In the afternoon hours of September 8, 1948, the prime minister and his wife hosted leading public figures at a reception at Government House, a three-story building that had once belonged to a family of the Templer sect in Tel Aviv’s Sarona neighborhood. The upper floor housed the prime minister’s office.1 Ben-Gurion was now interim prime minister and minister of defense. It was the first event of its kind since the declaration of independence; the guests included Cabinet ministers, the top commanders of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as the Haganah was now called, the leading Israeli and American Jewish Agency officials, newspaper editors, authors, artists, and actors. “The refreshments were light and sparse,” Moshe Gurari, a veteran Jewish Agency official, later recalled, but spirits were high and the guests animated. Everyone crowded around Ben-Gurion, who stood in one corner, dressed in a gray suit, shaking the guests’ hands “with unconcealed indifference.” Earlier that day, Ben-Gurion had spoken at length with the U.S. special representative to Israel, later the ambassador, who warned him against violating the cease-fire that the sides had agreed to.
He suddenly vanished. The guests speculated about where he had gone; a few were offended and left. Gurari went to Ben-Gurion’s office. He found him “immobile, gazing into space.” Gurari tried to get him to return to his guests. Ben-Gurion referred to the event with distaste in Yiddish as a hasenah, which literally means “wedding” but connotes mindless revelry. He spoke of the families who had lost loved ones in the war and how they would react were they to see him at this party. “How many sacrifices we have made and how many more will we offer on the altar of this country?” they would ask, he thought. He sometimes attended the funerals of soldiers, or appeared at gatherings where bereaved parents were present, he said, “and I always wonder—no one has yet attacked me, no one has tried, in his sorrow and grief, to cast a stone at me, no one has raised his voice to me, and no one has shouted in his pain: ‘You wanted a state and we are paying the price.’” He showed Gurari a book that a poet, Reuven Grossman, put out in memory of his son, Noam, who had been killed just north of Jerusalem, along with fifteen other soldiers. Some of them had been captured by Arabs, tortured and murdered, and their bodies mutilated. It was one of the war’s most searing failures. Yitzhak Rabin, the IDF’s operations chief in the Jerusalem sector, believed that Grossman’s contingent had been assigned an impossible task; some would later term it a suicide mission. Ben-Gurion received a report on the incident. When he took hold of the book, Gurari recalled, his hands shook and his voice choked. He read Grossman’s dedication out loud: “At your order he fought, at your order he fell, may your name be blessed!” Ben-Gurion hid his face in his hands and Gurari’s impression was that he was crying. “It is immense, sublime, unbelievable,” he wept. The book included a poem the father wrote, with the title “For This I Thank You, God.” In a letter to the poet and his wife, Ben-Gurion wrote: “I am moved and shaken to the depths of my heart. Blessed is the nation that has sons like Noam, doubly blessed is the nation that has parents like you.”2
Ben-Gurion’s readiness to send people to their deaths in a war against the Arabs, and his ability to do so, singled him out from all other Jewish leaders. Together they were principal components of his leadership, and were anchored in his unshakable belief in Zionism. Yigael Yadin later remembered that Ben-Gurion did not generally ask how many soldiers were expected to die in a particular operation.3 At times the responsibility was almost too heavy to bear; he found himself consoling friends and colleagues in the Israeli leadership. Among the fallen were brothers of both Yadin and Moshe Dayan, as well as one of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Rachel Yanait’s two sons. Yitzhak “did not shed a tear and discussed the situation—but his pain was no less than Rachel’s,” Ben-Gurion wrote after returning from a consolation visit to the home of his old friends. They believed that their son had used his last bullet to shoot himself in the head, so as not to fall into the hands of the Arabs. He was to have been married just a few days later, Ben-Gurion noted.4
The fact that the political elite participated in the nation’s grief must have deflected many of the accusations that Ben-Gurion had expected to hear. Quite naturally, he needed support of the type he received from bereaved parents like Shlomo Lavi and Reuven Grossman, who later changed his last name to Avinoam—meaning “Noam’s father.” He glorified the heroism of the fallen and declared: “Everything now for the war.”5
*
He made a point of meeting with IDF commanders each day. He generally radiated self-confidence and self-control, but on occasion he fell apart. Yadin recalled him as a strong man who was difficult to oppose because, while he sometimes raised his voice, most often he did not. He sometimes sat in a discomfiting and unexplained silence, or suddenly began to talk about the Bible. According to Yadin, he did so mostly when people tried to tell him something he did not want to hear. Furthermore, the fact that the prime minister and commander in chief recorded everything people told him in his diary unsettled and awed those who met with him. Many conversations with him had to be conducted at dictation speed, Yadin recalled; he frequently interrupted to ask questions. When he looked up from his diary to indicate disagreement, he would blink nervously. “It was a very strange characteristic,” Yadin recalled. “People who knew him were not disturbed,” he said, “but most people could not take it, and it was very difficult for them to question his decisions.” Many decisions seemed to grow out of things he had just at that moment written down. Yadin believed that Ben-Gurion organized his thinking by writing.6 He listened to his officers, but, as one of them said, in the end he consulted only with himself.7
He generally did not end a conversation with an order, related Moshe Carmel, commander of the northern front. He would simply say what he wanted done, assuming that his intention had been understood and would be carried out. At times he spoke cryptically, in hints. “You’d understand what he wanted and what his intention was,” Carmel said, “but in a way that you could not afterward maintain that you had heard something or other explicitly.”*8
At times he made decisions that ran counter to the tactical views of his officers, on issues including the deployment of forces, timing of action, and targets. He demanded taking the Arab position at Latrun no fewer than six times, so as to open up the road to Jerusalem. He feared that Jewish Jerusalem could not endure the siege if the position were not captured, and would fall to the Arabs. All six times the mission failed. It was his most blatant intervention in military operations. Yadin tried to explain to him that he was wrong, both about the capacity of Jewish Jerusalem to withstand the siege and about the IDF’s capabilities. The effort to save Jerusalem would lose the rest of the country, he claimed. Some of their meetings deteriorated into shouting matches and ended with frayed nerves. Yadin, one of the most senior figures in the Haganah, maintained that the arguments were due to the fact that Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ben-Gurion had not a clue about logistics and their operational implications. Ben-Gurion also lost his temper when Yitzhak Rabin told him that it was impossible to capture Latrun. “Yigal Allon should be shot,” Ben-Gurion fumed. Allon was the commander of the Palmach. “I was in shock,” Rabin wrote. “I was speechless. With difficulty, I mumbled, ‘Ben-Gurion, what are you saying?!’ And he did not take it back: ‘Yes, what you heard!’ he repeated.”
Yadin termed Ben-Gurion’s insistence on conquering Latrun an “obsession,” but gave in. The repeated defeats there took a toll of hundreds of men. Soon thereafter, with great effort, a different road to Jerusalem was paved, and given the name the Burma Road.†9
His incessant intervention in the conduct of battle identified him with such failures. In the meantime he had to defend his authority; he had never faced a tougher test.
During the first half of June 1948, an agreed cease-fire gradually came into effect. The UN Security Council sent a Swedish mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. One Saturday, Ben-Gurion appeared before the Mapai Council to survey the situation. He termed the cease-fire an initial victory; the fact was that it looked more like a defeat. His party comrades did not complain, but they must have been expecting Ben-Gurion to explain what had happened. He called on his audience to stand in memory of Shlomo Lavi’s two sons, and then took a personal tone, asking for understanding, almost apologizing. During his fifteen years of membership in the Jewish Agency Executive, he had not held any portfolio, and the “war portfolio” had been placed in his hands only two years previously, he said. He had not agreed to accept it because he was a general, he said; on the contrary, there was no portfolio he was less suited for. He had no knowledge of military matters, he reiterated; he knew only what any person could read in books and in newspapers. He had agreed to take responsibility for security only because, like every profession and field of knowledge, military science was largely “a matter of common sense.” He had begun his new career with study, recalling the seminar he had conducted for himself. “We have still not learned the craft of war,” he claimed, using the plural. As in the past, he declared, “We are all to blame.” He then moved on to a “delicate” question that many believed should not be brought up at all, he said, but he was not deterred by it, just as he was not afraid of bitterer and more dangerous matters. The issue was the Palmach.
