In the latter part of December 1949, the millionth Jew arrived in Israel. “It is good to be a million,” cheered the poet Natan Alterman. A modest ceremony was held on the deck of the ship that was to set out to bring the first members of the second million. They were meant to be the fuel, the oxygen, the electricity, and the lifeblood that would propel the new country forward. But most of the Jews who arrived in the years that followed were broken people, emotionally in particular. They were penniless refugees, Holocaust survivors and Jews from the Islamic world. Like the archetypical kiosk proprietors who arrived in the 1920s, most of the newcomers had no interest in and no capacity for settling the land as pioneers or defending it as soldiers. They disappointed as “human material”; Ben-Gurion referred to them as “human debris.” He longed for Zionism’s primal era. “There was a different sort of human material in the country then,” he said.1 The Jews of the United States, the human material that he would have welcomed, continued to choose to remain in America; the Soviet Union’s Jews were not allowed to leave. It was one of the major challenges Israel faced in its early years. It vexed Ben-Gurion and eroded his ability to lead the country.
The period was one of the most difficult of Ben-Gurion’s life. Israel’s economic frailty endangered its very existence; and even after the armistice, war with the Arabs had become routine. Only one out of every three Israelis voted for Mapai, but almost everything seemed to depend solely on him. The enormous responsibility sapped his strength. His fatigue mounted year by year. As prime minister, he reached the pinnacle of his career, but attaining that post also marked the beginning of his decline. As the Zionist dream achieved its goal, it lost its heady potency; what it now needed, principally, was a manager.
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They came in a huge tidal wave; the rate of their arrival recalls the million Jews whom Ben-Gurion once said he wanted to bring, all at once, on a thousand ships. By the end of 1950, Israel’s Jewish population had doubled; Ben-Gurion noted that the number of Jews who had arrived in the state’s first thirty months was equal to the number who had arrived in the thirty years of the British Mandate—about half a million. He calculated that were the United States to increase its population proportionally, it would have to take in thirty million people in a year. “Of all the miracles in our history, none has been like this one,” he wrote in his diary. He told the Knesset that history had never seen such a small country, in a state of war, absorb so many immigrants.2
As in the past, they came for many reasons. The war in Palestine had caused Jews in Arab countries to be labeled enemy agents and to become targets for revenge. Jews in Eastern Europe, which had in the meantime fallen under Communist rule, also encountered animosity. All of them longed for a better life, free of prejudice and persecution. Some experienced a Zionist awakening of a religious or secular kind, in many cases as a response to the Holocaust. Not all came willingly. Israel urged them to leave, made the necessary arrangements, and paid for passage, in direct contact with national leaders who sought to rid their countries of their Jews. A few countries demanded that Israel pay for each exit permit, the price in dollars ranging from two to three figures per head. Ben-Gurion said it was blackmail, but declared: “Immigration is not an economic matter. It is more like war.” That summed up his views on Israel’s national security.3 The thirty-year-old Zionist enterprise, including the expulsion and flight of the Arabs and the victory in the War of Independence, was not able to guarantee the country’s existence. His aim was four million Jews. “It’s a life-or-death question for us,” he wrote.4 And, for him, almost all the newcomers, Holocaust survivors and Jews from the Islamic world, were foreign and alien. They were Jews, he said, “only in the sense that they are not non-Jews.”5
The Jews from the Islamic world were needed as a replacement for “the selected members of the nation,” as Ben-Gurion referred to the Holocaust’s victims, who were Eastern European Jews endowed with the capacities needed for building the Jewish state. They had stood “at the forefront of the Jewish people,” he wrote, “both in quantity and quality,” and were the “prime candidates for immigration.” But they were murdered: “The country came into being and did not find the people who had awaited it.”6 The Zionist movement thus had to seek out the Jews of the Islamic lands, “something to fill up, at least a bit, the empty space left by the victims of the Holocaust.”7 Up to that point, the Zionist leadership had evinced only a marginal, folkloristic interest in these communities.
Prior to World War II, Ben-Gurion had not seen them as real partners in the Zionist enterprise. “We gave no attention to what was going on in Persia and Iraq,” he later recounted. He seems to have become aware of them gradually, during the war. As he increasingly grasped the scale of the slaughter of Europe’s Jews, he began to consider bringing the Jews of Yemen and Morocco to Israel.8 But, as he saw it, the Jews of the Arab countries were a poor substitute for the murdered Jews of Europe. In recent centuries, he explained, the Jews of the Islamic world had played only a “passive role” in the history of the Jewish people. The lands in which they resided were replete with ignorance, poverty, and slavery, and had fallen far behind the European nations, who had experienced rapid progress. “The state of the Jews is like the state of the gentiles,” he said. “The divine presence withdrew from the eastern Jewish communities and they had little or no influence on the Jewish people.”9 They thus had no place in his Zionist dream, nor that of other members of his generation. “We came here as Europeans,” he maintained. “Our roots are in the east and we are returning to the east, but we bear European culture with us. We will not want to cut off either our ties or Palestine’s ties to European culture.”10 That was the common wisdom in the Zionist movement, advocated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky as well. “We, the Jews,” he said, “have nothing in common with what is called ‘the east,’ thank God.”*11
Ben-Gurion also had an aversion to the Holocaust survivors who were settling in Israel. “Among the survivors of the German concentration camps,” he said, “were people who, were they not what they were—hard and bad and egotistical people—would not have survived, and everything they endured purged their souls of all good.” He was disappointed. For many generations the Jews had been a nation without a country, he pondered; now there was a danger that they would have a state without a people.12 He wanted to upgrade the human material coming into Israel, and quite naturally thought of the United States. “North America,” he wrote, “settled by waves of immigration from all the European lands and some Asiatic ones, along with the blacks who were brought as slaves from Africa, is a melting pot similar to Israel.” The usual term for this was the “melding of the exiles.” It was an attempt to assimilate the newcomers into Israeli society and make them forget where they came from “just as I have forgotten that I am Polish,” as he told the Knesset. The idea itself had been with him for many years, appearing in a draft constitution he had published twenty-five years previously. He sometimes put it in biological terms—the children of the next generation were meant to be New Jews, those Israeli natives whose physical prowess as laborers, fighters, and heroes so enthralled him.13
Cabinet ministers and Knesset members, the press and sociologists often spoke patronizingly about the Jews of the Islamic world, sometimes in racist terms.14 For the most part, Ben-Gurion spoke of how foreign he felt them to be. “We are alien to them and they are alien to us,” he said. From time to time he also used the expressions “two tribes,” “two peoples,” and “two nations.” Thousands of years separated the two, on the one side the “cultured and educated,” on the other “primitive Jews.” The Yemenite father, he maintained, “does not look after his children and family as we do, and he is not accustomed to feed his children fully before he eats himself.”15 He once apologized for bringing up a subject that was not easy to speak of around the Cabinet table; he tried to persuade his colleagues that outhouses rather than bathrooms should be built for such immigrants. “These people do not know how to make hygienic use of a toilet in the home,” he argued. “Maybe we can educate the next generation in that. But not this generation.” Golda Meir differed, but Ben-Gurion stood his ground—an indoor toilet would be a catastrophe for them.16
