, you have found new attractions?” she reproached him.32
*
In August 1929, in Zurich, the world Zionist Organization signed an agreement with several non-Zionist Jewish organizations. Most of these organizations were American; Ben-Gurion was moved almost to tears, as if a time machine had taken him back to Herzl’s First Zionist Congress. The compact was concluded during the Zionist Congress. Zurich’s Tonhalle concert hall—Johannes Brahms had attended its opening—overflowed with elation; Albert Einstein was among the guests.
The negotiations had dragged on for years. In the end, they agreed on the establishment of a Jewish Agency, in which Zionists and non-Zionists would take part. The new body was meant to serve as the executive branch of the Zionist Organization. It was to replace the Zionist Executive that sat in London and Jerusalem, and to operate in parallel with the quasi-parliamentary bodies of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Assembly of Representatives and the National Council.
In ideological terms, the Zionists made a rather humiliating concession by accepting a partnership with non-Zionist organizations. Egos and mutual distaste made it difficult to establish a partnership. The non-Zionists also had to make difficult compromises. They did not like the term “national home,” but agreed to the expansion of immigration, the purchase of more land, the encouragement of Hebrew labor, and the use of the Hebrew language.33
“I was moved deeply by the profound and staggering experience,” Ben-Gurion wrote to Paula. Einstein was a genius and his face, shining like that of an angel, imbued the dais with majesty and splendor.”34 The Zionist coffers were empty; there were times when the Zionist Organization was unable to use all the immigration certificates that the British authorities issued. The assumption was that the American non-Zionists’ money would save the Zionist enterprise in Palestine from catastrophe, just as it had saved the country from famine during World War I. He began to think about “the conquest of Zionism,” meaning control of the Zionist Organization. That was the real center of power.
Jabotinsky and his followers claimed that the establishment of the Jewish Agency violated the principles of democratic representation. Some in the labor movement also had trouble overcoming their repugnance for partnering with American capitalists, whom they saw as the enemies of both Zionism and socialism. Ben-Gurion declared: “We are not completely at ease with the Jewish Agency … yet we accept [it] because we believe that Palestine will be built by cooperation among all Jewish forces. For us, democracy is not just an empty expression, but we have a principle more dear to us than democracy, and it is the building of Palestine by Jews.”35 Democracy thus became one with socialism and peace—in Ben-Gurion’s thinking, it was, like the others, ranked under the goals of Zionism. At the next Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1931, a huge drama took place. Chaim Weizmann deviated from the Zionist mainstream and was ousted from the presidency of the movement.
The wave of terror of 1929, the White Paper that followed it, and the Zionist movement’s opening to non-Zionists all renewed the debate over what Zionism’s ultimate goal was, and what it could realistically achieve. In advance of the Basel Congress, Weizmann said that there was no way to establish a Jewish majority in Palestine in the foreseeable future, and as such there was no point in demanding a Jewish state. “The propaganda which is carried out in certain Zionist circles, like the Revisionists, for a Jewish state, is foolish and harmful,” he wrote, saying that demanding a Jewish state in Palestine was like demanding one in Manhattan. At the Congress, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he was even blunter: he opposed seeking a Jewish majority in Palestine on the grounds that the world would see it as a plan to expel the Arabs. He maintained, however, that there was a chance of achieving an agreement on the basis of parity.36
He caused a scandal. The Revisionists made the most of it—they demanded a resolution explicitly stating that the Zionist movement sought a Jewish state. Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and many others believed that such a declaration would be detrimental to the cause and that it would be best to maintain ambiguity. The labor movement again had trouble deciding where it stood. Ben-Gurion believed that Weizmann was spouting “gratuitous foolishness,” but he could live, for the time being, with the parity principle, given that the Jews were still a minority in Palestine. Furthermore, were he to come out against Weizmann, it would benefit the Revisionists.37
Weizmann was short a few votes for reelection to the presidency. Ben-Gurion decided to help him. Weizmann phoned the British prime minister Ramsey MacDonald and asked him to receive Ben-Gurion that evening and grant him a statement supporting the parity principle. Ben-Gurion said he was surprised that Weizmann sent him and not Haim Arlosoroff, whom Weizmann had also consulted on the issue. Arlosoroff, who headed the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, was close to the president, and his English was better. “My English was very bad then,” Ben-Gurion observed. Weizmann seems to have been thinking of the labor solidarity that tied Ben-Gurion to Prime Minister MacDonald and his son Malcolm; Weizmann had one of his own close associates, the eminent historian Lewis Namier, accompany Ben-Gurion.
