I was eleven years old the first time I saw the place, tucked away and surrounded by trees. The simple house belonged to my aunt and uncle, who built it themselves after settling in the land of Israel. It was 1934, a time when the area was home to only a few thousand Jews; its roads remained unpaved, the land largely unsettled.
As we got closer, I realized that the trees were not a kind I’d ever seen before; they were orange groves, planted by hand. My older brother Gigi and I set off at once, racing up and down the perfectly placed rows, each tree bearing more than a hundred plump, bright fruits. The remaining white blossoms filled the air with an enchanting fragrance.
In my mind I was suddenly back in my small Jewish village—back in the “shtetl,” as they were called—back to the moment I’d first seen an orange, back to a place so very far away.
Our shtetl was known as Vishneva. It sat near the border between Poland and Russia, a strip of land surrounded by forest that existed in a seemingly permanent state of winter. There were often weeks on end where bitterly frigid winds would whip through the narrow birch trees, sweeping unforgivingly against the patrons in the market. Even during the summer, it felt like we rarely saw the sun. And yet despite the cold and isolation there was a warmth and magic to the shtetl, a culture of kindness and community. We had found, in each other, a place to belong.
We lived a simple life: there were only three roads, each lined with bare wooden houses. There was no running water and no electricity. But there was a train station, just three miles away, and from its travelers and its shipments we got a glimpse—and a taste—of the world beyond the forest.
I still remember that powerful moment, that first orange. My parents had taken me to the home of their friends, where a large group had already gathered. A young man had arrived, recently returned from the land of Israel, and was regaling the crowd with grand stories of a distant land. He spoke of endless sunshine and exotic culture, of patches of desert with fruit-bearing trees, of tough, tanned Jews who worked with their hands and fought with them, too. When he finished, he turned to a box behind him and lifted it for those gathered to see. There was an audible gasp in the room. There was a ceremony to his presentation, a formality that suggested this had been done many times before. One by one, each person in the room chose a package from the box, delicately undoing the parchment wrapping to reveal a ripe Jaffa orange, picked straight from the tree. When it was my turn, I was slow and deliberate, nervous that I might do something wrong. I held the orange to my nose, breathing in my first smell of citrus. It was truly extraordinary—in color, in fragrance, in taste—as otherworldly as anything a young boy could have imagined. It was so much more than a piece of fruit; it was a symbol of my hopes and aspirations.
My family had lived in the area for several generations. And, indeed, the area had, for hundreds of years, been a place for Jews to call home. But despite its simple beauty, neither of my parents considered Vishneva their permanent home. They saw it more as a way station, one of many stops over thousands of years along the road back to our homeland. The land of Israel was not just the dream of my parents; it was the animating purpose of so many people we knew. It seemed that at every gathering, the conversation turned to talk of going to Zion, of leaving the shtetl we loved behind, of joining the pioneers who were reclaiming our land. We spoke often of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, who argued that the future of the Jewish people depended on the existence of a Jewish state, one bonded together not just by religion but by language and nationality. “Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the earth’s surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people. Then we will do the rest.”
Herzl’s dream had become my own. I thought of my family as people living contently, yet in exile. We spoke Hebrew, we thought in Hebrew, and we eagerly read the news that came from Mandatory Palestine, the British-controlled territory (or “mandate”) that included our ancient homeland. There was a collective longing—a yearning to return—that came with a powerful grip. There were times when it made me feel as though I were in purgatory between a faraway past and an imminent future. The closer to that future we came, the more unbearable the delay felt.
Despite that desire to journey onward, my memories of childhood are endless and fond. My mother, Sara, was brilliant and loving, a librarian by training and a devotee to Russian literature. There were few things in life that brought her more joy than reading, a joy she shared with me. I grew up to become a man of books, but I started as a boy of books, reading next to my mother. There was a loving challenge to it—to try to keep up with her—if only for the discussion to follow. My father, Yitzhak (known as Getzel), was warm and generous, a lumber merchant like his father before him. He was a man full of energy and kindness, both doting and diligent. He emboldened me always, and beamed at my achievements. His love gave me confidence, and my confidence gave me the ability to fly. I felt profoundly blessed.
My parents raised me without many boundaries or limits, never telling me what to do, always trusting that my curiosity would lead me down the right path. In my youngest years, when I decided to put on shows and make speeches in front of my parents and their friends, I received nothing but encouragement. Sometimes I would offer up impressions (there were a few people around town whose voices and mannerisms I had perfected). Other times I would deliver fully formed addresses about the nature of Zionism or the relative virtues of my most favorite writers. To the adults, this made me the precocious young boy with a bright future ahead. To me, it felt like the beginning of something bigger. But to my schoolmates, it made me something of an outcast, the one so clearly unlike the others. What I was, in fact, was what I have remained: at ninety-three, I am still that curious boy, enamored of hard questions, eager to dream, and unbowed by the doubt of others.
My parents helped shaped the man I became, but it was my grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, whom I admired most deeply, and with whom I formed one of the most important bonds in my life. He was a stocky man who somehow always looked tall. Having attended the finest yeshiva in Europe, he served as the shtetl’s chief rabbi. If Zionism was the center of our civic lives, Judaism was the center of our moral lives. He was the authority figure from whom my family took our direction and, because of his position and his exceptional mind, the community leader to whom the entire shtetl turned for guidance and wisdom.
