Ben-Gurion spent the last weekend of November 1947 at the Kalia Hotel, on the north end of the Dead Sea. “I was with my wife, my son, and my little granddaughter,” he later recounted. “Late at night people woke me up and told me about the UN decision. The laborers from the Dead Sea Works quickly arrived and danced all night.” He was referring to Resolution 181 of the United Nations General Assembly, convened at one of the World’s Fair pavilions in Queens. The great majority of the organization’s member states supported the decision, which called for the partition of Palestine into two states. When Ben-Gurion reached his office the next day, he found the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building packed with dancers. “Every Jew in Jerusalem celebrated and danced,” he related. “I never before saw such Jewish joy. And I was perhaps the only Jew who did not dance. Not because I did not appreciate the UN decision like the others, or that I wanted a Jewish state any less than they did. Rather, it was because I knew what awaited us before the state would arrive, and what awaited the state when it was established.” He told his daughter Renana: “Who knows if some of the dancers here will not fall in battle.”1
A few months later, he concerned himself with the question of what would happen in Palestine if the Jewish community were suddenly annihilated, as had happened with the Jews of Europe. It was, he said, a “brutal question,” and he presented it to the members of his party. As they did their best to recover from the queasiness that must have overcome them, he explained that it might not necessarily happen the way it had in Europe. “If, God forbid, there was some catastrophe, say a geological catastrophe, or a political one, and the community was wiped off the face of the earth,” he wondered, “would the Jewish people have the ability to reestablish one?” No other person involved in Jewish local politics in Palestine could have raised such a question; he answered it in the negative: the Zionist enterprise could not be re-created. His pessimism lent realistic credibility to the optimism he often displayed.2 It was only natural that he take upon himself to prepare the Jewish public for war. He had no doubt that he was the right man for the job. “All my time in Palestine I was somewhat involved in defense,” he wrote. Many years later, he explained: “I dealt with defense while still in the town of my birth, and when I worked at Sejera, I was placed face-to-face with death and came to understand the necessity of self-defense.”3 He knew nothing about leading an army into war.
*
When he returned from London in February 1947, he estimated that it would be two years before war broke out in Palestine, and as such he embarked on a leisurely study of the security situation. “I am not making it my top priority right now,” he told the members of his party. The party’s immediate problems were more important, but he also promised to look closely at what was happening in the Haganah. It seemed to him that not everything there was as it should be, “and that, too, is a serious matter,” he said.4
He termed the months he spent on this his “seminar.” Each day he summoned Haganah leaders, one after the other, and presented them with questions that elicited smirks from some and alarm in others. He had no clue as to the state of the Haganah and how it needed to prepare for war. The structure and chain of command, personnel and the training of commanders, equipment and arms, strategy and tactics—it was all new to him.5
As he had often done before, he familiarized himself with the subject by setting down endless details in his diary. That was how he had prepared for the great election battle in Poland in 1933. Just as he had carefully recorded the votes each party could count on in each neighborhood, and how many Zionist memberships could be sold in each town, he now wanted to know everything: rifles and provisions, helmets and cigarettes, medications and socks, vehicles and cannon and military chaplains. There was barely a subject that did not appear as data in his diary—myriad figures, more numbers, and names as well. The numbers seemed to give him a grip on the subject he wished to internalize, and also provided self-confidence and perhaps a sense of control. Like the books that he purchased, the numbers also fed his passion for retention.6 Sometimes he encouraged his interlocutors in his “seminar” to evaluate the personalities and capacities of their colleagues; he also asked about their party affiliation. From time to time he returned to the central question: “Can we survive?”7
One of the founders of the Haganah had summed up the situation for him in 1938: “Chaos. There is no military spirit. There is no plan nor any thought about bad times, especially the case of war.” That had also been the situation in the world war, when Ben-Gurion feared that Germany and Italy would help the Arabs annihilate the Jews of Palestine.8 The seminar of 1947 indicated that he did not prepare the Haganah for the coming war, just as he had not prepared it previously for the challenges of the 1920s and 1930s. Taken together, the details he recorded in his diary revealed an alarming picture.
The Haganah still largely comprised some twenty thousand volunteers, who were meant, in time of need, to defend their own settlements and neighborhoods; it now became, as well, something like a civil guard. About six thousand of them spent a day or two a week training and were termed the Field Corps. Some two thousand volunteers served in the Palmach and were, as Ben-Gurion put it, “semi-mobilized.” The closest thing to a real military force, they spent half their time training, and they could be deployed outside their communities. Several of the Haganah chiefs whom he interviewed complained of a lack of antitank and antiaircraft weapons, but Ben-Gurion discovered that most members of the organization had not even been issued a rifle.9
In parallel with his personal inquiry, Ben-Gurion employed an American colonel named Mickey Marcus, who issued a lethal report. There was not a single full battalion that could be sent into battle, Marcus informed him.10 Yitzhak Rabin, already then a Palmach commander, later wrote: “There is no way to escape the sad truth—in the face of huge political decisions and the danger of an Arab invasion, we were not properly prepared. Too much time was wasted.”11
Ben-Gurion was dumbfounded. “I discovered that we were unready to an extent far beyond what I had imagined,” he wrote.12 The use of the first-person plural allowed him, as usual, to avoid pointing to the person principally responsible. He remarked that it had been that way “for many years”; in his absence, Moshe Sharett also addressed security issues. But, as chairman of the Jewish Agency and the holder of the security portfolio, Ben-Gurion had the overall responsibility. When he wrote a few weeks later that the Haganah “is not fit for its mission,” he thought it best to add, cautiously: “That is not criticism of the past, but rather concern for the future.”13 He took it upon himself to reorganize almost everything from the ground up.
Less than a month after the partition resolution, Ben-Gurion was already offering excuses for neglecting the Haganah. “I ask myself how it happened that at this critical time we find ourselves unprepared, when the Haganah has been in existence for twenty-some years,” said Moshe Shapira, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive. Ben-Gurion replied: “I ask Shapira to cease criticizing the past at this time. I have just as much to say about the past as anyone else—but what good will that do?”
He was not good at dealing with criticism. As in the past, he argued not only that “we are all guilty,” but also “I told you so.” He was not a general, he said, and did not want to be one. “I am not a military expert and war is not my profession,” he declared.14 Despite that, he had been the only one to discern the real danger, already two years previously, he stressed. For seventy years (“since Petah Tikvah’s inception”), the Jewish community had needed to defend itself only against the Arabs of Palestine. But it would soon face the combined armies of the Arab states, mainly Egypt and the emirate of Transjordan, which would invade the Jewish state and seek to destroy it. That was an entirely new situation. He had begun warning about it in 1945, but he claimed no one had listened: “I sought to bring the Zionist movement to the realization that the security of the Jewish community is at this hour the central, vital, decisive issue, which determines everything else. Apparently the Zionist movement was not then prepared to hear such things.”15
He also accused the Haganah’s commanders themselves. The officers he interviewed were overly optimistic and did not understand how great the danger was, as he did. They thought only of the Arabs of Palestine, not the Arab armies from outside. “I was not persuaded by those optimistic answers,” he said. He went so far as to send back the budget request they submitted to him, because in his estimate it did not provide for current needs. Sounding like a foreign correspondent, he asked Sneh, “Why did you not take action in your time to improve the command?” Sneh, who no longer headed the Haganah, responded that they had put their trust in the British army, and that seems to have been the principal reason for the Haganah’s feeble state—the Jewish Agency leadership had made a point of not absolving the Mandate authorities of responsibility for security.
