David Ben-Gurion retired twice from public life, once in 1953 and again, finally, in 1963. In both cases he went not to the Tel Aviv apartment from which he conducted business as the leader of the Jewish community of Palestine, and later as Israel’s first and most important prime minister. Rather he retired to a new and struggling kibbutz, or collective settlement, Sde Boker, in Israel’s Negev desert. There he lived in what became known as his tsrif, or hut—a modest one-floor bungalow, crammed with books, where his formidably abrasive wife Paula kept a vigilant eye on him and the awed kibbutzniks kept their distance. There are four pictures or images in the tsrif. One, on his work desk, is a picture of Berl Katznelson, one of the leading figures in Palestinian Jewish politics in the 1930s, and one of Ben-Gurion’s earliest comrades. He was as warm and lovable a man as Ben-Gurion was forbidding and distant, proof that in political as in more intimate life, opposites sometimes attract. Opposite that desk, on a wall lined with books, stands a replica of Michelangelo’s Moses, with whom some might compare the doughty father of the Israeli state—not only for his achievements, but for the incessant battling he did with a recalcitrant people and stubborn dissenters in the course of his labors. One of Ben-Gurion’s intimates, when asked late in 1953 why the Old Man had resigned, remarked: “The Messiah arrived, he gathered in Israel’s exiles, he triumphed over all the peoples around, he conquered the Land of Israel … and then he had to take his seat in a coalition.”1 In the tiny living room, where distinguished visitors came to visit Ben-Gurion, the wall was graced by a third image: a portrait of Abraham Lincoln inset in a micrograph of the Emancipation Proclamation. And, most surprising of all for this pugnacious battler, in his bedroom is a fourth picture—of Mahatma Gandhi, the pacifist who forced the British Empire to yield.
These four images capture much of the complexity of Ben-Gurion’s personality—Katznelson, his immersion in the fierce internecine struggles of the Labor movement of Palestine, and the even more ferocious contests with political rivals outside it; Moses, his roots in Jewish history and identity and his messianic aspirations for the Jewish people; Lincoln, his admiration of the English-speaking world and its greatest leaders in their most bitter contests for freedom and democratic rule; Gandhi, his appreciation of spiritual power even when its expression took a form so completely different from his own. His own greatness resided, in great measure, in his ability to harmonize these contrasting and in some respects contradictory sides of his personality.
Surrounding these images are vast quantities of books, which line the walls of the hut as they do the walls of his apartment in Tel Aviv. Totaling some 12,000 volumes in both locations, they reflect the interests of a man who read at least eight foreign languages, and include numerous volumes on military history as well as philosophy, science, literature, and Jewish lore.2 A hard-bitten political activist since his earliest years (he had to flee Russia and later Palestine itself early in the century), he was, as well, a widely read man of insatiable intellectual curiosity, who in his old age would explore Eastern philosophy with the same zest that he studied European history and military science. The world has never seen a more astonishing autodidact among its great statesmen. The qualities of intellectual breadth and application apparent in this extraordinary library manifested themselves no less clearly in his preparation for war.
In December 1946 David Ben-Gurion, aged sixty, became the shadow defense minister of the embryonic Jewish state; with Israel’s independence a year and a half later he became the real thing, as well as prime minister. During that time he transformed an already impressive underground military establishment, the Haganah; absorbed smaller but better organized dissident guerrilla and terrorist organizations; created one of the most formidable armies in the world for its size; and handled the conduct of a war that created a state—a state that has, willy nilly, occupied center stage in international politics ever since. He did all this with fragmentary material resources and a tiny population, in the face of the organized opposition of every neighboring state and the dominant force of Great Britain, and only tepid approval—occasionally, little better than indifference—from the emerging superpowers. It is as remarkable a story of statecraft in its way as that of Washington or Lincoln, and under circumstances no less adverse.
For a time after World War I, the ambition of creating an autonomous national home, even a state, seemed within the reach of the fledgling Jewish community in Palestine. In the early 1880s the Jewish population of Palestine numbered barely 25,000; by the beginning of World War I that number had risen to 85,000. Rebounding from losses by emigration during the war, Palestine absorbed another 100,000 by 1925, for a total of perhaps 160,000. By the late 1920s, however, the environment had changed. Arab riots in Hebron in 1929 revealed the intensity of local opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine, and the 1936 eruption of the Arab Revolt confirmed to Palestine’s British masters the dangers of allowing unimpeded Jewish immigration into the country. By then some 400,000 Jews (many recent refugees from Germany and Poland) were calling Palestine home. In May 1939, after a series of investigating commissions and conferences, Great Britain published a White Paper providing for the eventual creation of an Arab-dominated Palestinian state after ten years. The most terrifying part of this White Paper, not only for the Zionists’ prospects of overcoming their demographic disadvantage vis-à-vis the Arabs of Palestine, but for the sheer survival of the multitudes of Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe, was a proviso limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, with any future Jewish entry depending on Arab acquiescence—certain, of course, to be denied.
Desperate not only to save the Zionist project but to create a refuge for the imperiled Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, the leadership of the Jewish community struggled against the strictures of Great Britain. In the midst of the world war Ben-Gurion coined the slogan, “We will fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there were no war.” But despite such valiant talk the Jewish community of Palestine was, in fact, powerless to do much to rescue European Jewry or to convince Great Britain to provide it sanctuary in Palestine. On the whole the Palestinian Jewish community, numbering by the war’s end some 500,000 souls, could make only feeble and unsuccessful efforts to rescue their brethren in Europe. Tens of thousands of Palestinian Jews served in the British Army, and a handful of Jewish agents heroically but ineffectually infiltrated occupied Europe, but on the whole the Jewish community in Palestine could only watch with horror the catastrophe that was overwhelming European Jewry.3
Through 1945 Ben-Gurion had, of course, paid attention to security matters, but he had not made them his principal concern; the establishment of Zionist institutions, the creation of a consensus in support of the idea of a Jewish state, and the increase of immigration, legal or not, into Palestine absorbed all of his energies. The war, calamitous as it had been, renewed Jewish hopes for an independent state; masses of Jewish refugees were ready to come to Palestine, and American (and to a lesser degree, British and European) sympathy for their plight and horror at the Nazi extermination campaign smoothed the way for them. A struggle between Britain and the Jews of Palestine took shape, conducted on the political front through American pressure to admit immediately 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine, and through an Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry in the spring of 1946 and later a UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in 1947. These battles on the diplomatic and political fronts led to the collapse of the policies (particularly those limiting Jewish immigration) enshrined in the White Paper of 1939, and the eventual British decision in September 1947 to end the mandate, turning the problem of Palestine over to the United Nations.
If the Zionists’ political struggle against the British mandate constituted one front—albeit one that extended to the front pages of the New York Times and the back benches of Parliament—their overt armed struggle in Palestine itself constituted a second front. Early in the 1940s two Jewish guerrilla and terrorist groups—the Irgun Zvai Leumi, or IZL (also called “the Irgun” in English) and Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Lechi)—embarked on a violent campaign against the British authorities. Their use of assassination and sabotage took a dramatic and politically disastrous turn with the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944. The Jewish community, horrified by these deeds yet desperate to open the gates of Palestine to the remnants of the slaughtered communities of Europe, wavered between repugnance at the deeds of these groups and a tentative cooperation with them. At a certain point, the mainstream Jewish community took part in the struggle as well. In October 1945 Ben-Gurion induced the Haganah to begin a series of attacks on British installations (avoiding, where possible, causing British casualties) in order to force Britain to acquiesce to increased immigration to Palestine.4
British countermeasures—including the June 1946 “Black Sunday” mass arrest of Jewish leaders, and raids on Haganah arms depots—and the excesses of the extremists (including, in particular, the spectacular bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946) ended the general community’s armed resistance to British rule. Ben-Gurion had, as the main Jewish leader in Palestine, urged a course of moderate opposition to British rule, including the use of force but in a controlled way. Enraged at the actions (and, let it be said, the independence) of the IZL and Lechi, he twice (from late 1944 through March 1945, and again in April 1947) supported collaboration with the British to help suppress those organizations. Throughout this stormy period, Ben-Gurion and the Jewish community’s other leaders favored a combination of confrontation and negotiation with Great Britain, yielding neither to those who thought all direct struggle with the mandate authorities to be futile nor to those who thought that Britain could only be dynamited out of Palestine. Some of the patterns of his later war leadership—ruthlessness and flexibility, most notably—began to appear during this grim apprenticeship. Ben-Gurion adopted a mixture of violence and compromise, confrontation and accommodation that made him neither popular with nor entirely trusted by his comrades in arms, but which served him well in his dealings with a British government that had lost whatever interest it had once had in promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine.
The end of World War II marked the beginning of far higher levels of violence in Palestine. The anti-British IZL and Lechi began active operations against the British, while Arab hostility to the Jews of Palestine and Arab fear of Jewish statehood grew enormously. The Palestinian Arabs, numbering between three quarters of a million and a million, consisted of diverse populations.5 Although still divided by clan and local loyalties, they had a number of popular leaders, and in particular the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who saw the rise of a Jewish state as an intolerable development for the Arabs of Palestine. Husseini, a shrewd agitator, had been both installed and exiled by the British and had aligned himself with the Germans during World War II. He had returned to the Middle East determined to lead the Arabs of Palestine in a struggle to the death with the Jews.