He had thought out his speech very carefully. He began by praising the Palmach and its soldiers, and said that he had excellent relations with its commanders. Unfortunately, however, they were trying to turn the force into a “private preserve.” He would not allow that to happen, he said. One person present warned of a “war of passions.”10 Ben-Gurion was prepared for a double war of passions.
That same Saturday during the cease-fire, a ship carrying several hundred immigrants and a large quantity of arms and ammunition approached the country’s shores. Its name was the Altalena, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s pen name; it arrived under the auspices of Etzel. The story began on the day after the declaration of independence, when Begin proposed to sell the boat to the government.11 The deal did not go through, but in the weeks that followed, negotiations were held with Begin over the allocation of the arms the ship would bring—80 percent for the IDF, 20 percent for Etzel in Jerusalem. The negotiations reached an impasse just a few hours before the ship arrived. Ben-Gurion brought the issue to the Cabinet for a decision. “I am prepared to act, and that means to shoot,” he said, but he was willing to do so only with the Cabinet’s approval. The ministers authorized the IDF to prevent the unloading of the arms from the ship, if possible without violence, “but if its order is not obeyed, force is to be used.” The decision passed unanimously.12 The problem of the Palmach fell on the government’s table almost at the same time as the Altalena did.
*
The ship first anchored across from Kfar Vitkin. A web of contacts attempting to resolve the problem failed and shots were exchanged. The passengers were removed, as were most of the arms. Begin boarded and the ship set sail for Tel Aviv. At 2:00 a.m., Ben-Gurion was woken and informed of the fact. The next day, the Cabinet again convened. Ben-Gurion had lost all interest in negotiation. “It is an attempt to destroy the army. It is an attempt to murder the state,” he said. “These are the two questions and with both of them there cannot be, in my opinion, any compromise. And if, to our great tragedy, we need to fight for it, we must fight. The moment the army and the state surrender to another armed force, we are done for.” He told his ministers that there had been dead and wounded on both sides in the exchange of fire on the beach at Kfar Vitkin.
Not all the members of the Cabinet agreed with him, but in the meantime, Yadin drafted an order for military action against “the enemy,” as he called the ship. The aim was “unconditional surrender, by all means and by all methods.” By a majority of seven to two, the Cabinet resolved that the ship be turned over to the authorities.13 Ben-Gurion proceeded to General Staff Headquarters and ordered Yadin to act. Yitzhak Rabin commanded the operation itself. “Jews shooting Jews, for many hours,” he later wrote. “Jews wounded and killed by the bullets of other Jews.” But Ben-Gurion had no qualms. He wrote: “Day of Etzel … the ship is in flames.”14
*
The smoke that rose over the Altalena had not yet dispersed when Ben-Gurion went back to subduing the Palmach. The compromise that put an end to the generals’ revolt in May did not end the political tension and personal hostility between Ben-Gurion and the Palmach; he aimed to disband it and to integrate its personnel into the IDF chain of command. Thus, for the second time in two months, with the war still far from over, Ben-Gurion again got caught up in a conflict with the army leadership. The clash revealed the limits on his power and forced him to ask for the government’s support. The Cabinet decided to set up what came to be called the Committee of Five. He had only himself to blame for permitting the Palmach to build up so much political power. While none of the Cabinet ministers chosen to inquire into the issue had anywhere near Ben-Gurion’s standing, they interrogated him and the army leadership as if they were of equal status.
The committee spent three days hearing testimony. Israel Galili explained the damage done to the army’s fighting capabilities after he’d been removed as chief of the National Command; Yadin complained about Ben-Gurion’s intervention in the conduct of operations and offered a detailed account of his incessant pressure to take Latrun. Everyone claimed, some explicitly and some implicitly, that Ben-Gurion appointed only Mapai loyalists to top command positions. Ben-Gurion claimed that the Palmach served Mapam’s interests. He claimed that military defeats were due to the Palmach’s refusal to obey his orders.15 He did not look like a national military leader but rather like a politician who had miscalculated his rivals’ strength. The investigation was humiliating, the committee’s recommendation a heavy blow.
After accepting, in effect, every one of the claims of the rebels, the committee drafted a plan to reduce the powers of the defense minister. He would be forbidden to interfere with the army’s operational considerations and to make appointments opposed by the chief of staff, and disputes about appointments were to be brought before the ministerial committee. Minister of the Interior Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who chaired the inquiry, presented a summary of the recommendations to Ben-Gurion and asked him if he had anything to say. “I have no comments,” Ben-Gurion responded, and left the room. Gruenbaum soon received the expected letter from Ben-Gurion—the recommendations the committee was preparing, he claimed, were pushing him out of the Defense Ministry and government.16
The next step was not unexpected, but it was nevertheless dramatic—Gruenbaum sent Moshe Sharett to Ben-Gurion, to persuade him to relent. Sharett found him at his home, in serious mental distress; a doctor was in attendance. When he reported back to the committee, Sharett said he had found Ben-Gurion in a state of nervous breakdown. He used the same biblical word that Berl Katznelson had once used to describe Ben-Gurion’s state, “tottering limbs and bitter grief,” a combination of physical debilitation and mental enfeeblement. “I could not get into a conversation with him,” Sharett related. “I tried to speak to him, but could not get him into a conversation about the subject that is of interest to us. When Sharett asked him if he was still prime minister, Ben-Gurion responded: “No.”
Yadin also came to talk to him. Paula tried to keep him away. She screamed that Yadin was to blame for his distress and tried to kick him out. Yadin insisted that he had to see him and Paula told him to try, but that Ben-Gurion would not want to see him. She was right. Yadin went up to him and found him lying on a couch. When Ben-Gurion saw him, he turned his face to the wall. “Listen, history will not forgive you,” the acting chief of staff said to the prime minister’s back. Ben-Gurion did not want to talk to him.17
*
At the time Ben-Gurion took action against the Palmach and Etzel, victory in the war was still distant. He needed successful battles. The ideological and political identity fostered by the Palmach threatened the standing of Mapai and its leaders in the larger labor movement. Begin was dragged into the Altalena episode by extremists in his own movement. They sought to force the arrival of the ship not just on Ben-Gurion’s government but also on Begin. He had already agreed to integrate Etzel’s combatants into the IDF and to place them under the army’s authority—on condition that his men serve together in two battalions and receive the arms they needed to carry out their operations. There is not the slightest indication that any of them was plotting to “destroy the army” or “murder the state.” They were no danger to its sovereignty; at most, they threatened to weaken Ben-Gurion’s leadership and that of his party. Both Etzel and the Palmach were tied to movements that represented different social sectors and values with very different views and economic policies than those of Mapai, but they were all committed to the fundamental principles of Zionism, and in that sense they all operated under the same roof; hence there was no reason to use force against them while the war was still raging. Both organizations turned the actions against them into powerful myths for their supporters.
Ben-Gurion tended to become addicted to his hatreds, and to defend his decisions passionately. The morning after the attack on the Altalena, he said, “Blessed is the cannon that bombed that ship. The cannon is worthy of standing in the Temple, if it gets built.” Supporters of the attack on the ship soon came to call it the “holy cannon.”18 Maybe he used such great force against Etzel so that he could threaten the Palmach with turning the holy cannon against it as well. Whatever the case, Etzel was a relatively easy target; the principal political enemies, as he saw it, were the leaders of the Palmach and Mapam.
