One evening, in February 1941, Ben-Gurion attended the Palestine Folk Opera. The show was Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. He did not often listen to music, but attended the theater from time to time. “I had a nice evening,” he told the members of his party. “There was pleasant music and good acting and I enjoyed myself.” It was not unusual—the newspapers of the time show that wartime Tel Aviv offered a wealth of cultural events and leisure activities. Advertisements invited the public to attend sports competitions and fashion shows, end-of-year sales, plays, concerts, and other entertainments. The city’s cafés and bars, hotels and dance clubs, remained crowded and lively, as if there were no world war. Terror attacks were almost entirely a thing of the past.
The problem was that the operetta began late. The audience was already seated and the singers were waiting for the curtain to rise. Ten minutes passed. Ben-Gurion went to ask the manager what was going on. The manager explained that they were holding for a senior British official who had been invited and had confirmed that he would attend. Ben-Gurion saw it as a national insult.
Yes, it’s a tiny matter, there are worse things, he admitted, but for him it was “very bad.” True, he had never gone to the opera in London, he said, but he had never heard of a performance being held up because some dignitary was running late. “I was ashamed,” he said. “What have we come to? Why are we spitting in our own faces? If that is how we are, why are we incensed when others insult us?” In his opinion, the tardy bureaucrat should have been told to wait for the intermission.
At this time, Ben-Gurion was going from one public assembly to another preaching “Zionist alertness.” He demanded that Palestine’s Jews “stand tall,” including to the British regime. “I am not interested in whether they love or hate us, but I want them to respect us,” he said in the wake of the incident at the opera. “We will act with honor and they will respect us.”1
The term “Zionist alertness” (literally, “Zionist tension”) thus also gave expression to patriotic anger against the British. Never had cooperation with the British been tighter and more vital than during the war. As part of this, the Jewish Agency’s Political Department used the Haganah’s intelligence service to ferret out German and Italian spies among Jews who reached Palestine. But Ben-Gurion said that the English had imposed a “half-Nazi regime” in the country.2
*
While he was still in New York, Ben-Gurion had been cut off from Palestine. When he returned, he felt isolated. “I have no personal interest in delving into what happened here,” he said. The leaders of the Jewish Agency and Mapai in Palestine did not frequently report to him about what was happening and generally did not consult him. That irked and troubled him, and from time to time he protested. Yitzhak Gruenbaum filled in for him at the Jewish Agency; Sharett, the Jewish Agency treasurer Eliezer Kaplan, and Golomb continued to coordinate ties with the British, the economy, and security, respectively. The sky did not fall. When they needed a leader to offer guidance, they asked Katznelson. Upon his return from the United States, Ben-Gurion was a private individual; following his resignation, he held no official post. “I sit before you at the moment as just an ordinary Jew,” he said to his colleagues in the Jewish Agency. But the members of the Executive asked him to rejoin the body, and his resignation might as well have never happened. He did not immediately have much to do; in the meantime, he placed himself on the sidelines and waited.3
The country he had left was deep in an economic crisis that had its origins in the time of the Arab Revolt. The one he returned to ten months later was flourishing. Tens of thousands made their livings off the war, some of them by building defensive fortifications, mostly on the northern border. In total, the British security apparatus employed about 15 percent of the Jewish labor force. The British decision to make Palestine a supply depot was due in part to the lobbying Weizmann and Ben-Gurion had done in London. Military production in the service of the British also encouraged the Haganah’s own military industry.4
The atmosphere of complacency that he encountered upon his return filled him with “fear and trepidation.” He had the impression that the people in Palestine were not living the war, he said. In April 1940, Sharett reported to the Executive that, given the situation on the Balkan and North African fronts, a German invasion of Palestine could not be ruled out. It was very unlikely, he said, and did not shake his confidence that Britain would be victorious, but he felt duty-bound to inform his colleagues that he was under public pressure to work out a plan for a massive evacuation from Palestine. Ben-Gurion was present. A few days later, he was speaking of a Nazi invasion as if it were already under way and he was the only one to have noticed. “Palestine is already at the front, the conflagration has reached us but we don’t see it. We are not preparing for it and are not living it … but the war has now reached the gates of Palestine, that is now a fact.” He did not argue that more “Zionist alertness” could prevent a Nazi invasion. On the contrary, “it is a volcano that cannot be put out with a cup of tea,” he said, “but we must see it. When will we see it? When the lava covers us?”5
As the German advance continued, the Jewish Agency considered whether some of its leaders should be sent overseas, where they perhaps should function as a kind of government-in-exile, just as other nations had done. The Executive asked Ben-Gurion to go to London, but he refused. It was precisely in such hard times, he said, that “each of us must become a Zionist preacher.”6
*
It was a traveling political awakening show and a personal journey to his roots. Over and over again he laid out the fundamental principles of Zionism for his listeners, as if he had just discovered them for the first time; again and again he shared some of his most profound experiences that had shaped him as a person, and he seemed to relive them each time. It was an ideological and indeed an ethical experience—“the Jews of Palestine needed to tell the Jews of the Exile: ‘Zion, not as a lesson for the future, but for our own time.’” And it was a political campaign as well. Zionist patriotism fortified Ben-Gurion’s power; he frequently intervened in his party’s affairs and bolstered his hold over defense affairs. The term “Zionist alertness” thus dictated the proper attitude toward the war and the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.
He described this work as a life-or-death engagement. Hence the need to help the English destroy Hitler. All the nations participating in the war were interested in their collective victory, and each one wanted its own victory, he said, and the Jewish people were no different. He meant a victory for Palestine. He believed that Germany would be defeated, but took into account that after the war the British would not repay the Jews for the assistance they had given. That meant that the Jews of Palestine should lend assistance to the British as allies, “not as servants, not as nameless people.” Therefore, a Jewish army was also needed to defend Palestine against the German army. It was also a matter of honor. “At the very least Jews will die as men and not as dogs,” he said.7
“Zionist alertness” toward “the annihilation of European Jewry,” as he already termed it then, in 1940, required at this point preparations for the absorption of those Jews who remained alive after the war. “Zionism is now one thing and only one thing: concern for saving five million Jews.” When he said “now,” he was referencing “concern.” Rescue would come only after the war.8 He presumed that there would be millions of Jewish refugees in Europe at that time. He did not know precisely how many and cited estimates, between three and eight million. They would have no future in Europe, he asserted. Even if they were promised full and equal rights, it would be nothing but an “empty dream” that could undermine the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. That was why it was essential, even in this time of Jewish catastrophe, to fight “quack remedies,” as he referred to plans for Jewish immigration to other countries. He termed it “greater Zionism.” He believed in the power of “Zionist alertness” in Palestine to make an impression on American Jews and to reinforce their willingness to harness themselves to the promotion of Zionism.9 He left some ends loose regarding the basics of Jewish identity. Despite that, the lectures were well organized and clear, among his best.
During those months, he was in a constant state of nostalgia; it sometimes seemed as if he were making farewell visits to stations along his life’s road, beginning with Yitzhak Tabenkin’s room in Warsaw and his early days in Palestine. “There was a different atmosphere then,” he said wistfully about the Second Aliyah. The Jewish community was small and weak, half of it was starving to death, but there was “moral inspiration.” He meant, among other things, the influence of the Russian Revolution. Everyone was affected by it, he said, even those who claimed not to be. “I may not believe in Karl Marx, but I am a socialist and I am a Zionist,” he stressed.10 Time and again in his speeches he harked back to Sejera, and as is often the case, his memories grew more and more embellished. The story of the Arab who almost killed him turned into a kind of Galilean legend.