The two flew to London. But because of a mechanical malfunction they arrived late. The prime minister had waited for them, but when they did not arrive he set off for a weekend in Chequers, a grim estate outside London. Ben-Gurion and Namier were invited to come for breakfast the next morning.
It was the first time that Ben-Gurion had taken upon himself such a delicate political mission, on such a high level. The prime minister told them that he would never forget his visit to Palestine. He was referring to his trip of 1922, which Ben-Gurion had worked so hard to organize and at the end of which he wrote that Zionism had gained a friend. The statement of support he requested of MacDonald required negotiation, conducted in a positive atmosphere, and a telephone call to Weizmann. Ben-Gurion was pleased with the result. Then the question arose of how Ben-Gurion would return to Basel. There was no direct flight on Sunday, and they had missed the flight to Paris. The younger MacDonald telephoned his father’s office. Downing Street had looked into several options, but they were all too expensive. Sending a plane especially was ruled out due to the concern that it would prompt a provocative parliamentary question. In the end, it was decided that Ben-Gurion would return to Switzerland by train. It was a wonderful idea, but it raised a problem of its own—Ben-Gurion did not have a transit visa allowing him to cross French territory. MacDonald disturbed the weekend repose of the French ambassador to make that arrangement. He accompanied Ben-Gurion to London. Ben-Gurion called him Malcolm.
The story demonstrates the ongoing special relation that British prime ministers had with Zionism, the same combination of awe and fear that produced the Balfour Declaration. Weizmann made an art out of exploiting this phenomenon—almost every door in London continued to be open to him; in the same manner, it went without saying that Ben-Gurion would be invited to breakfast with the prime minister on a day’s notice. Ben-Gurion learned from his trip to Chequers that the Zionist movement needed its own airplane.38
Before he was able to return to Basel, a telegram arrived there from Tel Aviv. It was from Eliyahu Golomb and it warned that, were the Congress to pass a resolution declaring Zionism’s ultimate goal to be a Jewish state, it would set off a new round of Arab terror. The Revisionist resolution was rejected. Jabotinsky climbed on a chair, tore up his accreditation as a delegate, and cast the scraps in the air. Several of his opponents tried to strike him, his supporters defended him, and one of them took Jabotinsky on his shoulders and took him out of the hall. Weizmann was ousted nevertheless.39
*
The routine work that awaited Ben-Gurion when he returned from the Congress was dreary and wearying. The issues that required his involvement offered no challenge; among other things, he had to put considerable time into a school janitors’ labor action. More and more people were coming to him with personal problems. He appeared as a prosecutor in the Histadrut’s high court, in a proceeding regarding the struggle against the Communists and the employment of Arab workers. By this point, it was already clear that his campaign against the employment of Arab workers had failed, even if it was not his fault. The facts of life were stronger than ideology. “There are Jewish citrus groves that Jewish workers do not set foot in,” he complained, offering a long list of Zionist projects that were carried out by Arab workers, among them the Herzl Forest and the laying of the cornerstone of Tel Aviv’s first neighborhood.40
He looked after his family, which moved into a home in a new workers’ neighborhood in north Tel Aviv. It had two floors, and 140 square meters (1,500 square feet) of floor space. For the construction, Ben-Gurion received a mortgage, loans, discounts, and various other considerations, all thanks to the generosity of the Histadrut Executive. The nearby homes also belonged to Histadrut leaders, but they had only one floor.41
Some three months after the family moved into its new home, Ben-Gurion recorded a grievance he had heard in one of his conversations with workers. “Histadrut officials receive high salaries,” the worker had charged. “You all have houses, and received large advances from Solel Boneh and Kupat Holim.” Overseas travel was another bone of contention. “If, instead of going from Paris to London and from London to New York, the leaders would come in a car to see what was going on here, it would be better,” said another worker.42 Ben-Gurion took the bus to the Histadrut offices when he was in Tel Aviv, but that seemed not to be enough. During those months, he recorded much such resentment from the public: “apathy,” “negligence,” “discrimination,” “exploitation,” “rot,” “failure,” “disgrace,” and “despair” were just some of the words he heard. It all meant that the Histadrut was no longer on the side of justice, they told him. He also encountered ethical disappointment. In the Histadrut’s ten years of existence, they told him, the ideals it had been dedicated to degenerated and disappeared, especially among young people. Ben-Gurion sadly recorded in his diary that, instead of reading books, they played soccer and danced the fox-trot. Workers spent too much money on clothes.43
Not only did this cast a pall over the Histadrut’s achievements during its first decade; even more so it disheartened Ben-Gurion. His diary is full of disappointment and ennui. Soon thereafter he traveled to Vienna. “I will finally have time to be alone for a few days,” he wrote in his diary. That was not correct; Vienna was home to a young woman named Rega Klapholz, whom Ben-Gurion desired to see. He informed her of his arrival and asked to keep it a secret.44