But, most of all, he feared that the Jews of the Arab countries would not contribute to the country’s defense and might actually be detrimental. That was one of the chilling predictions he shared with his Cabinet in a frank moment. He had no doubt that the Arabs were readying themselves for another round of war, and as such he did not dismiss the possibility that Israel could be destroyed. But instead of fortifying its military, the state was investing in the absorption of immigrants who did nothing to bolster the army. “A mob will not fight in the conditions that we will have to fight in for our survival, and the ingathering of the exiles is bringing us a mob,” he said.17
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Briefings by the IDF’s chief of staff Yadin and his deputy, Mordechai Maklef, painted a grim picture for the Cabinet. Eight out of every ten new recruits had arrived in Israel less than two years before their induction; 90 percent of them did not know Hebrew. “The intelligence level is very low,” Yadin told the ministers, possibly referring to the amount of schooling they had received. “It is so low,” he said, “that it constitutes a security risk.” He meant soldiers from North Africa in particular. Ben-Gurion spoke of a “substandard generation.” He added that “almost all those who are going into the police force, like those going into the army, are refuse.” He feared that the IDF’s ethnic composition was detrimental to its qualitative superiority. “If our army as a whole gets to the level of the Syrian army, we’re done for,” he told his ministers. He repeated that sentiment a few months later: “Our entire advantage, our entire defense, is built solely on our quality, that our soldier is superior to the Arab soldier … that is our most precious asset.”18
He meant not only the inferior combat capacities of the recruits; they were undisciplined as well. They committed crimes against Arabs. In a passage that the editors of his war diary omitted when they prepared it for publication, he described soldiers who had come from North Africa as “difficult human material.” Specifically, “their cultural level is low, they use knives, there are cases of rape.”19 When a Cabinet minister questioned him about this information, Yadin confirmed it. These were Jews, he suggested by way of explanation, who had been oppressed by the Arabs and now suddenly found themselves with the upper hand.20 Ben-Gurion hoped the education that the IDF provided to Jews from Arab countries would counteract their criminal inclinations. “To teach a young man from these countries to sit on a toilet like a human being, to wash himself, not to steal, not to grab an Arab girl, rape her, and murder her—that comes before everything else.” For a brief moment he felt an unexpected longing: “We don’t have the boys who grew up here,” he said, mentioning specifically the Palmach soldiers who had completed their service and been discharged.21 He suggested a special appeal to the Jews of the West to send Israel young people “of high quality.” Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett told the Soviet Union’s deputy foreign minister, Andrey Vyshinsky, that Israel needed Jews from Russia, because it could not depend on the resilience of Moroccan Jews.22 Another security risk was the physical resemblance between Jews from the Arab countries and the Arabs living in Israel. People might think that an Arab attacker was a Jew and thus not be on guard. “Is it such a big deal to go into a movie theater, throw a bomb, and run away?” he asked.23 Arab terror brought back the atmosphere of the years preceding the War of Independence—during the five years following the war, about 175 Israelis were killed in such attacks, on average almost three a month.24
He wrote that the problem was a “racial” one, putting that term in quotation marks. He reluctantly suggested that, in Israel, “an ostensibly ‘superior’ race, the Ashkenazi race, stands out and in practice leads the nation, as opposed to an eastern race of “‘inferior level.’”25 More than fifteen years later, he would say, “We did not take care of them,” and ten years after that he would admit, “We greatly sinned against some eastern Jews.”†26
The first several tens of thousands to arrive, both Europeans and Asians, were settled in homes that had emptied of their Arab residents. This completed a population transfer. Some of the deserted Arab villages were in very poor physical shape. Just as Shlomo Lavi had once complained about the state of the Arab houses into which the Ein Harod settlers moved, Ben-Gurion lamented the filthy and fly-ridden state of the shacks and shambles that the Arabs had left behind. “The more property, the more worry,” he remarked.27 When the Arab homes were filled and the tidal wave of immigrants continued, they were settled in tent camps; many had at first to make do with living conditions no better than those in the Arab refugee camps that had been set up in neighboring countries, and harsher than those of the DP camps in Europe and the detention camps in Cyprus.
Ben-Gurion took a great interest in the camps for new arrivals; the reports he received told him of great hardship. The tents were densely packed together; the camps lacked running water and adequate sanitary facilities. The provisions supplied to the immigrants were insufficient and the specific food items provided were not what many of them were used to eating. Many of the immigrants brought illnesses with them. Ben-Gurion received data on the large number of tuberculosis cases. “An eight-year-old girl with active tuberculosis sleeps in the same bed with her brothers and sisters, six of them in a tiny room,” he wrote in his diary. The disease was especially common among newcomers from Yemen and Turkey. There were other epidemics as well, among them polio and eye ailments. There were not enough doctors, medical equipment, or medicines. There were schools for only some of the children, and many of the teachers lacked appropriate training. Many of the residents of the camps had no work, and none of them knew how long they would be there. They were subject to the whims of officials who could not communicate with them in their languages, and were at the mercy of swindlers, scalpers, and party hacks. Understandably, the immigrants were depressed, resentful, and frustrated. Ben-Gurion also received a report on a burgeoning amount of prostitution.28
At the end of 1949, nearly one hundred thousand immigrants, or one out of every ten Israelis, were living in the camps. Given that tens of millions of indigent refugees had roamed through Europe after the Holocaust and the world war, it was not a big story. But placed against Ben-Gurion’s expectations and his definition of the Jewish state’s purpose, the situation in the camps bordered on a humanitarian disaster. In summing up the first year of Israel’s independence, he acknowledged that the country’s absorption efforts had failed. As usual in such cases, he spoke in the plural. “It turns out that we are not yet prepared for this task,” he said.29 Speaking to the Knesset in January 1950, he accused the kibbutz movement of neglecting the absorption effort. “I am ashamed” of them, he said, as if he were not responsible for the government’s immigration and absorption efforts. Unsurprisingly, he set off a storm of protest.30
In February 1950, Ben-Gurion decided to devote himself to a study of the absorption problem. As he did when he prepared his seminar on the Haganah, he drafted a list of questions.31 He was cognizant not only of the plight of the Jews of the Arab lands but also of the need to improve their public image and to facilitate their integration into Israeli society. He compared racist acts against them to those committed by whites against blacks in Africa.32 He did not want to be a racist, but in his view there was a real cultural problem that he had not anticipated prior to the Holocaust. Just as, not wanting to be a prophet of war, he repeatedly declared his belief in peace, he also proclaimed again and again that the Jews from the Islamic world were not inferior to European Jews, and that it was only a matter of time until the two merged into a single nation. “There is no basis for the assumption that the Jews of North Africa, or of Turkey, Egypt, Persia, or Aden are qualitatively and fundamentally different from the Jews of Lithuania, Galicia, and America,” he said when he introduced the compulsory military service law to the Knesset, adding, “In them, too, are hidden rich springs of pioneering capacity, springs of heroism and creation. If we invest here, as well, the efforts we made with Jewish youth in the lands of Europe—we will receive the same welcome results.”33
