As 1960 approached, Ben-Gurion increasingly evinced signs of cognitive decline, and he gradually lost touch with reality. At the end of the summer of 1961, he responded to a request from Look magazine to forecast the state of humankind fifty years hence. He predicted that the Soviet Union would evolve into a democracy and that Europe would unite. He maintained that the world would be organized as a federation of autonomous polities united under a social-democratic regime, with a global police force that would resolve conflicts. Armies would be disbanded. The United Nations would establish a World Court with its seat in Jerusalem. Most of his other predictions had to do with scientific developments, in particular the enhancement of the human brain. New and powerful sources of energy would enable the desalinization of seawater and the “air-conditioning of the globe will grant all parts of the world a moderate climate.” Humanity would settle the moon and Mars. He also prophesied the development of an injection that could change the color of human skin from black to white or the other way around, which would end the practice of racial segregation in the United States. The United States would be revamped as a welfare state. Average life expectancy would reach one hundred. It took him six drafts to put his prediction of the future in final form.1
Despite this vast optimism, he continued to be troubled by visions of a dark future. At the end of 1962, he grew distressed, once again, about the concentration of Israel’s population in Tel Aviv, reiterating the fear he had felt since the 1930s that Tel Aviv would end up being a second Carthage. The danger had only grown since then, he said: “We live in the age of the atom—are we to mass everyone in one place so that the atom will annihilate them?”2
The compulsive behavior noted by Moshé Feldenkrais had always been part of his personality, central to his leadership style, along with his proclivity for provocative pronouncements, some of which were staged while others were uncontrolled.3 The boundaries between statesmanship and politics, realism and fantasy, courage and adventurism, originality and obstinacy, were often blurred in his character. Many of the initiatives and ideas he proposed over the years made his acquaintances’ jaws drop. But because he was such a venerated and powerful leader, a humorless one who often elicited awe, his pronouncements produced an impact that they did not always deserve. He once, out of the blue, proposed that Tel Aviv should be renamed Jaffa, or Jaffa–Tel Aviv.4 In January 1952, he told the Cabinet that the only way to resolve the conflict with the Arabs was to convert them to Judaism. He solicited an expert opinion on that idea.
It was difficult to assess these and other proposals, because he presented them with great conviction and often vehemence, as if they were vital to the future of the country and society. That was the case when he tried to prove that Jewish religious law did not in fact prohibit the consumption of pork, or when he announced, on the basis of his own research, that the number of Israelites who participated in the Exodus from Egypt was not six hundred thousand, as the Bible says, but only six hundred or a bit more.5 On any number of occasions he was carried away by his passion for disputation and victory and veered off into eccentricity. He thus invested an enormous amount of energy and time in skirmishes over what he thought was proper Hebrew usage.
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Soon after his failed attempt, in 1956, to establish a new Middle East, he embarked on further political initiatives that seemed fantastical even at the time. One of these had been brought back from Paris by Shimon Peres, according to which France would grant Israel control over French Guiana, turning that French territory on the southern shore of the Caribbean Sea, north of Brazil, into an Israeli colony. A team of Israeli experts were sent to Guiana to look into the matter. A few months later, he presented President Charles de Gaulle with a plan to solve the Algerian problem without ending French rule. It involved partitioning the area between the French and the Arabs and settling another million French nationals there.6
At around that time, the Mossad director, Isser Harel, claimed that Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had recruited German scientists for a project to build missiles that would be able to strike targets anywhere south of Beirut. Harel saw the project as a major threat to Israel. The press soon began publishing reports that presented the work of the German scientists as a continuation of the extermination of the Jews under Hitler. Ben-Gurion suspected that Harel was exaggerating, and replaced him with the chief of military intelligence, Meir Amit. Harel’s dismissal set off a storm in Mapai, with some demanding Ben-Gurion’s ouster. “Isser is going from one person to another and Golda is putting together a conspiracy,” Navon wrote. He noted that Golda Meir opposed both military ties with Germany and the Dimona project; furthermore, she hated Shimon Peres, whom she saw as a threat.7 Navon tried unsuccessfully to make sense of what he termed the “hidden psychological recesses” in the relations between Ben-Gurion and Meir. “When he seeks her favor, she thinks he is insincere; when he doesn’t, he’s ignoring her, and there’s no end to it. Love, admiration, hatred, and jealousy merge one into the other, and the wretched romance of this couple has no remedy.”8
His treatment of the hysteria regarding the German scientists showed that he was still capable of reasonable and pragmatic decisions. But Ben-Gurion also feared that the Adenauer era was coming to an end. He repeatedly inquired into the chancellor’s health, fearing that his death would take with it the agreements with Israel. In 1961 he allowed Shimon Peres to propose a secret pact to Germany, according to which, in time of need, Israel would entertain a German request to establish military bases in Israel.9 Just as the affair of the German scientists in Egypt was reaching its climax, a political crisis in Germany led to the resignation of Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss. Ben-Gurion feared the future of the Dimona project was in jeopardy. Simultaneously, President John Kennedy was demonstrating ever more determination to prevent nuclear proliferation, and demanded that the Dimona reactor be placed under outside oversight.10
On April 17, 1963, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq declared the establishment of a United Arab Republic. Its goals included “the liberation of Palestine.” Two days later, Chief of Staff Tzur offered the Cabinet a survey of the development’s significance, focusing on the danger it presented to the stability of the regime in Jordan, whose King Hussein was, Tzur maintained, in danger of assassination. He told the ministers that the IDF could, with a lead time of twelve hours, capture all of East Jerusalem with the exception of the Old City. With forty-eight-hour advance notice it could take the entire West Bank, in an operation that would last twenty-four hours. Ben-Gurion had pondered such plans any number of times over the years; he opposed the idea this time for the same reason he had in the past: “This time the Arabs won’t run away,” he feared.11
Golda Meir was in the hospital at the time, meaning that Ben-Gurion was also acting as foreign minister. In that capacity, he ordered that letters be drafted to several dozen prime ministers and presidents. The text was more or less identical, condemning the Arab intention of destroying Israel and demanding that the United Nations require the Arabs to make peace. The Foreign Ministry’s staff wondered why Ben-Gurion had suddenly decided that this was necessary, but did not see it as a major deviation from diplomatic routine. In fact, Ben-Gurion was in a frenzy, firing off two letters—a total of sixteen pages—to President Kennedy. A Foreign Ministry official referred to the second of these as “sick.”12 The meaning of the letters was that Ben-Gurion might be prepared to compromise with the United States regarding the Dimona project.