He was out of action on every front, including—exceptionally—writing in his diary, for a full three days. Some members of his Cabinet took advantage of his absence to put their frustrations into the minutes of Cabinet meetings. Minister of Health Shapira said, “Were I responsible for the atrocity of Latrun, my conscience would torture to my last day.” Minister of Agriculture Aharon Zisling, of Mapam, proposed Ben-Gurion’s ouster. He argued that the prime minister was on bad terms with the entire army, not only the Palmach, a veiled implication that his penchant for trusting his intuition may have inflated the number of dead. Ben-Gurion, he charged, was seeking one-man rule, free of criticism. He did not know how to work with people, another minister said, and wanted only yes-men around him. Sharett told the government that Ben-Gurion was hugely insulted and that the issue at hand was whether the government wanted to do without him. And then the Cabinet decided to call him back.19
When he returned, he seemed to have recovered from his tottering limbs and bitter grief. He calmly went about his regular business and led a discussion of the design of the country’s flag and seal. For a moment it seemed as if this, too, was not his day—he wanted only a single blue Star of David in the upper corner of a white flag, and rejected the proposal to add seven golden stars, as Herzl had proposed. Gold is ugly, he declared. But he lost the vote—the government decided that there would be seven stars, and that they might be golden. For the state seal, Ben-Gurion now demanded two lions bearing the Ark of the Covenant, but agreed to a compromise: instead of the lions there would be the Menorah, the sacred lamp of the Temple, as it appears on the Arch of Titus in Rome, and there would be no golden stars. It was a promising start.
He opened the discussion of the Defense Ministry in a similarly conciliatory tone. He did not reject the government’s right to dismiss him, he said, and for a moment it seemed as if he were encouraging his colleagues to do so. No man is irreplaceable, he said, and offered a favorite example. For many years, he told them, people thought that no one could take Chaim Weizmann’s place. But when he was compelled to leave his post, the Zionist movement did not collapse. “It’s in your hands,” he concluded. But that was only his opening gambit.
The principal question was whether the defense minister was the commander in chief and what authority lay with the ministerial committee. It soon became clear that the Cabinet ministers were not seeking the most effective way of directing the war. They wanted a compromise formula that would keep Ben-Gurion at the helm. Gruenbaum suddenly remembered that, formally, the recommendations made by the Committee of Five regarding the Palmach had not yet been approved by the whole Cabinet and were thus null and void. Another minister quickly added that, if that were the case, they could simply be filed away. Ben-Gurion made an offer: “I’ll be happy to bring every difficult matter here,” he said, meaning to the full Cabinet, “so as to make things easier, because such matters require collective responsibility.”
At this point, he offered them his vision of the war and the peace that would follow. The war should go on for another month or so and then “come to an end with a bombing of Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo until they no longer have any desire to provoke us to war, and will make peace with us.” Because that was the goal of the war: peace. “We must gain the hearts of the Arabs,” he said, “and there is only one way that we can teach them to respect us. If we don’t blow up Cairo, they will think that they can blow up Tel Aviv.” All that remained was to find the right words to define the powers of the defense minister; Ben-Gurion promised to consult with a committee of ministers “as needed.”20
At the end of the year, in advance of the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which were held while the war was still in progress, ugly exchanges of insults over the Palmach question continued to be recorded in the Cabinet’s minutes, but the force was disbanded anyway. Thousands of people never forgave Ben-Gurion for it to their dying days. In the elections, the Marxist Mapam won 19 seats in the 120-member Constituent Assembly, which soon transformed itself into the First Knesset, Israel’s parliament. That made it the second-largest party, after Mapai’s 46 seats.21
The political tone of the critique of his conduct of the war made it easier for Ben-Gurion to fend it off. He was determined to run the war himself, using the working methods he had adopted many years before. “In security affairs, nothing is general, everything is details,” he told his colleagues. “The only thing I need to address is the details.” From time to time he issued a threat, saying he would not consent to work any other way; if he couldn’t do that, he’d find himself another job, he said.22 And so the war, like the seminar that had preceded it, looked like a new edition of the great election campaign in Poland.
In the meantime, combat had resumed in full force, on all fronts. During the ten days between the breakdown of the first cease-fire and the beginning of a second one, the IDF conquered Nazareth, Ramla, and Lod, but failed in another attempt to take Jerusalem’s Old City. Beirut and King Farouk’s palace in Cairo were bombed by airplanes purchased only a short time before—three B-17G Flying Fortresses. “Our pilots are enthusiastic,” Ben-Gurion wrote. The next day, Damascus was also bombed, “finally,” Ben-Gurion wrote.23
Ramla and Lod were “thorns,” as Ben-Gurion put it at one Cabinet meeting, and he ordered them demolished forthwith.24 In May and June 1948, the two towns were bombarded from the air, but were not captured. “We have decided to help [Etzel] cleanse Ramla,” Ben-Gurion told the Cabinet two days after the state was declared.25 At the beginning of June, he was still griping that Yadin “did not appreciate” the importance of the Ramla-Lod front. In the end, he had to wait for about six weeks, until both were conquered in Operation Danny. Three of its best-known commanding officers were Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, and Yitzhak Rabin, all of them Palestine-born. Two days later, Ben-Gurion marveled at the “audacity of the tzabarim,” the term, literally meaning “prickly pear cactus,” that was used to refer to native-born Israelis. “It was an immense deed that stunned the town” of Lod, he told the Cabinet.26
He met Rabin and Allon just outside the conquered town at noontime on July 12, 1948. Rabin later related that he asked Ben-Gurion what to do with Lod’s Arab inhabitants, and that Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a manner that Rabin interpreted as a directive to expel them; Rabin later claimed that Ben-Gurion had given an explicit order to do so. For his part, Allon told Ben-Gurion that the inhabitants “were inclined to leave,” and that all they wanted was for the IDF to release those it had arrested in the town. According to Allon, Ben-Gurion told him: “I advise you to free the prisoners,” giving him a wink. “I was very much impressed,” he said. “There was actually an understanding between me and Ben-Gurion that it was best if they left Lod … I tell him: I understand. So the pace will speed up. And he said: Yes. It was one of those exchanges of two sentences, and that was the end of the matter.” Allon ordered the army “to encourage, with vehicles and even with buses and trucks, the exodus from Ramla to the front line facing Latrun.” Later he would say that he commanded the army “to let them go.” Allon claimed that he and Ben-Gurion also hoped that the flow of refugees would make it more difficult for the Jordanian army to advance.27
The need to ask Ben-Gurion what to do with the Arabs arose in part because of an order issued in the name of the chief of staff a few days earlier, on July 6, 1948. The order explicitly forbade the razing of villages and towns and the expulsion of Arabs other than during actual battle, “without special sanction or an explicit instruction from the minister of defense, in each and every case.”28 At 1:30 p.m. on July 12—that is, apparently, immediately after Ben-Gurion left—Allon signed an order that also bears Rabin’s signature. It consists of two provisions: “1. The inhabitants of Lod are to be expelled quickly without any attention to sorting by age. They are to be directed to Beit Nabala. 2. For immediate execution.”29
The great expulsion began on July 13, a day after Ben-Gurion’s visit. The next day, he told the Cabinet that, according to a report he had received that morning, not a single Arab remained in Ramla and Lod. He claimed that, on the day of the deportation, only three to five thousand remained in Lod. “Many fled beforehand,” he claimed—that is, before his visit to Allon and Rabin’s command post.30 The editors of his war diary, published by the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s publishing arm, determined that most of the inhabitants of the two cities left, “whether willingly or by force,” on July 14 and 15, 1948, after the cities were captured.31 On July 15, Ben-Gurion quoted a Jordanian cable referring to thirty thousand refugees from Ramla and Lod moving in their direction. Regarding this, he wrote: “They should be transferred to Transjordan.”32 Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan told his colleagues that he asked Ben-Gurion what the fate of the cities’ inhabitants would be, and that Ben-Gurion’s response was that the young men would be taken prisoner and that the rest should be “encouraged to leave the place,” but Israel would have to see to the provisioning of those who chose to stay. Zisling said he read that wording as a warning that meant “save your lives while you can and flee.” His party, Mapam, had received an independent report describing “the expulsion of the Arabs of occupied Lod and Ramla.”33
One of the operation’s field commanders, Shmaryahu Gutman, composed a detailed report of the incident immediately after it happened. His account largely confirms the version offered by Allon, Gutman’s commanding officer. The battle for Lod was a difficult one; the IDF encountered opposition. At one stage the Israeli forces succeeded in confining thousands of the city’s men in a mosque. They were permitted to leave and return to their homes, on condition that they and their families leave the city within a few hours. According to Gutman, “They greeted the edict about leaving with immense enthusiasm and rejoicing. They feared that the city would be destroyed in the battles that would continue there … It was as if they were fleeing from hell, from the vale of battle.” He recalled them advancing in a long convoy toward the Jordanian lines, their wagons laden with their belongings and livestock. “There was not a man who was not overloaded, and even each child bore something, a basket of food, a jug of water, coffee implements, and the like.” The city emptied out entirely. “A strange stillness pervaded the streets … as if after a pogrom,” Gutman wrote. The inhabitants of Ramla were taken to the Jordanian border by bus.34
On September 26, 1948, Ben-Gurion proposed to the government that Israel break the second cease-fire and conquer Latrun.35 The Jordanians had already disregarded the truce by bombing Jerusalem’s water main, killing several Israeli soldiers. The Cabinet refused his proposal. He later said the decision would cause “generations of weeping.” The expression soon found a foothold in Israeli politics and myth to the point of becoming a persistent irritation, constantly resurfacing and refusing to disappear into the depths of history, just like the attack on the Altalena and the dismantling of the Palmach.