I felt especially lucky, not just to have such an important figure in the family, but because he gave me special attention. He was the first to teach me the history of the Jewish people, and the first to acquaint me with the Torah. I would join him each Sabbath at the synagogue, and followed intently the weekly reading. Like other Jews, I considered Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, the highest of holidays. It had special resonance for me, though, not just for its own significance, but because I would get to hear my grandfather sing. Only on that day would he serve as our cantor, his wonderful voice booming out the hauntingly beautiful prayer of Kol Nidre. It would move me to the depths of my soul and I would hide under his prayer shawl, the only place I felt safe on such a serious day. From the darkness of my hiding place, I would ask God to forgive the transgressors and have mercy on every man, as he himself had sown the seeds of weakness.
In his image, and from his teachings, I became strictly religious myself as a child, much more so than my parents. I came to believe that my obligation was to serve God through His commandments, and that no exception could be tolerated. My parents didn’t fully appreciate the depths of my commitment until the day my father brought a radio home, the first in Vishneva. In his excitement to show my mother how it worked, he turned it on during the Sabbath—a time of rest and contemplation during which Judaism forbids certain actions, including those required to switch on a radio. I was furious. I threw it to the ground in a fit of overzealous righteousness, breaking it irreparably as though the fate of humanity depended on my doing so. I am grateful that they were forgiving.
When I wasn’t at home or in synagogue, I would try to hitch a carriage ride to the train station; it was from here that people would begin the long journey that would take them to our ancient homeland. The whole town would gather in loud celebration, wishing farewell to their neighbors in bittersweet fashion. I watched with admiration, joining in the cheering and reverent joy, but I always returned home with a tinge of sadness, wondering if my turn would ever really come.
In time, circumstances required us to leave. By the early 1930s, my father’s business had been destroyed by anti-Semitic taxes levied against Jewish enterprises. Left with nothing, he decided it was time to depart. In 1932, he set off on his journey to Mandatory Palestine by himself, a pioneer in his own right, eager to get settled and prepare for our arrival. It was another two long years—a lifetime for an impatient child—until he sent word that he was ready to receive us. I was eleven years old when my mother came to Gigi and me and told us the time had come.
We loaded our possessions into the back of a horse-drawn cart and set off on the ride to the train station. The cart creaked as it bounced frenetically over the many rocks in the road. My mother didn’t enjoy it, but for my brother and me, every jolt was a joy—a reminder that the great adventure was already well under way. We were dressed in thick wool jackets and heavy winter shoes that we would soon no longer need.
When we arrived at the station, there were dozens of people waiting to send us off with well-wishes and prayers. My grandfather was one of them. Given his age and centrality to the community, he had chosen to stay in Vishneva. He was the only thing I knew I would miss about my hometown. I watched him say good-bye to my mother and brother on the platform, and waited for him to face me, not knowing what I’d say. His large frame loomed over me as I looked up toward his eyes through his thick, graying beard. They had tears in them. He placed a hand on my shoulder, then bent down to meet my gaze.
“Promise me one thing,” he said, with the same commanding voice I had come to know so well.
“Anything, Zaydeh.”
“Promise me you’ll always remain Jewish.”
My grandfather’s life ended in Vishneva. The Nazis marched through the forest and into the village square only a few years after I left, gathering up the Jews to meet a horrific fate. My grandfather was forced into our modest wooden synagogue along with most of his congregation, while the Nazis boarded the doors. What terror they must have experienced, I cannot comprehend—the first moment the smoke poured in through the cracks of the door; the crackling sound that would have made them realize the building had been set ablaze from outside. I am told that as the flames grew violent, as they engulfed our most cherished place of worship, my grandfather donned his prayer shawl, the same one I had hidden under during Yom Kippur, and chanted a final prayer—a last moment of stoic dignity before the fire stole his words and his breath and his life, along with all the others.
The Jews who remained were rounded up, house to house, pulled from their hiding places, snatched from their lives. They were forced to watch as the shtetl was destroyed, as though a tornado had torn through the area, but with precision and intent. They were marched to the train station, through the cruel rubble, past the fiery grave. The same tracks that had started me on the journey to my homeland would take them to the death camps instead.
I hadn’t known, when we boarded the train for Mandatory Palestine, when it lurched to a start and I waved good-bye through the window, that I would never see my grandfather again. I can still hear his voice every time a cantor chants the Kol Nidre. I can still feel his spirit every time I face a hard choice.
•••
In 1934, our journey to Mandatory Palestine took us south to the Mediterranean Sea, which seemed to stretch endlessly that first time I saw it. We boarded a steamship for a several-day voyage through mostly calm waters. I was convinced that the absence of squall and rough seas was a sign from above. From the deck of the ship, enveloped in all directions by dramatic blue skies, I could feel the gentle heat of the sun unimpeded by clouds. It was as though my world had been repainted and reheated to animate my dreams.
On our final day at sea, I awoke to the sound of the ship’s air horn. The captain was alerting passing boats to our arrival and, in his way, announcing it to the passengers, as well. Gigi and I scrambled out of bed and ran up the stairs to the top deck, where we hoped to see the first glimpse of our new life. A group of passengers had gathered already, shouting and singing with delight. I made my way through the crowd until I was standing at the railing, with nothing and no one blocking my view.
Outstretched before me was the magnificent shoreline of Jaffa. The sea seemed to be composed of all shades of blue, the bright sapphire of the deep waters dancing with the iridescent turquoise in the shallows as they lapped against the perfect white sand beach. Beyond the bay I could see a hill in the distance—the heart of a grand and ancient city. The collection of stone buildings that surrounded the promontory seemed to be standing at attention and on guard. Behind them, a slender clock stretched for the sky.