The Hebrew press in Palestine headlined the rise of the Nazis; there was no doubt that it was a horrifying development. From the start, Davar was unequivocally pessimistic. Hitler, the paper asserted the day after the takeover in Berlin, intended “to pull the Jews out by the roots.” But these same writers had trouble comprehending and explaining Nazism as a phenomenon—its evil force was of a magnitude they had never encountered before. Likewise, Ben-Gurion’s initial reaction was to focus only on the German election. A few days after Hitler came to power, on January 30, 1933, Ben-Gurion opened the Histadrut Convention with a long, data-replete, and optimistic speech. Toward the end he referred to developments in Germany. “The forces of obliteration and destruction are not restricted to a single country,” he said. “The emissaries of Hitlerism,” he asserted, were also active in the Zionist movement. He meant the Revisionists.45 At a public rally in Tel Aviv, he once called his nemesis “Vladimir Hitler.”46
During those months, Ben-Gurion extricated himself from the dull work of the Histadrut and began preparing himself for what would be his greatest battle to date, for the leadership of the Zionist Organization, which he hoped to win at the next Zionist Congress. He intended to enlist his soldiers from among the masses of Jews who remained in Poland’s cities. He seems not to have been aware of the irony; as far as he was concerned it was the natural thing to do. At first he made a preliminary trip to collect information about the mood and the power relations there, and about his chances of winning. It was a kind of self-taught seminar—part journalist, part intelligence agent, he went from political party to political party, from party official to party official, jotting down names and numbers and trying to penetrate the internal politics of every city and town. He found much resentment and petty jealousies; he was unable to unite all the left-wing factions into a single party. His only consolation was that the Revisionists had also split. In September 1933, he returned home, via Vienna, and the following April he went back to Poland. This time, too, he wrote to Rega Klapholz to tell her he was coming. “I’d like,” he wrote to her, but did not complete the sentence. Instead of a period, he put down a portentous dash and added: “In Vienna I will tell you what I would like …” The mysterious ellipsis appears in the original.47
*
He conducted the election campaign as a military operation in every way. He brought the strategy from home; the tactics he crafted only after he arrived. The first step was to register Polish Jews to vote—that is, to induce them to pay dues, shekalim, in exchange for which they would receive membership cards in the Zionist Organization. The assumption was that people who paid their dues through the representatives of a given party would vote for that party in the election. But before that happened, the people who had paid their dues needed to be convinced to go to the polls and vote. That was the second step.
Ben-Gurion headquartered himself in Warsaw in the offices of the League for Labor Palestine, a coordinating body for the parties of the Zionist leftists in Poland. Soon after his arrival, he summoned an activist from Hehalutz, which had, by Ben-Gurion’s estimation, some forty thousand members. Haim Fisch, twenty-five years old, worked in the organization’s central office; he apparently had been recommended to Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion proposed to him that he coordinate the shekalim operation. The next day he asked Fisch what he proposed to do. That was the way Ben-Gurion worked—once he chose an assistant, generally one many years younger than he was, he gave the assistant freedom to accomplish his mission as he thought best. Fisch suggested conducting a survey of Jewish communities, so as to obtain an up-to-date picture of where they were politically; it was exactly what Ben-Gurion had thought to do. He drafted the questionnaire himself. It asked for figures on the local population, the number of Jews, the results of the previous Zionist election, the number of members of each party, and the number of shekalim that each party had sold. Respondents were asked to provide the names and addresses of relatives living in Palestine and information about election rallies, the distribution of leaflets, and, most important, a forecast of the outcome.48
The members of the staff at Ben-Gurion’s headquarters later remembered him as a strict boss with a talent for instilling in them devotion to their mission. He preserved a businesslike distance from them. He generally wore a black overgarment, something between a shirt and jacket, like a Russian commissar’s, with a stiff collar in Chinese fashion. Many of his colleagues were skeptical, but he persuaded them that they could win, on condition that the campaign be properly organized. “I believe in power,” he said.49 He used military metaphors, terming the Revisionists a “dangerous enemy” requiring “maximum mobilization of all our forces.” These forces would be sent to “the combat front.” He also engaged in political espionage. On one occasion he received information from a “more or less reliable” source regarding the Revisionists’ bank account. The information indicated that, at the last minute, Jabotinsky’s people were liable to distribute membership cards without requiring the payment of dues. At difficult moments he would say, “Our movement is just not organized for war,” and once he also warned: “Our members will have rifles without bullets.”50 The questionnaires soon began to come in. Ben-Gurion studied them, eagerly copying out their columns of numbers. “We have business to do in six to seven hundred towns,” he remarked, and embarked on his campaign.