At the end of 1946 Palestine was in crisis. British military efforts to suppress both an increasingly vicious Jewish guerrilla campaign within Palestine and Arab-Jewish communal violence coincided with pressure from the West to do something about Palestine. Public opinion in the United States, and to some extent in Britain itself, was distressed by what Winston Churchill, now on the Opposition benches, described as “this squalid war against the Jews.” The sight of Jewish refugees from Europe, survivors of Hitler’s massacres, being manhandled, held behind barbed wire, or even shipped back to the sites of their families’ extermination was repellent. More concretely, the desperate financial circumstances of the Empire simply could not support the deployment of nearly a hundred thousand troops a year to keep hold of Palestine. Only a massive American loan had averted British bankruptcy in 1946; economic ruin, piled on Imperial crises around the globe (including most notably in India, where the viceroy no longer believed the Indian Army to be a reliable instrument for maintaining order), persuaded the now willing British leaders to leave Palestine to its own devices.6
When the representatives of the international Zionist movement met at the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress in Basel in the fall of 1946 they found themselves struggling with a radically new situation. The horrors of the Holocaust were now fully known. In Europe, there was a pool of hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees anxious to come to Palestine; in the Jewish community there (now numbering over 600,000) a no less desperate determination to open the gates to immigration; and in the prosperous Jewish community in the United States, an eagerness (absent in many quarters before the war) to support the Zionist endeavor. In many countries as well (the United States most notably, but others too) there was sympathy on the part of non-Jewish leaders and peoples for the Jews and their dream of a state.
On all other counts, however, the situation for the Zionist leadership was grossly unfavorable. The British government, in the hands of a hard-pressed Labour leadership, manifested an animosity toward the Zionist cause that went, in some cases, beyond mere policy to something more personal and darker. In particular Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin seemed to have become hostile to the point (as it appeared to leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, the yishuv) of anti-Semitism. The British government seemed to the Zionist leaders to be implacably hostile to their aspirations. The Arab states had emerged from World War II in positions of increasing independence, both formal (in the case of Jordan and Syria) and substantive. As tension between East and West grew, so too did Arab leverage with both Britain and the United States, because the Great Powers needed bases, oil, and quiet for their remaining colonial positions. American support for the Zionists was, to an alarming degree, a matter of personal sympathy rather than collective interest: the coldness with which the State and War (later Defense) Departments viewed the Jews of Palestine reflected not so much antipathy as an absence of any sentiment at all.
The presence in the Jewish camp of Communists and their sympathizers only reinforced this preference on the part of the Western Great Powers for nations numbering thirty million over one nation counting all of 600,000 souls. At the same time, paradoxically, the predominance of democratic socialists among Palestinian Jews, together with the fact that they were led by a man who had early become disillusioned with Communism and whose movement could not but reject Communist claims of universalism, created a certain distance from the Soviet Union. It was in these desperate conditions that David Ben-Gurion, the acknowledged leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, asked for the “Defense portfolio,” becoming in effect, the quasi-state’s minister of defense as well as its prime minister.
What manner of leader had now taken upon himself responsibility for the physical security of the Jewish community in Palestine?7 David Ben-Gurion had immigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1906, at the age of twenty. By the early 1930s, through a combination of hard work and dedication to political activism, David Ben-Gurion had become the first secretary-general of the Histadrut, the Jewish labor organization, which soon combined union activity with ownership of key economic and social activities in the Jewish community. In 1935 he became the chairman of the Jewish Agency, the semi-official self-governing organization of Jewish Palestine. Although he had participated in some of the Jewish community’s earliest self-defense efforts before World War I, and had served in the British Army during it, his active military experience was slight. His service during World War I he had regarded primarily as an opportunity for political work, to which he devoted his entire being. His goal throughout was clear and simple: the creation of a Jewish state, despite all obstacles.
He was, in personal habits, frugal save in the matter of buying books—a practice which, combined with a fierce rectitude in financial matters, more than once forced his wife to scrimp on meals in order to make ends meet. Ferociously argumentative, implacable in his animosities, but possessed of a powerful sense of political realism, he knew when and how to check the harshness of his personal feelings in battles with political foes—be they Jews, Britons, or Arabs. His sociopolitical and economic views, and those of his movement, were essentially those of Russian socialists from the turn of the century, but with a twist. He saw himself, as did so many of the early Zionists, as one of a new kind of Jews: farmers, laborers, and soldiers, proud of their people’s history and achievements on the one hand, yet disdainful of ghetto-bred meekness and physical softness on the other.
Ben-Gurion’s Jewish patriotism and rough humanitarianism, together with his grudging but sincere admiration of British and American political institutions, trumped his socialism. By the late 1920s he doubted that the world’s only socialist state, the Soviet Union, could provide a model for the state-in-the-making. As the years went on he came to regard the USSR with the wariest of respect, taking advantage of its support where offered, but never supposing that its universalistic claims and tyrannical system of government would, in the long run, coexist with Jewish nationalism and the civil liberties he admired in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Ben-Gurion brought to the task of supreme command scant military experience and, one might have thought, little aptitude for the job. He had, however, the tenacity and cunning bred of decades of political work, the talent of an orator driven by belief and in full command of the language he used, and the intellectual discipline and depth of a scholar. Throughout his adult life he kept a voluminous diary, not merely as a personal journal but as a working tool for absorbing and digesting vast quantities of information. Slowly writing near-verbatim accounts of interviews and conversations, copying statistics and making careful notes for later review, Ben-Gurion kept a unique record of what passed across his desk and through his mind, in these as in other matters.8
Ben-Gurion’s place in the leadership of the Jewish community, although central, was not without its challengers. He had his opponents within the Jewish labor movement, including a pro-Soviet Left based in the collective settlements (kibbutzim) that were dominated by what would become the United Workers’ Party or Mapam. He faced bitter opposition from the “separatists” (porshim), and in particular the National Military Organization (IZL) of the Revisionist movement, and he had uncertain relations with the bourgeois, religious, and Eastern communities of the yishuv. He contended successfully for supremacy with leaders of the Zionist movement who resided outside Palestine, most notably Chaim Weizmann, the brilliant scientist who had managed relations with Great Britain for years and who would subsequently become the first president of the State of Israel. Finally, and not least important, although Ben-Gurion dominated his own party, Mapai, he operated within a socialist tradition of collective decision-making and leadership that made him something considerably less than the dictator of legend. Indeed, his colleagues’ resentment of his high-handed ways on more than one occasion brought the nascent Israeli government to a condition of internal crisis.
Against such an array of rivals and under such a set of constraints Ben-Gurion had only the power of persuasion and, no less important, the ultimate lever of his own indispensability. His bitterest enemies could call him dictatorial and manipulative; they could not impugn his intelligence, his energy, or his devotion to the cause of a Jewish state in Palestine. “The Old Man,” people called the diminutive man with unruly wings of white hair setting off a large bald head. Few, even among his closest colleagues, liked him; even his enemies had to respect him. Willing to resign over matters of principle (not least of the principles being his own supreme authority), Ben-Gurion played a complex domestic political game of pleas, threats, and bargains. It would absorb his energies almost as much as the far deadlier grapples with foreign enemies.
By the end of 1946 it had become clear to Ben-Gurion that those struggles would likely broaden well beyond confrontation with the British Empire, whose days were obviously numbered and whose resolve ebbed daily. As harsh and even cruel as that contest was, it had taken place against a civilized and on the whole restrained power, which Ben-Gurion admired in many ways. He had seen London during the Blitz, had British friends (including a mistress), and respected all that the civilization of the great Empire had to offer in cultural, political, and military terms. The struggle that loomed ahead was with an Arab world that he knew far less well, although he had traveled in it and met some of its leaders.9 It was a world from which he had no desire to borrow institutions or any aspect of culture. It was, he feared, a world which might exercise very little of the self-restraint and compunction of even the more malign inhabitants of the governor-general’s residence in Jerusalem.
Unlike many if not most of his colleagues, Ben-Gurion had always believed that the Zionist program would lead not merely to unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of a semi-autonomous British protectorate there, but to the creation of a full-fledged Jewish state. He had been instrumental in the passing of the so-called Biltmore program of May 1942, which, during some of the darkest days of World War II, proclaimed the Zionist objective to be statehood. His desire to take direct control of defense matters flowed from his belief that the time had come—even before the British had concluded that the time had come for them to leave Palestine—to prepare the underground army for new tasks.
As preparation, Ben-Gurion conducted, from the end of March to the end of May 1947, what became known in the history of the underground army, the Haganah, as “the Seminar.” For two months he suspended his normal duties and instead undertook to interview systematically the entire high command of the Haganah (and many of its subordinate officers as well), so as to review its state of preparedness. Writing slowly but unweariedly in his diary, he probed the quality of the commanders, the nature of their training, the state of their equipment, the position of the budget, the structure of the high command, the quality of intelligence collection—all the facets of the Haganah’s activities. Underlying the Seminar lay one simple, massive, and as it turned out, entirely correct political premise: that the upcoming confrontation between Jews and Arabs would not be like the disturbances of 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939; it would not be a contest between a semilegal voluntary defense organization on the Jewish side and gangs of Palestinian Arab villagers or clansmen on the other. Rather, it would be a contest with the Arab states and their armies, and it would take place in the context of the creation of a Jewish state, which would require an army of its own.10 Ben-Gurion’s judgment at the end of the Seminar, in a speech to the Mapai central committee, was typically harsh and direct. By the end of the Seminar he had concluded that the Haganah was profoundly unfit for the challenge looming ahead—and worse, its leadership was reluctant to admit as much.
I know that I am saying very hard things. In my heart are even harder views, and I speak therefore the minimum … We have to start everything virtually afresh, because the Arab front is becoming serious, and it is no longer a front of robbers.