At one point, his seminar left him despondent. He urgently called in Golda Meir, who was at the time filling in for Sharett as head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department. She came to his home that evening and found him in the midst of an anxiety attack—he paced his room, which was almost completely dark. “What will happen? I know now what the Haganah is, more or less. We will face a war,” he muttered. “I can’t sleep at night. I’m going mad. What will become of us?” Meir was flattered that she was the one he chose to pour his heart out to: “He apparently knew that even if he told me all the truth, I would not despair,” she wrote. Before she left, he said to her: “You know, it takes a lot of courage to be frightened.”16
Beginning in 1945, he had indeed concluded that the Haganah would have to fight the Arab armies, and he had worked to strengthen it, particularly by enlisting support in America. He understood that the Haganah would have to be rendered fit to fight the impending war, but he did not have the military experience needed to do that, as he himself said.17 It thus seems that he needed to do more than just prepare the Haganah for war, after neglecting it so far. He also had to prepare himself. Everything now happened at a spectacular pace. The war broke out just a few months later; the efforts to upgrade the Haganah into a combat force were still then far from successful. In the meantime, he fought his political rivals.
On Wednesday morning, April 16, 1947, four Etzel men were taken to the gallows at the Acre prison and executed. One of them was Dov Gruner, who had been sentenced to death by a British military court for his part in an attack on the Ramat Gan police station. The terror operations carried out by Etzel and Lehi increased in number and severity week by week. Approximately three weeks after Gruner’s hanging, an Etzel contingent broke into the Acre prison and freed a few dozen of their comrades, as well as a couple hundred Arab prisoners. Three of the perpetrators were captured and sentenced to death. To prevent their execution, Etzel kidnapped two British sergeants as hostages.18
UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, was in the country during the search operation for the abducted men. Its task was to draft a UN resolution in advance of the decisive General Assembly session on Palestine’s future. Ben-Gurion feared that the terror campaign would hurt the chances of achieving a UN decision friendly to Zionism. He also feared that the terrorists would try to blow up the al-Aqsa mosque.19
The bold militancy of the underground organizations gained them much popularity; Dov Gruner metamorphosed into a national hero after his hanging. The dissidents were making the Haganah envious, Ben-Gurion noted.20 He now loathed them even more than during the Saison. “The issue has taken on the form of a war for the rule of the state that has not yet been established,” he declared.21 He wanted to “uproot them,” and thought of two ways of doing so: “either kill them all or imprison them all.” For the moment, he recommended a more limited action, but “without blows, hands or fists, rifles or pistols, I don’t see how we will be able to stand against them.”22 As in the past, there were members of the Mapai secretariat who warned against civil war, but Ben-Gurion was adamant: “If our doom is that we cannot withstand Etzel without civil war—there will be civil war.” To those who were appalled by the idea, Ben-Gurion proposed “sending the keys to Mr. Begin” and fleeing for their lives, because Etzel was “a gang of Jewish Nazis.” Two days later, he added: “They must be wiped off the face of the earth, this gang.”23
*
The circumstances that produced these outbursts were indeed extraordinary. On July 18, 1947, an illegal refugee ship named the Exodus arrived in the port of Haifa with forty-five hundred Jews on board. It was meant to be the most conspicuous ship in the history of the illegal immigration operation, “one of the greatest manifestations of the Jewish struggle, Jewish pride, and the connection to the Land of Israel,” as Ben-Gurion put it. It was also meant to be the labor movement’s ultimate response to Etzel and Lehi’s terror operations. A highly visible sign bearing the name of the Haganah was hung on the ship. The Mandate authorities decided to send the passengers back to France, their point of departure. This response, it was hoped, would sweep the public up into the national struggle and unite their ranks. But a few days later, the three participants in the break-in to the Acre prison were executed. The next day, Etzel announced that it had killed the two sergeants. Their bodies were found in a woods near Netanya, hanging from a tree. It was the most fearsome terror operation since the bombing of the King David Hotel. Ben-Gurion was incensed. The murder of the sergeants, he claimed, had caused the world to forget the great and tragic struggle of the Exodus.24
As a Zionist idealist, Ben-Gurion found it difficult not to be impressed by Gruner’s idealistic dedication, which challenged his self-image and his responsibility as a national leader. “I am full of admiration for Gruner, but I will not spend even a moment exerting myself to prevent his hanging,” he said, adding, “He is indeed a hero and is giving his life. But those who sent him are, in my opinion, the enemies of the Jewish people, and they are the ones responsible for it.” After the hanging, Ben-Gurion meditated on the similarities and differences between Zionism and other nationalisms, between heroism and criminality. “Gruner was hanged a martyr,” he said to the Mapai Council, “and with Hitler there were also young men who joined, perhaps were killed in that movement, in the name of their ideals—and we can appreciate Gruner’s heroic act, how he ascended the gallows heroically, but not make him an example for youth, because the thing he ascended the gallows for is tainted, objectively.”*25
*
On the left, criticism came mostly from Ahdut Ha’avodah, which continued to oppose partition and preferred, in the meantime, a continuation of the Mandate, and from Hashomer Hatza’ir, which advocated a binational arrangement. Echoes of Weizmann’s moderation could be heard here and there; its major spokesmen were the members of Aliyah Hadashah, a small party of peace seekers, most of them immigrants from Germany.26 There were a few intellectuals who roused Ben-Gurion’s ire, because he had no recourse against articles in Ha’aretz. Two days after Gruner’s execution, he read a piece that enraged him, probably not just because of what it said, but also because of who wrote it: Shlomo Zemach.