I didn’t know much about Jaffa before I arrived, only that it was an ancient city that was mentioned in the Bible. Now, as it came into view, I could see a texture and vibrancy that could have been gleaned only firsthand. There were large crowds of people in red fezzes and checkered headdresses. Some had gathered together to enjoy the bright morning, playing with small children as the sea breeze moved through their loosely fitting robes. Others had boarded boats to meet us in the heart of the bay. Most of these were filled with people offering to sell passengers things we had never tasted. They offered us jars of lemonade over crushed ice, and dates harvested from the palm trees I had known only from my aunt’s pictures. Some of the boats had been chartered by Jews, who were picking up passengers right there where we anchored.
As I scanned the boats looking for my father, I noticed scores of local Jews whom I barely resembled. In perpetually gray Vishneva, every Jew I knew was incredibly pale. To be among these men who were tanned by the sun and chiseled by the hard work of cultivating the land was to be among heroes. I wanted nothing more than to join them, to become one of them.
Eventually I spotted my father standing at the front of a small Arab fishing boat, enthusiastically waving at my brother and me, so much tanner than when last I had seen him. Beside him stood the captain of the vessel, a tall Arab man dressed in wide, flowing pants with accordion creases. We leapt into the boat and greeted our father with two years of unspent love. To us he gave the same. As we made our way to shore, I could feel the sun’s warmth beating down through my thick winter jacket. I closed my eyes and imagined the soft heat was my own personal welcome, a welcome from a sun that had been biding its time until my arrival. The moment I stepped out of the boat and onto the land, I knew I had found my way home.
The land of Israel suited me well. Over time, I felt like I was sloughing off my old life, as though Vishneva had been my cocoon and now I had grown wings. I stopped wearing jackets and ties, trading them in for short sleeves instead. I watched my skin darken under the clearest blue skies, and never felt more like a true child of Israel than when I came home with a sunburn. I loved books with intense fervor and interest, but now I read them under a sycamore tree in the park or on the sands at the edge of the sea.
•••
On July 15, 2007, I was sworn in as Israel’s ninth president. I was eighty-three years old. It was the culmination of a career that spanned the life of the state itself, a final opportunity to serve the people through government. Standing on the stage, taking the oath of office, it was Vishneva that occupied my mind, a reminder of where my journey had started. I had an endless imagination as an eleven-year-old boy, but even in my most ambitious dreams, I never thought that I would find myself at such a moment.
At a celebration the evening of my swearing in, a young man I’d never met approached me, launching straight into conversation with an unabashed Israeli frankness I couldn’t help but admire.
“Mr. President, with due respect, after such a long career, why would you keep working at your age?”
“Why do I serve?” I asked. “I suppose I never considered the alternative.”
It was the truth. As long as I could recall, Zionism had been the center of my identity, and service to it a requirement for its success. In my eighties, that service led me to the presidency, after six decades in Israeli politics. But as I came of age as a young man in Mandatory Palestine, the service I imagined was not work in government; it was work in the fields, work settling the land, work creating a new kind of community. I wanted nothing more than to be a kibbutznik.
The first settlement known as a kibbutz was called Degania, established in the Jordan Valley in 1910 by a group of young pioneers who had fled Europe. They had come with grand plans, not just to build settlements, but to make real the dream that was Zionism. The kibbutzim were, first and foremost, agricultural settlements, places where people worked to the bone, tilling the rocky soil and draining wretched swamps. It was the pioneers who were working every day to make the uninhabitable bloom. In due time, Degania inspired others, and the barren lands of the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys became dotted with flourishing communities. There were around thirty kibbutzim when I immigrated to Israel, and many more in time. In the harshest conditions, they reshaped the landscape with palm trees and field crops and orchards and livestock. They made the desert beautiful and bountiful, and in doing so, convinced us of the limitless potential we could summon among us. In the years before statehood, we had strong leadership and were building the foundations for state institutions and a government. During that time—and out of necessity—it was the kibbutzim that became our most central institutions, not just because of their delicate harvests or elegant ideology, but because they took on the essential responsibilities: managing settlements and immigration and organizing our defense. And while each kibbutz had its own unique characteristics, they all organized themselves around the same central vision. In their pursuit of the Zionist dream, the pioneers had also tried to reimagine a new kind of society, one built on equality and cooperation, on justice and fairness, on collective ownership and communal living.
I enjoyed my life in Tel Aviv, the afternoons spent riding my bicycle down the streets, counting the new buildings, cataloging the daily progress of construction. But it was the kibbutzim in the distance that captured my heart. I had joined the youth movement at my high school, through which I had met and learned from the Jewish nation’s greatest pioneers. At school, we studied—but in the youth movement, we dreamed. I had become convinced, having spent so much of my childhood lionizing the pioneers, that there was no more essential a mission, no higher a calling than to join them. I wanted to trade the noise of the city for the quiet of the fields—to be a part of the quest to transform the land. Over time, our group leader, Elhanan Yishai, came to understand the path I sought to travel and, in his kindness, chose me as someone to help.
“I think you should consider Ben-Shemen,” he said to me, during a conversation that would change the course of my life. It was the first time I had heard its name.
Ben-Shemen Youth Village was many things to many people. Founded in 1927 by Dr. Siegfried Lehmann, a German physician and educator, it was—and remains—the most wonderful place I have ever known.