A visit to one of the camps led him to the conclusion that the IDF needed to be mobilized to deal with the situation. The army needed to provide not only water and medical services, but also counseling and instruction. The army would be the real melting pot that would forge everyone “through Jewish brotherhood and military discipline … into a nation renewing its youth.”34 He proposed conscripting the immigrants for labor “without individual profit” under a military or “paramilitary” regime that would give them a working knowledge of Hebrew and “national discipline.” It was an echo of the “large commune” or “labor army” that he had suggested twenty-five years previously. A special committee was set up to study the idea, but it met with considerable opposition and was dropped.35
In May 1950, the people in the immigrant camps began to be transferred into new facilities that were called ma’abarot. Living conditions were meant to be better, and their residents were supposed to work in government employment programs, paving roads and planting trees. Within a few months, more than a hundred ma’abarot had been established, home to some eighteen thousand families and a total population of about fifty thousand. The reports Ben-Gurion read continued to be a source of great concern. He was informed that the infant mortality rate in the ma’abarot was twice that of the rest of the country. A few months later, he wrote: “The comrade in charge of the ma’abarot notes a frightening moral decline—they don’t work, sell food to children, black market, gangsters.” The transit camp population had risen by then to some one hundred thousand, but only a third of the adult men had jobs. The reports did not improve: “The ma’abarot are a cancer,” he wrote in his diary in 1952. The following year he was told that tens of thousands of Israelis were starving; 90 percent of them were Jews from the Islamic world. One Mapai leader warned that the ma’abarot “are poisoning the air,” by which he meant that they were endangering Mapai’s standing; he demanded that they be dismantled. Some of the ma’abarot, established on the margins of cities, transformed in time into poverty-stricken neighborhoods.36
In the first half of April 1950, an organization representing Yemenite immigrants sent a complaint to the police minister regarding the disappearance of a five-month-old baby who had been hospitalized. “All trace of the baby has been lost and the father’s searches have produced nothing,” the complaint said. The police did not immediately investigate despite reminders that the organization sent. In the meantime, further cases came to light of Yemenite babies who had disappeared after being taken for medical care. A rumor soon started spreading that there was an organized operation to abduct Yemenite infants and sell them into adoption, in Israel and in other countries. This scandal would metamorphose into a myth that haunted the country for many years thereafter. Later investigations found that most of the children, several hundred of them, had in fact died and had been buried, but the parents were not notified.37
Bringing hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel in such a short period of time, before homes and jobs and hospitals and schools had been prepared for them, was a direct outgrowth of the Zionist faith of Ben-Gurion and his contemporaries. They believed in the “liquidation of the Diaspora,” meaning an end to Jewish life outside the Jewish state.38 As he saw it, the country’s needs justified the suffering that was involved in absorbing the masses who arrived. “Had we not brought them in in an insane way,” he said, “had we not brought 700,000 Jews in then without thinking about it twice, 700,000 Arabs would inevitably have returned. There’s nothing we could have done to stop it. By bringing in 700,000 Jews, we blocked the way for them.”39
The winters of 1950 and 1951 were particularly harsh; heavy snow fell almost all over the country. Public censure of the immigrants’ treatment grew more vehement, eventually leading some to demand that the immigration rate be slowed. “We are destroying and enfeebling these people,” said one senior absorption official. The key concepts in the debate were regulation and selection, meaning that only those who had potential for successful absorption and who could meet the country’s needs should be allowed to immigrate. Ben-Gurion was adamant: “People can live in tents for years. Anyone who doesn’t want to live in one shouldn’t come.”40 Those who wanted to limit immigration were racists, he charged. “They see no need for the blacks, these niggers, they see no need for this whole business,” he said disgustedly.41 In line with his policy since the days of the Bricha, he ordered that immigrants be brought in as rapidly as possible, on the grounds that they later might not be able or willing to come. Reports sent by Israel immigration emissaries in Morocco might well have reminded him of the early reports he had received during World War II. One of them asked: “Have we done and are we doing everything possible, even under current conditions in Israel and our difficult financial position, to save those children and families who can be saved?” It was a question pervaded by the memory of the Holocaust.42 In the same context, Ben-Gurion also pushed for a higher birthrate.‡
At the same time, large numbers of young men, veterans of the war, were discharged from the army; many could not find work. The country was living largely off loans and grants from overseas, and it funded part of its budget deficit by printing money and a mandatory bond issue. In April 1949, Ben-Gurion announced an austerity program that included strict price controls and the rationing of food, services, and raw materials, as well as foreign currency controls.43
At times he said that he did not understand the laws of economics, that they were a “sham” that he didn’t get. His contribution during Cabinet meetings on economic matters largely took the form of questions and trivial interjections, some of them comic. “King Solomon did not wait for private capital, and neither can we,” he asserted at one meeting.44 Just as the inadequacy of his military knowledge on the eve of the war led him to grasp at the fine details of army operations, he now regaled the Cabinet with data on the inventory of soap and pickled fish, milk powder and iron, fodder and tea, nylon stockings and false teeth. He grasped the general picture only vaguely; he was aware of the cost of the Zionist enterprise, but did not really understand the economic systems needed to fund it and propel it forward. “You talk without understanding the issue,” Finance Minister Kaplan rebuked him.45
The austerity policy grew out of an almost mystical belief in the power of bureaucracy to control market forces. Part of it involved a debate over fundamental ideological principles. Ben-Gurion declared that Israel was not a socialist country, but not a capitalist one, either. His government did not seek to impose equality on society, he promised—not yet. But neither was it prepared to permit “abundance for the few.” The goal was “a minimum for all.” He argued with the advocates of free enterprise, and sought to draw lessons from the American New Deal. He believed the public would cooperate, but he was wrong. The common wisdom was that the bureaucracy that enforced the austerity regulations was corrupt; everyone who was able to do so got around the rules. A black market bloomed and operated, almost completely in the open, in every economic sector. It was for all intents and purposes a mass act of middle-class civil disobedience.46 He had a hard time accepting this. “Horrible,” he said. “This is, after all, our economy and our honor … this phenomenon sullies the country’s reputation.” He declared that he would stand at the vanguard of the war against the black market, despite the political risk involved. “I will go all out against the black market,” he said. “Find someone else to deal with the other stuff.”§47
The black market gradually came to an end as the economic situation improved. In the meantime, tens of thousands of public housing units were built for the inhabitants of the immigrant camps. Hundreds of new settlements were also founded for them, many of them along the country’s borders.48 All this was meant to be part of a “profound human revolution,” as Ben-Gurion termed it, and a fundamental transformation of human values.