*
During the weeks that followed, he crisscrossed Poland by air, rail, and car. He held three or four events a day, many of them ending in the small hours of the night. His message was dramatic: “This is not an election battle, but a decisive battle for life, a battle for the fate of Zionism and for the Histadrut and pioneering immigration.” A labor victory would strengthen the Zionist presence in Palestine, and enable an enlargement of pioneering immigration; defeat would be tantamount to the defeat of Zionism.51
But in many cases the message was less important to his audience than was the fact that he had come all the way from Palestine to visit the remotest villages so as to call their inhabitants to war. Everywhere he went, people congregated at the train station to greet him; some came from nearby, even more godforsaken places. Sometimes they came on foot, through rain and mud. He was very obedient, going where he was sent; only once did he rebel: “In the town of Bielsk we can obtain at most two hundred votes. Is it worth going there?”
He always began his speeches on time. He began one event before an almost empty hall. One of his helpers, Baruch Azanya, recalled that Ben-Gurion forbade him to send out invitations with the word “exactly” after the time. “Seven-thirty is seven-thirty exactly, there is no such thing as seven-thirty inexactly,” he insisted. He displayed an interest in the makeup of local politics, and addressed people by name. “He had a card file in his head of people who could help him,” one of his people later recalled.52
It was a work model that had proven itself in the past—direct contact with as many people as possible and close tracking of what was being done in each cell of the political hive he sought to conquer. That was how he had conducted the campaign for the Assembly of Representatives and taken control of the Histadrut. In the next elections to the Assembly (1931) and the Histadrut (1932), Mapai won major victories.53
“Sometimes I am overcome by fear,” he wrote to Paula. “Everywhere I find young people studying my articles and speeches … I never expected that, I never wanted it, never aspired to it … I see what a great responsibility lies on me and I am overcome by fear.” One member of his staff had a different impression: “After returning from his first rally, he literally sprouted wings,” he wrote. “The difference, with him, between a relaxed and a tense mood was always huge … When he was tense, he was tense to the limit, and when he was relaxed he was unrecognizable because he was an entirely different person.”54 The small towns filled him with hope; in Warsaw and Łódź he had trouble winning support. “Our situation is very worrisome in the big cities,” he wrote, but he still believed in the chance of receiving an absolute majority.55
Many urban Jews supported the Revisionists; the campaign was seen as a personal contest between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky; it was fierce and violent. Here and there Ben-Gurion’s speeches were disrupted, and there were some brawls. In Warsaw, two stink bombs were discovered in a hall in which he was about to speak. During his speech, he called Jabotinsky a “maniac” whose goal in life was to be the dictator of the Zionist Organization. “When I finished that sentence, a heavy object fell at my feet and my pants were covered with yellow dust,” he related. “The hall erupted … they thought a bomb had been thrown. But it was only a tin can full of sand and dust and bricks. The can was thrown from the balcony by a Betar girl, a young student, and it was aimed at my head and it was good it missed.” The girl was arrested and Ben-Gurion went on with his speech. A brawl was under way outside. A few days later, eggs got thrown at him. The campaign provided him with bodyguards, who were told that his life was under threat.”56
At this point, Ben-Gurion was once again close to collapse, both physical and mental. “I do not know if I will make it safely to Election Day,” he wrote two months before the end of the campaign. Some of his traveling was indeed extremely fatiguing. He had trouble sleeping at night and lost his voice at one point. A doctor ordered total silence and Ben-Gurion had to cancel several events. He once went to Płońsk to rest. “I still haven’t been at home,” he explained. His family was no longer there; perhaps there were some matters that demanded his attention. Whatever the case, he didn’t enjoy a respite there. Everyone wanted him to use his influence to obtain immigration certificates for them. Only a few members of the party traveled to Poland to help. Haim Arlosoroff came for two days.57
Ben-Gurion arrived in Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, in the evening hours of Saturday, June 17, 1933. An excited throng awaited him at the train station; many of them accompanied him to his hotel. Along the way, they began to ask him if he had already heard the news from Tel Aviv; they had a telegram for him but were uncertain whether to show it. Ben-Gurion understood that something had happened, and then they gave him the message. Arlosoroff had been assassinated. “My world went dark and I collapsed,” he wrote to Paula.