It was, first and foremost, a place to call home, including for the brave and weakened children who had been orphaned in Europe, and yet somehow made their way to Mandatory Palestine alone. But it was so much more than that. It was both an intellectual center of Zionism and a place to learn the most practical applications of its tenets. It was a place where boys and girls could acquire the skills required to settle the arid land: how to herd sheep and milk the goats and the cows; how to press seeds into the hard, salty soil in a way that would give them nourishment; the proper way to sharpen and swing a scythe. It was also a place where boys and girls were trained to be soldiers, knowing that Zionism would surely require a fight. Students learned how to shoot, how to fight, how to navigate by the stars. But most of all, they would learn the values that kibbutz life represented: how to work together as equals, how to build and sustain a community over time. It was a place that turned children into leaders. Ben-Shemen had just accepted a large wave of children from Europe, and its leaders were hoping to match them with others who, having emigrated from Europe themselves, could help the new arrivals adjust to a very different life.
Before I had the chance to respond, Elhanan injected a final piece of information. “You don’t have to go,” he said. “But I want you to know I already recommended you, and because I know of your family’s financial situation, I also applied for a scholarship on your behalf.” I must have looked truly stunned.
“They want you, Shimon,” he said with a smile, “and they will cover the costs. So if you want to do this, the decision is yours.”
I leapt from my chair and raced straight to my house to tell my mother and father. I didn’t even ask for their permission. I just told them my plan and my hopes with all of the passion and impatience of a fifteen-year-old boy. This, I was certain, was my destiny. I think they thought so, too.
I arrived at Ben-Shemen in 1938, brimming with opinions and eager to learn. I remember first walking through its entrance and into the courtyard, a small square surrounded by modest one-story buildings. There were two beautiful oak trees in the heart of the courtyard, old giants that must have borne witness to centuries of history. Under them stood a small group of children gathered around what looked like their teacher, listening intently as she discussed the day’s lesson.
I was assigned to a spare wooden cabin at the end of a narrow dirt path where I lived happily with two other boys. There were times, at first glance, when it must have looked like a summer camp. We told jokes and played pranks and sang songs by the fire. We went on long, winding hikes through the neighboring foothills and played all sorts of games while we worked through our chores. It was the first time, and first place, where I truly made friends. In Tel Aviv, I was an outsider. At Ben-Shemen I was popular.
And yet despite the camaraderie and the occasional mischief, we were all keenly aware that we were part of a mission—something far bigger than ourselves. We weren’t just living on the frontier of Jewish history; we were shaping it with our hands. With every seed we planted and every crop we harvested, we were extending the reach of our dreams. This was the harsh land on which we were going to rebuild the Jewish state—and it fell to us to tame it, to make sure it could support many millions of others. What kind of security can we provide to our people, we were often reminded, if we can’t fill their bellies once they come? So we had to prepare.
By day, we worked the fields or studied in our classrooms. By night, we stood guard. It was not unusual for Arabs in the neighboring villages to fire their weapons at us or try to pilfer our food and supplies. I had been appointed commander of one of the guard posts, a reinforced concrete structure at the edge of the village. The sun having set, I would crawl up its wrought-iron ladder and position myself as a lookout, my back against one wall, my rifle at my side. Each time, I hoped for a quiet evening—but there were many times when the village was shot at, many nights when I had to exchange fire with the darkness.
Each night of my posting I would pass by the Gelmans’ house. Mr. Gelman was our carpentry teacher, and oftentimes I would see him in the front yard, sawing away at a long board of wood. Sometimes I would see his wife tending the garden, watering her flowers or checking the progress of her tomatoes. “Hello,” I would call out with a wave.
On one particular night, however, there was someone I didn’t recognize standing barefoot in their doorway. Her long brown hair was pulled back and braided, revealing piercing eyes and a porcelain face, a beauty like none I had ever seen. We made eye contact just for a moment, and with the slightest of smiles, I was hers. It was as though she had destroyed me and rebuilt me in an instant. Her name was Sonia. She was Gelman’s second daughter, and had spent her whole life growing up in the village. Each night I would see her, always without shoes, a lawn mower by her side. I was mesmerized.
In time I would find the courage to speak to her. But she was not impressed by me. I did my best: I read her poems, even chapters of Karl Marx, but nothing seemed to break through. Not until the day I asked her to accompany me to a young cucumber field. There was something about the perfume of the cucumbers, the romance of nature, that must have finally worked. She looked at me differently, finally—the way I had been looking at her.
Sonia was my first and only love. I would come to find a young woman who was both gentle and firm, and, in every way, a source of great wisdom and strength. Sonia let me dream, but kept me grounded. She believed in me and supported me as I chased my wildest visions. But she never let me get ahead of myself. She was my compass and my conscience, in one. In all of the world, there could not have been another person more deserving of my love, and somehow—for some reason—she seemed ready to love me, too.
This was Ben-Shemen. It was a place where we learned by day and defended by night. A place where we could be ourselves and chase our purpose. A place where soul mates waited for you a short walk down the road.
It was also a place of great political drama. It was there that I first started to refine my political opinions, and the first place I had the chance to put them to good use. Indeed, for all that we learned from our teachers at Ben-Shemen, there were few things more formative than what we did in the shadows. Ben-Shemen was home to a number of political youth movements, organizations where students would debate the future of the Jewish people, the necessity of a Jewish state, and the strategy required to create one. But this kind of political activity was officially forbidden on the grounds, so any such debates would take place at night, in secret whispers and impassioned pleas. These were the conversations of a generation—the youngest generation—rooted in a sense that it was our own future we were trying to build, that what we spoke were more than words. We felt as though our mission was greater than securing a homeland, that it was our job to imagine a new society. This was the driving concept behind the kibbutz system, and the idea that we had so firmly embraced. And perhaps because the stakes were so high, and because our role felt so central, our debates were often quite heated.