His first letter to Kennedy evinced anxiety and a state of emergency. He took the words “liberation of Palestine” that had been included in the declaration of the new Arab state as if they were an actual plan for an immediate attack on Israel aimed at destroying it.
“The ‘liberation of Palestine’ is impossible without the total destruction of the people in Israel,” he declared. He quoted at length from one of Hitler’s pronouncements about the extermination of the Jewish people. The nations of the world had treated Hitler’s declaration “with indifference and equanimity, enabling the Holocaust,” he wrote. “Six million Jews in all the countries under Nazi occupation (except Bulgaria), men and women, old and young, infants and babies, were burnt, strangled, buried alive.”
To avert the catastrophe that the liberation of Palestine would bring on, Ben-Gurion demanded that Kennedy and Khrushchev issue a joint statement guaranteeing the integrity of all the countries of the Middle East, withdrawing aid from any country that threatened to attack any other, that maintained a state of war against another country, or that refused to recognize another country. He stressed that the declaration needed also to threaten sanctions for noncompliance. He noted that the Soviet Union was providing arms to Egypt and that the United States was giving economic aid. He knew the chances for such a declaration were not great, but he felt it was incumbent on him to tell the president that the situation in the Middle East had grown inestimably grim. He thus asked Kennedy to free up an hour or two of his time for a conversation about a possible way out of the situation. He would come to Washington on whatever day the president liked, “without publicity.”13 He drafted the Hebrew version of the letter himself and corrected it by hand. The Foreign Ministry staff was stunned, but prepared an English version for him and dispatched it to Washington.
At the next Cabinet meeting, Ben-Gurion focused on how the Arabs could be deterred from attacking Israel. Such a discussion would seem to have been mandated by the declaration of a new united Arab state, but Ben-Gurion intended a discussion of fundamentals that would produce a long-term road map, for a time when he would no longer lead the country. In other words, he wanted to establish his legacy in the area of Israel’s security. He offered four alternatives for ensuring Israel’s survival: public guarantees in the form of a joint Kennedy–Khrushchev statement; a military alliance between Israel and the United States, or alternatively a military alliance with France; full Israeli membership in NATO; or the development of a deterrent weapon of which Ben-Gurion was willing to say only that it required missiles. He stressed that his second alternative referred to an alliance, ratified by Congress, providing that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on the United States. He had sought American guarantees since the 1950s, and had dreamed then of a military alliance with America as well. It was the only thing of any value, Ben-Gurion said in 1955. The military alliance he was speaking of at this point needed, by the nature of things, to include a provision about Dimona. It made Dimona out to be a sort of atonement for the sin that the Jewish people had committed over two millennia, the “sin of weakness,” as Ben-Gurion had put it many years previously.14
In the meantime, Peres returned from Washington and reported to the Cabinet on his talk with Kennedy. The president asked him what he could tell him about Israel’s nuclear plans, and Peres responded that Israel was not going to manufacture atomic weapons and would certainly not be the first country to introduce nuclear arms into the region. Kennedy also took an interest in why Harel was replaced, and in the work of the German scientists in Egypt. It was an official meeting, with Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Avraham Harman, in attendance. “Kennedy looked less handsome than in his photographs,” Peres told the ministers.15
During the next Cabinet meeting, Ben-Gurion was told that the American ambassador to Israel would be bringing him Kennedy’s reply to his letter that afternoon. In the meantime, Ben-Gurion continued to impart his thoughts on the nature of the needed deterrent. “Either a political deterrent force or a military deterrent force. Because I don’t want there to be a war,” he said. Had Khrushchev accepted his proposal, he maintained, he would have agreed to a military alliance with the Soviet Union as well. But, just like Israeli membership in NATO, that possibility did not seem like a real option. For that reason, it was necessary to find out if it would be possible to receive “real help with deterrent arms.” It was not a focused discussion; Ben-Gurion flitted from one subject to another.16
Kennedy’s reply, which arrived that afternoon, was chilly, almost sarcastic. The president understood, of course, that Israel was concerned about the declaration of intent to “liberate Palestine,” but, in his opinion, the practical implications of those words were no different from those of the innumerable similar statements the Arabs had made in the past. The United States remained as concerned about Israel’s security and peace in the region as it had ever been. He did not think that a joint declaration by the United States and the USSR was a possibility, and even if it were, it would only enhance the USSR’s importance in the eyes of the Arabs, thereby increasing Soviet influence in the Arab world. He did not understand what Ben-Gurion meant when he warned of an unparalleled increase in the gravity of the situation. He thanked the prime minister for his willingness to lay aside the urgent affairs for which he was responsible in order to rush to Washington, and perhaps if it were possible to have such a meeting without it being publicized it would even be helpful, but he knew from experience that that was not possible. Promising that American efforts to strengthen its ties to the Arab states would be to Israel’s benefit, he concluded with the hope that they would remain in touch.17 The letter could hardly have been more patronizing, given that Ben-Gurion had warned that Israel was in imminent danger of being destroyed. Affronted, Ben-Gurion forthwith began drafting his second letter, nine pages long.