When he recovered, they told him that Arlosoroff had gone out for a walk on the Tel Aviv beach the previous night, with his wife. Two young men approached the couple, and one of them shot him. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died. Researchers at the Ben-Gurion Archives put some effort into trying to find out how exactly and when Ben-Gurion learned of the event. The problem is that Ben-Gurion, who recorded so many superfluous details in his diary, was atypically vague in documenting this incident. This raised the question of whether he really fainted—no reference to that can be found in his diary entry of that day. It is not clear at what point he received the cable his party sent from Tel Aviv; it is thus not clear what he knew about it when he cabled his party that Arlosoroff “died at the hands of thugs thirsty for our blood.” The word “thugs” hinted at the identity of the murderers—followers of the far-right Abba Ahimeir. The use of the first-person plural, “our blood,” underlined the political nature of the murder. Ten days later, Ben-Gurion instructed his people in Tel Aviv to send someone to the library to collect incriminating articles by Ahimeir.58 Ahimeir and two of his men were charged with the murder. One of them was sentenced to death, but in the end all three were acquitted on appeal. The question of who killed Arlosoroff remained an open wound.
As the head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department, Arlosoroff had been involved in negotiations with the Nazi authorities to allow tens of thousands of Jews to leave Germany and settle in Palestine, and to bring some of their property with them. The Haavara (“transfer”) Agreement aroused much opposition, led by Ahimeir’s Hazit Ha’am, principally on moral-national grounds. The claim was that there should be no negotiations with Hitler’s government; the newspaper condemned Ben-Gurion as well as Arlosoroff. Between the lines was the message that both deserved to die.59 The Vilna police provided a guard for Ben-Gurion, and when he returned to Warsaw, he moved his lodgings because the Revisionists had learned where he was staying.
Arlosoroff’s murder naturally raised the question of how Ben-Gurion would be affected. Arlosoroff was considered a rising star. His death may well have removed an obstacle along Ben-Gurion’s path to the top of the Zionist movement. The immediate concern was that the murder would lead to a postponement of the elections. At this point, Ben-Gurion’s confidence was on the rise; at the beginning of July, he wrote in his diary, “If the elections are held, our victory is certain.” He thus told his people not to attribute the murder to the Revisionists. “Jabotinsky wants to use the murder to build himself up, and right now he is succeeding!” he warned. He had earlier regretted accusing “thugs” of the murder. He sent another telegram to Tel Aviv: “We will hold back on our pain, God will avenge!”60
He had no clue of who the murderer or murderers were and what the motive had been. In the meantime, he focused on the election campaign.
*
About two weeks before the election, Ben-Gurion wrote: “For a long time I have not felt such manifold strength in this war that I find myself in, but I believe the battle will be a decisive one and that victory will be ours.”61 He thus considered what needed to be done to “purge” the Zionist movement after the elections. The Revisionists needed to be punished, and the non-Zionists needed to be expelled from the Jewish Agency. The establishment of the Agency, about which he had been so enthusiastic in 1929, had been “a shameful criminal mistake,” he now wrote. “We humbled the banner of Zionism and of the popular will.” It was, he claimed, “the greatest catastrophe that had ever happened to the Zionist movement.” He admitted to being partly responsible for the mistake, but castigated and cursed the non-Zionists in his best style. They were, he said, “a gaggle of presumptuous bourgeois eunuchs who still make themselves out to be the proxies for the people, but they are nothing but miserable and impotent bankrupts.” The word “bankrupts” appeared twice, and revealed the real problem. The economic crisis that befell the United States in 1929 made it very difficult for America’s wealthy Jews to meet the expectations that the Zionists had of them. Ben-Gurion did not forgive them for terming their money “charity.” He treated them as if they carried a plague: “We can cut out this cancerous disease and purify the air around us,” he threatened, suggesting that they go to hell.