He would soon have to address a traumatic identity crisis with particular impact on Israel’s Yemenite Jews. “I have a weakness for Yemenites,” he wrote. “They are different from all the other communities I am acquainted with.”49 But his acquaintance with them was superficial, replete with prejudice. His attempt to smelt them in his Israeli melting pot almost toppled his government.
The Yemenites were seen as authentic, as a surviving remnant of the biblical Hebrews. Indeed, many of them knew Hebrew, even if they spoke it with a heavy accent that was difficult for others to understand. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the first minister of the interior, believed that uprooting them from their homes in Yemen and bringing them to Israel would be harmful both to them and to Israel, and others agreed. But Ben-Gurion ordered that they all be brought in, every last one. Their “children are dying like flies,” he maintained. “We must save them.” Many of them were hospitalized as soon as they arrived. He went to visit them. “It is one of the most frightening things I have ever seen,” he said immediately thereafter, in a powerful and emotional speech. The children he saw looked more like skeletons than human beings, he related. “The spark of life could be seen only in their eyes, the eyes of Jewish children, precious children, and Jewish doctors and nurses are caring for them with devotion, with love.” It was like a revelation: “I was horror-stricken and stupefied by that great and terrible vision. Yes, these are the birth pangs of the Messiah.”50
He had been acquainted with Yemenite Jewry since they were first brought to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century as a substitute for Arab laborers; he seems never to have forgotten the role they played in the campaign for Hebrew labor.
His expectation that the IDF would serve as a melting pot was realized at a very slow pace, at best. But he promised the maximum—one day the IDF would have a chief of staff “from among our Yemenite brothers,” he wrote to Yisrael Yeshayahu, a Yemenite member of the Knesset for Mapai. It was a prediction he often repeated. He also sought a Yemenite candidate for the post of Israel’s president.51
Women sent as soldiers to the camps counseled women and taught Hebrew, but Ben-Gurion wanted a more fundamental change. “The abyss between Yemenite men and women is terrible,” he wrote. One of the things he was referring to was the marriage of young girls, an accepted practice in Yemen. “For us it is barbaric,” he said at a Cabinet meeting.52
When he directed Yadin to deploy the army to extricate the Jews of Yemen from the ignorance he attributed to them, he warned him: “The soul of the Yemenite must be understood and his habits must be treated with respect, and they should be changed with good manners and by presenting an example.”53 But by the time the directive made its way down to the field, it had become a deliberate effort to impose secular education on the Yemenites. Their “primitiveness” was equated with their religious lifestyle. Boys and girls were put into coeducational classrooms and boys were required to cut off their sidelocks and to stop putting on tefillin, worn by Jewish men during morning prayers. The food they were given did not always meet their standards of religious dietary observance. One IDF officer working in the camps persuaded its residents to use contraception to lower the birthrate.
Ben-Gurion was shocked when he heard about the secular coercion in the camps. “These are horrible things,” he said. “Not letting someone put on tefillin is an act fit for Sodom and Gomorrah.” If it turned out to be true, he added, “not only will the government not survive, neither will the country.”54 He agreed to set up several inquiries and promised the minister of religion, Yehuda Leib Maimon, of the United Religious Front, “I will not take part in any government that is responsible for such actions.” Without waiting for the outcome of the official inquiry, he sent several army officers to the camps. They reported back that the stories about secular coercion, including the cutting off of sidelocks, were baseless. Other inquiries confirmed the stories.55
The affair quickly ballooned into a power struggle over the souls of the inhabitants of the camps, and threatened to turn into a crisis of national identity. “We now face a situation in which an entire generation of religious children has been done away with,” said Minister of Health Moshe Shapira, also of the United Religious Front. They had, he said, “been taken from their parents” and sent to secular schools. You could already see Yemenite Jews smoking on the Sabbath, he complained. It was, he said, “a death sentence against religious education.” He was especially furious about the religious schools sponsored by the labor movement via the Histadrut, which competed with those run by the religious movements. Ben-Gurion refused to give in on this point. “You have no monopoly over religious Jews,” he declared again and again. He claimed that the Yemenites were more tolerant than Shapira and the other members of his party.**56
Nevertheless, he tried to confine the dispute. When Shapira demanded that parents be allowed to choose freely what schools their children would attend, Ben-Gurion immediately agreed. “I am with you,” he said, maintaining that the Yemenite community should be provided with religious education as they understood it, as long as it included basic core studies, including arithmetic. This brought the issue back into the realm of political give-and-take. “I presume that if there is goodwill, we will be able to reach a fair arrangement on this matter,” he said, summing up an especially acrimonious Cabinet debate.57 He was acutely apprehensive about a culture war, which would, he said, “be a greater danger than any external enemy.”58
On October 28, 1952, Ben-Gurion went to the home of Rabbi Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz, who was commonly referred to as the Hazon Ish, that being the title of his magnum opus on Jewish religious law. He was one of the great halachic minds of his generation. The audience visit lasted only about fifty minutes, but was as much the subject of anticipation as a historical summit conference. Ben-Gurion’s military secretary, Nehemiah Argov, had visited the rabbi for a preliminary meeting. When they arrived, a huge crowd stood in front of the house. Ben-Gurion brought his aide Yitzhak Navon. Both of them wore hats. The Hazon Ish, then seventy-five years old, lived in quite ascetic conditions. He received them in his one-room home; it was furnished with a bed and a bookcase; they sat at the dining table. Ben-Gurion said that he had come to ask how religious and nonreligious Jews could live together in Israel. The rabbi responded with a story from the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 32b) about two boats on a narrow river; if they both try to pass, they will both sink. Likewise, if two camels meet on a narrow and steep ascent and both try to pass, they will both fall. If one ship or camel bears a load and the other does not, the one without the load should allow the one with the load to precede it. According to Navon, the rabbi explained: “We religious Jews are like the camel bearing the load. We bear the yoke of many commandments. You must clear the way for us.” On Navon’s account, Ben-Gurion responded by tapping himself on the shoulder and saying: “And does this camel not bear a yoke of commandments? Is the precept to settle the land not a commandment? … And what about the boys whom you so oppose, who stand on the borders and protect you, is that not a commandment?” The Hazon Ish objected that many Israelis drove to the beach on the Sabbath instead of praying and studying. “It is outrageous and shocking to see such desecration of the Sabbath in the land of our forefathers,” he said. “I don’t drive to the beach on the Sabbath,” Ben-Gurion responded, but he said that others should be allowed to do so. “It’s their right,” he said, adding: “Do you think that if they do not go to the beach, they will go to synagogue?” The rabbi said: “We believe that a day will come when everyone will observe the Sabbath and pray.” Ben-Gurion responded that he had no objection, but that this could not be forced on people. “There should be no religious coercion and no antireligious coercion, each person should live as he sees fit.” But the rabbi could not accept that. They parted without having reached an agreement, but they established the foundation for a working relationship. The encounter reinforced Ben-Gurion’s belief that it was useless to get into debates over principle with Orthodox Jews. He recalled that the Hazon Ish had listened to him with a droll smile. “He has the face and eyes of a spiritual man,” he reported. But he made no mention himself of the parable of the ships and the camels. He viewed the Hazon Ish’s willingness to receive him at his home as an achievement in and of itself. Another Haredi leader, Yitzchok Zev (Velvel) Soloveitchik, known as the Brisker rabbi, refused.59
*
His connections with the leaders of the religious public had always been based on four principles. First, the nature of the relationship between religion and state should not be defined by law. To every extent possible, theological debates should be avoided. Differences should be settled politically.