“I felt somewhat disappointed when I read your message,” he wrote, attributing this to his high expectations of Kennedy, based on his support for and assistance to Israel up to that point. It was a personal letter. He had spent decades living with the Arabs, he related, and had worked in the fields with Arab laborers. He had also studied with Arabs in Istanbul before World War I, and had spoken with Arab leaders before World War II. During the war, he heard many Arab leaders praise Hitler as a liberator of humanity, and pray for his success. He was not surprised. “Knowing them, I am convinced that they are capable of following the Nazi example,” he wrote, claiming that Nasser was in fact adopting the National Socialist ideology of the Nazis. “I have no doubt that a similar thing might happen to Jews in Israel if Nasser succeeded in defeating our army,” he declared. There was no certainty that such a thing would happen today or tomorrow, he added. “I am not so young anymore, and it may not happen in my lifetime,” he continued. “But I cannot dismiss the possibility that this may occur, if the situation in the Middle East remains as it is—and the Arab leaders continue to insist on and pursue their policy of belligerency against Israel.” It didn’t really matter whether or not it happened during his lifetime, he explained. What was important was that there was a way to prevent it. He meant the joint U.S.–Soviet declaration he had described in his previous letter. He went on to lay it out in detail one more time. In his opinion, that was the safest way to ensure Israel’s survival. Given Kennedy’s opinion that such a declaration was not on the table, what remained was a “Bilateral Security Agreement” between Israel and the United States. Likewise, the United States would need to supply Israel with all the types of arms that the Soviet Union was supplying to Egypt.18
The Foreign Ministry’s top officials convened to work together on the English version of the letter. One of them, Gideon Rafael, proposed that the letter not be sent. “We must not reach a point where the prime minister writes fantastic and sick things,” he said. He showed the draft of Ben-Gurion’s letter to Golda Meir, and she, still bedridden, was particularly shocked by the words “I do not know if the country will continue to exist after my death.” She instructed Rafael to persuade Ben-Gurion to omit them, but Ben-Gurion agreed only to tone down the language. Ambassador Harman tried to make the letter even gentler. Ben-Gurion was furious when he heard of it, Navon wrote in his diary: “To hell with them—he shouted—and his face turned red. Idiots. They don’t understand what they are saying.” The Foreign Ministry cabled Harman a firm directive to convey the letter even if he did not agree with it.19
Fear of a second Holocaust might have been the principal justification for the establishment of the Dimona reactor. But Ben-Gurion’s letter to Kennedy could also be read as a proposal to compromise on Israel’s nuclear program in exchange for security guarantees. There can be no other interpretation of the security agreement he asked Kennedy for, because he had nothing to offer the Americans other than to give up the Dimona project. That was also how it was understood in Jerusalem.
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Foreign Ministry officials quickly jumped on the idea and began to craft a policy around it. Some of them had been opposed to the nuclear project from the start—the debate around it had penetrated their ranks as well. One proposed seeing the Dimona initiative as “an impetus for solving the fundamental security problem” that Israel faced; another proposed using it as a “bargaining chip.” Gideon Rafael swiftly sent the ministry’s director-general a draft security agreement to propose to Kennedy. The director-general, Haim Yahil, sent a few of his thoughts to Golda Meir. Israel needed to demand “concrete guarantees” for the country’s security, with two foundations, he wrote. The first was sufficient Israeli power to hold back an attack during its early stages, until outside assistance could arrive. The second was an explicit and detailed agreement about assistance and joint planning of how it would be provided. Only such an arrangement could serve as a deterrent factor, Yahil maintained. He proposed to be frank with the Americans about what would happen if such an agreement was not offered. In its absence, he said, Israel would have no choice but to look after its own interests, and could not forgo the option of developing nuclear capability. If the United States proved willing to sign a deterrent agreement, or to bring Israel into NATO, the country could relinquish the option of a nuclear potential.20
Meir was inclined to agree. There was no reason to stop the work in Dimona, she said, but she also saw the reactor as a bargaining chip. That being the case, she proposed telling the Americans the truth. “If we deny that Dimona is there, then we can’t bargain with it, because you can’t bargain with something that doesn’t exist,” she explained. Ambassador Harman and the Israeli minister in Washington wrote to her to say that they had “taken note” of her position on the Dimona facility, and that they presumed that instructions for proceeding would soon be formulated in that spirit.21
Ben-Gurion’s willingness, in principle and under certain conditions, to trade the Dimona project for a military alliance recalls his agreement to extend the British Mandate and put off declaring Israel’s independence. He left the decision on the future of the Dimona project to his heirs, Dayan among them, but it is reasonable to presume that the two of them argued about the subject while he was still in office. Dayan’s position was firm: “The most important thing that can change our security balance is the final product of Dimona,” he maintained. “Nothing else can replace it and there is nothing else that can do the trick. As long as we face any sort of chance of reaching that, we need, in my opinion, to do everything to reach it and not to do anything that is liable to stand between us and that.” He thought a military pact with the United States would be dangerous, and maintained that it should not even be discussed. Never before had such a fundamental and sharp disagreement divided Ben-Gurion and Dayan. Dayan was at the height of his power; Ben-Gurion could no longer withstand him. Peres thought that there was no chance of achieving a military alliance, but agreed to consider a compromise on developing the reactor in exchange for $1 billion that Germany was to give to Israel. “We have six million voters in Germany,” he cynically remarked.22
The continuing controversy over Israel’s relations with Germany frayed Ben-Gurion’s nerves. He went to the Knesset and set off a scandal unmatched since the great reparations debate; some said that there had been nothing like it since the Knesset was first established.