A few days previously, the UN mediator, Bernadotte, and his deputy were murdered in Jerusalem. The killers were members of Lehi. Bernadotte had put together a new peace plan that required Israel to agree to the return of the Arab refugees. The plan also proposed a new set of boundaries—the Negev would go to the Arabs and the Galilee to the Jews; Jerusalem would become an international city. Ben-Gurion ordered the Lehi disbanded and launched a manhunt against its partisans. He proposed to the Cabinet an antiterror law that some of its members felt contradicted their fundamental values—it included a death penalty and granted the defense minister great latitude. The debate over his proposal once again demonstrated that his colleagues feared that he was seeking unlimited powers.36
Under the circumstances, most of the Cabinet ministers were not inclined to accept his proposal to take Latrun. The operation Ben-Gurion proposed was a local one, “a small Arab pocket that needs to be done away with,” as he put it.37 “Latrun is Jerusalem,” he said, but the six previous failures to capture it did not encourage the operation’s opponents to sanction a seventh attempt. Bernadotte’s murder also mandated refraining from any further provocation against the United Nations and the United States.
He hoped that the Arab reaction to the operation he proposed would restart the war throughout the country. For some months he had felt that a long truce was liable to strangle Israel economically; the number of enlisted troops was one hundred thousand, and he warned that their release could not be postponed for long. The war might last for five years, he feared. “If I were an Arab, I wouldn’t let it end,” he said, adding: “The object is not to capture Ramla or Lod, but to win and achieve peace.”38
He tried to convince the members of the Cabinet that restarting the war had further important advantages for Israel, most importantly the chance to “cleanse” the Galilee of one hundred thousand refugees who were there at the time. An empty Galilee could not be achieved without war, he said. With a war, and without a great effort, “the Galilee is cleansed.” He described the “cleansed Galilee” as a “dowry.” Beyond that, he mentioned the chance to conquer the Negev and to move the state’s border eastward, at least to the central mountain ridge. At this meeting he made no mention of the conquest of Jerusalem’s Old City, Bethlehem, or Hebron. In his diary he wrote: “I proposed attacking and capturing Latrun.” In response to those Cabinet ministers who were apprehensive about the UN, he said, “Let’s assume that the operation will not be legal—but reality is reality.”
The legal aspect was not Moshe Shapira’s main concern; he and several of his colleagues did not trust Ben-Gurion. The plan is very nice, Shapira said, but if every war went according to plan, no country would ever lose one. Seven members of the Cabinet voted against the proposal, defeating it.39
At one Cabinet meeting, Ben-Gurion said: “I have no detailed comprehensive plan.”40 That was the case with the war as a whole. He had a minimum goal, which was an independent state able to defend itself, preferably devoid of Arabs. Most of the other ideas he brought up were more in the nature of improvisations and sudden flashes of inspiration, which at times contradicted one another. Part of this was a long string of definitions of victory, including “a huge bombardment” of Arab capitals, some of which were carried out, and the conquest of Nablus—which did not happen—with or without the entire area he referred to as the Triangle. “The conquest of the Jenin-Tulkarem-Ramallah-Jerusalem Triangle is compulsory, as soon as possible,” he said a month after independence. He always used the term “the Triangle” to refer to an area in Judea and Samaria in the center of the country, but not always to the same area. The conquest of Nablus, or alternatively the entire Triangle, was meant to ensure victory in Jerusalem, and thus in the entire country. Sometimes he meant gaining control of the road into Jerusalem and sometimes the capture of the city itself, with or without the Old City.41
These inconsistent and unsubstantiated impulses all date from the five months between May and October 1948, and resulted not from difficulties and changing circumstances but his inclinations and intuitions, and the absence of any comprehensive strategy. Along the same lines, he offered incongruous national messages. “We can conquer all of Palestine,” he once said. “We can also reach Nablus—Damascus, too, in my opinion. We can extend the borders to the Litani River.” In his view, “we deserve all of the western Land of Israel,” by which he meant the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, but if he were given the choice between conquest of that territory and the partition borders of 1947 with peace, he would take a “clipped state.”42 At the Cabinet meeting of September 26, he only proposed capturing Latrun; he hoped that the operation would restart the war, but that was not its main goal.
A few days later, he tried to prove that there had actually been a majority for his Latrun initiative, because Sharett in fact supported it. According to the minutes of the meeting, that was not correct. It didn’t really matter, as during the course of the week the matter became less important to him. We won’t reopen the debate, he said, offering, as if it were an afterthought, “We don’t need Latrun.”43 Instead, he proposed conquering the Negev. This time he did not tell the Cabinet that he wanted the war to start up again. Instead, he explained that the Egyptians were blocking access to Israeli settlements in the south, and they needed to be relieved or evacuated. He stressed that it was possible to defeat the Egyptians and take control of the entire area between Jerusalem and Aqaba. A few members of the Cabinet thought they were hearing something much like the proposal they had rejected just a few days earlier; Shapira again expressed a lack of confidence in Ben-Gurion and demanded more information. Ben-Gurion promised that, as long as Jordan, Iraq, and Syria did not come to the Egyptians’ aid, “we will not do anything to them and the campaign will be limited to the south.” A majority voted in favor. The decision was tantamount to finally giving up on the conquest of the Old City in Jerusalem.44
During the months that had passed since Israel declared independence, several attempts to break through the Old City walls had failed. The Jewish Quarter had surrendered at the end of May and most of its residents were taken prisoner by the Jordanians.45 But Ben-Gurion did not make conquering the Old City a high priority. While still waiting for the UN to approve the partition resolution, under which Jerusalem and its environs would not be included in the Jewish state, he said explicitly that he had no intention of conquering the city, including its western Jewish neighborhoods. This could have been an attempt to improve the chances that the resolution would pass, but he offered a classically Zionist justification for his position. “If we expand Jerusalem in all directions, it will include many Arab villages, and the Jewish majority will become a minority,” he explained.46
He fixated on opening the road to Jerusalem because he saw the connection between the Jewish state and the Jews living on the city’s west side as a matter of national importance. He was well aware of the city’s religious significance, but did not personally feel its holiness. It was a stronghold of Haredi Judaism, and Ben-Gurion feared that Jewish extremists were liable to stage attacks on the holy places of other religions. He was not eager to assume responsibility for Jesus’s tomb, he said some time later at a Cabinet meeting; Begin needed to be watched to keep him from blowing it up.47 In the time leading up to the declaration of independence, he said that tranquillity in Jerusalem was more important than access to the Western Wall. “It’s not a tragedy if we don’t go to the Western Wall for three months,” he said.48 After the state was established, he continued to display a degree of indifference with regard to Jerusalem, as he had since his arrival in Palestine.