He surveyed the terror waves of 1921, 1929, and 1936 and told of his conversations with Arabs “who still have not made peace with the fact that they are not the only masters of the land.” He recounted the partition debate, the Blitz, and of course how he had come to admire the spiritual magnitude of the English nation.*11
Many of the people who came to hear his speeches had settled in Palestine after the war began. He saw them as a problem, since they had come as refugees, rather than Zionists. “And they remained alien to our enterprise and our vision,” he said. “They are different and can bring a holocaust upon us.” He nevertheless sought to raise their Zionist alertness. He seems to have had German Jews in mind, as he spent more time meeting with them than with any other group.12 In contrast, he sang the praises of native-born Palestinian Jews, who were tall and breathed the scent of the soil, “a young Hebrew generation that we should not be ashamed of,” as opposed to Diaspora Jews, whose “cowardice” he condemned time and time again.
His thoughts ranged between redemption and hell. “We Jews have real power to help destroy Hitler,” he said at the beginning of March 1941, praising the clout of the Zionist enterprise. “Jewish strength in Palestine consists of every Jewish child, every Jewish school, every Jewish tree, every Jewish goat,” he declared. A few weeks later, he fantasized that Zionism’s end was approaching. “Only a blind man can’t see it,” he said in early April 1941. “We are on a terrible decline. All of us. The great project of a generation is being destroyed.” Six weeks later, he announced: “We now stand, once again, before a revolutionary period, the sea of life storms and roils, and we can again solve the problem of Palestine.”13
He was a man in his midfifties who was already taking account of his past and shaping how he would be seen in history books. He had received his political education from the French and English, he said. From the French he took clarity and from the English simplicity. “I am nothing but a single craftsman, and at this moment I am working only on Zionism,” he said. In one discussion from this time he suddenly declared: “I want our friends [in America] to know that I demanded this of them before my death, that they take care of Zionism at the end of the war.”14
In general he lectured and spoke, rather than engaging in dialogue with his audience. He imbued everything he said with gravity—the art of humor was almost entirely foreign to him. If he said something funny, he would first make an excuse in the form of “I once said,” as if the only legitimate witticism was one from the past, or quoted from others. “I once said that if the Histadrut Executive were to call on ten thousand workers to die, they would die, but if it demanded that they pay a penny more, no one could be sure they would,” he related. He attributed to Herbert Samuel the epigram “The Jews are just like the gentiles, but more so.”15
Some differed with him, but no one could dismiss what he said. His inner conviction made a great impression on those who heard him. With the exception of the elderly Ussishkin, perhaps, there was no other person who lived Zionism so profoundly as part of his personal identity.
A few weeks after he began his preaching circuit, Ben-Gurion demanded that the Jewish Agency adopt a “Great Zionism” plan for after the war. It was a fairly long document. Ussishkin complained that it was too long, and Ben-Gurion responded that it could be summed up in a few words: Jewish state, the war against Hitler, Jewish army, war against the White Paper, and Zionist alertness. There was nothing new about it and it was not a pressing matter. The Zionist movement had always been committed to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and there was no way to establish one before the war ended. The demand that the Jewish Agency Executive accept his plan thus looked like a display of leadership, and probably grew out of his sense of isolation from Zionist affairs because of his lengthy sojourn overseas.
The members of the Jewish Agency Executive took up the plan. Their debates sound like a continuation of the dispute over the partition plan. To defuse their opposition, Ben-Gurion modified his position, as he often did. As part of this he promised that there would be no forced transfer of Arabs, and if they were to ask him, he thought that the Jewish state should be a British dominion, as Canada was.16 But the liberalism of the German Jews exasperated him—some of them were demanding a binational state. “Does this man not see himself as a Jew?” he responded to an article by Martin Buber. “If not, he has no business intervening in what the Jews are doing. If he is a Jew, he should act like one.” At another opportunity he said that Buber had the “psychology of a servant.” He warned the advocates of binationalism that “if you reach an agreement with the Arabs, you will be in Hitler’s camp.”17
Menachem Ussishkin attacked his plan from the perspective of what he considered true Zionism. There was no point talking about an independent state as long as there was not a Jewish majority in Palestine, he said, warning against Zionist apartheid. “In South Africa,” he noted, “the blacks are eighty percent and the rulers there are the twenty percent of whites; the eighty percent have no rights at all … do you want that the Jews who are twenty percent should rule in Palestine? If that’s what you say, then the way you use the term ‘Jewish state’ is comprehensible. But you won’t say that, because you can’t say that, since there is no hope that anyone in the non-Jewish world would accept that concept, and also a large part of the Zionist movement would oppose that concept, justly or not.” The Bible’s laws of war teach, with regard to certain nations, that “you shall utterly destroy them” (Deuteronomy 20:17), Ussishkin pointed out, but times had changed. “Today, first, a Jewish state, and second, equal rights for the Arabs, and third, transfer of the Arabs only if they consent, as Mr. Ben-Gurion has written, that is squaring the circle, it is impossible.” Nor was there any use in talking about a “Jewish state of Tel Aviv and its environs,” Ussishkin said, as it would be impossible for such a state to take in five million Jews. He thus proposed limiting the Jewish Agency’s goals in the years to come to large-scale immigration.
Ben-Gurion did his best to accommodate him, proposing that the question of borders be left vague at this point. “We won’t say now what the borders should be. If they ask me what the Land of Israel is, I will say that it will be determined by our Zionist strength.” That is what he had always said. “No one should ask me about borders,” he told his colleagues in 1939. “It depends on our strength.” But Ussishkin stood his ground. “Why fool ourselves?” he asked. “After all, every one of us knows that it will not happen during his lifetime.” He died four months later.18 Weizmann remained the last Zionist statesman whose career had begun during Herzl’s lifetime.
*
In June 1941, the British army employed several dozen members of the Haganah in reconnaissance, in advance of its incursion into Syria, which was controlled by the French Vichy government. A few days later, the Haganah reconnaissance detachment participated in the invasion itself. Among its members were two young men who were to play major roles in the military and politics—Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. Dayan lost his left eye in the operation. It was one of the first operations of the Palmach (Strike Forces), which the Haganah had recently set up in cooperation with the British. Ben-Gurion saw it as a step toward the establishment of a Jewish army. For him, the purpose of the Haganah’s mission was not just security; it was also to “assemble around it” all Zionist Jewish youth and to prepare for the conquest of the Negev Desert. The long political struggle over control of the Haganah had not yet been decided; some of the Jewish Agency Executive were displeased with Ben-Gurion’s militaristic attitude. Gruenbaum warned his colleagues to watch out for people with “a large, fiery, and impulsive temperament.” Then, as usual, the Executive accepted Ben-Gurion’s program.19
*
Around that time, Ben-Gurion received a letter from Shlomo Zemach. After resigning from his post as headmaster of the Kadoorie Agricultural High School, he served as a Jewish Agency emissary in the United States, and then in South Africa. When he returned to Palestine, he made his home in Jerusalem. He didn’t have a job. So he wrote to his friend David. “I know that you cannot and probably should not attend to individual cases at this time,” he began, “but, believe me, were it not for the fact that my family depends on me, and if not for the shadow of literal hunger at the door to my home, I would hold back and wait patiently and not bother you today.” He had had many failures in life, he wrote, but had succeeded as an agronomist. He worked for nine years at the Jewish Agency’s Agricultural Experimental Station in Rehovot, furthering intensive farming, which at the time was but a dream. He had fought for water, for irrigation methods, for vegetables, for crop rotation, and, thank God, he wrote, his dream had become reality. He did not care where he worked, who would be his boss, how much he would earn—the main thing was that they take him back. He asked for Ben-Gurion’s assistance in the name of the friendship of their youth, he wrote. “You know very well that my hands are not versed in writing about personal matters. I speak to almost no one about them, but I said, with you, David, I can speak as a friend. After all, there were days when I hid nothing from you.”