Here was the central problem, to which Ben-Gurion would return throughout the ensuing two years, and even after, as a profound lesson in military statecraft. The Haganah was a generally successful adaptation to one problem—the threat posed by the Palestinian Arabs, both in organized units and as gangs of marauders, to the security of the Jewish settlements. This very success, however, had rendered the Haganah in many ways unfit for the challenges of the future, not least because its leadership refused to admit the fundamental differences in the nature of the future threat.
There is an organized Arab world, states, armies. Of course, as compared to European armies they have no value, but compared to a non-army they have value, while what we have is a non-army. We have to undertake difficult work—to uproot from the hearts of men who are close to the matter the belief that they have something. In fact, they have nothing. They have good will, they have hidden capacities, but they have to know: to make a shoe one has to study cobbling.11
On the eve of the Seminar the Haganah (or “The Organization” as Ben-Gurion and his collaborators called it) was a complex organization. It operated under the general supervision of the Mifkadah Artzit (National Command), headed by a civilian leader (Rosh Mifkada Artzit, or Rama) who looked primarily to budgetary and general policy matters. It had a general staff, although without quite the usual staff elements that one would expect in a regular army. Six regional commands Qerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, plus the South and the Upper and Lower Galilee for the smaller cities) coexisted with the three battalions of the Palmach, or commando units, which had their own staff and separate chain of command. The general staff of the Haganah had units for planning, training, and other functions. But they did not control the intelligence service, which reported both to the Jewish Agency and to the chief of the National Command (Rosh Mifkada Artzit, or Rama), who acted as a kind of quasi-defense minister but without comparable authority. Organizations for illegal immigration and overseas acquisition and recruitment networks were also outside the Haganah’s direct chain of command, reporting instead to the Rama. It was a confusing, anomalous structure.12 By the end of 1947, however, the Haganah consisted of perhaps four hundred full-time personnel, 2,000 semi-official Jewish police, the reserve Palmach battalions (3,000 in all), roughly 10,000 infantry plus various home guard and youth units.13
The underground army had existed in a kind of legal twilight—generally tolerated by the British although subject to repression by them when it opposed the mandate government directly. Voluntarily recruited, sparsely funded, and staffed—for the most part—by homegrown talent with little or no formal military training, it was, for an underground, a remarkably sophisticated organization. It conducted regular training and had a fledgling arms industry, an excellent and improving intelligence service (which was already supplying the leadership with telephone intercepts of high-level Arab conversations, as well as agent reports), and a daring commando force. Later in 1947 a Security Committee of the embryonic national assembly provided civilian oversight and control. Throughout its history the Haganah was, in fact, subject to supervision of some kind by the shadow government of the yishuv. The depth and intensity of that control was, however, as much a matter of personality as of institutional arrangement; nominally a nonpartisan body, the Haganah was, in fact, largely under the control of the moderate socialist faction led by David Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion’s own position in this already diffuse hierarchy was in some ways unclear. As the chairman of the Jewish Agency and the leading political figure in Palestine, he exercised considerable power, but he was, as well, at the mercy of a Jewish community riven into a number of political groupings. His own party, Mapai (Mifleget poalei yisrael—Israel Workers’ Party) was the largest, but he had to contend with right-wing Zionists as well as groups considerably further to the left, not to mention non-Zionist groups and several religious parties. Moreover, as a result of the socialist traditions of Mapai and many of the early Jewish settlers of Palestine, who provided its leadership elite, he had to contend with a tradition of collective leadership, which viewed with suspicion the domination of any one man.
The Seminar took place in the “red house”—Haganah headquarters in Tel Aviv, and it covered all aspects of the defense structure of the Jewish community, including “structure, organization, exercises, education, planning, training, equipment, storage, manufacturing, acquisition, budget, shai (intelligence), youth, [foreign] relations.”14 Ben-Gurion’s first interest appears to have been the personalities and qualities of the senior Haganah commanders. He seems to have crystalized, at this point, his assessments of various leading personalities, saying, for example, of Yitzhak Sadeh, one of the Haganah’s pioneers in offensive operations, that he was unsuited to serve as chief of staff because “he’s an artist.”15 Ben-Gurion was already selecting some of the field commanders for Israel’s war of independence, and among those whom he praises (Moshe Carmel, for example, later to serve as the commander of the Northern Front) are foreshadowed the high command for the latter phases of that war.
Two broader leadership concerns troubled Ben-Gurion greatly. The first was the lack of overall preparedness for leadership at the higher level. Early on, for example, he noted the absence in Palestine of higher schools for Jewish commanders and he deprecated what he took to be the amateurish quality of the Haganah’s leadership. With a trace of the autodidact’s exaggerated respect for the formally educated, he doubted the ability of homegrown leadership to perform the tasks required of the true professional. His second concern centered on an administrative structure that, already at this period, appeared to him anomalous and unclear. In particular, the role of the chief of the National Command inserted an unwelcome layer of authority between himself as shadow defense minister and the chief of staff. He replaced the current Rama, Ze’ev Feinstein, with Israel Galili, an able organizer prominent in leftwing political circles. But within weeks he was chafing at the tendency he thought he had discovered for the Rama to serve as a layer of insulation between the civil and the military authority rather than as a conduit for it.16
The fundamental organizational problem Ben-Gurion saw in the Haganah was one of scale. The former Rama, Moshe Sneh, gave him a long account of the dispute in Haganah circles about whether the fundamental unit of organization was the platoon or the company—and indeed, the course for platoon leaders was then the highest level of effective military education offered in the Haganah.17 The embryonic state’s military leaders, therefore, were thinking in terms of units of thirty-five or at most 150 men. Ben-Gurion believed that they should be thinking in terms of brigades of several thousand, and indeed that they needed to begin plans to acquire tanks, airplanes, artillery—in short, all of the equipment of a regular armed force. He set that standard explicitly: when Moshe Carmel, who subsequently became one of the first generals in the Israel Defense Forces, praised the fighting qualities of the Jewish soldier vis-à-vis his Arab opponent, Ben-Gurion asked whether the Haganah could stand up to a single British battalion in the field.18 Carmel admitted that he did not know. Ben-Gurion had no intention of starting a war with the British, of course, but he wished to establish the standard.
Ben-Gurion explored not only the fighting organization of the Haganah but its support functions as well—noting, for example, the essentially static communications system of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, which would need considerable improvement if the Haganah were to shift to mobile operations.19 Only in the area of intelligence did the underground meet Ben-Gurion’s standards. His diaries contain long discussions of the program for acquiring arms overseas. The underground arms industry of Palestine was impressive enough, turning out crude small arms (particularly the homemade Sten submachine gun), mortars, some high explosives, ammunition, and even improvised armored cars and buses. But it could not hope to come up with the tanks, airplanes, and heavy weapons like machine guns and artillery pieces needed by a regular army.
Ben-Gurion learned during the Seminar that the Haganah was very far from being a fully mobilized underground force. The yishuv was, by intention or good fortune, reputed to have a much more substantial force than it actually possessed: British unclassified estimates in January 1948 assigned the Haganah a strength of 70,000 and the Palmach 15,000—numbers off by factors of two and five, respectively; British, American, and French intelligence sources were, interestingly enough, even further off base.20 The publicly reported numbers of men and women in the underground military were fictitious. Even the internal number (30,000–35,000) was, Ben-Gurion learned, “an exaggeration.”21 The Haganah was, of course, a voluntary organization, and it competed with the IZL and Lechi for manpower. But the relative shortage of manpower, in Ben-Gurion’s view, stemmed from a failure to tap the 25,000-odd Jewish men who had joined the British military during World War II and served in a variety of capacities, both in combat and, no less important, in the support services. The personnel branch of the Haganah had copies of the demobilization certificates of many of these soldiers but, he noted in his diary, two-fifths of the addresses on them were no longer correct.22
The root of the problem, Ben-Gurion believed, was a willful provincialism on the part of the Haganah’s leadership, almost all of whom had stayed in Palestine during World War II and who scorned the lessons to be learned from a regular army. A complex psychology seemed to be at work: a doubt that the regimentation of British army life could meld with the anarchic egalitarianism of Palestinian Jews, a more reasoned rejection of the applicability of the practices of a large, well-equipped, and traditionally organized military to the problems of an impoverished and only semilegal militia, and perhaps as well a measure of resentment and envy of those who had taken part in the greatest struggle of the time. Moreover, as one Haganah commander correctly observed, most of the British veterans had not served in the combat arms, and the Haganah leadership’s view was that the greatest and most urgent need was for more and better-trained infantry.23
Compounding the difficulty was the élitism of the Haganah’s proud striking arm, the Palmach (a Hebrew acronym for plugot machatz, “storm companies”). The Palmach, founded in 1942, were the Jewish Palestinians’ equivalent of eighteenth-century America’s Minute Men. Supporting themselves by working part time on kibbutzim, they were the only standing—actually only semi-standing—force of Palestinian Jewry. Led for the most part by representatives of the left-wing kibbutz movement, they had a strong streak of socialist egalitarianism. A light infantry or commando force, they had both superior training and high morale, and were entrusted by the Haganah high command with various operations against both the British and local Arab populations. But much though he valued the Palmach’s superior effectiveness, Ben-Gurion had already become alarmed at its élitism and its autonomy; it had a separate staff and a budget whose details proved remarkably opaque to outside scrutiny.24 He could not deal with it immediately, but its time would come.