The speech was prepared as a response to participants in a foreign policy debate, and was meant to be half an hour long. The text was handed out in advance. But Ben-Gurion managed to speak for only four minutes before screams of protest drowned him out. Ben-Gurion had declared, basing himself on an article published in a Revisionist newspaper in 1933, that Jabotinsky’s supporters had lauded Hitler. During the uproar, several members of the Herut faction rose to their feet; Ben-Gurion’s bodyguards went on alert.
Most of the Mapai members did not come to Ben-Gurion’s defense. Instead, they sat in embarrassed silence. Meir even sharply dissented. The press reaction was harsh. One article caused Ben-Gurion to erupt like a volcano, this time in writing.23
Its author was Haim Gouri, the poet of War of Independence heroism, loss, and the brotherhood of warriors. He gained many admirers in the early 1960s when he wrote sensitive coverage of the Eichmann trial. “Unforgivable” was what he had to say about Ben-Gurion’s Knesset speech. Ben-Gurion immediately sent off a letter to Gouri. “Begin is a classically Hitlerist type,” he wrote. “Racist, ready to exterminate all the Arabs for the whole Land of Israel, ready to employ any means for his sacred end—absolute rule; I see him as a serious danger to Israel’s situation, both internally and externally.” The letter went on for three pages. He had not been surprised by the bizarre charges Gouri had made, he remarked. It may well be that the Eichmann affair had left him with a trauma that “consciously or unconsciously affects things unconnected to the trial.” He had no regrets about a single word he had said in the Knesset, he asserted, offering a long list of crimes he attributed to Begin, including the bombing of the King David Hotel, Deir Yassin, and the Altalena. He predicted that if Begin were to seize control of the country, “he will replace the army and police command with his own thugs, and rule as Hitler ruled Germany, suppressing the labor movement with force and brutality; his political adventurism will destroy the country.”
The letter was delivered to Gouri early in the morning by a special messenger from the Office of the Prime Minister; apparently no one in the office had the presence of mind to keep it from going out. Gouri was alarmed in the extreme. The few people who knew about the letter feared that Ben-Gurion had lost his mental capacity for running the country.24
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A few days later, a press report outraged Israelis in a way unseen since the controversy over German reparations: Israeli soldiers, the public learned, were receiving military training in Germany.25 United Press International was the first to report it. A few hours later, Meir rushed over to Ben-Gurion’s home and demanded that he impose military censorship to prevent the report from being printed in Israel. Ben-Gurion refused. They argued about it until after midnight. Ben-Gurion stuck to his position, but agreed to hold a comprehensive discussion of Israel’s relations with Germany. The report was published. Meir did not quit.26
Prior to the weekly Cabinet meeting scheduled for the next day, June 16, 1963, Ben-Gurion called in all the Mapai ministers and informed them that he had decided to resign that day. Unlike in the past, he did not say he was taking a leave of absence for a year or two, nor was he threatening resignation in order to get a demand met. He said, once more, that he no longer had the mental fortitude to bear responsibility. Some of the ministers insisted that he make do with a vacation; he gave in only to their plea that he remain a member of the Knesset. The ritual was a very brief one this time. In fact, everyone felt relieved. Ten days later, Levi Eshkol formed a new government. Navon asked Ben-Gurion why he had done it. “He raised his head and gave me a weary look. ‘A man is not always rational,’ he murmured.” Isser Harel described him as a sad man, passive and withdrawn, and he was upset by his failing memory. Feldenkrais said that at about this time he heard Ben-Gurion ask Paula where in Tel Aviv they were living.27 It was not a single thing that broke him in the end, but rather an entire range of tensions, anxieties, and people, from Lavon to Kennedy, from Dayan to Nasser. Taken together, it was now more than he could handle.
He resigned unwillingly. “To my great chagrin, I cannot do otherwise,” he explained to the Cabinet ministers who tried to talk him out of it. He was profoundly sad to leave. “I was barely able to hold in my emotions and my tears,” he wrote. One of the last acts he took as prime minister was aimed at guaranteeing Ariel Sharon’s political future.28 The first person he visited after resigning was Shlomo Zemach.