There were plenty of disagreements among us, despite our shared aspirations. Some of the leaders were Stalinists, people who demanded ideological collectivism in their kibbutzim and saw a Jewish state as a mechanism for greater discipline and order. They wanted to replicate the Soviet system. I, on the other hand, believed that Stalin had perverted the teachings of Marx, that his style of government was anathema to the socialist ideal. Rather than replicate his system of government—or any other—I believed we needed one that was uniquely our own, one that reflected a national ethos based on the tenets of Jewish morality. As Herzl had once said, “It is true that we aspire to our ancient land. But what we want in that ancient land is a new blossoming of the Jewish spirit.”
I was increasingly a key player in our secret gatherings, no longer the outsider. The early experiences of the youth movement transformed me, shaping how I saw the world and, increasingly, where I saw myself in it. The more I became a leading voice in the room, the more I realized how much I enjoyed it, how impactful it could be to stand in front of a crowd, and with nothing but words, change minds and beliefs, and perhaps even history. It helped, I am sure, that even as a teenager, I was blessed with an unusually deep baritone voice, one that lent my words the aura of authority, even when it hadn’t been earned.
During my second summer at Ben-Shemen, the youth movement I had chosen to join—HaNoar HaOved, or Working Youth—voted to elect me as a delegate to its national convention. I was elated. I was no less committed to my dreams of settling the land, but I was suddenly aware that I had a skill others thought powerful—the ability to persuade. I felt I had been called to service, that circumstance was conspiring to create a second path for me.
A few months after accepting the position, I was required to make a trip up north to Haifa on behalf of HaNoar HaOved. I had planned to take a bus, but when I mentioned this plan to Berl Katznelson, an instructor and great Zionist thinker who had taken a liking to me, he suggested a better idea.
“Actually, the timing is perfect,” he said. “I have a friend who is driving up to Haifa next week. I’m sure I can arrange to get you a seat in his car.”
“That’s excellent news,” I said. “Who’s your friend?”
“It’s David Ben-Gurion,” he replied nonchalantly.
In my mind, David Ben-Gurion was not just a man, but a legend. He was the leader of the Jewish people in Mandatory Palestine, part strategist, part philosopher. He sought independence for the Jews not only to create a state, but to fulfill our historic mission, to become a “light unto nations,” an example for all of humanity. His vision for our future state—safe, secure, democratic, and socialist—was an inspiration to me, and the urgency with which he fought was a subject of constant admiration. Suddenly, I was going to get two hours with him, with nothing to interrupt us but time.
I slept very little the night before the journey. Instead, I spent most of the early hours of the morning considering what he might say to me, and how I might respond. I tried to imagine the questions he would ask, and tried to practice my answers, whispering quietly to myself as I stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t help but think that if I could impress him, if I could show him my grasp of the issues and my commitment to the cause, then perhaps he would remember me—that maybe I could stand out. Who knew where that might lead?
I was sitting in the backseat when Ben-Gurion got into the car, and took the seat next to me. In person, his hair seemed even whiter than in photographs, almost glowing against the tanned skin of his mostly bald head. He was wearing an overcoat, and a frown on his face that seemed more reflective of the permanent position of his mouth than his disposition—or, at least, so I hoped.
As we pulled away he looked over at me and gave a small nod to acknowledge my presence. But before I could introduce myself, he had already turned away. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes, and within a few minutes, it became clear he was sleeping. There was no end to my disappointment.
He stayed asleep for nearly the entire journey. But as we got close to Haifa, the bouncing of car on the dirt road must have woken him. Through the corner of my eye, I could see him adjusting himself, wiping his eyes and fixing his posture. It seemed I might have my chance after all. Then without warning, he turned and shouted at me, “You know, Trotsky was no leader!”
I didn’t know what to think—or what to say. I didn’t understand how we landed on the topic, or why he seemed to think I was curious about Trotsky, or what it was he was even referring to. But how could I not be curious?
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
In 1918, following the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky had become the Soviet Union’s first minister of foreign affairs. He had come to lead the Soviet delegation in peace negotiations to end Soviet Russia’s involvement in World War I. Having grown impatient with Germany for demanding more and more territorial concessions, Trotsky decided to cut off negotiations altogether. Instead, he unilaterally declared an end of hostilities without signing an agreement with the Germans. Trotsky had described the proposal as “no war, no peace.”
“‘No war, no peace’?” Ben-Gurion shouted, his face red with anger. “What is this? This is not a strategy. This is an invention. Either peace and pay the price or war and take the risk—there is no other choice.”
Again I was not sure how to respond, but this time it didn’t matter. Before I could formulate a careful reply, Ben-Gurion had closed his eyes and returned to his nap. He didn’t say another word.
•••
After graduating from Ben-Shemen in 1941, a group of us were sent to Kibbutz Geva in the Jezreel Valley for further training. At Ben-Shemen, we had learned the skills we would need to cultivate the land. At Geva, we were to learn what it took to succeed on a kibbutz. I had two jobs. My first involved working the cornfields. Only when I was finished—usually after sundown—would I turn to my next job, as a coordinator of HaNoar HaOved movement across the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys. I was given a large and unwieldy Triumph motorcycle to use so I could meet with members from other chapters. We would hold meetings and debates, organize seminars and public discussions, and dedicate what was left of our waking hours to convincing the others we were right.
At the heart of these discussions lay the issue of territory. In 1917, the British government, which controlled much of the Middle East, issued the Balfour Declaration, which endorsed the idea of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. But many feared our future state would be relegated to a sliver of territory, too small and unnourished to sustain the Jewish people. They believed that we should be uncompromising, calling for a return to our ancient borders—even if such a demand would never be met. I disagreed. Like Ben-Gurion, I believed the dominant moral consideration was the survival of the nation, rather than the size of the state that would house it. And I feared, as he did, that the greatest danger of all was to reach for a state and fail.