At the time, Zemach’s primary occupation was writing and editing. He opposed the terror of Etzel and Lehi, but did not recant his opposition to the various partition plans that Ben-Gurion had promoted. “I saw the horrible danger of exacerbating the conflict needlessly,” he later wrote. From time to time he published articles to that effect in Ha’aretz. Without mentioning Ben-Gurion by name, he accused him of introducing “recklessness” into Zionist policy. Zemach reiterated his proposal to extend the Mandate, as long as it enabled “Zionism to grow.”27
Zemach’s articles annoyed Ben-Gurion, in part because he himself had tried unsuccessfully to further just such an arrangement, and he set out to humiliate Zemach—as he knew how to do so well. He first told his colleagues on the Mapai secretariat who the man was, as if Zemach were an unknown. He recounted his party affiliations beginning in 1906, and added: “I do not know where he is now.” His tirade sparked a comic debate over what party Zemach might have joined by now. “I know him, he is actually from my hometown,” Ben-Gurion said, demanding to “fortify the public against sick responses like his.” Zemach’s proposal required the Jewish people to choose Bevin or Begin, he maintained. The middle road that he represented made it possible to reject both.28
The line that Ben-Gurion espoused at this point required patience and restraint—which made it hard to defend. Still, he continued to promote illegal immigration and settlement, and could point to some not insignificant achievements. During that same period, about seventy new settlements were founded, most of them kibbutzim. Between the summer of 1945 and the British evacuation of May 1948, some seventy thousand Jews set out for Palestine on sixty-five crossings; most of them were intercepted along the way and sent to transit camps in Cyprus.29
UNSCOP pursued its task of preparing a UN General Assembly resolution much in the way the Anglo-American Committee had in 1946. It held hearings, where Ben-Gurion once again declaimed his house parable. But the Special Committee worked in a very different context—Palestine would soon be without a sovereign, and the United Nations had to decide who would rule there. The Arabs, speaking in the name of the majority and invoking democratic principles, remained opposed to partition. They demanded independence in all of Palestine. Nearly a decade before, Ben-Gurion had threatened to prevent that by force.30 The DP camps in Europe were still full. Some of the UNSCOP investigators went to Haifa to see the Exodus.31
In September 1947, a majority of the Special Committee’s members voted to recommend the partition of Palestine into two states. Ben-Gurion was elated. “It is truly the beginning of the Redemption, and even more than the beginning,” he wrote to Paula, making rare use of a rabbinic expression referring to the Messianic process. A few days before the vote, he said: “It may well be that the age of miracles has not yet passed, and it may well be that one of the greatest miracles in world history will happen soon, in our day.” As he saw it, it was a moral victory. “Throughout our history the Jewish people have never once achieved what we have now,” he declared. “A new history is now beginning.” He attributed particular importance to the inclusion of the southern Negev Desert region in the Jewish state. “True, we will have to change one verse in the Bible,” he commented after the vote, “not ‘from Dan to Be’er-Sheva’ but ‘from Dan to Eilat.’” He still had to reconcile the opponents of partition. To that end, he tried to whip up enthusiasm in his party. “The wonder has come to be,” he declared. Instead of saying that the United Nations had decided to partition Palestine, he said that it had decided “to reestablish the State of Israel.” At another opportunity he referred to the new Jewish state as “New Judea.”
Passage of UNSCOP’s recommendations required the support of two-thirds of the delegates of the countries represented in the UN General Assembly. Moshe Sharett, the Zionist “foreign minister,” oversaw a large staff of lobbyists in New York. He also conducted rocky contacts with the administration in Washington.
The trump card that Sharett and his staff were able to play remained Chaim Weizmann. “Despite [his] not serving in any post,” Abba Eban wrote, “foreign statesmen stood before him with a strange mixture of awe and reverence.” Weizmann spoke before the General Assembly and conferred with President Truman. Ben-Gurion called it “the greatest political campaign in our nation’s history, at least in the last 2,000 years.” He made a point of using Sharett’s first name and indicated that he would be the foreign minister in his government.32 He made no mention of Weizmann’s role. American Jewish leaders joined the effort; they had the next year’s elections in mind.
All this was happening against the backdrop of the Cold War. In May 1947, the Soviet Union’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Andrei Gromyko, surprised the General Assembly by giving a speech sympathetic to Zionism’s aims in Palestine. During a long meeting with Gromyko, Ben-Gurion spoke of the socialist values that guided his movement. To persuade the Russian diplomat that a binational state was not a possibility, he quoted, as he always did in this context, what he had heard from Musa al-Alami.33
*
The partition lines that the UN approved were meant to be peaceful borders, and they would be very difficult to defend in wartime. They were also very bad in terms of Zionist demography—too many Arabs would remain within the Jewish state. According to UNSCOP’s figures, there would be almost as many Arabs as Jews, about half a million, including some 90,000 Bedouin. In contrast, the proposed Arab state would have 735,000 inhabitants, of which only about 10,000 would be Jews. The numbers Ben-Gurion used were a bit more optimistic, with the Jews constituting some 60 percent of the population of the proposed Jewish state. But even this majority was too small, he asserted. The danger was that “a Jewish minority in our house of representatives could join with the Arab bloc to constitute a majority and assume control.” He supposed that this would not happen, at least not immediately, “whether because the Arabs will boycott elections for a time, or what is more realistic, that no significant Jewish minority would lend their hand to such a betrayal.” Yet, he maintained, “there can be no stable and legitimate Jewish state so long as there is a Jewish majority of only sixty percent.” A million and a half Jews would have to be brought in over the coming ten years to boost the Jewish majority, he asserted.34
The demographic threat to the Jewish state would be even more grave were the Jewish state to expand its territory at the expense of the Arab state. Ben-Gurion offered contradictory messages in this regard. About four months prior to the partition resolution, he recalled the first convention of the old Ahdut Ha’avodah in 1919, which had demanded the establishment of a Jewish state in all of the Land of Israel, including territories east of the Jordan—the Hauran, Bashan, and Golan plateaus—and northward to the southern approaches to Damascus. “I believe that to this day,” he said.35 As the campaign in the United Nations reached its climax, he declared that the Jewish state would not try to capture territory designated for the Arab state, despite the fact that Jewish settlements would remain there. A few days after the resolution was approved, he said that the new state needed to hold back the opponents of partition who were still dreaming of “our undivided homeland.”36
That same day, however, Ben-Gurion reflected on the philosophy of history with his party colleagues. “The borders of the land under Jewish rule—from the time of the judges to Bar Kokhba—changed all the time …,” he said. “In ancient times the boundaries of Jewish independence retreated and advanced in accordance with constant political change.” He noted that the boundaries of the Jewish national home had been reduced “to a fourth” of their original size since the Balfour Declaration. The UN partition boundaries were, he thought, a possible stage in the process of expanding the state’s territory, just like the partition boundaries that the British had proposed ten years previously; then, too, he had justified his support of partition by using the same Messianic term that he now used: “I believe that a Jewish state is the beginning of the Redemption.” Geographically he was correct—the territory that the UN assigned to the Jewish state was more than twice as large as that which the British had offered in their partition plan.37 From this point on he was guided by a strategic aspiration that accorded with what had been the Zionist dream from the start—maximum territory, minimum Arabs.
*
During this same period, he received a number of plans for organizing the army, but only shortly before the UN vote, on October 6, 1947, did he call on a man named Efraim Ben-Artzi to urgently draw up a plan to deal with the worst-case scenario: “The Arab world … is liable to attack the Jews in Palestine, whether with the goal of repressing and subjugating it, or even to destroy it.” By “the Arab world” he meant the Arabs of Palestine with the aid of one or more Arab states. The purpose of the plan was “to mobilize the full capacity of the Jewish community (economic, technical scientific, and military) to defend the population and conquer the country, all or in greater part, and to maintain the conquest until an authoritative political agreement is reached.”