Shortly after the event, Ben-Gurion described to colleagues his assessment of June 1947: “[Here are] the faults I found: lack of equipment; for years no adequate thought about the needs of security and the Arab danger; the “Organization” sees itself as an end and not a means (the task for which it was created was not sufficiently in the forefront of their minds); the Haganah has a corporate spirit; they don’t have real military experience, and they don’t want it.”25 In the meanwhile, events had continued to move. In the winter of 1946–47 the British authorities concocted a proposal for dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab zones, supervised by a lingering British presence. Formally offered in February 1947, the proposal encountered stout opposition by all concerned, and it collapsed. In April 1947, in the midst of the Seminar, the British government referred the problem of Palestine to the United Nations. By the summer of 1947 it was clear that the climactic struggle was at hand: Ben-Gurion, above all, recognized that a UN vote for partition of Palestine would almost immediately unleash a war. In November of that year the Security Council did indeed vote in favor of partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish.
Anticipating these events, and immediately following the Seminar, Ben-Gurion embarked upon three broad policies. He began by overhauling the high command of the Haganah. In addition to replacing the ineffectual chief of the National Command, Ze’ev Feinstein, with Israel Galili, he made changes in the military command as well.26 He did not replace Ya’akov Dori, who had served since 1939 as the Haganah’s chief of staff, but he did install the youthful Yigal Yadin as chief of the operations branch. This was, as yet, a provisional change: more would come later on, but for the moment he wanted at the head of the Haganah men who would not challenge his authority and who shared his view that the organization was inadequate and complacent. Ben-Gurion remarked in October 1947 that the most serious problem he faced was “a lack of civilian control of the Organization [the Haganah]. Civilian control of the Organization was,” he declared, “without a doubt, fictitious.”27 His selection of new leaders for the Haganah already reflected his intention to assert civilian control: neither Dori nor Yadin had independent followings in the Haganah. The former had served in the Haganah for many years and was an engineer by training and outlook; ailing, he did not dominate a military staff. Yadin, the younger man, was a member neither of the Palmach nor of the old Haganah establishment, having taken a leave from the organization for a year and a half until the spring of 1947.28 The son of a self-trained archaeologist, Yadin prided himself on his military professionalism although he had never served in the British Army. Well read in military theory, he had played an important role in the creation of the Haganah’s officer training program, and actually ran the school; there he came into conflict with the freer spirits of the Palmach. The immediate disputes were incredibly petty—should platoons train for independent action or in company formations? should squads gain experience with medium machine guns?—but the larger issues of personality and style were serious.29 Ben-Gurion interviewed Yadin during the Seminar, and probed him particularly carefully about his leaving the Haganah. By the fall of 1947, Yadin was back in the center of the organization, setting up an operations branch and developing the staffs that the previous chief of staff, Yitzhak Sadeh, had sorely neglected.
Ben-Gurion thus began by inserting a more professional kind of underground soldier into the army. He also moved to clarify the chain of command. In particular, he moved swiftly to insist that Galili, as chief of the National Command (Rama), serve not as a buffer between himself and the general staff but as, if anything, a kind of executive officer. An open clash was deferred, but its outlines had become clear, and Ben-Gurion had already begun to describe the National Command as an organizational anomaly, to be disposed of (by implication) when the pressure of events would allow.30
Secondly, Ben-Gurion reached out to the British veterans, and particularly a serious young major, Haim Laskov, who had enlisted in the British Army in 1940 and taken every course available to him during the course of World War II.31 Laskov, who in 1958 became chief of staff in the postwar IDF, was languishing as the security officer in an electric company when Ben-Gurion picked him to become chief training officer of the Haganah in August 1947. Ben-Gurion had interviewed him during the Seminar. The Old Man, who had sworn all those who spoke to him to secrecy, heard Laskov give him exactly the same requirement for the number of rifles per battalion as another former British officer. After a sharp exchange in which Ben-Gurion accused Laskov of having found out more than was proper from other officers, Laskov patiently explained the concept of a table of organization and equipment—something that any well-trained British officer had committed to memory.32 It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship; Ben-Gurion turned to Laskov for concepts of organization and training that he could impose upon the Haganah—which viewed Laskov and other returned British officers with considerable suspicion.33
Thirdly, Ben-Gurion accelerated the programs for mobilization and acquisition upon which the military structure of a potential Jewish state would rest. Indeed, Ben-Gurion’s achievements in this area—his selection of leaders, his insistence on thinking big, his drive and ceaseless scrutiny—match his better understood role as a decision maker in the war of independence. Israel’s survival—and more than that, its victories—against the armies of the Arab states reflected not only the determination of a people with their back against the wall but a redressing of the quantitative balance in the war. The Arab states would make no all-out national effort to mobilize against the Jews: they had neither the experience nor the institutions that would have allowed them to do so. Their expeditionary armies, for better or worse, would neither grow in size nor improve much in proficiency. The Jewish state, on the other hand, much like revolutionary France in the 1790s or the Union in the American Civil War, could mobilize human and material resources for total war in ways that its opponents simply could not match.34 The mobilization problem had two sides: manpower and materiél.
Ben-Gurion’s intuition, backed up by close inquiry during the Seminar, that the Haganah had done a poor job of identifying and registering usable manpower was correct. Once a serious effort was made to register and induct men of military age in Palestine and, increasingly, in the refugee camps in Europe from whence new immigrants would come, the quantitative increase in manpower was staggering. In February 1948, on the eve of Israel’s independence, the Haganah numbered 16,000 men and women, in May roughly twice that, or 35,300. In December 1948, at the peak of mobilization, the IDF included over 92,000 soldiers.35 To be sure, some of the increase probably came from the absorption of the dissident military groups and the Palmach, and so represented reorganization and consolidation rather than growth. But even allowing for that, Ben-Gurion and his helpers paved the way for a mobilization of manpower that easily quadrupled the military manpower available to the Jewish state between the time of the Seminar and the end of the war of independence two years later.
The underground army had developed an impressive clandestine manufacturing capability, but the acquisition of arms from overseas would prove decisive for Israel’s survival, as the table indicates.
| April ’47 | Nov ’47 | May ’48 | Oct ’48 | Mar’49 | |
| Rifles | 10,073 | 10,678 | 21,886 | 59,389 | 62,200 |
| Submachine guns | 1,900 | 3,662 | 10,264 | 21,343 | 31,049 |
| Machine guns | 444 | 775 | 1,269 | 6,436 | 6,494 |
| 2” mortars | 672 | 670 | 682 | 618 | 1,706 |
| 3” mortars | 96 | 84 | 105 | 389 | 678 |
| Artillery pieces* | 25 | 25 | 253 | 492 |
*A11 types, including, by March 1949, 150 field pieces and 89 antitank guns.
The breakthrough developments were the nascent state’s arms deals with Czechoslovakia in the first half of 1948, which provided the Jewish state with the fruits of the Czech arms industry as modified by the Germans for their own use during World War II. Ironically, many survivors of Hitler’s extermination camps went into battle against the Arabs carrying German-designed Mauser rifles and light machine guns, under air cover from modified Bf-109 fighters—all fruits of the arms deals. These agreements, which combined finance (above all, fund-raising in the United States), diplomacy (as the Soviet Union established Communist rule in Prague), and organization (to bring the arms in despite a British quasi-blockade and in the midst of UN-sponsored truces), absorbed much of Ben-Gurion’s energy.
Ben-Gurion moved swiftly not only to reorganize the high command of the Haganah, but to provide it strategic guidance. This vision he expressed in a series of speeches to senior political and military leaders. Like Churchill, he believed in the importance of systematic surveys of the situation as a way of preparing colleagues and subordinates for the tasks ahead. Speeches, for Ben-Gurion, served not merely to rouse others to new efforts, but to explain to them—sometimes in deliberately harsh terms—the problems that remained to be confronted. Perhaps the most important of these speeches, “The Haganah in the days to come,” delivered on 18 June 1947, bears particularly close scrutiny, both for its substance and for what it reveals of the working of Ben-Gurion’s mind.37
Ben-Gurion began, as he often did, with a historical survey of the Jewish community’s struggle in Palestine, describing the conflict as one of changing stages, in which the yishuv had at different times faced different enemies on different fronts. At the turn of the century, the problem had been protecting their property and lives against the depredations of bandits; after the First World War the threat became organized groups of local Arabs whose motivation was, at least in part, political. There had come into existence, following the White Paper, a “British front” as well, as the yishuv had fought the efforts of the British to restrict immigration to Palestine. Now, however, the final and most important test would arise: “the aggressive hostility of the rulers of Arab states, and we must prepare for this front with all seriousness and urgency.”
After exploring the links between the British and Arab fronts, Ben-Gurion argued that the impending struggle would pit the Jews of Palestine against forces expected to be superior in numbers and having, furthermore, the benefit of belonging to ordered armies; the yishuv would need to strive for qualitative superiority by tapping the military experience of its World War II veterans and by tapping the technological superiority of the Jewish population of Palestine. The Jews required three kinds of forces: a static militia for territorial defense (the cheyl mishmar, or CHIM); a mobile force organized along regular principles; and an élite arm for special operations. No less important than this tripartite division of the Haganah (an assignment of functions that has persisted throughout the post-independence history of the Israel Defense Forces) was his insistence on preparing the way for larger units and a regular army. He concluded with an injunction to the leaders of the Haganah to set up schools to train leaders at the battalion level and above, as well as the staffs that would be needed for the control of large units in field operations.