The debates raged on from kibbutz to kibbutz. In the meantime, my circle of friends set off on the mission we’d been training for—trekking twenty-five miles north of Geva to the peak of Mount Poriya, where we were to become members of Kibbutz Alumot.
From the moment we arrived, I was in awe. I could look out in every direction and see something extraordinary. At the base of Poriya was the sparkling Sea of Galilee in all its beauty, its far banks stretching well beyond the horizon. There were magnificent mountains to the west, painted purple in long brushstrokes. There were rows of young saplings, newly planted, that would one day grow into groves of olives and dates. From the right vantage point, I could watch the pale silver bands of the Jordan River snaking its way through the valley. To the north, I could see the towering Mount Hermon—and, unobstructed, it could see me. All at once I felt I was at the center of the world. For so long I had imagined a life like this, and now it was realized in front of me, a most elegant argument for the virtue of dreaming.
Once I was settled into Alumot, I was assigned a job that would give me my first true experience as a leader—not of men, but of sheep. Yet there were striking similarities: a shepherd, for example, may have authority over his flock, but that alone does not mean he can control it. There were many times when I would lead the herd down the hill, intent on having them follow me, only to find them scattering across the fields, paying no mind to my commands. It took time and patience to master the skill. We had to find a common language, a common understanding. I had to know their fears as if they were my own, so I could understand where they could not be led—or at least, when I’d have to move with more deliberateness. I had to be both empathetic and insistent in stating my intentions—a figure they would follow, even reluctantly, if only out of trust.
On the good days, it was a beautiful dance, its own piece of poetry and a lesson in leadership that I’d long remember. But hard days, though less frequent, proved unavoidable facts of nature—these were beasts, not men—that could not be cured with sharpened skills. At my best, I could still experience the worst, and that was a lesson I took with me, too—in patience if nothing else.
Life at Alumot was not easy. Because of its location, the winds traveling through the valley would gain lift and power as they approached our settlement, tearing through the barns with incredible violence. The soil beneath our feet was saturated with salts that choked off our crops and, for the first several years, forced us to heavily ration our harvests. And for a time, the few members of Alumot resided in a cluster of sinister black basalt ruins of a previous settlement, one that had failed catastrophically twenty years earlier. It was as though we were living among tombstones, constant reminders that our efforts could fail.
It would have been easy for an outsider to measure Kibbutz Alumot by what it lacked. We lived in tents. There was no electricity or running water. Each person was given one pair of work boots, two pairs of khaki pants, and two shirts—one for work and one for the Sabbath. The kibbutz owned one pair of gray trousers and one British Army–issue battle-dress jacket, which were lent out to the men only on the most special of occasions. And yet those of us who lived there measured Kibbutz Alumot by what it offered. It gave us a sense of meaning and mission. It gave us a family larger than any we had known and a purpose that was greater than ourselves. The hardness wasn’t an inconvenience; it was the reason we were there.
And so we worked. We cleared the rocks and rehabilitated the soil. We cut tracts through barren lands and sowed them with seeds until they had no choice but to yield to our efforts.
Each morning, long before dawn, I would open the pen for the sheep so they could head down the hill of Poriya and graze between rocks on the intermittent pastures. The path down was dangerously steep, even more so in the darkness. But by sunrise, the flies would return to torment the sheep, so it was better to feed them at night.
I didn’t mind. If anything, I preferred the time alone. How many nights did I sit on a rock, watching the stars reflect in the stillness of the water below? Too many to count. In those days I wanted nothing more than to be a poet or an architect, to build something either from words or from stones. And what better place, I wondered, what greater perch in the world, for an aspiring writer to let his poetry take flight?
These were some of the happiest days of my life, and they were made all the more meaningful when Sonia chose to become part of them again. At the beginning of World War II, Sonia had enlisted in the British Army as a nurse, and had been stationed in Egypt. Now, having returned, she had decided to join me at Alumot. We were married under a simple white chuppah on Lag BaOmer, May 1, 1945, in a small ceremony at Ben-Shemen. I had to borrow Alumot’s formal pants and jacket, which were a bit too short for me; I spent the eve of our wedding using shoe polish to dye the jacket black.
Then one morning, Ben-Gurion’s closest advisor, Levi Eshkol, arrived at Alumot from his neighboring kibbutz, with a request from Ben-Gurion himself. Eshkol, the future prime minister, was already a giant in the movement in those days, someone whom we greatly admired, and it was a genuine shock to see him among us—even more so to learn he had come, in part, because of me. Ben-Gurion had grown worried that the youngest generation was drifting too far from his vision for a state of Israel. He believed the fate of the Jewish people rested in his winning the argument. This was why he had sent Eshkol: to request that Alumot release me from my agricultural obligations, turning my evening work with HaNoar HaOved into a full-time job. Ben-Gurion knew the young generation represented the future, and he must have felt they were more likely to be persuaded by one of their peers. At least that’s what I told myself as I struggled to comprehend how it was possible that, of all people, Ben-Gurion had chosen me, in all my inexperience, to participate in such an important mission.