Many years later, Ben-Artzi recalled this improvised meeting. “We need to prepare for war,” Ben-Gurion told him, as if he had suddenly come to that realization that same day. “How do we set up an army and what do we do with the underground militias, how do we mobilize the Jewish people?” Ben-Artzi asked: “A war against whom?” Ben-Gurion replied: “All the Arab countries.” Ben-Artzi, a man of experience, asked to receive written instructions. Ben-Gurion tore a page out of the notebook he had in front of him and began to write. He wanted a plan within three days. Ben-Artzi claimed he had no idea why Ben-Gurion had waited until the last minute, and why he had suddenly called him in, of all people. He probably knew, in fact—he was one of the senior Haganah men who had volunteered for the British army, rising there to the rank of lieutenant colonel, the highest rank achieved by an officer from Palestine. It took him six days to draw up a plan of twenty-eight pages, in addition to several appendixes. It was comprehensive and detailed in a way that Ben-Gurion could appreciate.38
It was a relatively quiet year; tensions between Arabs and Jews centered largely on criminal violations. The day after the UN decision, at about the same time that Ben-Gurion reached the Jewish Agency building’s courtyard after his stay at Kalia and found himself among circles of dancers, two buses, one from Netanya and one from Hadera, were making their way to Jerusalem. Arabs opened fire on them near Petah Tikvah, attacking first one bus and then the other. Five passengers were killed on the spot and nine wounded. One of the dead, Nehama Cohen, came from a Zionist dynasty that included both Ahad Ha’am and Yitzhak Rabin. A report Ben-Gurion received a few days later said that the attack had been a robbery, “ostensibly in response to the UN decision.” The report offered a long list of offenses, among them robbery and murder, committed by the same gang, all of them apparently with criminal intent.39
A few weeks after the partition decision, Ben-Gurion drove from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Because the road was no longer safe that winter, he joined one of the guarded convoys that were now the only way to travel between the two cities. The car he took was equipped with iron panels and reinforced glass; the Jewish Agency referred to the vehicle as “Weizmann’s armored car.” Not far from Bab al-Wad, later called Sha’ar Hagai, where the road emerges from the hills onto the coastal plain, the convoy came under fire. “We were attacked from the mountain and four were wounded,” Ben-Gurion wrote. A bus was disabled. “It was a horrible onslaught, from both sides,” a Jewish Agency official who traveled with him related. “Ben-Gurion suddenly opened the door and jumped out of the car. I thought he had gone mad.” He wanted to see what had happened. British soldiers who suddenly appeared out of nowhere returned fire, and the convoy went on its way.
Before leaving Jerusalem with his convoy, Ben-Gurion had met with an official of Hadassah, the American women’s Zionist organization, and described the situation to her with a single word: “War!” For the time being, the Arabs were limiting themselves to terror attacks, he reported. In the past two weeks, ninety-four Jews had been killed and a hundred wounded. There would soon be a real war.40 He told the official that Hadassah had to fund all medical services in the country.
When the convoy stopped at a strategic point, called Latrun, to care for the wounded, the high commissioner’s convoy passed by on the road. He now understood why British troops had been nearby: “It seems as if His Excellency had stationed forces by the Bab al-Wad forest.” His Excellency was the last high commissioner; a few months later he went home, and Ben-Gurion reached the pinnacle of his life.41 He later referred to the war he conducted during this period as an “improvisation.”42
*
December 1947 was a horrible month; Ben-Gurion had not experienced such catastrophes, and he was now commander in chief. The conflagration broke out in Jerusalem. The Arab Higher Committee, which represented the Arabs of Palestine, responded to the partition resolution by declaring a three-day protest strike. In the morning hours of Tuesday, December 2, 1947, an Arab mob emerged from the Jaffa Gate and headed toward Princess Mary Street, a commercial thoroughfare. By evening, some forty Jewish stores had been looted, and some of them burned. One of those who witnessed the attack was Eliyahu Elyashar, a merchant and public figure. He appeared before the Security Committee, a political body that replaced the X Committee. What upset him was not the attack as much as the Haganah’s incompetence. The contingent that had been assigned to protect the storekeepers fired only two shots and left the site. “How can a commander leave a battle?” he asked, demanding an investigation.
The attack plunged the storekeepers into despair; some of them proposed asking Etzel to take responsibility for security in the city. Ben-Gurion did not say much when the Security Committee met to address the situation. He suggested that maybe not all the facts were clear and promised an investigation. “Every failure must be looked into. This matter demands a thorough and rapid examination and it will be checked.” According to the Haganah History Book, “The Arab attack made a harsh impression on the entire country and abetted the spread of the riots to other cities in the country and to its roads.”43
Rendering the roads that connected Jewish settlements impassable was one of the principal goals of the Arab terror campaign; even convoys like the one Ben-Gurion traveled in were no longer safe.44
*
Ben-Gurion solicited proposals for a response, or, as he wrote, something like the choice of medications that a pharmacy offers to a doctor.45 The staff of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department recommended restraint, on the grounds that the leader of the country’s Arabs, Mufti al-Hussayni, was interested in escalation. On the opposite side, some of Ben-Gurion’s Arab affairs advisers proposed an aggressive reaction, in particular dealing a mortal blow to the Arab economy, and especially to Arab transport.46
The Haganah also proposed a punitive response, terror against terror. “If these things continue around Tel Aviv, we must make reprisals against the Arabs in such a way that will deal a heavy blow to a village such as Salamah and expel its inhabitants,” declared Israel Galili, head of the organization’s National Command. That same night, Haganah personnel set fire to fifteen automobiles in the Arab city of Ramla. A report given to Ben-Gurion a few days later stated that in the previous two weeks, the Haganah had carried out fourteen actions against Arabs. Etzel and Lehi had carried out only five, but killed more.47
The high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, complained to Golda Meir that the Haganah was pursuing an “aggressive defense.” According to a report of the conversation, he was furious. Meir confirmed that this indeed would be the tactic from now on. “We will defend ourselves and, quite explicitly, not only when they attack. And if dozens of Arabs get killed—that’s exactly what we want.” Cunningham cited an up-to-date count of 96 Jewish and 106 Arab casualties. Some were innocent. What would the world think? “We are prepared to stand before a world court tribunal for our actions,” Meir replied. That was from this point forward Ben-Gurion’s doctrine as well.48
*
Two days after the conversation with Cunningham, Ben-Gurion said to two top Haganah officials: “It seems to me that we need to reexamine the security plan. We may have been too optimistic and did not properly evaluate the Arab plan.” That same day he wrote in his diary that the kibbutz Kfar Yavetz was under heavy attack; two days earlier, he had written: “Bat Yam is cut off and surrounded by gunfire.” He told the leaders of the Haganah: “I have doubts about the effectiveness of reaction after an act—it is liable to be interpreted as aggression, fanning the flames, widening the disturbances. We need to pursue a tactic of offensive defense. To deal a decisive blow with each onslaught, destroying the place or driving out the inhabitants and capturing the place.”49 Ben-Gurion had thought since the 1930s that Arab terror required “aggressive self-defense,” but this was the first time that he numbered driving Arabs out among the goals of such actions. In the weeks that followed, Ben-Gurion reiterated this doctrine several times. In a talk with two top Haganah officials, Yigael Yadin and Galili, he named villages that needed “to be taught a lesson.”50
On December 30, 1947, thirty-nine Jewish workers were killed at the Haifa oil refinery; some of their Arab fellow workers murdered them as a spontaneous retaliation for the slaying of six of their number in an Etzel operation. The Haganah staged a reprisal against Balad al-Sheikh, the village where many of the refinery workers lived. According to the Haganah History Book, six were killed, including women and children.51 Members of the Security Committee criticized the operation; Ben-Gurion responded that although it was possible to refrain from attacking generally nonhostile villages, there was no way, during a military operation, to tell which individual Arabs were friendly and which hostile. “We are making war, and no war is conducted that way,” he said. Yes, he agreed, there was injustice in this, but “otherwise we will not stand.” He remarked that when a city is bombed from the air, what is hit is not a military target “but children who have not sinned.” A few hours previously, he had heard something similar from one of his Arab affairs advisers, Gad Machnes: “A brutal and strong response is needed … If the family is known, attack it without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise the response is not effective. At the place of the action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent.” Ben-Gurion adopted the approach. In reference to the Balad al-Sheikh operation he said: “In Haifa there was a great slaughter. It is not good that the Arabs see us undefended. This is not Hebron. Haifa is a Jewish city and it is best to do this immediately.” A week later, he repeated this before a party forum.52 He thus associated himself with the expulsion and flight of the Arab population.