A few months following independence, the government resolved to agree to the partition of Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan. The IDF did not accept the decision. “Moshe [Dayan] believes that we can try to conquer the city,” Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary; Dayan wanted two battalions for the purpose.49
Three weeks later, Ben-Gurion rejected Dayan’s request that he sanction a second attempt to take the Beit Jala ridge, not far from Bethlehem; the first attempt had failed the previous night. Ben-Gurion’s reasoning was political. He explained that Israel’s control of the city of Jesus’s birth was likely to anger the Christian world, and that given the tension between King Abdullah of Jordan and Egypt, there was a chance that the king would not intervene to aid the Egyptians in the Negev; it was best not to anger him. One of the members of the IDF staff, Baruch Rabinov, later recalled that Ben-Gurion asked Dayan to explain his request to the General Staff. He preceded Dayan’s presentation with his own explanation of why he was opposed, but said that, as a democrat, he would accept the will of the majority. Five of those present supported Dayan’s proposal and five were opposed, with Chief of Staff Yadin among the latter. Only nine of the men present were members of the General Staff; one of the others was Shaul Avigur, who was invited out of respect for his personal standing. He favored the operation. Ben-Gurion wanted a clear majority against it, Rabinov recalled. He thus called in the chief of staff’s attaché to express his opposition, as well as his own military attaché, Nehemiah Argov. The former favored the operation; Argov refused to offer his opinion. “Then Ben-Gurion blew up,” Rabinov related. “He shouted: ‘I am astounded by your lack of political judgment,’ and ruled that the operation would not be carried out.”
According to Rabinov, Dayan did not intend to conquer Beit Jala alone, but the Old City as well. On Sunday, Ben-Gurion went to Jerusalem and toured the Jordanian lines on the east side of the city. His impression was that they were very well ensconced and that, from a military point of view, it would be very difficult to eject them. He also expressed his concern that the Jordanians would bomb the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. He reported to the Cabinet only that Dayan wanted to conquer Beit Jala, but most of what he said was aimed at justifying his opposition to conquering the Old City. A few days later, he made another argument: to take the Old City, he told the Cabinet, it would be necessary also to conquer Jenin and Nablus and other places, but at this point the army needed a rest.50 There was another reason, also: “We don’t want to get tangled up with the Jordanian army,” he said. That same day, however, Yadin also told him that Jerusalem could be taken. “If we get to Nablus, Ramallah will fall of its own accord and Jerusalem will be liberated.” A few days later, he was growing more skeptical—driving the Arab forces from Jerusalem would require unlimited time, but the United States was acting to block Israeli conquests. The question remained open. A few weeks later, Israel and Jordan held talks over a list of issues in Jerusalem, including control of the rail line into the city, access to the Hebrew University compound on Mount Scopus, and Latrun. Before agreements were reached, Ben-Gurion maintained that “if it works out, the Jerusalem problem is solved.” He made no mention of the Old City; for all intents and purposes, he had conceded it.‡51
*
A few months after the war ended, he was still fantasizing to his colleagues about the Old City emptying of Arabs; only international teams would remain there, to guard the holy places. Israel would supply them with electricity. He told the Cabinet ministers not to repeat his idea in public. “There are certain things that it would be very bad to say,” he explained, but if such a proposal were to come from “some gentile,” Israel would agree. In a more realistic vein, he said: “We will not agree to fight for the Old City. That means we’ll accept the current situation.”52
Palmach veterans later claimed that Ben-Gurion missed a chance “to conquer the capital.”53
The final battles took place in the Galilee and the Negev. Years ago, during the great debate over the partition plan the British had proposed, Ben-Gurion had written in his diary that, were he to have to choose between the Galilee, which the plan made part of the Jewish state, and the Negev, which was not included, he would choose the Galilee without hesitation. In June 1948, he said that he would rather have the Negev. But he wanted both. When the war broke out, he declared: “If we do not stand firm in the desert, we will not stand firm in Tel Aviv.”54
He said it was the most momentous decision he had made since he declared independence. He traveled to the Negev to instruct Allon on how to conquer it, just as he had instructed Yadin on how to conquer Jerusalem. The Negev sparked his imagination in part because he saw it as “an area empty of people,” as he put it, an echo of the Zionist dream of a virgin and unpopulated Palestine.55 The Negev was a “huge Zionist asset,” he maintained; all it lacked was water. There might well be oil underground; five million Jews could be settled there; of these, two million would work in agriculture and three million in manufacturing. At one Cabinet meeting he spoke eloquently about Kurnub (Mampsis or Mamshit), the ruins of a Nabatean city southeast of Be’er-Sheva. A full three hundred thousand families could be settled there, and the government office complex could be located there as well.56 The landscape was beautiful. But Allon sent his troops in the direction of El Arish, in Sinai. He hoped to capture Gaza. President Truman demanded that the IDF be returned to Israeli territory, and Ben-Gurion acquiesced; Allon rushed to Tel Aviv, but failed to change the decision. He never forgave Ben-Gurion for that.57
When Ben-Gurion heard that the IDF had reached Eilat, he was beside himself with joy. “This may be the greatest event of the last few months, if not of the entire war of independence and conquest,” he wrote in his diary. He recalled his two trips to Eilat, in the company of Berl Katznelson, and set out on a third. Now it was an official victory tour—three airplanes containing an entourage of senior officers and officials, a press officer, and a cook; they flew over Masada. The prime minister dressed in khaki for this visit, but also sported a keffiyeh, as he had when he went with Katznelson. At one spot where the plane landed, he found himself facing a large lake and green wood, but it was a mirage.58
*
During this period, he lodged at the Miriam, a small family hotel near General Staff headquarters in Ramat Gan. He generally slept very little; he was one of those leaders who instructed his people to wake him up at night. He knew how to control his weariness—he stopped smoking, did not drink much coffee, and took sleeping pills.59 Gershon Zak, an educator and the founder of the Israeli navy, remembered seeing him lying crosswise on his bed, reading the works of Josephus, the author in whose works he had found his Hebrew name. “You can actually see all the military actions of that time and you can learn a lot from it,” Ben-Gurion told him.60 He may also have played chess, as he sometimes did to take his mind off his worries.61 He frequently spent his weekends in Tiberias. By Lake Kinneret, which had given him poetic inspiration when he was twenty-two years old, he could devote himself to his thoughts. In December 1948, he wrote in his diary: “It is almost unbelievable: along the way from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, there are almost no Arabs.” Four weeks later, he wrote: “A wonderful day. Will the war end today?”62