The moment I arrived at HaNoar HaOved headquarters in Tel Aviv, I understood exactly why Eshkol had come to find me. There were twelve members of HaNoar HaOveds secretariat, and it appeared that I was the only member who favored Ben-Gurion’s approach to statehood. The meetings were so one-sided as to be totally useless. I was viewed with suspicion, seen only as Eshkol’s mouthpiece. Any proposal I submitted was voted down immediately. Any argument I started was invariably silenced. It wasn’t long before I decided that the only way to help the cause was to change the makeup of the secretariat itself. This would be possible only at HaNoar HaOved’s national convention, and it would require the support of a majority of delegates in the room. Who those delegates would be—and whom they would ultimately support—was still an open question. And so rather than be swatted down day in and day out, I stopped going to Tel Aviv headquarters altogether and focused my efforts out in the field.
Again and again I drove the same roads on the same wily motorcycle, meeting with every chapter of HaNoar HaOved that would have me. At each stop I would advocate my own political views, pressing the urgency of Jewish statehood on behalf of all who could no longer afford to wait. I met with hundreds of people, making my case to anyone who would listen. I told them to make sure the delegates they sent to the convention were Ben-Gurionites, and asked them to vote against the secretariat and instead stand with me.
On September 28, 1945, the national convention of HaNoar HaOved was called to order at the Mugrabi Cinema in Tel Aviv. I was deeply nervous. In addition to the delegates in the hall, there were many prominent leaders of Ben-Gurion’s political party, Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael, which meant “Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel,” known colloquially as the Mapai. As delegates flooded into the hall, I stood at the registration desk, preparing a detailed list of who was attending and how they intended to vote. But I still wasn’t certain of the outcome.
One of the first orders of business was the adoption of the platform. The delegates were given two choices. The first came from Binyamin Chochlovkin, the secretary-general of HaNoar HaOved, and represented the “Greater Israel” position. The alternative proposal was my own, and reflected the Mapai positon. Binyamin had the backing of the secretariat and the majority of the Zionist movement. But to his surprise, and frankly, to mine, I had the backing of the room. The delegates had determined that a partitioned Palestine today was clearly preferable to a “Greater Israel” tomorrow; when their votes were cast, my proposal carried the day.
Neither side had expected the outcome, which was made obvious by the ensuing chaos in the hall. I was greeted as a conquering victor by the Mapai leaders. By the end of the convention I was a leader in the movement, having been elected HaNoar HaOved’s secretary-general. Suddenly my greatest heroes knew my name. I was no longer the anonymous boy sharing a car ride to Haifa.
•••
On October 20, 1946, we had our first child, Tsvia, a beautiful bundle, whom we named after my beloved late maternal grandfather. We moved out of a tent and into a small house.
Later that year, the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress was to be held in Basel, Switzerland, the first such meeting since the Holocaust. The Twenty-First Congress, which had been held only days before the start of World War II, was adjourned with the foreboding words of Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization and future first president of Israel: “I have no prayer but this: that we will all meet again alive.”
The world had changed irrevocably even before the start of the war. In May 1939, the British government issued the “White Paper,” a policy document that contained an incomprehensible betrayal of the Jewish people. It was a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, which had favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Having decided that if the Jews were to live in Mandatory Palestine, they were to do so as a permanent minority, the British government now put stringent restrictions on Jewish immigration and froze our ability to continue to purchase land to settle. It was intended to be a death sentence for the Jewish state. And by preventing immigration it would also be a death sentence to countless Jews fleeing the grip of the Nazis. If we wanted our independence, we’d have to take on the British.
In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and began his quest for world domination and Jewish annihilation. Two days later, the British declared war against Germany, becoming, paradoxically, both our most important friend and our second-greatest enemy. Ben-Gurion had crystallized the complexity of the relationship, and the new Zionist challenge, this way: “We must help the British army as if there were no White Paper, and we must fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”
And yet, despite the forces arrayed against the Jewish people, there were many on the left who had opposed Ben-Gurion’s change in posture. They preferred the slow and steady progression of compromise to Ben-Gurion’s more aggressive approach against the British. This infuriated Ben-Gurion, who saw no justification for inaction, certainly not in the midst of an attempted extinction.
By 1946, the war was over, and it had been time again to reconvene in Basel. The Mapai decided to send two of their younger members as part of their broader delegation, and I soon learned that Ben-Gurion had chosen me to be one of them. The other young man was a bit older than me, handsome, brilliant, and every bit as committed to Ben-Gurion as I was. His name was Moshe Dayan.
We boarded a ship together in December 1946, my first trip abroad since arriving in Jaffa more than a decade before. It seemed as though every member of the Zionist leadership was aboard, and somehow, here I stood among them.
On the upper deck, Moshe and I spent a great deal of time together. We were the youngest two on the vessel, and though we were vastly different from each other, we found an immediate friendship and mutual respect.
We spent hours engrossed in conversation about our views of the debate and our expectations for the conference. We both firmly believed in Ben-Gurion’s position, willing to use force to support the unfettered continuation of immigration to Mandatory Palestine, whether the British deemed it illegal or not. At one point, Dayan had even suggested we burn down the camps where the British were detaining Jews who had been captured on the way to their homeland. Part strategist and part fighter, Dayan was both an equal and a mentor, a man I deeply admired.
There was something incredibly moving about entering the hall where the Congress was held. Nearly fifty years earlier, this was the same place that Theodor Herzl had convened the First Zionist Congress. History was alive in the room, and an uncertain future at stake for us all. From my seat I could see Weizmann, Eshkol, and Ben-Gurion on the dais, along with every other major figure in the Zionist movement.
I could also see the visibly empty chairs of those for whom Weizmann’s 1939 prayer had not been answered. In his memoir, he wrote about the “dreadful experience” of presiding over the meeting, of standing before the assembly and “finding among them hardly one of the friendly faces which had adorned past Congresses.” The largest delegations had come from Mandatory Palestine and the United States; with few exceptions, the room was eerily absent of European Jews.