The two men had reestablished contact in January 1963. Ben-Gurion called to invite Zemach to attend the Bible study group that met at Ben-Gurion’s home every Saturday night. “David invited me to come to his home and I accepted,” Zemach wrote. “Perhaps there is a true feeling of youthful friendship in his desire to become closer to me,” he wondered. “He is alone and all the splendor that surrounds him does not satisfy his needs.” His sudden visit, immediately after his resignation, did nothing to change Zemach’s feelings about him. “He spoke for an entire hour,” Zemach wrote in his diary, “yet we did not touch on the main thing—what had brought about his resignation?” But he knew Ben-Gurion well, every “wrinkle in his soul,” and that enabled him to sense that he was upset and “bitterly disappointed.” And he feared that future events would be much worse than anything that had already happened. He seemed healthy. “I believe that he has put on weight and that his paunch is larger,” Zemach noted. “But there is a hidden hesitation in his expression, some sort of inner anxiety, but I do not know where it comes from or what its nature is.” During their conversation, Ben-Gurion “went off into higher spheres,” Zemach related. He meant Ben-Gurion’s interest in biology and related fields. Zemach did not believe that Ben-Gurion was really interested in science. “He was too quick to accept things he read and to lecture on them as if they were his own,” the friend wrote. According to him, the limits of Ben-Gurion’s intellect were now so starkly revealed that one couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Both of them had been well aware of those limits when they were young, Zemach wrote. “He knows it and he knows that I know.” That was the reason for his great thirst for the spiritual, “the attraction to things he was not given,” as his friend put it. When he launched into a discourse on cells and tissues and the cosmos and other such things, Zemach suspected that Ben-Gurion had lost his mind. “I sat there and pitied him,” he related.
Ben-Gurion came to him “with zero strength,” Zemach wrote. “He was lonely all his life. Perhaps I might have been a close friend, but things did not work out that way. No soul is close to him … Those who were close to him were, first of all, close to themselves, and used him for their own interests. In the great hubbub around him he stood alone and abandoned. That is his great tragedy.” Zemach continued to follow Ben-Gurion and received the impression that he was having trouble adjusting to being a citizen, without the “trappings of office.” Ben-Gurion began to write for Davar, a series of fairly long-winded articles about Israel’s history. Regretfully, Zemach thought they were not very good. “They have no stature and no depth, no feeling and no thinking.” He thought that the articles might be detrimental to Ben-Gurion’s reputation. He regretted that and considered sending him “a few writing tricks” that would help him improve his style. “But I am afraid that he will take my advice not as it is intended.”29
Less than a month later, their friend Shlomo Lavi died. “I am not concerned about myself,” Zemach wrote. “But this generation—my generation—is gradually leaving us, one after the other.” They had seen each other just a few days before; Zemach had congratulated Lavi on looking so well, but Lavi retorted that his look was deceptive—he was very ill. Zemach was not all that healthy himself; his doctors forbade him to travel to Ein Harod for the funeral. Ben-Gurion and Paula went; Ben-Gurion offered only a brief eulogy and looked distraught. Almost all the surviving founding fathers were there.30
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He was unable to disengage from politics; taking on the role of a gadfly who set off uproars, his actual influence was negligible. Four months after his retirement, Ben-Gurion called several dozen of his followers to his home and announced that he intended to run at the head of a new party in the next election. He was not inclined to return to the post of prime minister, but did not rule it out. “If I am called on to purify the turbid atmosphere, I believe I could not refuse to try,” he wrote.31 The result was that, thirty-five years after he and Berl Katznelson founded Mapai, the party, which was now run by Eshkol, expelled him.
Ostensibly it was all about the Lavon affair. Ben-Gurion insisted, incessantly, on investigating “who gave the order.” Eshkol wanted the question out of the way and if possible forgotten. Ben-Gurion’s endless demands, accusations, and protests seemed to be nothing more than an old man’s self-destructive obsession. He claimed to want the truth—but most Israelis, including his admirers, were annoyed or pitied him; some tried to analyze what they regarded as the founding father’s jealousy of his heir. Most people simply no longer wanted to hear about Lavon.