He spent much time thinking, writing, and talking about his relation to war and the military. “Every war is a horrible and terrible catastrophe, not just for the defeated but also for the victors,” he said. “War is a cruel waste of blood, destruction of property, loss of spiritual and material resources.” But since the day he was excluded from Bar Giora and Hashomer, he was irresistibly drawn to the practice of soldiering and command; he frequently spoke nostalgically about his brief and largely inactive service in the Jewish Legion, one of the seminal experiences of his life. He read a great deal of military literature.63 “War is a nation’s supreme test …,” he wrote. “Not a test of strength, but a test of will.” It was nevertheless important for him to distance himself from ideological militarism. “There is a historical philosophy that sees war as man’s highest destiny,” he said. He was referring to the Nazis and Arabs. “This philosophy is an abomination to Judaism as we understand it and as it was understood, I believe, by the prophets and sages of the Bible.” At a Cabinet meeting he remarked, “An army is the most dangerous thing there is in the world.” He feared a military coup and opposed ending the death penalty in the army, which would leave it defenseless against “scoundrels,” as he put it. He cited reports of abuse and looting committed by the IDF in Jerusalem. “That is why the army must be placed under civilian control,” he said. The need to subordinate the army to civilian institutions was the principle; the immediate corollary was that he had to control the army himself. Victory had challenged his image of himself as the supreme commander in a just war. “The bitter question has arisen of acts of looting and rape in the conquered cities,” he wrote in his diary two months after independence was declared.64
*
The greatest spoils fell to the state itself. They included Arab houses and land, farm machines, vehicles, and money deposited in bank accounts—all this was private property. The war’s expenses preoccupied Ben-Gurion and sometimes caused him hard nights. The shortage of money was a nightmare that did not let him sleep, he told his Cabinet ministers. At one point, however, he came to the conclusion that the war was profitable; the country spent less than it gained from it, he said. He meant, among other things, the development of military industries, as well as the trains and army camps left behind by the British, in some cases without compensation.65 He was enthusiastic when the airport at Lod was captured. “Who knows if the government of Israel would be able to build such an airport in the next ten years,” he wrote. It was worth millions, he told the government, adding: “I have learned that war is not just waste.”66 But he also learned something about the avarice of conquerors. About a decade later, he told of the massive looting that was, he said, an outbreak of the Jewish community’s most primitive instincts. “No group was immune to it,” he said. Some Hebrew University faculty members entered the abandoned homes of Arab intellectuals, took their books, and deposited them in the National Library.§67
The subject came up for discussion in the Cabinet several times; Ben-Gurion expressed revulsion and shock. “I was devastated when I heard about these acts,” he said. “It undermined my confidence in victory.” It was, he said, “a bitter surprise”; it was not how he had imagined Jewish morality to be. “I was confronted with moral flaws of a sort I had not suspected existed, and they are a serious military blemish,” he wrote at another opportunity, warning that “a person who abuses a non-Jew will abuse a Jew as well.”68 Greed, he said, led to murder. Minister of Agriculture Zisling described several “almost Nazi” acts committed by soldiers. Commissions of inquiry were set up on at least two occasions.69 Ben-Gurion also asked about it, at his own initiative: “Is it true that horrible acts were committed in the Galilee?”70 In the summer of 1949, he wrote: “A shameful atrocity: Battalion 22 in Be’er-Sheva apprehended an Arab man and woman. They killed the man and they (twenty-two men) discussed what to do with the woman. They decided and carried out their decision—they washed her, sheared off her hair, raped her, and killed her.” He noted that the battalion commander was sentenced to seven years in prison.71
Following instances of rape in the occupied cities, and with the possibility that Jerusalem and Nazareth might be taken, he ordered that every Jew, and especially every Jewish soldier, caught in an act of rape, looting, or desecration of a holy place, Christian or Muslim, should be shot “without mercy.” He ordered a poem by Natan Alterman execrating the murder of Arab civilians to be distributed to soldiers. Prior to this he overruled an order by the military censor forbidding Davar to publish the poem.72
Alongside the moral debasement of war crimes and his constant concern that the world see Israel as just, there were political considerations. About two weeks after Eilat was taken, Yigal Allon tried, without success, to persuade him to conquer the central mountain region, including East Jerusalem, and to make the Jordan River Israel’s eastern border. Allon proposed that the Arab refugees who had fled to this region from elsewhere in Palestine should be forced eastward into Jordan.73 A few days previously, Ben-Gurion had told the Cabinet that Allon had suggested that a whisper campaign be used to cause the Arab inhabitants of the south to flee. Ben-Gurion now made it sound like an unacceptable tactic.74 By this point, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had already been uprooted. Ben-Gurion distinguished between those who left their homes in fear of the Israeli army and those who stayed “and our army forced them out,” as he put it, adding somewhat philosophically, “That can be prevented, there is no need to make them flee.” In this context he offered the Cabinet his version of what had happened in Lod and Ramla. “The residents were given explicit orders not to flee, and it turned out that they were forced out,” he said. He tried to distance himself from the expulsions and created the impression that he had gone to Lod only a few days later.75 The Nakba, as the Palestinian Arabs called their tragedy, haunted him until the end of his life.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, tens of millions of human beings had been murdered or turned into refugees after being expelled from their homes, mostly in Eastern Europe. But the tragedy that the world has never ceased talking about is that of the Palestinian Arabs. Perhaps that is because people on every continent have displayed a special sensitivity regarding everything that happens in the Holy Land. Ben-Gurion was thus called on, time and again, to explain and justify what had happened under his leadership. But, as a person who truly believed, as a Zionist, Jew, and human being, that he was an exemplar of morality, he had trouble reconciling the expulsion of the Arabs with the humanist values he claimed to live by.
Not long after he became prime minister, it was proposed that he establish his official residence in a grand house in Jerusalem’s southern Talbiyeh neighborhood. It was a two-story stone structure with an outside staircase that granted it a majestic look; a stone arch shaped like a huge horseshoe faced the entrance. The house was shaded by pines and cypresses; a palm, an olive tree, and a lemon tree also grew in the yard. Like many houses in that area, it had been built in the 1930s, and like the others it was the very picture of Levantine affluence, with nods to English and French culture. Most of Talbiyeh’s residents belonged to the Christian Arab elite, among them officials in the British administration, physicians, attorneys, and businessmen. There was no more prestigious neighborhood in Jerusalem. Its streets were nameless and its houses unnumbered; one simply had to ask, for example, for “Anis Jamal’s house,” which was the house that was proposed as Ben-Gurion’s residence. Jamal had made his fortune in the insurance and tourism businesses. His wife hailed from the Russian aristocracy; the actor and author Peter Ustinov was her cousin. A few Jews also lived in the neighborhood. One of them, the publisher Reuven Mas, headed the Jewish residents’ committee there. Both the Jews and the Arabs lived with an illusion of multicultural coexistence in the world’s most cosmopolitan city—for as long as it lasted. At the end of 1947 the bubble burst.
In January 1948, Mas lost his son Danny, who had commanded a group of soldiers who, on their way to relieve the Etzion Block, were killed by Arabs. About four weeks later, Davar reported that “a Haganah vehicle drove through Talbiyeh yesterday afternoon and called on the residents to evacuate the neighborhood. Many of the Arabs left.” Some of them returned later, for a short time, under the protection of the British authorities. When that happened, Davar’s correspondent wondered whether “perhaps we erred … when we proclaimed by loudspeaker that the Arabs had to evacuate Talbiyeh entirely.” But the Arabs soon fled once more; most of them left behind nearly all their belongings, from grand pianos and wedding dresses to tennis rackets and kitchen utensils and books and family photograph albums. Many of the Arab houses came into the possession of Jews who also came from the elite, among them politicians, judges, and professors at the Hebrew University.