In January 1948, thirty-five Palmach and Field Corps troops were killed on their way to reinforce the besieged Jewish settlements of the Etzion Block, south of Jerusalem. A month later, a huge explosion shook Ben-Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem, killing dozens. “I never imagined such destruction,” wrote Ben-Gurion, who rushed to the site. “I could not recognize the streets—horror and dread.”53 Less than three weeks later, a car bomb blew up in the Jewish Agency compound; a senior official was among the nine people killed. Ben-Gurion made a point of mentioning that the car belonged to the U.S. consulate—it was flying the American flag and driven by the consul’s regular driver. But the fact that the vehicle had been allowed to enter the building’s courtyard was seen as yet another blow to the Haganah’s prestige in Jerusalem.54 The road from the coastal plain into the city was practically impassable, as were the arteries connecting the country’s center to the Negev and the Galilee. Convoys that tried to make their way to Jerusalem were forced to turn back; dozens of people were killed. Ben-Gurion was stressed and short-tempered: “I am not able to look at anything now except through the lens of security,” he said.55
On March 19, 1948, Shlomo Lavi was working in the small experimental garden at Ein Harod, where he was trying to grow subtropical plants. He heard an exchange of gunfire from the slopes of Mount Gilboa, to the southeast. It was a Field Corps operation against an Arab village, Zar’in. Just as he was watering the last tree he had planted, the body of his son Yeruba’al was brought to the kibbutz—he had been killed in the battle. Yeruba’al was twenty-four years old; in his youth he worked in the sheep pen and, like his father, had served briefly in the Jewish Brigade. Lavi sat by his eldest’s body, knowing that his younger son, Hillel, was fighting there as well. A few hours later, the battle was still raging and he had not heard a thing from Hillel. Finally, he appeared; he already knew of his brother’s death. “His helmet on his head and his rifle in hand,” Lavi wrote, “in silence the young warrior stood before his father and before his brother, lips pursed, nobility and heroism frozen on his face. The son stood for a few moments, looking, thinking whatever he was thinking, planning whatever he was planning, and then finally he said, ‘Father, I am going back.’ He meant that he was returning to his unit. Lavi, committed to the end to pioneering Zionism, the labor movement, the kibbutz, and Ben-Gurion, responded: “Go back, son, go back.” Yeruba’al was one of the nine hundred Jews killed since the UN approved the partition resolution.56 The next day, it seemed as if the partition plan was about to fall apart.
In Washington, the Haganah did not look like a fighting force, certainly not one that could win a victory. The State Department feared that the United States would have to rescue the Jewish state from defeat, because if the Arabs were to win the war, they would open the Middle East up to the Soviet Union. The United States thus withdrew its support for partition and proposed to the UN Security Council that a temporary trusteeship be established in Palestine. Ben-Gurion heard of it on the radio. A trusteeship instead of independence after the loss of close to a thousand Jewish lives could mean the end of his leadership. He issued a press release rejecting the proposal and did his best to broadcast confidence and responsibility. “I was not party, on November 29, to the Jewish community’s huge cheers, and I will not be party today to dejection, if the American announcement has dejected the community,” he said. He had a good idea of what would happen—presidential elections were eight months away, so any such initiative would quickly be shelved.57 But he could not disregard the widespread dejection.
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He tried to boost the public’s morale. With the armies of the neighboring Arab states poised to invade, he promised that he would “not only engage in defense tactics” but would “crush the enemy wherever we find him,” even outside the boundaries of Palestine.58 He celebrated the last Pesach Seder before declaring Israel’s independence with Haganah troops in Jerusalem. The decisive stage of the war had not yet begun, but he would soon be fantasizing about its end, still in the spirit of the Haggadah: “We will bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo, and that’s how we will end the war, settling our forefathers’ accounts with Egypt.” That same month the Haganah captured, razed, and evicted the inhabitants of half a dozen Arab villages lying close to the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road. Along with a number of other actions, Operation Nachshon, as it was called, was meant to open the road to traffic. Several supply convoys succeeded in getting through, but even after the operation the road into the city was passable only intermittently.59 In the meantime, his colleagues in the leadership tried to limit his powers.
The membership of the Jewish Agency’s Security Committee reflected the makeup of the Zionist coalition. It was meant to direct security policy and oversee its execution. Ben-Gurion provided the committee with a number of strategic overviews, but kept quite a bit from them as well. From time to time the committee’s members protested: “I have a right to ask why we are even being convened. I am not prepared to be a travesty,” one of them complained. Ben-Gurion reminded them that none of them was a Napoleon or a Montgomery. But he, unlike them, had recently learned how to manage the situation. He agreed to the establishment of a sort of war Cabinet, a coalition of thirteen members, which later came to be called the People’s Administration, or sometimes simply “the Thirteen.” Ben-Gurion recognized their authority, but also made it clear to them that they were not a command authority. A corporation required an administrative board, he said, but a war had to be commanded by a single man. That man was the chairman of the Jewish Agency.60
His need to bolster his position as commander in chief did not arise simply because of the grumbling he heard in the Security Committee. His principal concern was the Palmach’s insubordination and what he saw as the political ambitions of its commanders. He appreciated the force’s military abilities, but saw them as an undisciplined and rowdy band of men and women. They idolized Stalin’s Red Army and owed allegiance to Yitzhak Tabenkin; he saw them as no less dangerous than Etzel.
The Palmach’s first commander, Yitzhak Sadeh, began in 1945 to serve as the Haganah’s acting chief of staff. The chief of staff himself, Ya’akov Dori, was in the United States at the time. Ben-Gurion had known Sadeh since the 1930s; his roots in the rebellious Labor Battalions led Ben-Gurion to mistrust him. When Ben-Gurion met with him during his “seminar,” Sadeh was harshly critical. “We have lost this entire year—nothing has been done—the Jewish Agency Executive is largely to blame.” In an article he published in the autumn of 1946, Sadeh had accused “the leadership” of defeatism and asserted that military discipline could not be a goal in and of itself. There were things that even the Zionist Congress could not force him to do, he wrote.61 Ben-Gurion brought Dori back. Sadeh remained, for a time, without a post.