Second, there is no symmetry between religious and secular Jews. The religious population was divided into a number of different groups, but they all shared a willingness to defend the fundamentals of their faith zealously. Most nonreligious Jews were not so fervent. The Haredi welfare minister, Yitzhak-Meir Levin, told the Cabinet: “If we face the choice of transgressing the laws of Moses or the laws of the state, we will violate the laws of the state, not those of Moses.” Nonreligious Jews did not generally face such a dilemma.60 “I am familiar with your view of Judaism,” Ben-Gurion wrote to a well-known rabbi, “and while I dispute some parts of that view, I would never reject it as worthless … in contrast, you are obliged to reject any view that is inconsistent with tradition as you understand it.” The upshot was that nonreligious Jews could make more concessions, as they had done on the eve of the partition resolution of 1947, when they consented to leave a monopoly over marriage and divorce to the official rabbinate. So it was also when Ben-Gurion agreed to exempt yeshiva students from military service. His critics called that capitulating to religious extortion and preferring religious strictures to the conscience of the individual. Golda Meir warned that there were members of Mapai who were prepared to launch a religious war.61
The third principle was that the state should provide basic religious services to its observant citizens, without regard for their political position or the composition of the governing coalition. One of these was religious education.62 The fourth principle grew out of Ben-Gurion’s many years of political experience—it is easier to work with religious politicians in the government than with a religious opposition, because when they were Cabinet ministers they had more to lose and were thus less combative. It was this insight that once led him to offer Yeshayahu Leibowitz a place on Mapai’s Knesset slate. Leibowitz, a respected scientist, was active in a small religious party. He claimed that he told Ben-Gurion that he would accept the offer on three conditions, one of them being separation of religion and state. Ben-Gurion responded: “I will never agree to separate religion from the state. I want the state to keep religion in a grip.”63
*
His partnership with the religious parties went from one crisis to another. In the initial years following independence, there was no subject that occupied the government more often. The debate over the observance of the Sabbath in public spaces seemed at the time to be one of the country’s life-or-death issues. Minister of Religions Maimon wanted to forbid all transportation on the Sabbath, including private vehicles. Ben-Gurion warned the religious Cabinet ministers not to go too far with their demands: “If the aim is to give the rabbis additional legal authority—it won’t go through.” Whatever the case, he reiterated from time to time: “We see a need for us to sit together, if that is possible.”64 He generally came toward the religious parties, often using a conciliatory tone that could even be obsequious. “I am not a religious person,” he said, “but were I religious, I would seek a way to adapt religion to the needs of the state, because, if there is a conflict, the state will win.” He claimed to be trying to prevent such conflict. If that were possible, “we will be happy,” he said.
So they argued again and again over the demand to forbid the importation of pork (Ben-Gurion was opposed); to establish a religious university (he opposed that as well); to open Knesset sessions with a prayer given by a rabbi (also); to close stores on the Sabbath, to prevent public transportation from running on the Sabbath, and to require special permits for work on the Sabbath (he agreed); to establish special units for religious soldiers and to end autopsies (he opposed); to exempt religious soldiers from the IDF’s swearing-in ceremony (he opposed); and to end the death penalty (as he favored doing).65
On occasion he tried to demonstrate that he knew traditional Jewish texts better than they did. It was usually a mistake. Such moments sounded like the conversations he sometimes conducted with intellectuals—he spoke philosophy, they spoke politics. But for the Haredim, who rejected Zionism, Ben-Gurion was tantamount to a foreign ruler who was imposing horrible strictures on the Jews. Living in Israel, they felt like they were living in the Exile, Ben-Gurion wrote.66
It was a long series of power struggles. They sometimes sent thousands of demonstrators into the street. The compromises reached under Ben-Gurion’s leadership exhibited his political acumen, his experience, and, more than anything else, his patience. He was at his best with religious politicians. A great portion of the agreements were reached by allotting public money to religious programs and institutions.67 That enabled him to further other national issues that were more vital, as he saw it. But the partnership was not an easy one to manage. On more than one occasion he pumped himself up with fighting spirit, as he knew how to do. Once he warned that, if he did not resist the demands of the religious parties, Israel would end up with two governments, just as the Catholic Church had had two popes in the fourteenth century. He said that anarchy was a worse danger than the enemies’ weapons, and declared that his religious colleagues had caused a crisis more severe than that of the Altalena.68 Once or twice he resigned. Then they compromised and everything was as it had been before, as if nothing had happened. Soon the government would collapse over economic policy; elections were held in July 1951.
*
At that time, long speeches at mass rallies were still customary. But this time—a first—it was not an ideology that was being voted up or down, but rather a leader. Mapai placed Ben-Gurion front and center in its election campaign. As always, he put great effort and much time into the fight, meticulously tracking all the arrangements. His appearances drew huge crowds. Many of those who attended could not yet understand what he was saying, because their Hebrew was not yet fluent; they did not come to listen but to see him. For the first time he tried an American election campaign standard, “five minutes in a car,” as he put it. He went from one ma’abarah to another, showed himself but did not speak, and rushed on to the next camp. The residents greeted him as if he were the Messiah, wrote one journalist, Amos Elon.69 Ben-Gurion attended weddings and circumcision ceremonies, and, less than three months before the election, he set out on a victory tour of the United States, which included meetings with President Truman and Albert Einstein and an open-air car ride from the Waldorf Astoria hotel to City Hall. Three weeks before the election, he wrote in his diary: “I gave a directive to build an additional room for a Yemenite woman with three children in Kfar Uriah Bet, whose husband has another wife with four children.”70
Mapai remained the largest party. It received more than a quarter of a million votes and 45 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, leaving its strength almost unchanged. As in the past, that was not enough to form a government without partners. Most of its voters were newcomers. The centrist General Zionists gained strength among established Israelis after speaking out against the government’s economic policy and mass immigration. “We did not receive a majority, we are far from a majority,” Ben-Gurion said, but he consoled himself with the fact that the party had gained strength in several cities. “A great victory for the party, a failure for the country” was how he put it.71 Given that he was the emblem of the founding of the state and its victory in the War of Independence, it was to a great extent his personal failure.