Zemach did not just mail a letter—he went to see Ben-Gurion in his office. There he told Ben-Gurion why the Experimental Station had not taken him back. He had been blacklisted by a high Jewish Agency official who knew that Zemach knew that he, the official, was a thief. “All Ben-Gurion had to do was pick up the phone and say a word to [the treasurer] Kaplan and everything would have worked out,” he later wrote in his memoirs. “But when I went to him and told him, so foolishly, speaking to an old friend, that I was down to my last loaf of bread, what I saw in his eyes was not sorrow over his friend’s troubles, but a glint of joy, a spark of pleasure, as if he wanted to say, ‘Look how things have worked out—I can finally see the son of Abba Zemach standing before me in the pangs of poverty, asking me to have mercy on him.’ That was so transparent in his face that I ended the conversation and left the room.” Not long thereafter, Zemach found a different job and began to write the book on humor that would become his favorite.20
*
On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and three days later, Ben-Gurion said that the war between the two could save the world “and our land as well.” For the moment, it looked as if the attack on the Soviet Union had distanced the war from Palestine. He felt much better. Under the new circumstances, it was no longer as hard, psychologically, to leave Palestine. Five months after beginning his Zionist preaching campaign, he set off for the United States again. On the way he stopped over in London for several weeks, reliving “those good days,” as he said. His beloved city, “abounding with and radiating confidence and bravery,” had recovered. Here and there one could still see evidence of the bombings, and young people were dressed in khaki, but the bombardments had stopped and the sirens no longer wailed. It was hard to get a decent meal in a restaurant, but other than that the war was felt only in the newspaper headlines, “as if the world had returned to its path,” he wrote. He got together with acquaintances—journalists, officials, and politicians, among them the new colonial secretary, Lord Moyne. Ben-Gurion told him that, after the war, Europe would have three million Jews who would need to be settled in Palestine. Lord Moyne suggested that, after the war, a Jewish state be established in East Prussia. Ben-Gurion made no progress with his main goal, the establishment of a Jewish army under British control. In contrast, he established close relations with the U.S. ambassador, John Winant, and received from him a promise to arrange a talk with President Roosevelt. Weizmann had first met with Roosevelt in February 1940.21
In July 1942, Ben-Gurion met in New York with a man named Francis Kettaneh, who confirmed reports that the Germans had put into operation a plan to methodically annihilate the entire Jewish population of Poland. Kettaneh was an Arab Catholic from Palestine living in America. At the time, Ben-Gurion knew that hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews had already been murdered, but the information provided by Kettaneh had a much greater impact than early reports on the slaughter of the Jews had had. “What he told me seems to be true,” Ben-Gurion later informed the members of the Jewish Agency Executive.22
*
When the war broke out, the American Zionist Organization established an Emergency Committee, headed by the Reform rabbi Stephen Wise, of whom Ben-Gurion wrote: “Personally, he is the person most esteemed and beloved and respected by the broad public, but because of much bother and many meetings and the search for funding and thousands of different goals, he is always tired and fatigued, dozing off at meetings and unable to focus when something vital is on the agenda.” There was talk of replacing him, perhaps with another Reform rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver. Silver, according to Ben-Gurion, was “forceful in his opinions, a proud Jew who knows Hebrew and Palestine (more than other leaders), and is not fearful about displaying dual loyalty, but the Zionist public does not like him and he has no clue about Zionist policy.”23 With these two, and innumerable other activists who spent most of their time arguing with and intriguing against one another, Ben-Gurion did his best to heighten Zionist alertness among America’s Jews. He knew everyone; twenty-five years had passed since he first came to them. In the large picture, nothing had changed—the same mentality, the same sensitivities. He knew exactly what he could expect from them, but hoped to get more. He tried to engage the non-Zionists. His contacts with administration officials were meant to persuade the American government to press Britain to form a Jewish army in Palestine.
He established himself in the Winthrop Hotel in New York, on Lexington Avenue. This time, too, most of the people he saw were Jews. He spoke at rallies, went to meetings, had lunch with people. He did everything himself—made phone calls to set up meetings, wrote letters, took the train from place to place. When, two months later, he moved to Washington, he packed up his books himself.24 He had not previously engaged in American political lobbying, and as was his common practice, he studied the craft, as he did every new subject. People he consulted advised him to gather a group of young people around him and to seek ties with progressive-radical forces in the government, including the agrarian circle around Vice President Henry Wallace.
He brought with him to Washington a very valuable phone number, that of the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, whose acquaintance he had made through the late justice Louis Brandeis. Ben-Gurion asked for an hour or two of his time, to get his advice. Frankfurter asked if it would be an hour or two hours, and invited Ben-Gurion to come to his home at 9:00 p.m.; he opened the door himself. Ben-Gurion seems to have done most of the talking. Among other things, he said that America’s entry into the war improved the prospects of the Zionist struggle. Frankfurter, who was older than Ben-Gurion, treated him with paternal affection; according to Ben-Gurion, the justice lauded his intelligence and credibility, and revealed to him a state secret that would be made public only twenty-four hours hence—Winston Churchill was in town.
Frankfurter promised to do his best to help, and a week later invited Ben-Gurion to his chambers for a lunch with David Nyles, the son of a Jewish tailor who was an aide to President Roosevelt; one of his tasks was managing the White House’s contacts with minority groups. A third guest was Ben Cohen, whom Ben-Gurion had met in London; Cohen was a close associate of the president’s. Two of these three influential American Jews had heard Ben-Gurion in the past; Nyles was listening for the first time. Ben-Gurion opened, as usual, with the story of his early years in Palestine, how he had been one of the sowers and reapers, pavers and builders, and how the wasteland had become fertile. He said that the officials of the colonial administration in Palestine were hostile to the Zionist project. They knew that after the war there would be three million Jewish refugees who would need a home, but would do everything in their power to prevent the Jews from coming to Palestine. He had thus come to the conclusion that the future of Zionism depended on America, and when he said America, he meant Roosevelt. The president, he knew, did not live in a void. He was surrounded by advisers and friends. He, Ben-Gurion, had come to Washington to win the hearts of twenty or thirty people.
Cohen said that he needed to go and asked what plan Ben-Gurion was seeking support for. Ben-Gurion said a Jewish army, as well as a regime that would permit large-scale Jewish immigration. He did not say a Jewish state. Why a Jewish army, Cohen asked dubiously, why not simply volunteer for the British army? That was a question that many people asked; for Ben-Gurion, it was a “Jewish complex.” Nyles, an introverted and quiet man, did not say much, but he also counseled caution, lest the Zionists give the impression that they were looking only after their own interests. He proposed that he and Ben-Gurion meet privately, “for a more serious discussion.” When the two advisers left, Frankfurter told Ben-Gurion that he had made a good impression on Nyles.25 It was the most important conversation Ben-Gurion had had up to that point in the United States. His hopes that he would get a meeting with Roosevelt grew.