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Ben-Gurion ran for the Knesset at the head of a new party called Rafi, the Israel Workers List. Heading a slate that included Moshe Dayan, the former IDF chief of staff Tzvi Tzur, the author Yizhar Smilansky, and Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion tried, at the age of seventy-nine, to project a young and technocratic image. In November 1965, the party won ten seats in the Knesset. It was a humiliating defeat; in June he had fantasized that his new party would win twenty or even twenty-five seats.32 The Alignment, a joint Mapai and Ahdut Ha’avodah slate headed by Levi Eshkol, won forty-five seats. For the first time in his life in Israel, Ben-Gurion found himself in the opposition.33
He did not go often to the Knesset, spending most of his time at Sde Boker. He wrote articles, worked on his memoirs, and received visitors, including the foreign press. He continued to receive dozens of letters each week from people who thought he could help them with all sorts of questions and personal problems. It was a medium that he continued to enjoy; he devoted several hours a day to answering his correspondence. His prestige far exceeded the ten seats his party had received. His successor was his greatest enemy now; in fact, his hostility toward Eshkol swelled to the point where he viewed the new prime minister as the people’s enemy. When he was holding himself back, he limited himself to saying that Eshkol lacked “the moral and national qualities required of a prime minister.” At more unbridled moments, he called him a liar, fraud, and coward. Zemach asked himself where his friend’s “criminal vulgarity” toward Eshkol could possibly come from. As one might expect, he came up with a psychological explanation dating back to Płońsk. “The root and the source from which it derives,” Zemach wrote, “is the empty heart that, seeking recompense for the insults of youth, finds them in the troubles of others and self-promotion.”34
On the holiday of Sukkot, in the fall of 1966, some ten thousand people came to Sde Boker to celebrate Ben-Gurion’s birthday. He told everyone that he was sixty years old—the number of years he had lived in the country. Israel marked the event as if it were a national holiday. The IDF organized a huge ceremony at Sde Boker’s amphitheater, with speeches and an audiovisual display. Aharon Meskin, Habima theater’s leading actor, pronounced just two sentences: “The nation loves you, Ben-Gurion. Thank you for all you have done and remain in good health in the future.” He received thousands of congratulatory telegrams from all over the world. The Cabinet also offered its felicitations, after a debate over the wording. Eshkol forbade commending Ben-Gurion for the “development of the country,” because he maintained that his own contribution to the country’s development was greater.35
*
In June 1967, tensions between Israel and Jordan worsened, largely because of terror attacks committed by young Palestinian Arabs, many of them the children of refugees displaced in 1948. At that same time, the questions of why Israel had not conquered the West Bank in the War of Independence and why the Old City of Jerusalem had been allowed to remain in Arab hands were again being debated in Israel. The Ma’ariv correspondent Geula Cohen, interviewing Ben-Gurion for Independence Day, posed a question that his grandson might ask him: “Grandpa, what are the borders of my homeland?” Ben-Gurion replied that the borders of the homeland corresponded to the Green Line, but did not rule out that those might change, just as borders had often moved during history. “We are interested in peace based on the status quo,” he said, “but if the Arabs are not interested in peace, but rather in war, then we will fight, and then perhaps the status quo will be otherwise.” It was the same answer he gave to Israeli citizens who posed the question to him, time and again. Cohen asked him if he would encourage an Israeli child to write a song of yearning for a united Jerusalem. “If he wants to write one, he can write one,” Ben-Gurion replied, adding: “I will not write one.” Ma’ariv also interviewed the former chief of staff Yigael Yadin on the same occasion. Yadin intimated that Ben-Gurion had not wanted to conquer the Old City. A military correspondent for Ha’aretz recalled that the attempt to take Jenin had failed.36 The renewed preoccupation with the borders established by the victory of 1948 may have grown out of the gloomy atmosphere of the time.
When, in May 1967, Egypt announced that it was blocking the Straits of Tiran to Israeli traffic, Ben-Gurion was not alarmed. “In my opinion, Nasser won’t do anything, because he’s satisfied with having closed the Straits. That will enhance his stature,” he wrote. He proposed a limited operation to open shipping to Eilat. Neither did he think that such an operation was urgent. “The army is wonderful, but in this age one shouldn’t fight like David fought Goliath,” he wrote.37 He was presumably acquainted with the current strategy planned by the IDF—a surprise aerial attack to destroy the Egyptian air force. That, as he recalled, was how Egypt had been defeated in the War of Independence: “At the first moment, we defeated their air force,” he once told the Cabinet; a few years later, he repeated that this was the way to defeat Egypt.38 But, contrary to the opinion of the IDF’s generals, and most politicians and pundits, and in particular unlike the frightened public, Ben-Gurion opposed an Israeli first strike. He feared that war against Egypt and Syria would lead to the conquest of the West Bank from Jordan—and with it the acquisition of more Arabs.
Neither did he see any immediate need to conquer Sinai or the Gaza Strip, nor did he think it would be worthwhile to capture East Jerusalem. He apparently knew that, six months hence, Israel’s deterrent capability would improve dramatically, averting war.39 In the meantime, Israel commenced a massive reserve call-up. Ben-Gurion thought it was a mistake. When he said as much to the chief of staff, Rabin panicked. He suffered a breakdown and required medical treatment.
Most Israelis had no clue that this was Ben-Gurion’s opinion, as he did not state it publicly. They believed that the war was being delayed because Eshkol was waffling and weak. Ben-Gurion offered the prime minister no backing, and did nothing to cool down the bellicose atmosphere. When he heard that the world’s socialist parties had issued a statement of support for Mapai, his comment was: “Mapai does not support the State of Israel.”40
Neither did he use his influence to restrain the army, with the exception of that grim conversation with Rabin. When calls for Eshkol’s replacement increased, Ben-Gurion agreed to receive in his home the most dangerous and repulsive man he had known before he decided that Eshkol was even more dangerous and repulsive—namely, Menachem Begin. Begin had first tried to pressure Eshkol to bring Ben-Gurion back into the Cabinet, but when Eshkol refused, he proposed that Ben-Gurion return as prime minister and lead the country into war. Only when they met did Begin learn, to his astonishment, that Ben-Gurion opposed going to war, in part because he feared it would lead to Israeli conquest of territories populated by Arabs.41 Four days before the war began, Ben-Gurion copied into his diary numbers he found in a news clipping from nineteen years previously, according to which everyone was exaggerating the number of Palestinian refugees. Even the best binoculars would not be able to discern more than three hundred thousand of them, the clipping said. He himself generally spoke of six hundred thousand refugees.42
He supported replacing Eshkol, suggesting that Dayan serve as prime minister and defense minister; he also hinted that he would agree to reassume the post of prime minister if Dayan were to serve as defense minister. “As long as Eshkol is prime minister, we will descend into perdition,” he wrote. Perhaps he thought that Dayan would operate under his guidance, or at least in coordination with him. But Dayan favored war and Ben-Gurion knew it. The attraction of getting rid of Eshkol seems, however, to have been irresistible. When Eshkol agreed, reluctantly, that Dayan could join the government as defense minister, Ben-Gurion gave his consent to this arrangement on condition that Peres tell Eshkol that Rafi did not consider him to be the right man to head the government.43 Eshkol was now backed by a broad coalition, including Begin, who was appointed minister without portfolio.