The alliance with the religious factions, which joined the new coalition, proved itself once more. All parties understood one another, as Ben-Gurion had said even before the election.72 His religious colleagues shared the burden of their joint government’s failures. In 1953, Ben-Gurion’s policies were dealt a heavy blow when, for the first time, the number of Jews who left Israel to live elsewhere—most of them of European origin—exceeded the number of immigrants who arrived.73 On this point it was important for him to remind future readers of his diary how this had come to be: “What needs to be remembered is that the Jewish public that needed a state, and was capable of building one and likely to do so, was exterminated by Hitler.”74
The transition from the era of the Jewish Agency and the National Council to the era of independence went fairly smoothly, almost without disturbance. The institutions of the state-in-the-making, some of them put in place under Ben-Gurion’s leadership, proved themselves—in the areas of justice, education, health, and community organization, among others. Ben-Gurion was the leader and symbol of this continuity. His style of working and making decisions as prime minister was not fundamentally different from the way he operated as head of the Jewish Agency—he assumed an almost unbearable load.
About four months after the war’s end, he had one of those days that impelled him to write down, as one of his first tasks as prime minister: “Time must be found! How to manage within the bounds of twenty-four hours in a day!” That morning he paid a visit to a police force training base. He drove back with Moshe Dayan, at the time the commander of Jerusalem and coordinator of the armistice agreements. Dayan briefed Ben-Gurion on the tensions on the border with Syria and in Jerusalem. Jordan was trying to wriggle out of an agreement that granted Israel access to the Hebrew University’s buildings on Mount Scopus, which after the war remained an enclave under Israel’s control, surrounded by Jordanian territory. Dayan proposed opening the road to the enclave by force. “He is not afraid that a war will break out,” Ben-Gurion remarked. When he returned to his office, he found someone waiting to see him—a procurement agent who had just returned from overseas and reported that France was prepared to sell armaments to Israel. Ben-Gurion wrote down the list of what France was offering. It was also possible now to obtain Sherman tanks at $27,000 each, he noted. Someone who had returned from Argentina told him that the Jews there were living in fear—the regime there was “para-Nazi.” Then a “tree expert” arrived and received a chunk of the prime minister’s time. That afternoon he presided over the Cabinet meeting that made the decision to bring the Jews of Yemen to Israel. Among all this he also found time to address a request he had received from a girl named Roni Baron from Tel Aviv. “If I had my own car,” he wrote to her, “I would be happy to take you to your preschool every day and take you home from there as well. But, as defense minister, I unfortunately cannot permit your uncle to take you in an army vehicle, because the car belongs to the people and the country.” That evening he hosted an American couple in his home.75 It was an exhausting but not unusual day.
His mornings generally began with Paula in the kitchen—they slept in separate rooms. She made him a mixture of soft cheese and fruit that she called “kooch-mooch.” He listened to the morning news on the radio and looked at Davar and other daily newspapers. While he also served as minister of defense, his principal workplace was the prime minister’s office, first in Tel Aviv and then in Jerusalem. As always, he dressed carefully. Only in the summer did he allow himself to work without a tie. If there were no trips or meetings on his schedule, he for the most part stayed in his office. He read and wrote a great deal. During the course of the day, he drank Turkish coffee or apple cider. If he needed one of his aides or a secretary, he went out to them—the office was not equipped with an internal telephone system and he did not like to talk on an external line. This put a lot of power in the hands of Nehemiah Argov, his military secretary. Argov operated as a chief of staff, summoning the people the prime minister wanted to see and scheduling those who wanted to see him. It was not that easy to control the flow—the Israeli establishment was still small, everyone knew everyone else; many belonged to the generation of leaders led by members of the Second Aliyah.††
With hundreds of thousands of new Israelis coming into the country, this group tended to close ranks. Ben-Gurion, who throughout his political life tried to be as accessible as possible, agreed even now to take up almost every issue. Many people asked for his help in getting around bureaucratic obstacles that were impeding projects or to offer him their solutions to national problems. Many citizens wrote to him about their personal problems—one complained about a leaky roof and another was distraught because his wife had left him.‡‡
One of his secretaries would forward such requests to municipalities and government offices, but sometimes people appeared in person at the prime minister’s office, and if Ben-Gurion encountered them by chance in the anteroom or corridor, he would sometimes stop to hear what had brought them. From time to time he would spot a letter on one of the tables, pick it up, and take an interest in it as if he had suddenly put his finger on one of the country’s most pressing and fundamental problems. That may have been what prompted Roni Baron’s letter, in which she asked that her uncle be permitted to take her to preschool in his army vehicle. On the average, he replied to two such letters each day; at his death they numbered some twelve thousand.76
He ran the weekly Cabinet meetings skillfully. He generally arrived prepared, with a mastery of the subject, firm positions, and for the most part knowing what the decision would be. He permitted the Cabinet members to speak only in turn; if they deviated from the subject or from the rules of debate, Ben-Gurion would impatiently threaten to cut them off. But if they spoke to the issue at hand, he respected their right to disagree with him.77 He loathed verbose presentations but was good at summing up the positions of speakers, generally in a dispassionate way devoid of side comments or personal jabs. He did not encourage humor. The minutes of Cabinet meetings exude historical awareness—everyone knew that they were setting precedents for how Israel’s government would function for generations. Ben-Gurion generally spoke last; he often tried to frame what significance the issue at hand had for the country’s future. On occasion he offered autobiographical anecdotes. At other times he was unable, or unwilling, to keep himself from interpolating a fierce objection. He was good at formulating motions to be voted on and followed the rules meticulously in conducting votes. The most extreme motion was always put to a vote first. Frequently, he did not vote himself, as if he were merely chairman of the meeting and a neutral director of the discussion. In many cases he imposed his position on his colleagues; in other cases he was compelled to compromise with them.§§
He generally defended his decisions passionately, and only occasionally admitted mistakes, as he did six months after independence. It had been a mistake, he admitted, to include in the Declaration of Independence a deadline for the promulgation of a constitution. He said it had been a misunderstanding. “I edited the Declaration on May 13 in my room, and I know that that was not what was intended,” he told the Cabinet.78 He did not want a constitution.