But the request that the United States promote the establishment of a Jewish army in Palestine encountered opposition. The New York Times rejected the idea, since the British opposed it—with good reason, the Times thought—because of their concerns about how the Arabs would react. An editorial the paper published also voiced ideological opposition. Everyone knew, it said, that the ultimate purpose of a Zionist army would be to compel the United Nations to establish a Zionist state, an idea that many Jews opposed. In the new world that would rise after the war, “Jews along with other religious and national minorities may live peaceably and happily in every nation, enjoying the full rights of other citizens.”26 Ben-Gurion declared that it was a “vicious article,” but he did not give up. “The chances of uniting American Jewry are not bad at all,” he declared. Following a meeting with members of the Zionist youth group Habonim, he wrote that they were “alert, vigilant, perceptive, and of much promise.”27
His work plan proceeded successfully. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. was the son of the ambassador who had intervened on his behalf when he had been imprisoned under Turkish rule. By this point, Ben-Gurion had become an expert lobbyist. Before parting from Morgenthau, he made a point of asking for his phone number, and requested permission to call whenever he felt it necessary. He prepared himself well for meetings; a transcript of a long conversation he had with members of the research and analysis staff of the Office of Strategic Services, headed by the Harvard historian William L. Langer, shows that he spoke to them as equals.28
Frankfurter invited him to dinner at his home with William Bullitt, the first U.S. ambassador to the USSR and an intellectual who had coauthored a book with Sigmund Freud. Bullitt was about to set out for a visit to the Middle East at the president’s behest. Ben-Gurion remarked that Billy and Felix, as they called each other, began the evening with a whiskey; he did not have a drink. During the subsequent conversation, Bullitt declared that all the Arabs should be expelled from Palestine and a Jewish state established there. Ben-Gurion responded, as always, very cautiously, that there was no need to deport the Arabs, because the country was economically capable of supporting them all. From this point forward, Ben-Gurion and Bullitt met frequently.29
The Emergency Committee in New York paid for his stay in Washington, and also agreed to send a secretary, Miriam Cohen, and pay for ten days of her work there. It was the beginning of a love story.30
During those months, Ben-Gurion worked on organizing a large Jewish conference, in lieu of the Zionist Congress, which could not be convened during the war. He sought to gain as broad a consensus as possible for a program the Jewish Agency Executive had approved before he left Palestine, including the demand for the immediate establishment of a Jewish army and, after the war, of a Jewish state. As usual, he met opposition. America’s non-Zionist Jews enjoyed great public prestige and economic power. Ben-Gurion tried to integrate them into the Zionist effort, and as part of that had to explain why he rejected Magnes’s binational approach; it was not always easy. In contrast, he developed close ties with Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist organization. Once he went so far as to force himself to go with the women and their husbands to a benefit performance of The Marriage of Figaro.31 Even though he was well acquainted with American Jewish life, he felt alien among them. “I feel here altogether alone among so many people, but it is like a wasteland,” he wrote to Doris May. “In lonely sleepless nights I am still with my Plato.”†32
May had heard that Ben-Gurion was overcoming his loneliness. She continued to correspond with the Zionist diplomat Arthur Lourie, and Lourie knew that his secretary Miriam Cohen and Ben-Gurion had fallen in love. He passed this hot bit of gossip on to London, and May seems to have enjoyed it.33
*
In April 1942, Ben-Gurion came down with back pains. At Miriam Cohen’s suggestion he traveled, alone, to a resort in the Catskills, not far from Beaver Lake. The letters he sent her from there read much like the poetic outpourings that he sometimes wrote when he encountered the majesty of nature, at sea or in the air, whether at Niagara Falls or Trogen and Buergenstock in the Swiss Alps. The skies of upstate New York “declare the glory of God,” and the sun was “a divinity.” The frogs sang “wonderful symphonies” and he marveled at the cattle as well—it was all like in Palestine—so different from “that empty, forsaken desert called the city of New York.” He thought wistfully of the protagonists of his beloved Greek mythology and fantasized about another companion, “much taller than any of the Athenians, very upright, poised, fresh-looking, always deep thoughts, sure of himself, unmoved although very sensible.” He “never uses any of these long-winded, empty, high-sounding words,” and, Ben-Gurion added, “he never tells a lie!” He was an ideal friend. He told Ben-Gurion the story of his love and held forth on the meaning of life and love, and a “wonderful story of mysterious drops falling from the heavens, of refreshing, caressing breezes, of unspeakably beautiful and generous rays of light.” He was a tree, “a true, living, evergreen tree, deeply in love with the earth, which he does not want to leave for a single moment. Is that not true, dear love?” he wrote to Cohen. They exchanged their thoughts about the world and words of longing.
As new lovers do, the two of them wove a web of romantic mystery around their letters and around themselves. They called the letters the “BL papers,” after Beaver Lake. She referred to Ben-Gurion as Winthrop, after the name of the hotel he generally stayed at in New York. Ben-Gurion assured her that, while he could be unpleasant at times, he would always be a faithful friend on whom she could trust entirely. His word was sacred. In this sense, the letters evince a longing for friendship as much as promises of love. He was as heady as a teenage boy; the eroticism with which he imbued his natural surroundings recall Bialik’s “Scroll of Fire,” which Ben-Gurion had once sent to his beloved friend Fuchs.34
The secret of Ben-Gurion and Cohen’s love quickly spread and soon it was the talk of the town in Jewish New York. From there it reached Tel Aviv; Paula took it hard. Beginning in early January, she sought to obtain, through Jewish Agency officials, including Moshe Sharett, a copy of her diploma from her nursing school in New York. She presumably intended to start providing for her own livelihood. A few months later, Ben-Gurion told her that there was no way to receive the document.35
Geula and Renana sided with their mother and severed contact with their father. Renana was preparing for her high school graduation exams at the time, and Ben-Gurion wrote to her saying that he understood her silence. After all, she had a lot of schoolwork and also needed to play, go to the movies, and spend time with friends. “The last thing that comes to your mind is a letter to me,” he wrote, as if this were the only reason for her lack of communication. He sent her a long account of his activities in America, like those he had sent in the past to Paula, and asked that she write to him about what was going on at school and in the neighborhood. The most personal sentence he was able to write was “I bought nylon stockings for you and Mother and Geula, but I don’t know how to send them to you.” Apparently Renana was not interested in stockings at the time. “I thought that betrayal is a horrible thing,” she later said. “Mother was hysterical.”36
In mid-April 1942, Chaim Weizmann arrived in the United States. He was not pleased to find Ben-Gurion there and Ben-Gurion was not happy about his arrival. At the time, he was ratcheting up his efforts to get a meeting with Roosevelt, and had wanted to see him before Weizmann came. He told Frankfurter that Ambassador Winant had promised to arrange an appointment; Frankfurter promised to speak with the White House. The president’s emissary to the Middle East, William J. Donovan, promised to convey to the president a memorandum on the need for a Jewish army; nothing more than that happened.37
Ben-Gurion heard that Winant was in Washington and sought him out in the White House and State Department; he left him messages at the hotel where he was supposed to be lodging. The ambassador did not take his call; Ben-Gurion sent him a telegram and did not receive an answer. He met with another judge, Samuel Rosenman, whom he was told had been a close friend and confidant of the president’s for the last twenty years, and a frequent visitor at his home. Rosenman told him that “everyone” in Washington was asking if he had already met Ben-Gurion. But Rosenman also offered only to convey a memorandum to the White House. Ben-Gurion said to himself that perhaps it was harder to get access to the “captain,” as he called him, because of the war.38
*
Weizmann represented only the Zionist Organization, but since the time of the Balfour Declaration he had conducted himself as if he were the king of the Jews. Aside from his prestige as a scientist and his appealing British-Jewish humor, he acted the role of the statesman, projecting optimistic melancholy and aristocratic grandeur. In New York he lodged at the luxurious St. Regis hotel. “Hotels are always optimistic,” he once said.39 In London he stayed at the Dorchester. He most likely never made a phone call himself to set up a meeting. Prior to his arrival he published a long article in Foreign Affairs, a prestigious forum for leaders of countries. He demanded a Jewish state in Palestine.40 In the months that followed, he met three times with Vice President Wallace, mostly about his own scientific work; he was developing a chemical process that would begin with corn and end up, so he hoped, with rubber.