Ben-Gurion, like Churchill, spent much of his time goading and energizing subordinates who, even if they could never achieve what he desired, nonetheless complied with his wishes. His critics, then and thereafter, insisted that in most respects—regarding arms acquisition, for example, or the organization of large units—he had merely accelerated trends already under way. The old-line leadership of the Haganah argued that the British-trained officers favored by Ben-Gurion often lacked the flexibility of their Palestinian-trained counterparts, and that they favored British-style formal discipline and rigid tactics, which were suited neither to the psychology of the fiercely independent Jews of the yishuv nor to the requirements of light infantry warfare in the Judaean hills. There was no doubt some substance to these criticisms, but they are not entirely accurate, nor do they touch the heart of the matter. Like Lincoln, Clemenceau, and Churchill, Ben-Gurion drove and inspired his subordinates to do those things which, left to their own devices, they might have known to be desirable but also might not have carried out.
He got results because, like Churchill, he expected to hear about the details of compliance with his instructions. Ben-Gurion paid close attention, for example, to the establishment of courses for the Haganah’s small signal corps, which, though well suited for maintaining links among widely separated civilian settlements, had had neither the equipment nor the personnel to staff complex mobile military organizations.38 His monumental diary served as a means of keeping track of the changes that he had ordered, and of the transformation under way. The prospect of standing before the irascible Old Man, as he was already known, his bald head crowned with wings of unruly white hair, his questions short, sharp, and peremptory, and his pen always writing, may have recalled even to the less devout who stood before him a line from an ancient Jewish text: “Know what is above you: an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and a book in which all your deeds are recorded.”39
The test of Ben-Gurion’s labors came with frightening speed, because Israel’s war of independence began well before the formal declaration of a state in May 1948. On 29 November 1947 a wave of celebration swept the yishuv—the United Nations had decided, by a vote of 33 to 13 with ten abstentions, to partition Palestine and to create a Jewish state out of three barely contiguous areas west of the Jordan. The streets of Tel Aviv filled with dancing crowds—but Ben-Gurion, anticipating a bitter war to come, stayed in his room. He could not join the street celebrations, as he remarked somberly to his daughter, knowing that some of those now dancing would before long fall in battle.40
His words proved correct. The decision of the United Nations inaugurated the first phase of a war that would last some thirteen months, through three phases, each bringing its own array of struggle and hardships. In the first, which began the very next day, the yishuv suffered continuous attacks from local Palestinian Arab groups, while the Arab states began to mobilize against it. In this war of ambush and raid, the British mandate authority played an ambiguous role—occasionally intervening to stop the fighting and occasionally tilting to one side or the other—although generally more favorable to the Arabs, particularly after bloody attacks by Lechi and IZL on their forces withdrawing from Palestine. Arab villagers and irregulars struck particularly hard against the roads that linked Jewish population centers, above all the road to Jerusalem from the coastal plain. For four months the yishuv, still mobilizing its resources, remained on the defensive. In April 1948, however, it launched powerful counterattacks, temporarily opening the road to Jerusalem and defeating Arab forces in key cities, including Tiberias, Haifa, and Jaffa.
Israel’s declaration of independence on 14 May 1948 brought about the second phase of the war and its most severe crisis—the invasion by Arab armies. In less than a month of bitter fighting Jerusalem (where the exiguous garrison of the Old City surrendered to the professional soldiers of the Arab Legion) was again cut off, while the Syrian army seized small pockets of territory allocated to the new Jewish state and Egyptian forces occupied Beersheba and advanced to within thirty miles of Tel Aviv. Although by early June the Israelis had won some victories and thwarted the immediate onslaught, the first truce, which came on 11 June, seemed to some observers to have barely averted disaster.
During the month-long hiatus in fighting, however, the Israel Defense Forces, as they were now called, reorganized and equipped themselves for renewed fighting; this constituted the war’s third phase. On 8 July a ten-day struggle between the Israelis and their Arab enemies cleared much of the central part of the country of Arab forces and restored the initiative in the south against Egypt. A second truce, begun on 18 July, broke down and in a series of episodic campaigns, including a major outbreak of fighting in mid-October 1948, the Israelis swept the Egyptians out of the Negev and Arab irregular forces out of the Galilee, and they now seemed poised to renew the battle for all of Jerusalem. The last sharp fighting of the war occurred in the last week of 1948 and the first week of 1949 when Israeli forces thrust into the Sinai peninsula, very nearly precipitating a major armed clash with the British forces there.41
The sheer size of a military action—the numbers of soldiers involved, casualties suffered, or ground conquered—is no measure of its strategic and operational complexity and hence its value to the student of war. The Israeli war of independence, fought though it was in an area no larger than the state of New Jersey, provides a capital demonstration of this fact. Strategically, the conflict began as a war of survival, at least from the Israeli point of view: the leaders and people of Israel believed that upon their victory depended not only the existence of an independent Jewish state but the physical survival of its citizens. They fought, therefore, a total war, as all-embracing in its efforts (however much smaller in its dimensions) as the conflict that had swept the world in the preceding ten years. The Israelis mobilized, or attempted to mobilize, every last man and woman capable of bearing arms; they strained every nerve to produce their own weapons of war and to smuggle in equipment from abroad. In particular the battles to relieve Jerusalem, or the fights to hold on to isolated settlements such as Yad Mordechai, Negba, and Mishmar HaEmek, though no more than skirmishes beside World War II battles, were fought with no less a sense of enormous stakes.
Yet the war had another strategic aspect, as a coolly conducted struggle for limited ends among powers who had in mind a peace settlement of a moderate kind. Even at the outset, the leaders of the provisional government of Israel declined to describe the borders of the Jewish state, suspecting that by force of arms they might secure more territory from favorable adjustments to the partition plan of 1947—as indeed they did. Yet even during this phase, when survival itself was at stake, Ben-Gurion had perplexing choices to make. He had not merely to guarantee the security of the core Jewish population in the coastal enclave from Tel Aviv to Haifa, but to keep open lines of communication with major settlements in the north and in the south, and above all with Jerusalem. He sought as well to bring in the hardware and supplies (everything from uniforms to medicine) needed for the expanding Israeli military, while creating the state institutions that could make good use of them.
Following the first truce Israel’s leaders no longer worried about their prospects of simple survival. From the very first their opponents had not offered up a solid and implacable front. The Lebanese and Egyptian commitment to the war was, at the most, half-hearted, and in King Abdullah of Transjordan the Israelis had an opponent who had, in the past, been a collaborator—and possibly a recipient of Jewish Agency funds. Negotiating with Abdullah up to the very outbreak of the war, the Israeli leadership never seems to have lost hope that it could come to terms with the emir of Transjordan, who had command of the most formidable of all the Arab fighting forces, the Arab Legion. Indeed, it soon became apparent that Abdullah, who had little interest in conquering the Jewish state but every desire to retain the old city of Jerusalem and fend off his Arab rivals, was anything but a fanatical opponent. He was, rather, to some extent at the mercy of younger, nationalist officers such as Abdullah el-Tel, the commander of one of the four regiments of the Arab Legion.42 Similar rivalries and internal discord hampered the relations between Egypt and Iraq—rivals for leadership in the Arab world—and even the relations among Palestinian groups. Jewish factionalism also broke out in violence on occasion during the war, but on the whole the crisis of 1948–49 produced unity in the yishuv. On the Arab side the story was just the reverse, as initial unity gave way to increasing dissension in the loose anti-Jewish coalition. Furthermore the Arab side, with its small regular armies of mixed quality, was hampered by problems of distance and hence resupply to a far greater extent than the more compact Jewish state; nor did the Arabs have the potential to mobilize for war that the Israelis had. They had experienced neither the pressure of necessity that the yishuv had faced, nor the strain of the European powers in mustering forces for the great struggle of World War II; their bureaucracies were inefficient and slow, their armies by and large untested in war.
The paradoxical nature of this war—an unconditional struggle for survival, and yet a limited war for borders and minor advantage—became even more complex as one considered the role of the external powers. Great Britain favored its Arab dependencies, yet resentfully sustained an arms embargo on them; the United States, like several key European states, sympathized with the Israelis yet had its interests in the Arab world; the Soviet Union and its clients were willing to thwart British imperialism and hasten the collapse of pro-Western Arab regimes, yet mistrusted Jewish nationalism and the democratic socialism of the Israeli state. Furthermore, each of the great powers had their admirers and adherents in the Zionist camp. The Palmach was, to a remarkable degree, pro-Soviet; and some of Israel’s middle-class Anglophiles still looked to Britain while others saw in the distant United States, with its vast economic power and influential Jewish population, Israel’s most important ally.
Resolving the contradictions in the war’s strategic essence proved to be but one of Ben-Gurion’s challenges. No less daunting were its operational features. The means of conflict included aerial operations (the capitals of most major combatants came under bombing at different points in the war), guerrilla activities (focusing on road ambushes), and conventional assaults by combined arms formations up to brigade and sometimes divisional strength. Each of the three fronts—northern, central, and southern—posed distinct geographical and demographic challenges, even though they lay little more than thirty or forty miles apart. In the mountainous north isolated Jewish settlements were precariously linked by roads plagued by the irregulars of Fawzi el-Kawukji’s Arab Liberation Army, and threatened by the thrusts of the Syrian and to a lesser extent the Lebanese armies. In the center, the coastal plain provided the “Zionist redoubt” as one American observer called it, the center of gravity of the Jewish population and war-making potential. In the heart of the north-south Judaean hill mass, however, lay Jerusalem, the political heart of the Jewish state, surrounded by Arab villages and easily accessible to the Arab Legion, reinforced by the Iraqi army. In the south, Egyptian forces operated in a rolling desert region where Israel had only a few scattered fortified settlements to serve as staging areas for large-scale operations. There were no natural obstacles to Egyptian advances through the Sinai into the heart of the country and indeed, before the tide turned, the Egyptians came close to both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Hard fighting (and the morale and mobilization of resources behind it) no doubt determined the outcome of this, like any war, but the Kimche brothers, one of whom fought in the war while another covered it as a journalist, have a point when they write that
[W]hat really mattered was the clash of wills, the battle of commands.… In fact, the actual fighting of the war (certainly until October 1948) played a much smaller part in the wider aspect of the conflict than one would conclude from the somewhat stylized accounts of the military side of the war which have become familiar by repetition, each according to his needs: the Israeli, the Arab, and the British.… If ever there was a war of commanders, this was it: supreme commanders, field commanders and local commanders. They were decisive.…43
On the Israeli side the “war of commanders” was all the more difficult because it was a war conducted by a high command often at odds with itself, not only about personalities, policy, and goals, but about structure as well.