And he was infuriated by legal constraints on “the sovereignty of the nation and the state.” Jurists needed to be subordinate to history, not the other way around, he maintained, as part of his response to his justice minister’s demand that he delineate the country’s borders. “The law is whatever people determine it to be,” he insisted.79 Jurists were a nuisance, as far as he was concerned. “They don’t know the meaning of statesmanship,” he griped. “Policy is made by policy makers, not by legalists.” He sometimes extended his critique to include judges. “I think that I am capable of understanding things as well as the best judge in the world,” he said at a Cabinet meeting. “The most knowledgeable person in the world knows not just the law but also has common sense.”80 He frequently disparaged the low quality of most lawyers, and once said baldly: “I absolutely hate that profession.” Zerach Warhaftig, a religious Zionist member of the Knesset and jurist, attributed Ben-Gurion’s attitude to his failure to complete his legal studies in Turkey.81
As in the past, he continued to view the country’s moral image as a matter of existential importance. “If our moral purity is marred, we will lose the love of the Jewish people and the friendship of the few nations on whom our standing in the international arena depends,” he later wrote.82 But he frequently averted his eyes from supposedly patriotic crimes committed, ostensibly, in the service of the state, including war crimes.
On December 9, 1949, the United Nations General Assembly decided that Jerusalem and its environs would become a corpus separatum, an entity under an international regime. In response, Ben-Gurion decided to move the Knesset and ministries, which had operated in Tel Aviv thus far, to Jerusalem. The only exception was the Ministry of Defense and, for the time being, the Foreign Ministry. His concern was that if the General Assembly’s decision was not met with such a response, it would reconfirm the partition decision of November 1947 and require Israel to withdraw from all the territories designated for the Arab state that the IDF had since captured. But making Jerusalem Israel’s seat of government was liable to be seen as a provocation aimed at nearly every other country, and thus seemed risky. “In the past three years I have from time to time faced unpleasant and difficult, not to mention fateful, decisions,” he wrote in his diary. “I don’t know if I have faced a more difficult decision: to flout the United Nations, to face [the ire of] the Catholic, Soviet, and Islamic worlds.”83 Moving the Knesset and ministries to Jerusalem, and formally designating the city as Israel’s capital, did not accomplish anything more than negligible diplomatic damage. Ben-Gurion could tell himself that he had been right.
He generally went home to rest in the early afternoon. He ate quickly, apparently without deriving much pleasure from the meal; Paula served him and sat down to eat only after he finished. Then he would go up to his bedroom and read. Sometimes he fell asleep; he was able to refresh himself with catnaps of ten to twenty minutes.
Later in the afternoon he returned to his office, staying until sundown. He participated in many events and ceremonies; when he came home, he would again shut himself up with his books, sometimes well past midnight. He did not sleep well.84 As prime minister, he continued to avidly peruse catalogues from Blackwell’s, Oxford’s legendary bookstore, and often placed them on the tops of piles of state documents that demanded his attention. He seems not to have given much thought to the question of who ought to be paying for the books he ordered and how it would be done. One of his secretaries recalled that the governor of the Bank of Israel tried to impress on Ben-Gurion that he was violating the law, as the foreign currency controls then in force forbade him to buy the books he so desired. Ben-Gurion either failed to comprehend what the problem was, or acted as if that were the case. At least some of the books were paid for, it seems, by Lord Marcus Sieff of Marks & Spencer, who made frequent trips and contributions to Israel. At one point, Ben-Gurion was given a legal budget for purchasing “professional literature.” His aide Yitzhak Navon wrote in his diary about a loud argument between Ben-Gurion and Paula. “I asked where the money for all the books was coming from, and he said it was his own money,” she told Navon. “Trust me,” she added in Yiddish, “he can’t fool me. I said to him: it’s government money.”***85
Paula was an intelligent woman and politically engaged. She was opinionated, controlling, curious, short-tempered, and frank, and sometimes spoke bluntly. Navon recalled “unending provocations.” He recalled that she “was never boring, and you could never know what to expect with her. She put on no airs, never dissembled, and said out loud what we only thought of, as we were well-mannered. She was not.”86 Once she told UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld that he should get married; she knew very well, of course, why he was single.
Guarding her husband’s health and guaranteeing that he could rest were her life missions. As part of that, she jealously protected her position as his gatekeeper. She occasionally tried to prevent visitors from going up to his room, lest they disturb him, even if they were invited guests. She first asked what brought them, and when they descended from his room, she demanded to know what he had told them.87 She seems to have been especially jealous of his closest aides. She frequently called his office during the day, sometimes, apparently, out of boredom. Unlike Ben-Gurion, she inquired into the private lives of his secretaries. She asked about Nehemiah Argov, who was not married, where he had spent the previous evening, and with whom.88
A Yemenite maid, standard in many Israeli middle-class homes, cleaned the house, cooked, did the laundry and ironing, and even polished Ben-Gurion’s shoes. Paula had received Mazal Jibli from her friend Esther, the wife of the painter and diplomat Reuven Rubin. Jibli recalled that Ben-Gurion loved her traditional Yemenite jahnun, served with a tomato sauce. He didn’t like gefilte fish. Ben-Gurion was generally polite to her; he often washed his own dishes. Paula could be stricter, but always apologized afterward. When Jibli occasionally slept over, she shared Paula’s room. Her salary was paid by the Defense Ministry.89
Her impression was that Paula saw her daughters as rivals. That was especially true of Renana, Ben-Gurion’s favorite. Jibli described a game of infiltration—Renana would open the door to the house, ask in a whisper or with sign language where her mother was. Jibli would indicate that Paula was in the back room and Renana would leap up the stairs, very quickly, before her mother could stop her. Sometimes Paula even kept Ben-Gurion’s brothers and his sister Tzipora from seeing him. When he received women guests in his study, Paula would send in the maid to check to see if everything was in order. Jibli recalled a childish sort of game between him and Paula—he would lie down in his room, she would go up to see if he needed anything, and he would pretend to be sleeping like a baby. She did not have the same central role in his life as he had in hers. He seems never to have consulted her before an important decision. Their relations became a matter of routine. “Maybe he loved Paula when they were young,” Jibli said.90
*
Every so often Ben-Gurion would get together with a woman named Rivka Katznelson. In contrast with his relations with other women, that with Katznelson continued for almost forty years. It began in 1926, when she was nineteen and he about forty. She seems to have been his first extramarital romance, and it continued until the very end of his term as prime minister. Only his connection to Paula lasted longer. Rivka was a distant relative of Berl Katznelson, and spent most of her life working as a journalist for publications sponsored by Mapai. That included editing the monthly women’s magazine Dvar Hapo’elet; she also served as a literary critic. Twice married, with two sons, she kept company with poets, actors, and other members of Tel Aviv’s secular and unconventional bohemian community. Her relations with Ben-Gurion are documented in a large quantity of diaries, poems, and scraps of paper she placed inside notebooks and pads and among loose papers. Many of them were composed as letters to him, but she did not send them all, as she herself once told him.91