Ben-Gurion had already toured Jerusalem’s abandoned neighborhoods; he refused to move into the Jamal mansion. Shlomo Arazi, the official in the prime minister’s office who had offered him the house, later recalled the reason Ben-Gurion gave for turning it down—it was improper for the Israeli prime minister to live in a private residence confiscated from an Arab. At that time, the State of Israel had already taken possession of tens of thousands of houses confiscated from Arabs, but Ben-Gurion wanted to draw a line between himself and all that. He preferred to establish the prime minister’s residence in Rehavia, in a house that the state rented from the widow of a senior official in the British administration who had been killed in the bombing of the King David Hotel.76
He was entirely at peace with the fact that the Arabs had been displaced—between 500,000 and 600,000 of them at his estimate, according to others about 750,000. That was the price of Jewish independence in the Land of Israel, “a captured land,” as he put it. “War is war,” he added.77 His colleagues supported him. One termed the exit of the Arabs a divine miracle, a second remarked that the country’s landscape was much finer without them, and Shlomo Lavi said: “The transfer of the Arabs out of the country is in my eyes one of the most just, moral, and correct things that needs to be done.” That had long been his opinion, he remarked, meaning that he had held it even before his two sons were killed. Ben-Gurion agreed with his friend Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was concerned about the number of Arabs who remained in the State of Israel, about 100,000 of them. “There are too many Arabs in the country,” Ben-Gurion declared.**78
Ben-Gurion always denied that the Arabs had been forced to flee. At times he claimed that “no refugee fled from the State of Israel. All the refugees who fled from the territory assigned by the UN decision to the Jewish state did so during the period of the British Mandate.” In fact, close to half of them became refugees after the state was founded, but Ben-Gurion claimed that these people were not refugees—they were enemies.79 Yet the refugees and their plight gave him no rest. Ghost cities and abandoned villages drew him in; again and again he wandered their streets, as if seeking to confirm with his own eyes that no Arabs remained there, and perhaps also in response to his need to persuade himself that he had not lent a hand to expel them. “The city is almost empty” was how he summed up a visit to Jaffa, whose destruction he had fantasized about ten years previously. “Here and there an Arab in a tarbush,” he wrote. In Ramla he searched for but did not find the house in which, in 1906, he and his friends had composed the Po’alei Zion manifesto. The building should have been preserved, he complained.80
Just as he did after his tour of the abandoned Jewish neighborhoods in Haifa, he claimed that he could not understand why the Arabs had fled. It was an “astonishing phenomenon,” he said. It was important for him to state that, unlike the Jews, the Arabs had abandoned entire cities “with great ease,” even though there had been no danger of destruction or slaughter; in Jaffa there had not even been any shortage of provisions. “There may well have been cases where they were helped a bit to flee, he said, “but, fundamentally, this really was an inexplicable phenomenon. They were not driven out of Jaffa. They fled even before Jaffa was conquered. They fled Haifa, fled Tiberias, fled Safed. It is a strange thing that is worth researching sociologically.”81
He offered an explanation of his own: the flight of the Arabs, he claimed, showed that the Arab national movement was not based on positive ideas, whether cultural, economic, or social. All it had was religious hatred, xenophobia, and the ambitions of its rulers. A nation cannot fight for such notions, he said, because no fellah will want to die for them. “History has now proven,” he declared, “who is really connected to this land and for whom it is nothing but a luxury that can easily be done without.”82
It was a flattering thesis, but not an accurate one. The Arabs of Palestine wanted to prevent the establishment of Israel but were unprepared to do so, in terms of both organization and leadership. They had not yet recovered from the suppression of the Arab Revolt by the British, less than ten years previously. In their final months of ruling Palestine, the British did almost nothing to stop the flight. During their three decades of rule, they did not institute mandatory education, with the result that only three out of every ten Arab children had gone to school; the rest grew up unprepared for modern national life, especially in the villages but also in the outlying neighborhoods of Haifa, Jaffa, and other cities. In contrast, nearly every Jewish child went to school, and most adults had done so in their countries of origin.83 Yitzhak Ben-Zvi once quoted an Arab acquaintance who described the conflict over Palestine as a confrontation between a million fellahin and a million Einsteins.84 Even so, tens of thousands of Jews were forced out of their homes.
Mayor Daniel Auster of Jerusalem reported to Ben-Gurion that a “mass psychosis to flee” had overcome the city’s Jews; Ben-Gurion ordered that Jews should not be allowed to leave the city—they were meant to defend it with their bodies. He also rejected a proposal to evacuate the city’s children. As with the evacuation of the Jews from Palestine during World War I, and in keeping with his position on rescuing children from the Nazis in 1938 and the children in the DP camps, he took the position that removing Jerusalem’s children was tantamount to surrender to the enemy and thus should not be allowed. Furthermore, he said, there was no safe place anywhere in Palestine to accommodate children.85
Some of the Haredim living in Meah She’arim had raised white flags in surrender, Ben-Gurion reported, but Jews were driven out of their homes in Tel Aviv as well, and abandoned settlements that had become symbols of the Zionist enterprise, such as Masada and Sha’ar Golan, two kibbutzim located just south of Lake Kinneret. Their inhabitants had no desire to die, either. Ben-Gurion commented that he did not know how he would have reacted in their place.86 The inhabitants of the kibbutz Nitzanim, in the south, were taken prisoner by the Egyptians. By the end of the war, about sixty thousand Jews were refugees, uprooted from neighborhoods, cities, kibbutzim, and other farming communities.87 “Had the mufti captured the Old City in Jerusalem, he would have massacred all the Jews,” said Ben-Gurion, and the mufti would have done the same had he reached Tel Aviv. Ben-Gurion later latched on to the claim that the Jews asked the Arabs to stay and that they fled only because they had been ordered to do so by their mufti. As usual, he remarked in this regard that the Zionists should be grateful to the mufti for all the mistakes he made.88
He wanted to believe that the Arab refugees would be absorbed by the neighboring countries so that the refugee problem would disappear of its own accord. “Everything will calm down and dissipate,” he said. The Foreign Ministry fashioned this illusion into a political forecast. Ben-Gurion, who had devoted his life to achieving Jewish sovereignty, in fulfillment of the dispersed Jewish nation’s long-held dream, failed to appreciate the unifying force of exile and the longing for the Palestinian homeland. At least one member of his Cabinet, Zisling, reminded him of that. “Hundreds of thousands of Arabs, they and their young children, will become our enemies. Just as we imbibed from our sufferings the feeling of a need for war, so they will bear within them the desire for revenge, reparation, and return.”89 But Ben-Gurion believed that time worked in Israel’s favor. A million Jews, he maintained, would come in place of the Arabs.††
He sometimes brought up for discussion the possible return of the refugees, including those from Ramla and Lod, but these were largely diplomatic gestures aimed at enhancing Israel’s image around the world; Israel at that point had not yet been accepted into the United Nations. “South Africa needs not compassion, help, and money, so it can allow itself to thumb its nose at the world,” Ben-Gurion said. “We are not in the same position.” That was also the reason that he averted, almost at the last minute, the deportation of the Arabs of Nazareth, in contradiction of the orders of the local military commander. At the time, he was also waiting for Israel’s request for a loan of $100 million from the United States to be approved; it was just two weeks before the elections to the Constituent Assembly.90 Thousands of refugees tried to infiltrate over the borders in order to return to their homes; preventing the return of refugees after the war, and the expulsion of “infiltrators,” was an explicit Israeli policy that perpetuated their tragedy. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion ordered that only “infiltrators” be deported, not refugees who had left their homes but remained within the borders of the State of Israel.91 Once, in an especially emotional outburst, he spoke to them in the second-person plural, as if they had suddenly appeared in the Cabinet room: “You made war—you lost!”92
Levi Eshkol later related that, at his most difficult moments, Ben-Gurion used to hum to himself “It Is Burning,” a 1938 song about the burning of a Jewish town. The residents call on their Jewish brethren to put out the flames with blood. From time to time he mentioned the Holocaust, generally as part of a political argument. “We will not go like sheep to the slaughter,” he said during one of his last conversations with the high commissioner.93 Hitler was not entirely original in his attempt to destroy an entire people, he also said: the Muslims had preceded him, he maintained, listing a long series of war crimes committed by Muslims from the time of Muhammad to the mufti’s activity in Nazi Berlin. He also described the Arabs alternatively as Hitler’s teachers, helpers, and pupils. They all knew only one way to solve the Jewish problem—total annihilation, he said. At such moments, he sounded as if this were his personal war against the Nazis.94 He termed the aerial bombardment of Tel Aviv that took a toll of dozens of lives an “Egyptian Blitz.”95 As during the London Blitz, he sometimes refused to go down into a bomb shelter during the bombing, and as he had then, he took pride in it. “I see a psychosis of bombing” was how he responded to a proposal to move his office to a protected location. “I have more experience of this than all of you—I lived through it in London. The bombings are not so horrible.”96
His admiration for Britain, its history, its culture, and its heroic spirit, remained undiminished, despite the fact that the British were supporting King Abdullah of Jordan’s Arab Legion. He told the government almost nostalgically about England’s finest hour, including the enlistment of British women in the war effort. “In London there was not a bus that was not run by women, from the driver to the ticket vendor. The same was true of the weapons factories.” He maintained that women should be mobilized the same way in wartime Israel. In the dispute over his powers as commander in chief, Churchill’s name often came up as an example of a civilian military leader whom Ben-Gurion sought to emulate.97 He made “blood, sweat, and tears” speeches and often made use of the English term “D-Day.”98 When he stressed time and again that Israel needed to be prepared for a second Holocaust, he heightened the victory achieved under his leadership. In doing so, he fostered two myths that were seared into Israeli identity: the few versus the many, and the good versus the evil.