Thus, although the war of Israeli independence may have appeared a puny affair by the standards of the epic struggles just ended in Europe and Asia less than five years earlier, it was, in fact, a struggle of extraordinary strategic complexity. No government can conduct war by rule of thumb, and this situation was no exception. Thus, for example, at the outset of the war Ben-Gurion made a strategic decision that violated or seemed to violate a cardinal principle of war: he ordered the general staff to defend every Jewish settlement throughout Palestine, rather than abandoning some in order to concentrate their forces for counteroffensives. At the same time he authorized local commanders to undertake counteroffensives.44 This presents an interesting case of the intersection between operational and strategic decision-making.
Ben-Gurion’s decision had two rationales. First, by defending every location the Jews of Palestine would delay and absorb attacks by both local Arabs and the armies of the Arab states, gaining time for the mobilization of people and materiél within Palestine and abroad. This ability of the Jewish state to amass resources was central to his concept of the war. The agricultural settlements of Jewish Palestine were organized for self-defense; although a number fell throughout the country, most held, and even those that could not withstand Syrian, Egyptian, or Jordanian assaults made the enemy pay a price in time and space. His second reason for not yielding an inch of ground without a fight was psychological: it would deny the enemy the satisfaction and encouragement of seeing the Jews flee. Disdaining the Jews as a subject and nonwarrior race, many Arabs were unprepared for a fierce fight. To the Jewish side it was an equally important statement: that flight was no longer a possibility; now, unlike during the hideous years just passed, Jews could—indeed must—stand and fight.
Ben-Gurion’s perilous decision came at a cost. The Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem was wiped out by the Arab Legion; Zemach and Mishmar Hayarden fell to the Syrians; Yad Mordechai fell to the Egyptians. By the end of the first truce the newborn Israel Defense Forces, awkwardly positioned as they were, had been stretched to the limits of their endurance. But the Israelis had blunted the initial attacks, secured important pockets within the borders assigned to them (particularly in the cities), and were far better prepared than their opponents to take advantage of the truce—to smuggle in weapons and volunteers, to reorganize, and to seize the initiative, which they did as soon as the truce ended.
Ben-Gurion’s peculiar mixture of ability to think big, ruthless determination, and flexibility shows to greatest advantage in his strategic decisions about Jerusalem. Under the terms of UN Resolution 181, which authorized the creation of the Jewish state, Jerusalem was to “be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime … administered by the United Nations.” With its Jewish population of roughly 100,000 and the holy sites (above all the Western Wall) Jerusalem had enormous significance to the yishuv both as a symbol and as a major population center. Although barely thirty miles from the coastal plain the city was at the mercy of its sole supply line, a winding mountain road dominated by Arab villages. Well before Israeli independence, convoys carrying supplies to Jerusalem came under fire from local Palestinian Arabs, ably led by Abd el-Kadr al-Hussaini. As British forces withdrew, they tended to cover only their own convoys, and gave less and less protection to the Jewish convoys.
At the outset of the war, therefore, Ben-Gurion focused his attention on Jerusalem. By January 1948 he had in mind a multistage campaign for the city, timed to coincide with the British departure, and to include an operation to secure the road to the coast.45 On 31 March the general staff came to his house to discuss several matters.
I told them that at this moment there is only one burning question—the fight for the road to Jerusalem, and the manpower that Yigal [Yadin] has prepared—400–500 men—is inadequate. This is now the decisive fight. The fall of Jewish Jerusalem would be a death blow to the yishuv, and the Arabs understand that and have concentrated many forces to cut our communications, and we must take all unused manpower [for this purpose].… We immediately went back to the office to organize the operation.46
The result of Ben-Gurion’s order was the largest operation the Israelis would undertake until late in the war—NACHSHON, named after the first Israelite to plunge into the Red Sea during the Exodus from Egypt. The brigade-sized operation, the Jews’ first, involved 1,500 troops from 3–16 April; its desperate combat included a fight for the hilltop known as Kastel, in which the best Palestinian guerrilla leader, Abd el-Kadr Hussaini, fell. Three large convoys got through to the city, providing the wherewithal to allow it to hold on—barely—through the first bitter month of all-out warfare, which erupted a month later. The Jewish population of Jerusalem had, just as importantly, now gained the confidence to hang on during a desperate siege. The Arab villagers, on the other hand, never recovered enough offensive spirit for another try.
Once the war had fairly started, Ben-Gurion insisted that the defense of Jerusalem must take first precedence, even over the dire needs of Israeli settlements in the north and south that were under attack from regular Arab armies. As so often occurs in war, seemingly minor choices had large repercussions. At one point, Ben-Gurion argued with the chief of the operations department of the Israel Defense Forces, Yigal Yadin, over whether four obsolete 65-millimeter cannon should go north to the Galilee or to Jerusalem (as Ben-Gurion preferred). Yadin, who seems to have exaggerated in retrospect his willingness to defy the Old Man, reported that he slammed his fist down so hard on Ben-Gurion’s table that the glass broke. It seems that after all the two compromised.47
The eruption of the interstate war threw Jerusalem once again into contention. Once the interstate war began, the Arab Legion’s police fortress at Latrun sealed the road far more firmly than the villagers had. Ben-Gurion ordered repeated, costly assaults on Latrun; they were some of the bloodiest battles of the war, and they remain deeply controversial to the present day.48 In some of these assaults untrained waves of new immigrants were reported (inaccurately, as it turned out) to have borne the brunt of the assaults, suffering large losses for no gain. In any event the well-trained, British-led Arab Legion beat back the Israeli attacks on Latrun while Jordanian forces within Jerusalem reduced the Jewish Quarter in the walled Old City. Ben-Gurion turned to an American officer, Mickey Marcus, to deal with the problem of Jerusalem. Marcus, a graduate of West Point, had served with distinction during World War II as a US Army lawyer, albeit a lawyer with a penchant for finding his way to the front line. In keeping with the principle of thinking big, Ben-Gurion made him Israel’s first aluf, or general officer commanding a front. Marcus was unable to take Latrun, but he did, on the day just before the onset of the truce, succeed in constructing a bypass road that allowed convoys to move up to Jerusalem and relieve the near-starvation conditions there.
Ben-Gurion’s determined campaign to control Jerusalem had been largely but not entirely successful. The city held, and Jewish forces within the city had taken important Arab neighborhoods; the Old City, however, including the Temple Mount, had fallen to the Arab Legion. Yet when the truce ended and the period of Jewish offensive operations resumed, Ben-Gurion no longer devoted the bulk of the Israel Defense Forces’ efforts to Jerusalem; it became a relatively quiet front. He turned, rather, to the conquest of the Galilee and the clearing of Egyptian forces from the Negev.49
Ben-Gurion, seemingly inflexible in negotiation and action, had, in fact, the gift of knowing when to content himself with half a loaf—as he had in accepting the UN partition resolution, which left the proposed Jewish state looking like three indefensible blotches of ground touching at only two points. If the Jewish state was to be viable it needed the empty spaces of the Negev desert, and some degree of depth in the north as well. Moreover, Ben-Gurion knew well that Jerusalem was a matter of international concern, and he had already begun to feel pressure on that score from the international community. Furthermore, like other Jewish leaders, he continued to entertain hopes of a pragmatic deal with King Abdullah of Transjordan, who was restraining his more ardently nationalistic subordinates and would content himself with control of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem—which were virtually identical to the Jewish ones.
For half a year, from July 1948 through January 1949, David Ben-Gurion directed a war characterized by short, intense episodes of fighting followed by truces often violated in letter or spirit by both sides. Throughout this second half of the open war between Israel and its Arab neighbors the Israel Defense Forces grew in size, sophistication, and self-confidence. Its short, sharp offensives allowed the IDF to recover virtually all the territory assigned to the state of Israel under the original United Nations partition plan, and to gain more at the expense of its neighbors. By the time final truce talks began on Rhodes in January Israeli forces had penetrated into the Sinai peninsula, isolating a large Egyptian force, and had clear superiority over Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi forces in the country’s center and north. Ben-Gurion managed the Israeli war effort carefully, favoring the aggressive exploitation of Arab truce violations, but knowing when to refrain from pushing too far.
Thus, in September 1948 Ben-Gurion was contemplating a thrust at Hebron, just south of Jerusalem. A successful operation might have given Israel all of the West Bank south of Jerusalem, and perhaps brought it back to the Old City itself. The Cabinet opposed the move, so, reluctantly, Ben-Gurion set aside the proposal, later calling it a matter of “weeping for the generations” that the newly created state would not dominate all of the Judaean hills to the Jordan River.50 But in light of the hostility of Great Britain, only lukewarm support from the United States and the Soviet Union, and his own anxiety about the Palestinian refugee problem—already a source of ill will for the new state—prudence dictated otherwise, and on 27 September he told his government, “We are not free to use our military power. Even more powerful states than ours are not completely free in this way. In this world everything depends on everything else.…”51 Acutely conscious though he was of the new state’s military superiority over its enemies, and desirous though he was of expanding its borders, Ben-Gurion accepted the limits imposed by international politics.