The results were very good. The labor movement received 42 percent of the vote in Poland, some eighty thousand votes more than they had received in the previous elections. The Revisionists doubled their vote, receiving about fifty-three thousand votes, less than 25 percent of the total. The labor movement became the largest faction in the Congress, but did not enjoy an absolute majority.62 Ben-Gurion did not vote; he spent Election Day in Płońsk. Two days later, still without the results in hand, he rushed off to Vienna.63
Rega Klapholz was a medical student. Her father was a Polish-born businessman who opened his house to Zionist activists and visitors from Palestine. Apparently this was the background to his two daughters’ decision to attend the 1929 Zionist Congress in Zurich. They mingled among the delegates, asked for autographs, and joined in the Zionist ruckus. A labor movement representative from Vienna introduced them briefly to Ben-Gurion. In 1931, Ben-Gurion visited Vienna, where he renewed the relationship Rega Klapholz.64 She was twenty-four years old. In August 1932, she wrote to him that she would like them to meet in order to discuss several problems that were preoccupying her. As is customary in German, she addressed him in the third person. Ben-Gurion was in London at the time. He immediately responded, in the familiar second-person singular, that he very much wanted to see her and proposed several options. Perhaps it was childish on his part, he said, but he alone was not to blame for that—she was, too.65
Over the next three years he wrote her dozens of letters, first in Yiddish and then in Hebrew, which she had just begun to learn. They evince a paternal friendship that turned in time into a love that was disloyal to Paula and ultimately, as he would find out, impossible to sustain. His initial letters could be taken for a father’s letters to his daughter. He wrote to her about his work, about his travel plans, and about how he longed to see her. Whenever he could, he traveled to Vienna to spend several days in her company. He stayed in a hotel.
About a year and a half after they began to correspond, Ben-Gurion sent her the most revealing letter he had written since his youthful correspondence with Shmuel Fuchs. His letters to Paula were never more intimate, and some of those he sent to Rega display more maturity and depth and less emotional blackmail. It was a letter congratulating her on her twenty-sixth birthday. He wished her “valuable work” to which she could devote herself and gain satisfaction from, and “great love,” in that order. He philosophized about each wish. He did not know life’s purpose and reason, he wrote, nor did he even know if there was purpose and reason to life and the world. “But we ourselves create the purpose of our existence,” he wrote, “in the task to which we devote our lives. We set ourselves a goal and the goal grants content and meaning and reason to our lives, and all the good we have in us we put in the service of that goal.” It was the most precise formulation so far of his profound identification with the Zionist vision—the national goal and his desire for self-fulfillment were one.
But that fact alone could not provide all that a person needed or complete satisfaction, he continued. He thus wished her “a man who will love you and whom you will love.” Love is “a human weakness that nothing should be done to counter,” he continued, referring to their own affection. “Dear Rega, I love you, I love you with my entire soul, but I cannot give you anything—the happiness a woman needs, a complete love and total devotion of a loving man—I pray that you will find in your life a man who is right for you.”
Briefly he reverted to a paternal stance. “Study and work—never mind! There are difficulties in life, or troubles, there is sorrow and agony, but there is also something to live for, to suffer and to fight for, and there is also love in life, and even if love gives only suffering, it hardly matters.” He then waxed romantic again: “I love you—what can I do? I want nothing and I cannot want anything, and it does me good to see you here and there, a bit, and when I am lonely and sad I recall our meetings, I see your face and your steady eyes, so precious to me, and my heart pounds from far away and I miss and yearn and I know, for naught, and I pray for your happiness. Don’t worry, the difficult times you are having now will pass and other difficult times will come and good times as well. Your whole life is before you and I love you, my Rega, and I will be happy when I see you are happy, happy in work and with the love you will find in Palestine.”