When he was preparing the Haganah for the war, Ben-Gurion preferred officers who had served in the British army and the Jewish Brigade, such as Efraim Ben-Artzi. He especially valued the military discipline they brought with them. His inclination was to fill senior command posts with officers loyal to Mapai. At the beginning of December 1947, when he refused to appoint Sadeh to a new position, he found himself up against Israel Galili.
With twenty years of experience in the Haganah, almost from its inception, Galili was seen as the final authority in the National Command. As such, he shared responsibility for the state of the organization. And he, too, was in Tabenkin’s camp. Tabenkin and Hashomer Hatza’ir would soon found Mapam, the United Workers’ Party, Mapai’s major rival on the left. Relations between Ben-Gurion and Galili grew increasingly strained.
Ben-Gurion had named Galili chief of the National Command, the body that oversaw the entire Haganah organization, but almost immediately began trying to revoke the appointment. He promised “to consult in the most collegial way” with Galili and the National Command, but noted that wartime was not peacetime and that there was a need for “decisive rule.” If he thought it necessary to make a decision contrary to Galili’s position, he would do so. Several months went by; the war intensified and Ben-Gurion had difficulty overcoming the opposition of the high command.62
At ten in the morning on May 3, 1948, while conducting a meeting of the General Staff, Galili received notification from Ben-Gurion that, as of noon, his appointment as chief of the National Command was terminated. It was an impulsive, personal, political move, not one that could enhance the Haganah’s fighting ability. “My dismissal from my post immediately undermined the army’s General Staff in a difficult and dangerous way,” Galili later wrote. “The chiefs of the General Staff branches found themselves suddenly without coordination, without synchronization, without command, and without knowing why.”
A generals’ revolt broke out. The members of the General Staff sent Ben-Gurion a letter declaring that if Galili were not restored to his post, they could not be responsible for the consequences. Ben-Gurion found himself without a command echelon. Less than two weeks before the expected invasion of the Arab armies, he also threatened resignation. “I have spent forty-two years on defense in this country, but that can also be done without me, and now it depends on you,” he told his colleagues in the People’s Administration. But they did not want to choose between Ben-Gurion and Galili, just as his own party had not wanted to choose between him and Weizmann. Ben-Gurion was compelled to ask Galili to come back, without receiving a formal appointment, and Galili agreed.63
On May 1, 1948, as evening approached, Ben-Gurion, accompanied by a Haganah commander, set out to tour Haifa’s Arab neighborhoods. “A terrifying and fantastic sight,” he later wrote in his diary. “A dead city—a corpse of a city. In one place only we saw two old men sitting in a half-empty store, and in an alleyway we encountered an Arab woman, leading her son.” Other than that, he saw only stray cats. According to his diary, he was stunned: “How could tens of thousands of people, without any sufficient reason, leave their city, homes, and wealth in such a panic?” He was especially surprised that Haifa’s wealthy inhabitants had gone. “Was it really fear?” he wondered.64
What he saw in the abandoned city that evening may well have been “terrifying and fantastic,” as he wrote, but it could not really have surprised him. Just a few weeks earlier, two members of the Haganah’s intelligence service had briefed him on the Arab flight, including from Jaffa and Haifa. One of them predicted that the two cities would be left entirely empty if there was a food shortage.65 “Masses of Arabs have fled,” he wrote regarding Haifa’s Wadi Rushmiya neighborhood; about two months after his evening visit to the deserted city, he was informed that a total of fifteen thousand Arabs had vacated it.66
Ezra Danin, one of his Arab affairs advisers, later related that Ben-Gurion saw the great Arab flight from Haifa with his own eyes. “We stood on the balcony of the Eden Hotel,” Danin recounted, “and we saw the convoys of the city’s Arabs heading for the port. Once or twice Ben-Gurion asked, ‘How many have gone? How many remain?’ Some of those present thought that we should hold them back. Ben-Gurion asked: ‘If they want to go, why should you impede them?’”67
When he returned from his trip to Haifa, he laid the foundation for the perpetuation of the tragedy of Palestine’s Arabs. “It is not our job to see to the return of the Arabs,” he declared. At one of the first meetings of Israel’s Cabinet, he reiterated this position: “When they flee—we don’t need to run after them.” The last of the Arab inhabitants of Haifa to leave had good reason to flee for their lives from their neighborhoods in the lower city—the Haganah was bombarding them from the upper slope of Mount Carmel with mortar fire.68
During the months that followed, he continually tracked the flight of the Arab population. “No Arabs are to be seen at Tzemach,” on the southern shore of Lake Kinneret, he said, and of Jaffa’s abandoned Salamah neighborhood he wrote: “Only one blind old woman remains.”69 From time to time he cited the Arab flight as one of the Haganah’s achievements, to counterbalance reports of heavy blows the organization had suffered. In one speech he named eighteen Arab villages that had been emptied of their inhabitants, and said that these represented just a small proportion of the villages that had been evacuated out of fear. “Presumably many Arab villages will not be left deserted and Jewish boys will go in, and they have already gone into a number of villages,” he related.70 “In many of the western neighborhoods you don’t see a single Arab, and I don’t think that will change,” he reported after a trip to Jerusalem, and added: “Now when I go to Jerusalem, I feel like I am in a Hebrew city. There are no foreigners. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed in Roman times it has not been as Jewish as it is now.” And that could be only the beginning, he promised. “What happened in Jerusalem and what happened in Haifa can happen in large parts of the country, if we endure. And we will succeed and endure, if we so desire,” he declared. “And to so desire means to make a supreme effort, like that made by a nation fighting a life-or-death war.”71 The war would bring “a great change in the distribution of the Arab population,” and victory depended on that, he estimated.72
Like the expansion of the partition borders, Ben-Gurion viewed the depletion of the Arab population as a historical process that would take place gradually. The poet Haim Gouri once noticed on Ben-Gurion’s desk, between the green velvet blotter and the glass that covered it, alongside a photograph of Berl Katznelson, a piece of paper displaying a typescript verse from the book of Exodus. It was God’s promise to drive foreign nations from the Land of Israel and give it to the Jewish people: “I will not drive them out before you in a single year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply to your detriment. I will drive them out before you little by little, until you have increased and possess the land” (Exodus 23:29–30).73 In many cases there was no need to issue an explicit order to expel Arabs—the spirit of the message conveyed by the commander in chief was sufficient.