We can win in war and strike our enemies and smash the armies of Abdullah and Syria, and Iraq and Egypt, and drive them from the land—and we can still lose the diplomatic battle if as a result we create decisive state interests against us in the rest of the world.52
Visiting the southern front in 1949, he asked Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Rabin how they would conquer the area south of Hebron.
Alon began explaining in some detail how he would conduct the operation. Suddenly he stopped and asked in wonder, “Listen Ben-Gurion, do you really want to conquer this area?” There was a lightning flash in Ben-Gurion’s eyes. He replied, “It’s not possible now, but maybe, some day.…”53
Ben-Gurion would have gladly taken the entire western bank of the Jordan for the new Jewish state, and he grieved for the loss of the eastern half of Jerusalem. But prudence triumphed over ambition. The enmity of a British government that had opposed partition and supported Israel’s chief military opponents (Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq), coupled with the flood of Palestinian refugees fleeing the fighting to neighboring countries, made Israel’s international situation precarious. He neither desired nor could he expect the embrace of the Soviet Union as a patron, and the United States, although sympathetic, had no desire to further alienate the Arab world by supporting the expansion of the Jewish state.
Ben-Gurion, like many war statesmen, found himself not only immersed in the problem of strategy as normally understood—the challenge of applying force to achieve political ends—but compelled to construct institutions at the same time. He was a self-conscious state-builder, who described his political philosophy as one of mamlachtiut (statism). Acutely aware of the extraordinary diversity of the Jews of Palestine and of the many more diaspora Jews who, he hoped, would stream in following independence, he was determined to create a state with strong institutions. This began most simply with the mandatory use of Hebrew, an ancient language only recently revived from its status as a tongue of prayer and religious instruction to one of daily use. One of his first orders as defense minister, for example, was to require of general officers that they Hebraicize their names: he understood well the importance of symbols in shaping a new state.
Of most pressing importance was the creation of a military organization that would serve as a neutral servant of the new Israeli state, responsive to the duly constituted political authority alone and possessing an unquestioned monopoly on the use of force. A week after the beginning of the first truce (which commenced on 11 June and lasted through 8 July) Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, “Of all the deficiencies of our military, lack of discipline is the most severe, and above all at the highest levels.”54 He wrote this after a ten-hour meeting with all the brigade commanders in the IDF, in which he quizzed them closely about the conduct of operations to this point.55 Ben-Gurion blamed the unwillingness of the high command to devote an unreserved effort to the seizure of Latrun for the tenuousness of a secure line of communications to Jerusalem, but his worries included not only the creation of a responsive general staff but the incorporation of both the pre-independence guerrilla and terrorist movements and the absorption of the autonomous left-wing Palmach into the new Israel Defense Forces.
These internal political battles, which sometimes took place in smoky conference rooms but occasionally spilled out onto the Tel Aviv seafront, were every bit as bitter as any operational decision about where and how to deploy the scanty forces of the new Israeli military. No doubt Ben-Gurion’s autocratic style and temper contributed much to their acerbity and to the extreme quality of some of his decisions, and it is not always easy to distinguish between his concerns as a state-builder and his mere insistence on having his way. Nevertheless the result was an Israel Defense Forces that, despite its peculiar qualities as the embodiment of a nation in arms, was an essentially professional and politically neutral, if not completely subordinate, military force.
The IDF came into existence on 26 May 1948, its leadership and central staffs simply moving over from the Haganah and Palmach. The leaders of the two competing underground units, the Lechi and the IZL, pledged to merge with the new IDF—a relatively trivial problem for the tiny Lechi, which had only a few hundred activists at most. The IZL, which had perhaps 3,000 men under arms, in accordance with an agreement in March 1948 became part of the IDF in most parts of the country upon independence. It had fought under the general direction of the Haganah in the period immediately before independence, with the important exception of Jerusalem, where its base of support had been particularly strong, and where its men made up a substantial fraction of the city’s defenders—a strong battalion of perhaps 700.56
There remained bad blood between the IZL and the Haganah/Palmach. Memories of “the season,” when the Haganah had helped hunt down IZL activists, still lingered. The Haganah blamed the IZL for the April 1948 massacre of Arab villagers at Deir Yasin outside Jerusalem, when a misconceived and botched assault on a village that was marginal to the struggle for the roads around the city turned into a bloodbath. The IZL felt aggrieved at being blamed, given that the attack had been approved by the Haganah commander in the city. Furthermore, most IZL members viewed with suspicion the hard left-wing ideology of the Palmach, which in turn looked upon the IZL as a potential source of ideological contamination of the new state. The clash came to a head in the Altalena affair.
The IZL, like the Haganah, had run an extensive arms-acquisition and illegal-immigration operation in Europe immediately after World War II. In early June 1948 the ship Altalena headed for Israel from southern France, crammed with arms (some 5,000 rifles, 250 machine guns, mortars, and large quantities of shells, grenades, and high explosives) and some 900 overseas volunteers. She approached the shore on 19 June, eight days after the first truce began. It was a substantial increment of supplies and manpower, and it was clearly the intention of the IZL high command to reserve much if not all of the incoming ship’s cargo for the use of IZL units, particularly in Jerusalem. Ben-Gurion was equally determined that the ship and all it contained should be put at the disposal of the IDF. After a series of miscommunications between ship and shore, and misunderstanding between the two sides over who would have control of the ship’s unloading, on 19 June the Altalena stood in to shore, first at Kfar Vitkin and then off the Tel Aviv shoreline. IZL men left their units to help with the unloading. Ben-Gurion ordered Palmach units under the command of a twenty-six-year-old Yitzhak Rabin to open fire upon the Altalena, with the result that eighteen IZL men were killed and ten wounded.57 It was a heart-rending and horrifying scene. Barely containing his fury Menachem Begin, leader of the IZL, ordered his men not to retaliate, however, and the absorption of the IZL into the IDF was completed shortly thereafter. In a pugnacious phrase that outraged and infuriated many a right-wing Israeli in years to come, Ben-Gurion insisted that when the Jews finally built the Third Temple (the First having been destroyed in 586 B.C.E., and the Second in 70 C.E.), the “holy cannon” that sank the Altalena would find its place at the side of the altar.58
The end of the Altalena affair, however, was a long way from the end of the challenges that David Ben-Gurion faced in creating a united and politically responsive IDF. The continuation of a semi-independent Palmach posed, in his view, an equal threat to the solidity of the military institutions of the Jewish state. The Palmach had come into existence in 1941 as a way of keeping small standing units available, particularly for guerrilla operations, in defense of a Palestinian Jewish community menaced by the march of Rommel’s army in Egypt. In time the Palmach, based largely on friendly kibbutzim, became the semi-standing force of the yishuv. When the war with the Arab states broke out, the Palmach consisted of three brigades (out of an IDF total of ten), with a separate command structure, even though Ben-Gurion had intended its battalions to be distributed among the regular brigades of the army.59 It was most definitely a home-grown organization—socialist, informal, and proud of an independent military style, disdaining the spit-and-polish of regular armies. Its leaders were some of the best the IDF had, most notably Yigal Alon, its overall commander, and Yitzhak Rabin, commander of the Harel brigade on the Jerusalem front.
Ben-Gurion used the Palmach to suppress the IZL. He now undertook, in a far more measured way, the dismantling of the Palmach itself.60 The possibility of conflict with the high command of the Palmach, and to some extent with the Haganah overall, had emerged much earlier, beginning with Ben-Gurion’s firing of Galili as chief of the National Command on 3 May 1948, less than two weeks before independence and all-out war. He yielded to the military’s protests at this—they much preferred to work with the more even-tempered Galili—but although Ben-Gurion reinstated Galili in an anomalous status thereafter, he established his own control by insisting that he must have full authority as defense minister, i.e., the right to issue orders directly to the general staff. On 12 May the shadow government yielded to his demands.61
Ben-Gurion’s authority, however, came under fierce attack from his political enemies and from some quarters in the military itself. During the first truce Ben-Gurion wanted the appointment of British-trained officers, including Mordechai Makleff, to take over the all-important central front. He looked as well to experienced officers like Ben Dunkelman (a Canadian Jew who had served with distinction in the Canadian army in Europe throughout World War II) to take command of the dispirited, newly formed 7th Brigade, which would eventually become the first armored formation in the Israel Defense Forces.62 Like many foreign-trained officers, Dunkelman had encountered suspicion and even condescension from home-grown Israeli soldiers. When Dunkelman commented on the lax staff work in the Palmach brigade to which he was first attached, he received a sharp rebuke from the plans officer. “In the Palmach, we have to see the ground—we don’t do our planning from maps!”63
Matters came to a head on 24 June when Ben-Gurion rejected Yadin’s plan for reorganizing the high command, which would have kept the primacy of senior Palmach officers and men of the left-wing Mapam party. On 1 July Yadin and Mapam members of the general staff tendered their resignations—although just how serious that gesture was remains a matter of dispute. In one of the truly astonishing episodes of the war, the new Israeli government, in a country on the verge of renewed hostilities on the southern front, set up a five-man commission including the ministers of Foreign Affairs, Justice, Health and Immigration, and Agriculture, from a range of political parties chaired by Interior Minister Yitzchak Greenbaum, a long-time Zionist functionary, to inquire into Ben-Gurion’s conduct of the war.64 From 3 through 6 July it met, hearing the testimony of bitter generals—including Yadin, who, though somewhat more moderate than the others, criticized Ben-Gurion’s intrusion into the details of war. “Matters of war are separated into two parts,” Yadin argued, “one part strategic decisions, the highest politics of the war, but the army has a second part—the actual operational part.”65 One could not ask for a more perfect statement of the “normal” theory of civil-military relations. “Tell me what you want me to do, not how to do it,” he said in effect, echoing the sentiments of soldiers throughout the ages.