And yet, despite the many thousands of Holocaust survivors who were being denied entry to Mandatory Palestine by the British, the conference had proceeded as though there were no real urgency. There was genuine debate about whether we should do what it took—whatever it took—to get the survivors to their homeland. Ben-Gurion was furious, understandably so—at the tepidity of politics; at the conference’s obsession with the minutiae of bureaucracy; and most of all, at the lack of courage and commitment he knew we required. By the end of the first session, it had become clear that a deeply frustrated Ben-Gurion lacked support for his proposals.
I didn’t see him the next morning, when the conference reconvened. I remember I was seated next to Arye Bahir, a leading voice in the Mapai party and a friend of Ben-Gurion. We were discussing our frustrations with what had transpired when suddenly Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula, entered the hall with a dark look on her face, walking as swiftly as she could directly toward us. She came right up to Bahir and leaned in closely, whispering to him in frantic Yiddish.
“Arye, he has gone mad,” I heard her say. “You have to stop him,” she insisted. “He’s going to leave.”
Though Bahir and I shared Ben-Gurion’s frustrations with the conference, we both instinctively knew that his leaving would present a grave problem. He was viewed, even by his most vehement critics, as a uniquely resilient and visionary leader, the kind the movement could not succeed without. And he was surely the only one who could convince his fellow party members to support his plan for our future statehood. Paula was keenly aware of this. We hadn’t been summoned to calm an argument; we’d been summoned to save the movement.
Bahir stood up with Paula, then signaled for me to join him. We left the hall and went up to the hotel room where Ben-Gurion was staying—the same room Herzl had occupied during the First Congress, in 1897. When we got to his door, we knocked several times, but there was no response. From somewhere inside me, I found the chutzpah to turn the knob. The door was unlocked. There he was, standing with his back to us, angrily shoving his clothing into an open suitcase.
“Shalom, Ben-Gurion,” Bahir said tentatively. There was no answer. “Shalom?” Again no answer—no acknowledgment at all that we were there. Finally, Ben-Gurion spoke.
“Are you coming with me?” he asked.
“Where are you going?” Bahir asked.
“To form a new Zionist movement,” he bellowed. “I have no more confidence in this Congress. It’s full of small-time politicians, pathetic defeatists. They won’t have the courage to make the decisions that are needed now.
“A third of our nation has been wiped out,” he continued. “The survivors have no hope other than to rebuild their lives in our homeland. It’s the only land that must open its gates wide to welcome them. Do they not see this?”
Then he looked briefly toward me, a wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old boy. “Only the Jewish youth will provide the courage needed to face this challenge.”
Bahir told Ben-Gurion that of course we were with him, that wherever he went, we would go, that there was no hope for Zionism without him. Once Ben-Gurion realized that we were true allies, he calmed down enough that we could have an extended conversation. What we had told him was true: he had become the center of gravity for the movement—the one leader we could not live without. But we also knew that his walking away to start a new movement was not a solution to the problem of urgency. It would surely take years to organize such an effort, years we simply did not have to spare. And so Bahir and I suggested the only option we could think of. Before walking away from the Congress, we wanted Ben-Gurion to try to convince the Mapai faction one last time of his vision. “If there’s a majority there, we’ll all stay; and if not, we won’t be the only ones to leave with you; a great many more will come, too.” After much consideration, and some serious reservation, Ben-Gurion finally agreed.
It didn’t take long before word spread among the Mapai about Ben-Gurion’s anger and intentions. Bahir and I weren’t the only ones who understood the stakes of losing Ben-Gurion in the fight. That evening, they convened a meeting of the Mapai, chaired by Golda Meir. Golda was already a giant in the Zionist cause, and a close friend and advisor to Ben-Gurion. She would later become one of only two women to sign Israel’s declaration of independence, as well as its fourth prime minister. The debate was a brutal back-and-forth of arguments and emotions that went straight through the night. The final vote was called as the sun was coming up. When Golda was finished counting, we learned the result: Ben-Gurion had won with a razor-thin majority. The activist approach had prevailed. The movement remained alive.
It was a tremendously important victory, and not just on the immediate policy front. It felt to me and many others as though Ben-Gurion was unstoppable, that nothing and no one could prevent us from achieving our mission. Indeed, in that moment I felt as though the Jewish state had just been born, along with something new and powerful inside me. For the first time, I admitted to myself that a life of poetry and shepherding was not enough to contain my dreams. I had wanted so badly to join the pioneers. But to fight for a Jewish state in that way Ben-Gurion had just done—with urgent, imaginative, and moral leadership—this, too, was a frontier, and it was calling me to service.
Returning home to Sonia and Tsvia, it was impossible not to look back with enormous admiration at Ben-Gurion’s triumph. Of course, he had won the debate as a result of his brilliant rhetoric and, I firmly believed, the rightness of his claims. But I had seen something else, too, something that would strongly influence my thinking about leadership: when he had been most frustrated, most intent on walking away, he had remained open to the arguments made by two young men with a mere fraction of his experience and wisdom. He had nearly given up on the larger debate, but he had not given up on his belief in debate. During my career, I would encounter numerous situations in which parties found themselves full of mistrust and anger, where it seemed that all doors had been closed. Ben-Gurion had shown me that listening is not just a key element of good leadership, it is the key, the means to unlock doors that have been slammed shut by bitter dispute and resignation.
Little did I know how often I would end up thinking back to that moment in the hotel room—or how soon.