*
The disagreements between Ben-Gurion and Weizmann were not fundamental. Ben-Gurion could easily have penned Weizmann’s Foreign Affairs article, had he been asked. Weizmann also agreed that the fate of Zionism would be decided, in large measure, in Washington and New York. He was more apprehensive than Ben-Gurion was, however, about a break with Britain. With regard to bringing millions of Jewish refugees to Palestine within a short time after the war, he was skeptical. While not opposing a Jewish army in Palestine, he believed that the efforts to gain British consent had failed.
The surrogate Zionist Congress convened on May 9, 1942, in the historic Biltmore Hotel on Madison Avenue in New York. It was attended by several hundred delegates, most of them from the United States. As the representative of the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion positioned himself as an outside conciliator between self-aggrandizing activists who sought respect and were addicted to the joy of insulting one another. He was also deeply involved in the scheming behind the scenes that preceded the conference. He put most of his efforts into battling over the wording of the Zionist declaration that he wanted to take home with him. Nearly every word was the subject of debate and required compromise.
The Biltmore Program was perhaps the strongest possible declaration that could have been extracted at that time from America’s Zionists, but it barely came close to the fundamental aspirations of Zionist ideology. It called only for making Palestine into a “Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.” The word “state” does not appear. The conference called for the Jewish Agency to receive authority over immigration and development. According to the program, the White Paper regulations were to be revoked and a Jewish army established to defend Palestine. Ben-Gurion also held himself back—the boldest political statement he made was that “the Mandate must be entrusted to the Jewish people themselves,” in the form of “governmental authority.” It was still too early to say what would happen thereafter. Neither did the Zionist preacher call on America’s Zionists to ready themselves or their children to return to their historical homeland. He spoke of immigration to Palestine only in connection with the persecution of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe and the plight of the refugees who would survive the war, not in terms of the Zionist dream of the redemption of the entire Jewish nation. He evoked the tragedy of the Struma, a ship carrying 760 Jewish refugees from Romania that had been sunk two months previously in the Black Sea.
Not long afterward, Ben-Gurion told his colleagues in the Jewish Agency Executive that the goal of the conference had been to bolster unity among American Zionists, to clarify Zionism’s goals, and to put both the unity and the goals on public display. The event was an important one, he stressed, although he had hoped for a more explicit commitment to Jewish independence. He used the words “commonwealth” and “self-governing Jewish Palestine” at the Jewish Agency Executive meeting as well.41 The Biltmore Conference would later come to be seen as a milestone in the struggle for the establishment of the State of Israel.‡
*
Two days after the conference, Ben-Gurion’s father died in Tel Aviv at the age of eighty-six. During his final years, he split his time between the homes of his two daughters, Tzipora Ben-Gurion, who lived in Haifa, and Rivka Har-Melech, who lived in Tel Aviv. Aside from his son David, he was survived by two other sons: Avraham, a religious Histadrut official, and Michel, the kiosk proprietor. Avigdor Ben-Gurion received a Histadrut burial and was eulogized by David Remez and Moshe Sharett. The latter termed him “a veteran soldier of the Zionist movement.” Ben-Gurion’s absence was strongly felt; Sharett called him “the lion among us”; Shlomo Lavi said: “His spirit is with us.” Geula sent her father an almost formal letter of condolence.
Ben-Gurion sent Paula a terse telegram in English and the next day sat down to write a long letter in Hebrew. He described his father as a man full of love, upright and good-hearted, a faithful Jew full of love of Zion. “He gave me a great deal,” he wrote, mentioning also his mother’s death. In many ways, the letter reads like notes for a political autobiography; the impression is that his father’s major contribution to Zionism was not holding his young son back from becoming its leader: “When we, the boys of Płońsk, secretly founded a self-defense force and purchased weapons, and I stood at the head of the organization and hid the weapons in our house—Father knew of it and did not interfere.” He recalled that his father had been deeply saddened when his son decided to go to Palestine, because he had hoped that David would become a celebrated scholar, but he came to understand the value of the letters he received from Palestine. “Everyone in town would come to read them,” Ben-Gurion noted. He related how he had come down with malaria and gone hungry, and how he had worn tattered and ragged clothes. His father wanted him to come “home,” as Ben-Gurion wrote, with quotation marks, and also “tried” to send him money, “but when I asked him to stop, he stopped.” On one of the bottom corners of the page he wrote something in tiny, spidery letters that are very hard to make out. “When I return home, I will see him no more. I will never see him again.”42 Disappointed, frustrated, in love, and sad, following with trepidation the British efforts to halt the ongoing German advance toward Palestine, Ben-Gurion prepared to oust Chaim Weizmann; it was one of the most dramatic battles he ever fought. By this time, the conflict between the two had turned into profound personal antipathy, reflexive and seething. Ben-Gurion envied Weizmann; Weizmann sensed that Ben-Gurion was plotting to take his place.
On June 10, 1942, Ben-Gurion told Weizmann by phone that he no longer saw himself as his partner. The next day, he sent him a long letter that had gone through a number of drafts. As in the past, his charge was that Weizmann was acting on his own. “You identify your personal position with that of Zionism,” Ben-Gurion asserted. “You are here almost two months. You have talked in Washington and New York to many people on Zionism. I wasn’t consulted. I wasn’t told before or after.” That last line seems to be saturated with Ben-Gurion’s feeling that he had been insulted: in a previous conversation, Weizmann had told him matter-of-factly that Ambassador Winant had asked him to convey an apology to Ben-Gurion for not having yet kept his promise to arrange a meeting with Roosevelt, which he was still prepared to do. Weizmann passed on the message only weeks later.