For a moment he had his doubts and he added: “You will not oppose my loving you, will you, Rega? Dear and beloved Rega, I am yours.” He scribbled his full name on his initial letters, as he did on endless letters and documents. Then he started to sign DBG, but for this letter he was “David.”66
That was the high point of the affair. In February 1934, he was still writing: “How I would like to embrace and kiss you now.” But five months later, he pronounced himself a “bad boy,” and Rega, who would soon be a physician, seemed to metamorphose into his mother, just as Paula the nurse had done. “Such a bad boy,” he termed himself, “certainly much more than you think,” because he had for so long not answered her letters. It was just like when he abandoned Paula during and after the war, perhaps just as his mother had left him all alone. In that same letter he shared with Rega the pain he felt upon the death of Bialik; the poet had died in Vienna. Ben-Gurion wrote that he had been “stolen from us.” The pain he shared with Rega was similar in its force to the pain he had felt on Herzl’s death, which he had shared then with Shmuel Fuchs. Just as he sent Fuchs Bialik’s “The Scroll of Fire,” he suggested to Rega that she devote herself now to his poetry, instead of to the lexicon of Hebrew medical terms he had sent her. He took at least partial comfort in Bialik’s death. “Shall we resent the blind and cruel fate that stole Bialik from us?” he asked. “Must we not also thank fate for giving him to us?”67 If Rega indeed resented him for leaving her, she, too, could have taken similar comfort.
At this point in his life, Ben-Gurion had already lost most of his ability to maintain a modicum of privacy. Apparently quite a few people knew about the affair, just as they knew that other Zionist leaders had cheated on their wives.
Rega and Ben-Gurion once had their picture taken at a café in Vienna. Her sister was also with them. Maybe he was trying to make his relations with her look merely social, the kind that required no secrecy. Maybe he thought there was nothing wrong with the affair. Whatever the case, at some point he crossed the fine line between a calculated risk and recklessness. He tried to deceive Paula, and she caught him in the act. It was a rather operatic scene. He told Paula to come to Warsaw and said he would wait for her there, but in the meantime he went to Vienna to visit Rega. Paula arrived in Warsaw earlier than expected. According to one version of the story, when she discovered that he was not in the hotel where they were to stay together, she swallowed a large quantity of sleeping pills, as if she were trying to kill herself. Ben-Gurion was summoned urgently back to Warsaw and arrived on the first train.68 His relationship with Rega Klapholz did not last long. She settled in Palestine, working first as a doctor at a kibbutz, Ramat Hakovesh. When she had a crisis there, she appealed to Yosef Baratz, a public figure with some influence, but far less than Ben-Gurion. “Understand that you are my only hope,” she wrote to him. “If you don’t help me, I am lost.” Her letter was part of a long correspondence she conducted with Baratz, at the same time as her relationship with Ben-Gurion.69
*
In July 1933, Ben-Gurion asked Rega to obtain for him Konrad Heiden’s history of the Nazi Party. He had been told that it was the best book available on the Nazis, and it could no longer be purchased in Germany. A month later, he took a train that had a stop in Munich. He got off on the platform and bought a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.70
* Among the others were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Shmuel Yavnieli, Shlomo Zemach, and Shlomo Lavi.
† The most personal thing he said about the violence came nearly two years later. The disturbances of August 1929, he said, reminded him that Palestine was still the Jews’ “stepmother,” and that it was a “painful and tragic memory.” In a letter to his father he wrote a few days after the disturbances, he refrained, exceptionally, from asking after his stepmother. (Ben-Gurion, “Hamediniyut Hahitzonit shel Ha’am Ha’ivri,” Ben-Gurion 1931, p. 153; Ben-Gurion to his father, Oct. 1, 1930, in Erez 1974, p. 156.)
‡ Ten years previously, Yitzhak Tabenkin had estimated that it would be possible, within a decade or two, to settle nine million Jews in Palestine. Ben-Gurion spoke of far fewer. In fact, no one really knew how many Jews would settle in Palestine and when. “We need to prepare for the maximum,” Ben-Gurion said. (Ben-Gurion to the Provisional Committee, June 9, 1919, CZA 1/8777; Ben-Gurion and Tabenkin to a Po’alei Zion delegation, March 7, 16, 1920, in Haim Golan 1989, pp. 189, 195.)
§ To quell any doubts the name might raise regarding the national nature of the party, Davar made it clear that its English name would be the Palestine Jewish Labor Party.
** From the time of Ben-Gurion’s arrival in 1906 and the end of the 1920s, the number of Jews in Palestine had doubled, reaching approximately 180,000. The Arab population rose by about 200,000 in the 1920s, reaching approximately 850,000. (Tomaszewski 2001, 1, p. 422; Ben-Avram and Nir 1995, pp. 107, 193; Lissak 1986; Lissak 1994, pp. 173ff., 215; Palestine Royal Commission 1937, p. 279; Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry 1946, 1, p. 141.)