The Six-Day War broke out as a result of repeated Palestinian attacks on Israel, and Israel’s reprisals against Syria and Jordan. Nasser ostensibly acted in their support by mobilizing the Egyptian army. Israel’s attack on Egypt on June 5, 1967, reflected the army’s pressure on the Eshkol government to act, as well as widespread panic created by Nasser’s threats to eliminate Israel.
Ben-Gurion spent the first day of the war at his home in Tel Aviv. Dayan promised to visit and brief him. While waiting for him, Ben-Gurion started reading the new issue of a literary magazine, Molad, which had published a selection of the letters he had sent to Shmuel Fuchs in his youth. He read them avidly, as if encountering them for the first time. So his day passed, with his memories, cut off from everything that was happening, and Dayan did not show up. “He is bad-hearted,” he once told Navon about Dayan.44 The next day, Dayan sent a General Staff officer to inform him that the operation in the south had begun, in the air and on land. “I believe that it is a grave mistake,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “The great thing that took place in the past week is Levi Eshkol’s removal,” he wrote.45 He also opposed capturing the Golan Heights. But soon he, too, was swept up by that ecstasy produced by the victory and conquests.46
Journalists from around the world peppered him with questions about what should happen next. Ben-Gurion issued a public statement: he advocated withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a peace treaty with Egypt that would guarantee free passage of ships coming to Eilat through the Tiran Straits and the Suez Canal. The Gaza Strip should remain under Israeli control. Israel should withdraw from the Golan Heights as part of a peace treaty with Syria. The government should negotiate with representatives of the inhabitants of the West Bank to establish an autonomous entity tied to Israel economically, with an outlet to the sea through Haifa, Ashdod, or Gaza. Palestinian refugees should be moved from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, with the refugees’ consent and Israeli assistance. All the Jews who had once lived in Hebron should be permitted to return. Israel would protect the holy sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere that were now under its control; the IDF would deploy on the western bank of the Jordan River to guarantee the West Bank’s independence from Jordan. There would be no negotiations over the future of the Old City of Jerusalem and its environs. From the time of King David it had been the capital of Israel, and so it would remain forever.47
The majority of Israelis thus moved, quite suddenly, from fear of another Holocaust to the verge of the messianic era. Ben-Gurion had gone through no few such sudden shifts in his personal life; he recalled one from the end of the War of Independence. “The entire Jewish population is drunk with victory,” he wrote then. “A year ago, every Jew would have said that we have no chance, and today everyone is saying that no one can stand in our way.”48 He placed himself at the head of those who were demanding to move Jews into the Old City, as if he were seeking atonement for what he had decided not to do during the War of Independence. Less than two weeks after the war, he proposed demolishing the Old City wall. “It will unify Jerusalem and make it easier for it to expand to the east, south, north, and west,” he argued. It was the most notable testimony yet to the weakness of mind that had, for several years, produced any number of fantastical proposals of this sort. As always, he held fast to his idea, reiterating it over and over again: “Demolish the wall.” He claimed that the wall had no historical value, as it had been built only in the sixteenth century at the order of the Ottoman sultan.49 It was not easy for him to live with the fact that the Old City had been taken under a government led by Eshkol, in which Begin served, in a war that he himself had opposed.