Ben-Gurion’s letter was largely couched in generalities rather than specifics. “You do not grasp political realities,” he wrote. He quoted a number of statements by Weizmann that implicitly disparaged the importance of establishing a Jewish army. Unusually, he did not announce his resignation from the Jewish Agency. Instead, he made a veiled threat to oust Weizmann from his leadership of the Zionist Organization: “If I am asked whether you shall continue to act as you are acting here, or you should resign, my personal advice would be that you should resign.”43
Weizmann coldly and haughtily rejected all the charges, just as he had when he received a similar ultimatum from Ben-Gurion in London. It was, Weizmann averred, “merely the result of a temporary mood, dictated not by calm judgment but rather by an imaginary grievance caused undoubtedly by the many heartbreaking disappointments which all of us must face in this crucial hour.” Ben-Gurion responded, but Weizmann declared that there was no point in continuing the correspondence. The moment of truth had arrived.44
*
On the afternoon of Saturday, June 27, 1942, six leaders of American Zionism convened at the home of Rabbi Stephen Wise, at Ben-Gurion’s request. Weizmann was summoned as well. The meeting had been coordinated by an exchange of written messages; the main points were set down in an official record. Ben-Gurion saw it as a kind of hearing, ending in conviction. He argued that Weizmann’s activities in the United States were at this point endangering Zionism’s goals. But before initiating the process of unseating Weizmann, he wished to bring the problem to the attention of the Zionist leadership.
Prior to the meeting, Weizmann wrote to Wise denying Ben-Gurion’s charges. “I think the real cause of his unhappiness is the failure in persuading the British to agree to our plans for a Jewish fighting force,” Weizmann maintained. “But nobody is more unhappy about it than I.” He added sarcastically that he did not expect it to be a tribunal that would pass judgment. Actually, the clash between the two men bore a greater resemblance to a fight between two gladiators. With the exception of physical blows, they used all weapons at their disposal. One of those present, Nahum Goldmann, later recalled the following exchange, not recorded in the minutes:
Ben-Gurion: If we had a state, we would have to shoot you. You’re a traitor!
Weizmann: And if we had a police force in the state, we would need to send you to a madhouse.
Both of them meant every word they said, and that wasn’t Weizmann’s worst invective. He maintained that Ben-Gurion was leveling “charges out of the void” of the type Hitler and Mussolini used before they liquidated enemies in purges.45
Ben-Gurion reiterated that Weizmann was acting alone, and chronicled their relations since 1935. Weizmann, he said, could never say “no” to an Englishman. He argued that Weizmann had for all intents and purposes set aside the demand for the establishment of a Jewish army, and had consented to counterproposals he had received in London, including a common Jewish-Arab army and a Jewish force that would be enlisted in England but not fight in Palestine. Only the United States could compel Britain to agree to a Jewish army, he claimed, but Weizmann had been dismissive of this demand, even after it had been adopted by the Biltmore Conference. “If Weizmann can do the work only the way he is doing it, it is better that he should resign,” Ben-Gurion insisted. He mentioned Ambassador Winant’s promise to arrange a meeting with Roosevelt and asked for the support of the assembled leaders.
Initially, Weizmann displayed regal condescension, as if it were below his station to bicker with Ben-Gurion. He said that he would leave it to others to decide whether there was a need for someone to certify that he was kosher. He argued that Ben-Gurion was plotting a “political assassination.” With a mocking reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he compared Ben-Gurion to Brutus, implying that he himself was Caesar. But, he assured the others, “the future corpse is not worried.” Only the Zionist Congress could force him to resign, he maintained. For the last two and a half years, he claimed, Ben-Gurion had seen the establishment of a Jewish army as the sole problem facing Zionism. “Everything else in comparison with that fades into insignificance,” he said. “We may obtain Palestine without an army and we may obtain an army without Palestine.” He did not think that the world began and ended with America. Everything had to be done to ensure American and British cooperation in advancing Zionism. The United States could not act without Britain. Zionism could not do anything without Britain. In this context, he remarked that it was not true that he did not know how to say “no” to the British. The word “no” appears in the minutes in Hebrew. He reminded the rest of the men of his deep roots in the Zionist movement, dating to “prior to the Balfour Declaration.” Ben-Gurion had then been almost an unknown. The more Weizmann spoke, the more he found it difficult to hold back his anger; each sentence was harsher than the last.
At first he said that Ben-Gurion’s chargers were “futile and unjustified,” but afterward he referred to them as “misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and in many cases misstatements.” By the time the meeting broke up, Weizmann was convinced that Ben-Gurion was out of touch with reality, hallucinating, and suffering from a “sick imagination.”46
The six Zionist leaders recalled that battle of titans as one of the most tragic incidents in the history of Zionism. One of them, Hayim Greenberg, could not take it and ran out of the room in tears.47 Ben-Gurion tried to do to Weizmann what the young Weizmann had done to Herzl—his Zionist career was also built, in part, on the demand for a more radical Zionist policy, as if radicalism was evidence of greater patriotic commitment. They competed for the trappings of power and honor; it also manifested the rivalry between the Jews of Palestine and the global Zionist movement, which dated back to the Zionist Commission’s arrival in Palestine. Weizmann won this round—five of the six Americans supported him and gave him their confidence. Only one thought that Weizmann should resign.48
The next day, Weizmann recounted his efforts to persuade Ben-Gurion to go home. “But he seems to be taking his time over it,” he wrote, perhaps with a wink at his affair with Miriam Cohen. “Besides, means of transport are difficult,” Weizmann added, as if to stress that that was not the only thing keeping Ben-Gurion in New York.49 He knew how to be wicked, petty, and vindictive. In the meantime, he continued to humiliate his rival. “We have battled against Revisionism for years under the leadership of Jabotinsky. It would be a calamity to have to fight a new and more dangerous brand of fascism under the leadership of Ben-Gurion,” he said. He liberally spread worried insinuations about Ben-Gurion’s mental state, and in a letter to the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem—which he did not send in the end—he wrote: “His conduct and deportment were painfully reminiscent of the petty dictator, a type one meets with so often in public life now. They are all shaped on a definite pattern: they are humorless, thin-lipped, morally stunted, fanatical and stubborn, apparently frustrated in some ambition, and nothing is more dangerous than a small man nursing his grievances introspectively.” He is obsessed by his mission in life, Weizmann went on. He alone knows what is right, and woe to anyone who disagrees. “Anybody who is unfortunate enough to question some of his statements is simply jumped upon and shouted down and he terrorizes his audience by interminable ranting speeches.”50
The British embassy in Washington tensely tracked the struggle; its archives show that they knew almost everything. Among other things, they managed to obtain the exchange of letters between Ben-Gurion and Weizmann. Ben-Gurion feared that the British would not allow him to return. The ambassador, Lord Halifax, along with High Commissioner Harold MacMichael, and Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne, pondered where Ben-Gurion would do the least damage, in America or in Palestine. An intelligence dossier was prepared for them, covering the power relations between Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. “I doubt whether he will be an embarrassment to Dr. Weizmann in the U.S. Dr. Weizmann is after all a man of great distinction, not only in his own movement but in the world of science, whereas Mr. Ben-Gurion is a nonentity except in his own movement, and in that his reputation is more a local Palestinian one than a worldwide one,” the report maintained. “It is rather the case of the elephant and the mosquito. If it comes to a showdown between Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Ben-Gurion, then I put my money on Dr. Weizmann every time.” Weizmann asked the ambassador to act to have Ben-Gurion ejected from the United States.51
On July 1, 1942, Ben-Gurion arrived in Washington. Weizmann was also there. Ben-Gurion’s plan was to visit Lord Halifax so as to discuss with him the state of the Middle Eastern front. They did not meet. “At noon Dr. Weizmann’s secretary called to say that she had learned from his chauffeur that he had already been to see Lord Halifax,” Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary, in English, as if to designate the entry as testimony against Weizmann. A short time later, Weizmann called to brief him on the talk with the ambassador. Later that day, Weizmann met with Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. In the evening, Weizmann’s secretary phoned again. He was very tired and had gone to bed, she informed Ben-Gurion, but had asked her to tell him that the interview with Mr. Welles had been very successful.52
Justice Frankfurter was scheduled to meet with Roosevelt on July 3. Ben-Gurion knew about it and asked, in writing, if there was a possibility that he could also be given an appointment with the president, even for only ten or fifteen minutes, so as to explain the need for a Jewish army. He attached a memorandum summarizing what he intended to tell the president. The forces of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel were approaching the borders of Palestine, he wanted to tell Roosevelt, and “to the Jewish people throughout the world this will mean more than the massacre of some six hundred thousand Jews; it will be the ruin of their Third Temple, the destruction of their Holy of Holies.” He intended to tell him that in Palestine there were sixty thousand Jewish men who could be called up. “It may be that with all the Jews of Palestine fighting to the last, invasion and destruction cannot be avoided. But even then it will be a matter of supreme importance whether Jews of Palestine perish as soldiers and men fighting their enemies or are slaughtered like defenseless sheep.” Furthermore, “it will deal a fatal blow to the prestige of the British government.” Ben-Gurion wanted to impress on the president that “only the friendly intervention of the president of the United States with his British ally” could make it possible to mobilize all Jewish manpower and “avert the catastrophe threatening Palestine.”53
Five days later, the president received Weizmann for a twenty-five-minute conversation. “Incredible,” Ben-Gurion cabled Frankfurter.§54
Ben-Gurion returned to New York; it was a weekend, so no one was in the office. “Even with Rommel nearing Alexandria, everybody left for the country for the weekend,” he noted scornfully.55 The next day, he met with Francis Kettaneh, the Palestinian Arab who told him about the annihilation of the Jews of Poland.