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The ideological intent that had impelled him for many years had its roots in the struggle for Hebrew labor, which aimed to expel Arab workers from Jewish farming villages, and in his belief that there was no basis for peace with the Arabs. “I always thought, my entire life I have thought, that if we tell a Jew to come to Palestine, it means we are telling him to risk his life, because there will be a war here,” he said in February 1948. “I thought that before these events,” he continued. “When I had just come to Palestine I knew that.” He intuited that the British evacuation offered an opportunity that might not return. “Whatever we don’t do in the months to come will not get done for, perhaps, hundreds of years. I have no doubt that the next six months will determine the fate of the Jewish people, perhaps for hundreds of years, perhaps for thousands. We must know that it is an arduous effort, a financial effort, a human effort.”74
Causing the Arabs to flee as a war aim also reflected the old dream of population transfer. That issue came up again in advance of the UN partition resolution. Ben-Gurion told UNSCOP what he had said many times in the past, that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine did not require such a transfer. He assured his party, however, that he had said that for political reasons, even if he really believed it. “It would be convenient if there were no Arabs here, but Arabs can be here,” he said, “and we can settle another four million Jews.” When, however, he tried to prove that Jews and Arabs could overcome their animosity, just like other nations that have gone from war to peace, he once again chose to cite the 1923 peace agreement between Greece and Turkey, which was followed by a massive population exchange.75
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A formal written order to expel Arabs from entire villages seems to have first been given as part of Plan Dalet issued in March 1948; by then, tens of thousands of Arabs, perhaps more, were no longer in their places of residence. The plan came together under the guidance of Yigael Yadin, who was then chief of the Haganah’s operations branch. Its principal goal was to defend the partition boundaries against the invasion of Arab regular and semiregular forces, but it also spoke of the possibility of fighting outside those lines, in part in order to defend Jewish settlements that were meant to be included within the Arab state. The strategy that the plan laid out was in line with the offensive defense that Ben-Gurion demanded, and thus included operations against “enemy settlements within or close to our defense system, with the goal of preventing their use as bases for active armed forces.” The targets and operations for this purpose were primarily of two types: “The destruction of villages (burning, bombing, and mining the ruins), especially with regard to settlements that we are unable to maintain permanent control of.” Nothing was said about what would happen to the inhabitants of these villages. Other villages were not slated, apparently, for “destruction” but rather for “eradicating and taking control,” after being surrounded and searched. “In the case of resistance, the armed force is to be destroyed and the population expelled beyond the state’s borders,” the plan said of these villages.
Plan Dalet charged local commanders with responsibility for the villages within their sectors. “The villages, in your sector, are to be captured, cleaned out, or destroyed—decide for yourself, in consultation with your advisers on Arab affairs and the officers of the intelligence service,” it stated. The commander of the Etzioni Brigade, operating in the Jerusalem region, also received sanction, in case of need, “to limit, as per your ability, the cleansing, seizing, and destroying of enemy villages.”76 Commanders were supposed to have the assistance of Arab affairs advisers connected to the Jewish Agency’s Arab Department who were equipped with “village files” containing intelligence and general information about each village. Ben-Gurion demanded that these advisers also be given the authority to decide themselves to “get rid of” a village “that interferes with the plans of the Hebrew community or commits a provocation.”77 If commanders and advisers had doubts about how to treat any given village, they could be helped by the tenor of the messages conveyed by their supreme commander, Ben-Gurion. Yadin added an appendix to the plan in which he laid out the means to “break the spirit” of the population of “enemy cities,” some of which he named. He noted the option of expelling Arabs from their homes and cutting them off from the essential services detailed in the order itself, including water and electricity. Other plans recommended a variety of ways of sowing terror among the Arabs, including using whisper propaganda, a well-known method of causing people to flee, as Ben-Gurion learned from his advisers.78 News of Haganah actions against Arab villages spread rapidly even without a deliberate whisper campaign. The attack on the village of Deir Yassin by Etzel and Lehi combatants on April 9, 1948, became a symbol of brutality, especially against women and children. Ben-Gurion approved a Jewish Agency condemnation of the attack, and had the statement sent to King Abdullah of Transjordan; the Haganah also issued a condemnation. No such statement was issued in Ben-Gurion’s own name.† During his visit to Haifa, he was told that the panic in the wake of the attack on Deir Yassin had caused the Arab flight from the city.79 A few days later, Arabs attacked a convoy on its way to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Most of the passengers were Jewish civilians, among them doctors and nurses. Seventy-eight were killed. It was another blow to the Haganah in Jerusalem. The conquest of Arab villages created a new and promising geopolitical situation, vital to the realization of the Zionist dream. Benny Morris, a historian of the War of Independence, has estimated that, during the six months that preceded the end of British rule, between three and four hundred thousand Arabs fled or were uprooted.80
The British Empire’s Union Jack was to be lowered for the last time over Government House in Jerusalem, and the high commissioner was preparing to leave Palestine forever. It was scheduled to happen on Friday, May 14, 1948. In the meantime, the United States was pushing for a three-month cease-fire. That period would allow the Haganah to get stronger; according to Ben-Gurion, it was not yet prepared for war. “At this moment we do not have the necessary strength to withstand a possible invasion,” he stated five days before the neighboring Arab armies began their invasion. But the proposed cease-fire would also have required putting off the Jewish state’s declaration of independence. For Ben-Gurion, that was the proposal’s major shortcoming. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were still in their homes; the cease-fire was meant to keep them there and to allow the refugees to return.81 Ben-Gurion thus opposed the cease-fire and insisted on declaring independence immediately, despite the expected cost in human life.
He believed he was acting in the name of the yearnings of generations of Jews; that was his lifelong belief. At this decisive moment, then, he did not act like a “computing machine,” as he once said. It was not an engineer’s cold calculation that impelled him, but rather a mysticism of national redemption, perhaps a faith that the declaration of independence would call up the nation’s hidden powers of bravery and belief and fighting spirit. Some four months later, Ben-Gurion confirmed that “there were serious reasons not to declare independence,” since at the time ten American bombers could have prevented it, and the United States was capable of sending fifty of them without batting an eyelash. It was a decision made in a state of uncertainty. In such cases, he said, one chooses on the basis of “deliberations, guesses, and feelings.” The declaration of independence was, most likely, also meant to rehabilitate his own prestige, damaged by the Haganah’s failure and the generals’ revolt. There was another reason as well—Menachem Begin threatened that if Ben-Gurion did not declare independence immediately, he would do so himself.82
When Ben-Gurion said that the Haganah was not prepared for war, he chose his words very precisely. The key phrase was “at this moment,” meaning that the Haganah could grow stronger as it fought. Because at this stage, Ben-Gurion knew something that most people did not—in a few days’ time, large quantities of arms and ammunition would begin to arrive in the country. This included aircraft, which had already been purchased in Europe. The arms that made Operation Nachshon possible arrived four days before it began.83 Among the factors in Israel’s victory, arms procurement was no less important than the flight of the Arabs.
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Most of the money came from America. Golda Meir succeeded in raising an almost inconceivable sum, in the terms of that time, from America’s Jews—about $50 million, of which about $30 million was designated for Palestine. “Without it I don’t know how we could have come out of the War of Independence,” she said.
Ben-Gurion kept track of every dollar, but, as was the case with the Bricha and illegal immigration operations and often with land purchases, arms procurement required more than just money. For this new operation he employed some of the same people who had worked in the illegal immigration organization. Like that operation after the world war, arms and equipment purchases involved extended covert operations that demanded resourcefulness, daring, subterfuge, imagination, and a lot of luck. Ben-Gurion kept his eye on every step along the way.