Before, during, and after the war, he often said that 700,000 people were facing off against 30 million, one Jew for every 40 Arabs. That heightened the danger and the victory as well.99 That was both correct and incorrect. In Palestine, the demography changed rapidly. The Arab exile left a large Jewish majority, and over the course of 1948 more than 120,000 Jewish immigrants arrived.100 Israel’s fighting forces and those of the Arab states had an almost equal number of troops, as Ben-Gurion himself had explained at the end of 1948. “Up to this point the view was that the Arabs are the many and we the few, but that view is not correct. It is correct with regard to the total number of Arab inhabitants, but not with regard to the army fighting us.” Both sides fielded about 100,000 soldiers; the IDF steadily grew stronger, thanks to equipment from overseas. But the Israeli version of the story, as a battle between an Israeli David and an Arab Goliath, was more potent than the numbers, and it was correct in some individual battles. Ben-Gurion continued to promote it for many years after the war.101 From the vantage point of history, he told how it had all begun: “It was only thanks to the victory of Hebrew labor that a Jewish state was founded.” In response to a letter he received about the subject, he repeated this no fewer than six times.102
He claimed again and again that the IDF’s strength derived from Israel’s moral superiority. “Our human material … has much greater moral and intellectual capacity than that of our neighbors,” he maintained. He reiterated that countless times.103 His belief in the IDF’s moral preeminence was anchored in the moral and intellectual inferiority he had attributed to the Arabs for many years. “The Arabs are not sophisticated as we Europeans are,” he said in this regard. After the war, he declared: “Other than Turkey, these nations are not able to fight.”104 He sometimes cited the difference between Israeli and Arab attitudes toward human life: “For our adversaries, the number of losses is not critical—they have many millions.” At times he praised the way the Arabs fought, but even then as a way of magnifying the IDF’s victory. Sometimes he boasted: “Up until now I thought that our secret weapon is our spirit, and that is indeed true,” he said, “but our even more secret weapon is the Arabs: they are more bumbling than I can put into words.”105
But he could also offer more mundane reasons for the Israeli victory, most specifically arms purchases, and the aid that Israel received from American Jewry, which included soldiers, military experts, and money. He once put it simply: “We won because the Arabs were exceptionally weak.”106
*
The war ended in March 1949, sixteen months after it began. The Arab states were unable to conquer Israel, and in the months that followed, armistice agreements were signed and temporary borders established—the so-called Green Line. It more or less coincided with the partition line that Ben-Gurion had marked off with his finger on the map Bevin had placed before him seven years previously. Jerusalem was divided between Israel and Jordan. The country’s territory was about 40 percent larger than that awarded to the Jewish state in the UN partition resolution, with the additions providing Israel with the territorial continuity it would have lacked under that plan. The Arabs were left as a small minority in Israel, in keeping with the goals Ben-Gurion had spoken of since 1937. Those were the war’s major achievements. “Outside of sorrow for the sons who fell, we have nothing to be sorry for in this war,” he said.107
A few weeks before the war’s end, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “Peace is vital, but not at any cost.” In the years that preceded independence, countless ideas about the disposition of Palestine had been suggested—partnerships, federations, partitions, autonomies, cantons, mandates, and trusteeships, almost every possibility imaginable. Some of them provided for settling the Jews in Europe’s DP camps in Palestine. But none of the arrangements proposed as a way of averting war would have promised independence with a Jewish majority, which was Zionism’s fundamental demand. War was probably inevitable, as Ben-Gurion himself had always maintained. “The war was a necessity foreseen,” he said.108 As he saw it, it was one of those historical moments in the life of a nation, a singular moment that would never occur again. It required a courageous decision, a violent and brutal one, that would serve as a new start and a transition into another and better age. At this stage, there was no reason to believe that the Arabs would willingly come to terms with a Jewish state in Palestine, so it was necessary to impose the state by force.
When Ben-Gurion led his generation into war, he took a calculated risk that was meant, in part, to improve the partition boundaries, while paying the price that this required. The price was heavy—close to six thousand Israeli dead, almost one out of every hundred, among them two thousand civilians. One out of every three of that toll was killed in Jerusalem or in the Negev. There were also twelve thousand wounded.‡‡109
It may well be that the high number of casualties on the Israeli side was due to Ben-Gurion’s failure to establish an army earlier, and on his insistence on conducting the war largely by himself. The glory of victory enhanced his political standing despite his faulty conduct of security affairs before the war and his flaws as a commander in chief during its progress, the exceptions being establishing a military industry and obtaining arms from overseas. He radiated khaki-tinged optimism. “One day a young amputee came to me, actually running,” he told the Cabinet. “They made him a temporary prosthesis and he felt excellent. I was intoxicated by what I saw.” He told of the cooperation between an English factory that made prostheses and his plans to found a similar one in Israel. “We will have an excellent plant,” he promised; it opened a year and a half later.110 It was a period of uncertainty—no one knew how to move forward to a permanent status agreement with Israel’s neighbors. “The Arabs don’t believe us, and I can understand that,” Golda Meir said. Ben-Gurion responded: “Even more Jews don’t believe us.”111 That was not accurate, but it reflected the sense of disappointment that had begun to gnaw at him. It was not the country he had hoped to found and lead.
* That was how he spoke and argued at Cabinet meetings as well. He almost always worded himself in a way that left him an escape hatch, such as “I myself believe that there is a chance of winning, but if Mr. Gruenbaum were to put a question about it to me, I would not commit myself.” He had done the same as secretary of the Histadrut. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Sept. 21, 1948, ISA; Mordechai Bentov, interview transcript, BGA.)
† Some of the men who fought at Latrun were sent there immediately upon their arrival in Israel, without any training. Ben-Gurion accepted responsibility: “We had no choice,” he later said. “Jerusalem was in danger.” Rabin told him that the immigrant soldiers were demoralizing his battalion. The debacle at Latrun was in part due to a failure of intelligence. (Moshe Shapira and Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, June 2, 6, 8, 1948, ISA; Ben-Gurion, Diary, June 14, 1948, BGA; Ben-Gurion to the Mapai Council, June 19, 1948, in Ben-Gurion 1982a, p. 538; Ben-Gurion to the Knesset, Jan. 4, 1950, Divrei Haknesset, 3, p. 434ff.; Shamir 1994, p. 249ff., p. 7ff.)
‡ The agreement with Jordan moved the boundary with Israel to the east; as part of this, Israel agreed to take control of a cluster of Arab villages in Wadi Ara, and promised not to expel their inhabitants. (Segev 1986, p. 27.)
§ His archives contain two sheets of paper inscribed with verses from the book of Joshua, from the story of Achan, a man who was sentenced to death after he stole a fine mantle as well as silver and gold from the conquered city of Jericho, instead of leaving them “to the treasury of the Lord,” as Joshua ordered before the city’s wall fell. The first of these documents bears the date of the expulsion of the inhabitants of Lod and Ramla. (Verses from Joshua 6, BGA, general chronological documentation.)
** The IDF later conducted an inquiry into why such a large Arab population remained in the Galilee, despite the fact that “our forces tried to get rid of it and frequently did by other than legal and gentle means.” The report quotes an order to commanders “to assist the inhabitants to leave the captured territories.” (Yitzhak Moda’i, “Mivtza Hiram,” IDFA 189.922/1975.)
†† The deportation of Ben-Gurion himself in 1915, “never to return,” as the Ottoman document put it, became fixed in his mind as having occurred on the same date as Israel’s establishment. “I was deported on May 15,” he said at a Cabinet meeting in which the fate of the refugees was discussed. But the date he cited was incorrect. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, June 25, 1961, ISA.)
‡‡ The losses incurred by the Arabs of Palestine remain unclear. They may have been greater than Israel’s losses. The armies of the Arab states, taken together, seem to have lost fewer men than the Israelis. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, April 27, 1953; Sivan 1991.)