During the months that Ben-Gurion spent in America, many people he did not know approached him, Jews and non-Jews, with all kinds of ideas and all sorts of plans to improve the world.**
He listened to them just as he hoped they would listen to him. He, too, operated largely as a lone lobbyist. Kettaneh, then forty-five years old, had been born in Jerusalem and studied engineering at the American University of Beirut. Together with his three brothers he founded a firm in Beirut that traded in automotive industry products; the business expanded to Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. During the 1930s, he was elected secretary of the Rotary Club, and then district governor of all the organization’s chapters in the Middle East, including those in Palestine. He and his family settled in the United States in 1942, when he served as the director of Rotary International.56 A few months prior to his first meeting with Ben-Gurion, he wrote an article in the organization’s magazine lauding Jewish-Arab coexistence in Rotary Clubs in Palestine. “During the tragic years of 1936–1938, when Arab and Jew were murdering each other in the Holy Land,” he wrote, “the only peaceful oasis were the Rotary Clubs of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa–Tel Aviv.”57 He may well have been introduced to Ben-Gurion by Aharon Rosenfeld, one of the first shipping agents in Palestine and an active member of Rotary in Haifa. Rosenfeld and Kettaneh knew each other both from Rotary and from the shipping business.††
Whatever the case, Kettaneh brought Ben-Gurion a peace plan based on the division of Palestine into cantons. He noted Arab sympathies for the Nazis and said that they would not believe a word of what they heard from the English. He thus proposed calling a convention under American sponsorship, and listed the senior Washington officials who he thought should participate in the discussions as observers. Ben-Gurion was acquainted with the names and knew some of the officials personally. Kettaneh told Ben-Gurion that he was a British agent, but Ben-Gurion suspected that he might have actually been sent by the State Department.‡‡
Ben-Gurion told Kettaneh that Zionists were primarily interested in immigration, and asked for the names of Palestinian Arabs who were prepared to accept Kettaneh’s plan. Kettaneh mentioned the mayor of Jaffa, Omar al-Bitar. He also said that Palestine could not absorb six million Jews. They would need to be settled elsewhere, most of them in the United States.58
Kettaneh told Ben-Gurion about talks he had recently held with members of the Polish government-in-exile in London. Ben-Gurion received the impression that he had perhaps met with its prime minister, Władysław Sikorski himself, even though Kettaneh did not mention him by name. The Poles told him, Kettaneh said, that they were counting on Hitler to solve Poland’s Jewish problem; by the end of the war, he would exterminate them all. If he didn’t, they would finish off the job themselves. No Jews would remain in Poland. Kettaneh gave the impression of being honest and was not an anti-Semite, Ben-Gurion later related.§§
It was the first time he had heard of the Nazi plan to exterminate Poland’s Jews from a non-Jewish source. “I was terrified,” he told the Jewish Agency Executive. He and Kettaneh agreed to remain in contact, and they met again three weeks later.59
Several researchers at the Ben-Gurion Institute later sought to learn from his acquaintances when, in their estimate, “he learned about the Holocaust.” None of them could offer a definitive answer.60 There seems to have been no clear dividing line before which Ben-Gurion did not know and after which he did know. Discrimination against and persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and later in the occupied lands, were widely reported. They were seen, justifiably, as part of the same spectrum, a line leading, step by step, from Dachau to Auschwitz. When the war broke out, the Germans did their best to conceal the slaughter of the Jews, and in particular their plan of systematic extermination. They were successful only in part—reports leaked continuously, from several sources, and had no great difficulty reaching the West, almost in real time, by mail, telegraph, and telephone, as well as via reports from people who were able to get out of the occupied countries. Some of them were eyewitnesses—refugees, diplomats, businessmen, emissaries of various kinds, spies. In February 1940, the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem received a fairly thorough report on the persecution of Poland’s Jews that reached the conclusion that the entire Jewish population there was at risk of being eradicated. Some of these reports reached the general public.61
It was not possible to verify all the reports, but even a cautious and critical reading of them could leave no room for doubt—the Nazis were murdering the Jews systematically; news of extermination in gas chambers soon followed. The reports that reached Ben-Gurion’s desk from time to time also seemed to confirm the inevitable fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
While in the United States, he could have read about this from time to time in The New York Times and other newspapers. On March 1, 1942, the Times reported that the persecution of the Jews in Poland was proceeding in accordance with a systematic plan to eliminate them. The newspaper’s source was Henry (Chaim) Shoskes, a well-informed economist and journalist from Poland who had served as a delegate to several Zionist Congresses. He warned that if the Nazis continued with their program, every Jew in Poland would be dead within five years.62 For Ben-Gurion, these reports fit easily into the historical viewpoint that had produced the Zionist movement. “The persecution and destruction of Jews is not a new invention of Hitler’s. It has been going on through the ages,” he told a Jewish women’s organization in Detroit in June 1942. “There is not a country, except, perhaps, in the New World, which has not persecuted and tortured Jews. They asked us for one little thing—that we should change our names and call ourselves not Jews but Christians.” Even at this stage, he had yet to internalize the unique nature of Nazi racial anti-Semitism.63
That same month a quite detailed report on the extermination of the Jews was smuggled from Poland to London. It reached the press by a tortuous road; on July 2, 1942, it appeared in The New York Times. The report cited the number of Jews murdered thus far in several major Polish cities, and put their number at about seven hundred thousand. It also reported that Jews had been killed in gas chambers, at a rate of a thousand a day, and named two of the extermination sites: Chelmno and Majdanek.64
The Times attributed the report to Szmul Zygelbojm, a leader of the Bund, the anti-Zionist party that Ben-Gurion had battled in his youth in Płońsk. Zygelbojm lived in London and was close to the Polish government-in-exile; the report reached him from members of his party in Poland. When Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive how he knew about the plan to exterminate Poland’s Jews, he made no mention of the Bundist, only of the Arab Rotary officer.***
Between his two meetings with Kettaneh, a crowd of twenty thousand assembled in Madison Square Garden to protest the murder of the Jews of Poland. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill sent messages of support. In advance of the demonstration, Ben-Gurion published the memorandum on the need for a Jewish army that he had presented to Roosevelt. He did not speak at the event. Jewish organizations raised money and sent it to Palestine through him.65
*
Weizmann scored another small victory before Ben-Gurion left the United States. On August 6, the British colonial secretary announced the establishment of a regiment for the defense of Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would both serve, not necessarily in equal numbers. The decision was understood to be an achievement of a sort and the product of the efforts Weizmann had made since the war began. He was pleased and wrote that he had always known it would happen. The Colonial Office’s statement was made public three days after Ben-Gurion explained to the Zionist Executive in New York why the British were refusing to establish such a unit. “They do not want to have Jewish soldiers because after the war they may turn against them … They do not want to have Jews become a strong force in Palestine, because they will have a claim to Palestine. I see this very clearly.”