The conquest of the Old City corrected what many Israelis saw as the major shortcoming of the political order that Ben-Gurion had bestowed on the Jewish state nineteen years earlier; up until a few days before, Ben-Gurion had viewed the borders set in 1949 an acceptable basis for a final status arrangement with the Arabs. In this sense, the Six-Day War was the second round in the battle for Palestine; the Sinai Campaign now seemed like but an interim episode. The new situation sent him back to the dawn of Zionism. He was overwhelmed by a “profound and joyous experience,” he wrote. “I experienced something so profound only on my first night after arriving in Petah Tikvah, when I heard the howling of the jackals and the neighing of the donkeys and I felt that I was in our nation’s renewed homeland, not in exile in a foreign land.”50
The sense that history was beginning again from the start led him to renew his acquaintance with Musa al-Alami, the man he had so often quoted over the intervening thirty years as proof of his contention that the Arabs did not want peace. Ten years before, he had told Navon that he missed Alami. He asked that he be found. Alami was in London; Ben-Gurion’s attempt to speak to him by telephone seemed to be a metaphorical confirmation of his opinion on the chances for dialogue with the Palestinian Arabs, because the connection was bad. “He didn’t hear me, although I heard him. It got a little better afterward, he heard me but I didn’t hear him,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.51
*
The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip suddenly confronted Israelis with the truth about the conflict over Palestine, including the suffering of the refugees and their yearning to undo their national catastrophe and take back the parts of the homeland, the homes, and the property they had lost, beginning in 1947. Many Israelis felt that they had reached a historical crossroads that required them to make a choice. While the war was still in progress, an impassioned debate over the fundamental values of Zionist identity reignited. Few of the people involved offered real alternatives. One who did was Shlomo Zemach. The war made his views more extreme, as it did for many Israelis, both those on the left and, even more so, those of the center and right. Many longed for a new start, as Zemach did. “To go to the Arabs and say to them—we have been going the wrong way all these years … and now we have come to you, tribes of Arabia, to live under your protection.”52
Ensuring a Jewish majority in a democratic Israel required the immediate immigration of two million Jews from other countries, or expelling the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or giving up the captured territories, including East Jerusalem, even without a peace treaty. The idea of resettling in the West Bank the 1947–49 refugees living in Gaza was not carried out and in retrospect was the single greatest mistake of those years.53 One Cabinet meeting also raised the possibility of asking Canada and Brazil to take in the Gaza refugees. Israeli Jews soon started settling in Judea and Samaria, as they called the northern and southern parts of the West Bank, just as they had settled in the central and northern parts of Palestine during the sixty years since Ben-Gurion’s arrival, “village by village.” In that sense, the Six-Day War propelled the Zionist project forward, in the Ben-Gurion spirit. After visiting the Golan Heights in August 1967, he changed his mind and declared that Israel should never leave it, even in exchange for a peace treaty. In the months that followed, he began to voice a vague version of a formulation he had used in the past: “If I had to choose between a small Israel with peace and a large Israel without peace, I would prefer a small Israel.” Those who were impressed by this statement did not know that he had never believed that peace was really possible. He had always dreamed of possessing the entire Land of Israel, and that continued to be his ultimate wish. “If only the government had the strength and will to hold fast to the occupied territories when our neighbors refuse to discuss peace with us,” he wrote in July 1967. He maintained, as he always had, that Israel’s survival depended on bringing in millions of Jewish immigrants. “If the Zionist movement had not made do with words, and instead every Zionist had come here, we would long since have become the majority on both banks of the Jordan, and Israel would have come into being prior to World War I and certainly before World War II,” he wrote. “We must now principally see to a large wave of immigration from the prosperous world—the danger of war has still not passed.”54 He spent some three months in Tel Aviv, caught up in politics, the war, and the connection between them. Then he returned to Sde Boker, to write.
Paula died in January 1968 of a stroke. Israel’s president and many Cabinet ministers and members of the Knesset attended the funeral. Prime Minister Eshkol was notably absent, but issued a statement of mourning; Menachem Begin was notably in attendance. The German ambassador also came. Ben-Gurion decided that she should be buried on the site that he had chosen for himself, on the top of a cliff overlooking a breathtaking desert view of the Zin riverbed. “I was always sure that I would die first,” he said again.
He immediately returned to his work routine. “I did not notice that he was badly shaken after Paula’s death,” one of his bodyguards said. Yehoshua Cohen of Sde Boker also received the impression that her death was not, for Ben-Gurion, a “geological fault line” in his life.*55
For the first time in his life, he was irrelevant, cut off from public life. Rafi turned out to be a passing episode. Most of its members voted to merge with Mapai and Ahdut Ha’avodah to form the Labor Party. Ben-Gurion led the rump that remained, under a new name, into the next election, winning only four seats, one of which went to Isser Harel. In 1970 Ben-Gurion finally resigned from the Knesset. On occasion he still received distinguished guests, among them the former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He continued to lash out at Prime Minister Eshkol, including in a thirty-three-page letter he sent to Golda Meir.56 In addition to accusing him of lies and corruption, he now added “idiocy.” At the Six-Day War victory parade, he sat in the audience instead of on the dais, apparently so as to avoid shaking Eshkol’s hand. That seems to also have been the reason that he refused to accept the Israel Prize he had been awarded, at a ceremony that evening. Eshkol died a few months later, while Ben-Gurion was vacationing at the Tiberias hot springs. He refused to leave the resort to attend the funeral.57
When he said that he expected to die before Paula, he was presumably giving voice to a conviction that wives should not die before their husbands, any more than mothers should die before their small children. After Paula’s death he stopped eating meat, just as he had when his mother died when he was a boy. In January 1973, at Sde Boker, he told Yehuda Erez, who was helping him write his memoirs, that he had wanted another child, but that Paula had not. Yitzhak Navon wrote in his diary that Paula told him: “I never told Ben-Gurion how many abortions I had. Three children are enough for me.” On the second anniversary of Paula’s death, two great-grandchildren were born to Ben-Gurion, a boy and a girl. He wished to tell Paula the news, his daughter-in-law recalled, but did not know how to reach her. “I think he began to die the minute she did,” his grandson said.58
* About a year after her death, he evoked her name while seeking to persuade Begin to join his fight against Eshkol. “My Paula admired you, for some reason,” he wrote to Begin. He did not deny that he disagreed with Begin about many things. Still, “on the individual level, I never had a personal grudge against you,” he maintained, “and the better I have come to know you in recent years, the more I have come to admire you, and my Paula was very happy about that.” (Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin, Feb. 6, 1969, BGA.)