Ben-Gurion offered a spirited response. He noted the politicization of the army and was sharply critical of the Haganah and the Palmach for their bias against British-trained officers and for general indiscipline. He declared that his intrusion into matters of detail resulted from the failure of the military to follow through on his orders. He asserted his right to oversee all aspects of war, which were interconnected. When the Greenbaum committee recommended curtailing Ben-Gurion’s powers by inserting an intermediate level between the defense minister and the chief of staff (re-establishing, in other words, the chief of the National Command), and suggesting that all disputes between the two come to the War Cabinet, Ben-Gurion offered his resignation. With only a day to spare before the end of the first truce, the Cabinet caved in, and Ben-Gurion retained his overwhelming authority.
Ben-Gurion timed his move against the Palmach carefully. On the eve of the resumption of hostilities against the Egyptians in late October 1948 he had the IDF disestablish the Palmach’s high command while retaining its units in their three brigade-sized formations. It was a shrewdly chosen juncture: Yigal Alon was busy as commander of Israel’s southern front; he succeeded in taking the whole of the Negev desert, sending a flying column to take possession of Eilat, Israel’s future Red Sea port, and even penetrating as far as El Arish in the Sinai. Still, Palmach members protested the decision, foreseeing that this would lead to the ultimate dissolution of the Palmach itself. Ben-Gurion denied this, but made a case that pointed in the direction of such a move. Writing to a wounded Palmachnik, he disavowed (disingenuously, of course) any intention of breaking up the Palmach itself.66
Again Ben-Gurion chose his moment carefully. In May 1949 he ordered the final absorption of the Palmach into the IDF by dissolving the three Palmach brigades. There were protests and much bitterness.67 Ben-Gurion shunted aside the charismatic Alon, who was a natural candidate to become the first peacetime chief of staff of the IDF; he turned instead to Yigal Yadin, the ascetic young archaeologist turned soldier who had never served in the Palmach, as a replacement for the ailing Ya’akov Dori. Yadin had complained about Ben-Gurion but never turned as bitterly against him as other commanders, and he was neutral in the disputes between the different schools of thought in the new IDF. Ben-Gurion retained the promising young commanders, including Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin, who would subsequently become chiefs of staff themselves, but he made quite clear his intention to create a unified IDF culture. The selection of Yadin was shrewd: organized and precise, Yadin resembled the British-trained officers that Ben-Gurion favored, without having been one himself.
Yadin possessed great talent as an organizer and briefer, if not as a combat commander. His crisp military analyses impressed more than one foreign observer, including the British military journalist and historian Basil Liddell Hart; and to Yadin belongs the credit for the groundwork of the IDF’s organization as a nation in arms following the struggle for independence. He appreciated, with Ben-Gurion, the need for formal discipline and for all the infrastructure of a regular army; what he lacked was the spark of inspired combat leadership—which others could and did provide.
Working through Yadin, Ben-Gurion navigated Israeli strategy through a complex set of perils—the imminence of UN intervention to internationalize the new part of Jerusalem, which the Israelis held firmly; British hostility, which culminated in an aerial clash between the Israeli and the Royal Air Forces over the Sinai at the end of the war; international sympathy for the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the fighting. At war’s end Israel, having successfully mobilized and organized a substantial military force, controlled more land than had been originally allotted under the partition resolution, and, because of the flight of large portions of the Palestinian Arab population, land in which the Jews constituted a firm majority. A Jewish state recognized by the world’s great powers had come into existence, and if its borders were long and exposed, it had, nonetheless, the base it needed on which to grow and flourish.
Israel, like many democratic states, takes for granted a military that views itself, by and large, as the neutral servant of a modern state. It has not always or entirely been so—and indeed, without Ben-Gurion’s conscious efforts, one doubts whether it would ever have become so.68 The Palmach could easily have become, or attempted to become, an ideological Praetorian Guard for a socialist state. In fact, the senior ranks of the IDF were not and never have been quite immune from partisan politics—nor could they be, as generals retired young and often moved directly into politics. Still, the Ben-Gurionist imprint on the IDF made it an infinitely more professional and apolitical force than that of any Arab country save Jordan, with corresponding benefits in terms of military effectiveness.
Ben-Gurion was the father of the IDF in other ways. He remains even to this day a revered founding figure in the military even more than in society at large: periodically, in fact, members of the IDF high command have been known to gather for a day of study of his writings, pondering his legacy and its meaning. Throughout his retirement generals came to consult the Old Man, sometimes with scary results. When in May 1967 Rabin as chief of staff came to talk to him at Sde Boker about the imminent possibility of war, Ben-Gurion lashed out at the danger of Israel embarking upon a conflict without a single international ally.69 Shaken, Rabin, his nerves already overstretched by anxiety, short of sleep and overdosed on the cigarettes he puffed nonstop, almost collapsed. But the old statesman knew better than most the dangers that inhere in war. Operationally the conflict turned out better than anyone could have expected, but his forebodings about the consequences even of a war handily won—in particular, the problem of what to do with a large, hostile Palestinian population—were closer to the mark than any could have anticipated.
Ben-Gurion, like other great war statesmen, combined a warm affection for soldiers and their commanders with a mistrust of military bureaucracy, he had, let it be said, a streak of near-pacifist antipathy to war as well.
The essence of an army’s existence is not democratic, not humane, not Zionist, and not socialistic, because an army exists for killing and destruction. But there is no escaping the fact that our enemies wish to annihilate us, and only through military power can we destroy the enemy’s will and ability to harm us.70
These words come from one of his most interesting speeches, delivered on 19 June 1948; entitled “From the Haganah in the Underground to a Regular Army,” it captures some of the key features of his military thought. It included, as well, his unyielding view of expert military advice:
In military matters, as in all other matters of substance, experts knowledgeable in technique don’t decide, even though their advice and guidance is vital; rather, an open mind and a common sense are essential. And these qualities are possessed—to a greater or lesser degree—by any normal man.71
There are no general issues [in war],” Ben-Gurion said, “only details.”72 If he is to be faulted it should be for having failed to create institutions that could sustain the kind of civilian control he exercised personally as prime minister and minister of defense, roles that he combined throughout his political career. He had brilliant protégés such as Shimon Peres, whom he put into the ministry of defense, but before long retired generals, rather than true civilians, came to exercise the real control over the conduct of Israel’s military affairs. Ben-Gurion’s inbred secretiveness, the result of years of semi-clandestine political work, the East European socialist political culture, and the imperative of security for a small and threatened state, impeded civilian scrutiny of Israel’s military institutions by, for example, the Defense and Foreign Affairs committees of the Knesset. Some would go further, arguing that Ben-Gurion was responsible for a kind of idolatrous worship of the IDF which obscured its real weaknesses until 1973 and 1982, and which bred a kind of militarization of Israeli foreign policy. These criticisms may have some merit, but they go too far. The feat of creating an independent state under incredibly adverse political and military circumstances in 1948-49 was an astonishing achievement; to do so while inculcating the fundamentals of political neutrality and professionalism into a military forged out of disparate factions and composed of recruits from every corner of the earth, was more remarkable yet.
Ben-Gurion held one more seminar. In 1953 he once again stepped back from public responsibilities and carefully scrutinized Israeli defense policy.73 From the end of August through mid-October—seven weeks—he decided to start over again “as if I knew nothing, just as I did in 1946.”74 Once again he interviewed commanders, read widely, and pored over intelligence estimates.
This time his conclusions were very different. He saw for Israel a window of opportunity in which a resumption of large-scale warfare was unlikely. He also noted that the traditional Arab regimes, which the Jews of Palestine thought they understood and with which they had had longstanding contacts, were being displaced by more radical nationalist regimes far less amenable to covert or tacit deals. Foreseeing a long period of hostility to the Jewish state, he began constructing a new strategy, resting on three pillars: foreign alliance (with France), the acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the temporary deferral of large-scale military expenditure in favor of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of new Jewish immigrants from Arab lands. It was another act of strategic foresight and one which, once again, did not sit well with the Israeli military establishment.
Ben-Gurion had many remarkable qualities as a military statesman, not least of which was his awareness of when to stop. In a stubborn, willful, and angry man such qualities are all the more impressive. His unwillingness to overreach at the end of the Israeli war of independence, when the IDF could probably have seized much if not all of the West Bank of the Jordan or bits of the Sinai, is a fine example of understanding what Clausewitz called “the culminating point of victory”—the point beyond which success will likely tip into failure. But most remarkable of all was his willingness and ability to think everything through afresh. That indeed was his most important message for the IDF. In the summer of 1950, less than two years after the war, he wrote an introduction to a collection of speeches published by the IDF’s publishing house. He concluded with these words:
The most dangerous enemy to Israel’s security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security. This simple and fundamental idea guided me from the day that I accepted, at the 22nd Zionist Congress, responsibility for the security of the yishuv. And this simple and fundamental thought I tried to instill in all of the comrades that worked with me on security matters before the war, during the war, and after it.75
This “simple and fundamental truth,” as he called it, still stands as a warning to the IDF—and indeed to all military organizations today.