When it was opened after many years, her archive revealed a love story that did not bring her much satisfaction. She liked him when she first saw him at a political rally, she later related: “That large head with the huge forelocks—there was something cute about it.” Her diaries, and the love poems she wrote him, evince a longing for a more total relationship, both intellectually and sexually. He did not respect her political admiration for him, nor did he satisfy her passions as a woman. Once he told her that she had eyes like Berl Katznelson, but an entry in her diary from 1928 complained that he could not tell the difference between her body and that of any other woman. That was a searing and mortifying insult, she wrote. She knew that he would set aside only a small, dark corner for her. She accepted that as a fact, but not submissively. When they met, he seems to have spoken a great deal, while she was relegated to listening. “You never saw me, you did not want to hear what I had to say, and my dreams held no interest for you,” she wrote. He wanted a “little woman,” she claimed, and she did her best to be one, but it “cast a shadow over her personality and inner soul.” Their relationship apparently cooled for a time, but she spent her fortieth birthday with him in his house, and in the months that followed she wrote with wonder about the “revival of female desire that you aroused in me after years of cold-heartedness and communion with myself.”92
Over the years her expectations and disappointments and love seem to have blended so completely that it is difficult to discern what her relations with him really were and what part of it was imagined.93 The impression is that, in general, the two had brief trysts in his home when Paula was not around, or at hotels overseas. “His time was short, his passion impatient, and he didn’t like love games,” she wrote. Ben-Gurion, she later said, was “hungry.” He “rushes, pounces, embraces, kisses, exposes himself, seeking release and nothing more.”94 His love was entirely “a love of animal urges,” she related. “He did not know if I was married, did not know that I had children, did not ask and gave no thought to me. It didn’t interest him. He wanted me, only wanted me.”95
During and after the War of Independence, she had assignations with Ben-Gurion “in his military hideouts,” and apparently also in his office; Argov was the principal go-between during the 1950s. “Nehemiah would call and say: Rivka—the Old Man needs you. I’ll arrange it, come,” she related.96 She felt used: “Time and again I could not respond to his thirst for a quick bite when he saw me,” she wrote, adding, “It may have disappointed him.” Her papers include several letters that he wrote her, once a month, during 1963, on the prime minister’s official stationery, in which he asked her to call one of his aides at his office to set up the next assignation. “I want to get together with you,” he wrote to her, taking care to note that it was for “a talk.”
According to Katznelson, his life with Paula was piteous. She saw his attitude toward Paula as “a man’s desire for a woman,” as well as for the mother’s love he had lacked in his childhood, but without a trace of real interest in her. Paula served him, “as devoted as a faithful dog,” Katznelson wrote, and he was grateful. In his old age he depended on her, and he seemed attached to her as well. They lived together for many years and had children together, but on the basis of his relationship with her, Katznelson maintained that Ben-Gurion had never reached “the depths of the satisfaction of masculine eros,” and never knew a woman “to the depths of her sexuality.” Not even Paula. In this sense, “he died a virgin,” she wrote. Katznelson once asked Ben-Gurion to expedite the funds for a periodical she edited. Ben-Gurion reacted as if she had demanded money for their liaison. “You have humiliated me utterly,” she wrote to him. “He may have loved me, or perhaps something sensuous flickered within him toward me, and he knew my devotion and sincerity,” she wrote to the poet and literary scholar Simon Halkin. “I do not know if I loved Ben-Gurion. I did not fight to see him frequently, I did not struggle to claim him for myself. He was on some far horizon of my life, and so I was in his life.” She did not want to be remembered as his mistress.97
* Ben-Gurion’s first encounters with non-Ashkenazi Jews were in Izmir and on the deck of the ship that brought him to Palestine for the first time. “They dress like Arabs,” he remarked at the time. In 1951 the Jews from Arab countries made up about half of the immigrants. That proportion rose in the years that followed—more than 70 percent in 1951–53, up to a height of 90 percent in 1955. (Ben-Gurion to his father, undated, in Erez 1971, p. 71; Ben-Gurion, “Netzah Yisra’el,” in Ben-Gurion 1964a, p. 157; Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, July 12, 1950, ISA; Cohen-Friedheim 2011, p. 318; Ben-Gurion, Diary, Nov. 13, 1951, BGA.)
† Shlomo Zemach compared Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward the Jews of Arab lands with his attitude toward the Arabs. He had initially argued that peace with the Zionist movement would raise the level of the Arabs. That was an “idiotic claim,” Zemach said. “We’ve now reached the level that we have ‘Jewish Arabs,’ and we Ashkenazim are treating them condescendingly.” (Zemach 1996, May 3, 1963, p. 64.)
‡ A year after independence, Ben-Gurion announced a prize of one hundred Israeli pounds for every mother who had given birth to at least ten living children. Arab women were also eligible, but the assumption was that Arab families of this size included more than one mother, so the chance that any one of them would win the prize was not high. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, July 5, 1949, ISA; Ben-Gurion to Bluma Klein (Herzl), Sept. 22, 1949, BGA; Dorit Rosen, interview transcript, BGA; “Beshulei Devarim—Hapras Lemi?” Davar, Nov. 14, 1949.)
§ The IDF Archives preserves copies of thank-you letters that Paula Ben-Gurion sent to several of her overseas acquaintances after receiving packages of food and clothing, items she could not have obtained legally in Israel. She also frequently requested gifts from her husband’s aides and associates—warm winter pajamas from one, a refrigerator from another, a set of dinner plates from a third. (Paula to Teddy Kollek, Dec. 1, 1953, Rachel Gindi to Paula, Nov. 8, 1960, IDFA 492/2011; Robert Szold, interview transcript.)
** Ben-Gurion argued that the Yemenite Jews were tolerant because, unlike Polish Jews, they had not been influenced by the fanaticism of the Catholic Church. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Jan. 18, 1951, ISA.)
†† Close to 100 of the 120 members of the Second Knesset were men who, like Ben-Gurion, had been born in Eastern Europe; one out of every three, Ben-Gurion among them, had been born in the previous century. (http://main.knesset.gov.il/Pages/default.aspx/.)
‡‡ He received many letters from overseas as well. Some advised him to order a retrial of Jesus. (Ben-Gurion, Diary, March 18, 1949, BGA.)
§§ On at least four occasions he had to fight to enforce his prohibition on smoking at Cabinet meetings. As a former smoker, he knew it was possible to survive for several hours without a cigarette. (Ben-Gurion to the Cabinet, Aug. 31, 1950, Oct. 19, 1952, March 27, Nov. 6, 1955, ISA.)
*** Navon had worked previously with Foreign Minister Sharett. He was sent to Ben-Gurion as a teacher because he knew Spanish and the prime minister had suddenly conceived a desire to read a book in Spanish about Spinoza and Don Quixote in the original. In the end, Navon stayed on as an aide. Ben-Gurion was an extremely diligent and analytic student, Navon related in his memoirs, but he had a horrible accent. (Navon 2015, p. 83ff.)