He termed the establishment of the new regiment as “a slap in the face of the Jewish people.” Its soldiers, he charged, would have “inferior standing; they have not the same training, the same equipment, or the same chances as other battalions.” They would be, he claimed, “the stepchildren of the British army.” Nevertheless, he promised to encourage enlistment, “not for the benefit of the British but for our own.”66
*
Ten months after he arrived in the United States, Ben-Gurion left for home. In the meantime, the United States entered the war. As when he returned after World War I, he felt that he had experienced the making of a new world, and brought with him an updated version of the American dream. It was a feeling that had incubated within him beforehand, while he was preaching Zionism in Palestine, but it grew during his stay in America. “This war, perhaps more than the previous one, will shake the foundations of the earth, make hearts and minds tremble, and impel a profound and exhaustive soul-searching,” he prophesized. There would thus be a ready ear after the war for great and bold solutions, including the vision of “greater Zionism.”67 He dreamed that it would happen under U.S. protection. “The American army will be in every country. I hope that they will also come to Palestine. I pray that they will come to Palestine. They will have power. America can send ten million soldiers. And that’s enough for peace. They will have economic power.” The Soviet Union would also gain influence, he estimated, but the world would depend on America. “They will rule with the power of their army, food, and money,” he predicted.
Zionism’s faith in technological progress dated back to Herzl and had sparked Ben-Gurion’s own imagination in his youth. Now it excited him in particular with regard to the transport and communications revolutions that the war had brought about. Time would no longer be what it had been, and in the new world there would no longer be a need for a Zionism of stages, as there had been for the last sixty years. Two million Jews would be moved into Palestine after the war, all at once. He did not know if it would take six or eight months, he said, or perhaps a year or two. The transfer of two million Greeks had taken a year and a half. As soon as he returned, he called on Ruppin to draft an appropriate plan.68 His journey home lasted two weeks; he had to fly via Bermuda, South Africa, and Egypt. One of the passengers who sat next to him on one of the flights noticed the book he was reading and wrote him a note in ancient Greek: “Love the dialogues of Plato.”69
* The historiosophical mood that overcame him during these months led him again, as in the past, to compare pioneering Zionism to Europe’s colonial conquests, but following several days in India and Africa he again said: “For the first time I felt that I belonged to the white race … and one is ashamed of that. I in any case was ashamed of it, in particular in light of the war against the country that claims to be the master race.” (Ben-Gurion to Hitahdut Bnei Hamoshavot, April 14, 1941, in Ben-Gurion 2008, p. 358; Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, Oct. 4, 1942, BGA.)
† His boyhood friend Shmuel Fuchs, who was now spelling his name Fox, did not mingle with Zionists, and the ties between the two men were tenuous. When Ben-Gurion needed urgent treatment, he went to a different dentist. (Ben-Gurion to Paula, Jan. 12, 1939, BGA.)
‡ According to The New York Times, the conference was a show of confidence in the leadership of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. While Ben-Gurion must have been pleased by that formulation, he probably would not have liked hearing one delegate describe the dramatic climax of the event as the moment when Rabbi Stephen Wise, chairman of the Emergency Committee, placed on Chaim Weizmann’s finger a signet ring he said he had received from Theodor Herzl at the end of the Second Zionist Conference. The significance of the gesture was not lost on the mesmerized audience—America’s Zionists were designating Chaim Weizmann as Herzl’s heir. (“Zionists in Accord at Meeting Here,” New York Times, May 12, 1942; Louis Lowenthal, interview transcript, BGA, p. 6.)
§ Roosevelt was most interested in his guest’s efforts to advance the production of synthetic rubber, but Weizmann was able to get a few words in about the need for a Jewish army. Lord Halifax had previously asked the White House whether the president would consent to receive Weizmann for a conversation “about the Jews.” Roosevelt promised Weizmann a further meeting in two weeks. They next saw each other a year later. (Weizmann to Walter Laqueur, July 15, 1942, in Michael Cohen 1979, p. 330ff.; Lord Halifax request to the White House, BGA, general chronological documentation, June–Aug. 1942.)
** The editors of the official version of his papers frequently note that they have not been able to identify some of the people he mentions in his diary. (Ben-Gurion 2012, p. 225; Ben-Gurion 2008, p. 124, editor’s note et al.)
†† Ben-Gurion claimed that they were introduced by a man named Rosensky, from Haifa, but he may well have been mistaken. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, July 7, 1942, BGA; Aharon Rosenfeld 1982; Haifa Rotary Club no. 3592 and Rotary Haifa 1932–1955, Haifa Municipal Archive, file 56910; Claim of F.A. Kettaneh Bros. Ltd. against Air Ministry, NA [UK] CO 733/472/7 [680796] 1945–1947.)
‡‡ Another acquaintance of Ben-Gurion’s, Isaiah Berlin, then on the staff of the British embassy, mentioned in an internal document that Kettaneh worked with both British and American intelligence services. According to Berlin, Kettaneh sent him “a flood of letters.” (Isaiah Berlin to Agnus Malcolm, Aug. 2, 1943, in Berlin 2004, p. 440.)
§§ Ben-Gurion did not tell his colleagues what Kettaneh had been doing with the exiled Poles in London. Perhaps he did not know. He may have offered to sell them vehicles for the army of General Władysław Anders, which was then deployed in the Middle East. Whatever the case, Ben-Gurion presumed that, as Kettaneh was a Catholic, the Poles spoke frankly with him.
*** In 1948, Kettaneh published a plan to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, and in the 1950s he represented Yemen as a registered lobbyist in Congress. He was occasionally mentioned in The New York Times as attending social and cultural events. He died in 1976 at the age of seventy-nine. (Kettaneh 1949; Francis Kettaneh to Allen Dulles, April 20, 1955, CIA-RDP80R01731R000500540006-6.pdf.)