Ehud Avriel, who made initial contact with an armaments factory in Czechoslovakia, later told of the telegrams Ben-Gurion peppered him with “by the hour.” A few weeks before Operation Nachshon, Ben-Gurion wrote to him: “I am worried and stunned that I have not received any news from you. Can you obtain heavy weaponry? And what everything depends on, combat aircraft.” He instructed him to cable a reply with the words “I am healthy” if the answer was positive, or “I am being hospitalized” if it was negative. “Those missives really scared us,” Avriel said. When Avriel visited Palestine, Ben-Gurion wanted to hear everything, just like during the Bricha operation. One story Avriel told him was about how he had gotten around a bureaucratic obstacle that had come up with the Czech manufacturer. The factory was permitted to sell its products only to governments; prior to independence, Avriel did not represent a government. During the Bricha operation, however, he had obtained stationery from the Ethiopian embassy in France, which he had used to type forged laissez-passers for refugees. The Czechoslovakian foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, an old acquaintance of Ben-Gurion’s, helped Avriel compose an arms order in the name of the Ethiopian government, and Masaryk’s secretary typed it up on the stationery that Avriel supplied her with. At the bottom of the order she typed the name of Emperor Haile Selassie. To Avriel’s astonishment, Masaryk signed the document—but with his own name rather than the emperor’s. It was enough for the factory.84 Alongside overseas procurement, Ben-Gurion worked to expand the arms industry in Palestine, and followed its production on an almost daily basis.
The opportunity to bolster the Haganah could have served as a justification for putting off the war, so as to gain time, but the risk Ben-Gurion decided to take was not an unfounded one. “I received tidings of the arrival of the first cannon,” his diary states; three weeks later, he wrote: “Ten Messerschmitts from Europe,” meaning fighter aircraft. Two weeks later, he wrote: “Our air force should bomb and destroy Amman.”85
That same day, Ben-Gurion offered his party’s Central Committee a survey of the security situation. He had been warning about an invasion of Arab armies for seven years, yet four days before it was set to begin, by his estimate, he spoke of it only as a possibility, not a certainty. Four days before that he had suddenly asked Yadin: “Will the neighboring countries fight?”86 He may have meant Transjordan specifically—a compact had been reached with King Abdullah, according to which he would refrain from attacking and would receive in return that part of Palestine that the UN had designated for the Palestinian Arab state. Golda Meir arrived late at the meeting—she had been conferring with the king. She passed a note to Ben-Gurion: Abdullah, she wrote, claimed that no agreement had been reached. That was not unexpected. With a growing tide of refugees inundating his country, many from Haifa, Jaffa, and other cities taken by the Haganah, Abdullah could not permit himself to take a course different from the other Arab states.‡
Ben-Gurion immediately left the meeting, rushed to Haganah headquarters, summoned its top people, and demanded of them, among other things, “to plan a campaign against a full-scale Arab invasion,” as if no such plans had been made already. There was enough personal gear for soldiers, he recorded, except for socks and blankets.87 In the meantime, the Central Committee continued its deliberations. The record of the meeting has not survived in its entirety, so it is not certain that the resolution to declare independence was put to a vote and approved; in any case, there were not many opponents.88
He was careful to include not just his party but also the People’s Administration—the Thirteen—in decision making. Two of that body’s members were not able to reach Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, and one was in New York. His political acumen prompted him to create the sense that everything was open for discussion and that his colleagues were free to reach decisions on the basis of their best judgment, with no pressure from him. The next day, he permitted Yadin and Galili to brief the members of the People’s Administration. The two of them appraised the Haganah’s chances against the Arab armies as “pretty much even.”
The members debated; some of them thought there were good reasons to postpone independence.89 Some of the decisions were made by vote. The decision to reject the cease-fire proposal and declare independence was reached by consensus, without a vote; some of the members seem to have capitulated to pressure from Ben-Gurion. Pinchas Rosen, a German-born jurist who was still called Rosenblüth at the time and who generally took a moderate line in Weizmann’s spirit, demanded that the official document, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, explicitly lay out the country’s borders. It was a legal issue that was impossible to avoid, he maintained. Ben-Gurion replied: “Everything is possible. If we decide here that we won’t say what the borders are, then we won’t say.” Five of the nine participants in the meeting voted to support Ben-Gurion’s position on the border issue, and the matter remained open, to be decided by the war. One day around that time, he flew from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and back. Upon his return he wrote: “The flight took 35 minutes. How small our country is.”90
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On May 14, 1948, Davar’s front page ran a small item quoting sources in Cairo: Egyptian army forces would cross the border into Palestine one minute after the end of the British Mandate, at midnight. The real war had begun. Just before striding into the Tel Aviv Museum to declaim the Declaration of Independence, Ben-Gurion learned that Haganah forces and members of the kibbutz Kfar Etzion, just south of Jerusalem, had surrendered after a two-day assault by forces of Abdullah’s army and local Arab attackers. “The defenders have been butchered by the Arabs,” he wrote in his diary, and also “cheering and profound joy in the land, and again I am a mourner among the joyous, as on November 29.” He began a new journal, recording: “At 4 p.m. Jewish independence was declared and the state was founded. Its fate lies in the hands of the security forces.”91
The declaration, redrafted by Ben-Gurion the previous night, contained a commitment to freedom and equality for all—including Arab citizens—and a call for peace.
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A few days later, Shlomo Lavi received word from the Negev: his younger son, Hillel, had also fallen. On the way to the front, Hillel had run by chance into his girlfriend; the two had been separated for a time but the unexpected encounter had reignited their love. He was not yet nineteen years old. “I will not eulogize Hillel, as one does not eulogize a soldier when he falls,” Lavi said at the gravesite. “I will lament only myself. From now on, whose face will light my days as my boy could?” Addressing his two sons and the other soldiers who had fallen and would still fall, he declared: “The State of Israel is being founded … Your greatest dreams, our dreams, are becoming reality, and you have not seen it and will not see it … We will be your heirs. How bitter and frightening that thought is.”92 Hillel had been born in August 1929; in Hebron on that same day, dozens of Jews had been slaughtered by Arabs.
* Winston Churchill said something similar about Gruner in Parliament: “The fortitude of this man, criminal though he be, must not escape the notice of the House.” (Gilbert 2007, p. 263.)
† In his memoirs, Ben-Gurion wrote at great length about the involvement of the village of Deir Yassin in attacks on Jewish neighborhoods, but in general he stayed away from addressing what happened during the capture of the village. After the war, he opposed his justice minister’s demand to bring the perpetrators of the deed to trial, and later refrained from replying to a letter he received from Martin Buber protesting a plan to build a Jewish neighborhood over the village’s ruins. (Ben-Gurion 1971a, p. 346; Segev 1986, p. 88; Pinchas Rosen and Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Sept. 19, 1948, ISA.)
‡ An Egyptian pilot whose plane was shot down over Tel Aviv related in his interrogation that the refugees were spreading stories of atrocities; Ben-Gurion received similar intelligence from Lebanon. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, May 15, April 5, 1948.)