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What would Ben-Gurion do?
Pioneer’s biographer imagines bold steps for peace
As a doctoral student at the University of Paris, Michael Bar Zohar wrote “Suez Top Secret,” a thesis on the Sinai campaign. He sent a copy to Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1964.
It was eight years after Ben-Gurion’s government had vanquished Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula.
“He sent me a very warm letter,” said Bar Zohar, “and I was emboldened by it,” enough to ask for a meeting with the prime minister. “I asked to write his biography, and two weeks later I got a positive answer. It started a cooperation that lasted on and off” until the Israeli pioneer’s death in 1973.
Now, some 33 years later, Bar Zohar will take a look back at Ben-Gurion’s life and contributions when he speaks at B’nai Israel in Millburn at a May 7 lecture entitled “Ben-Gurion As I Knew Him.”
To the biographer, Ben-Gurion remains a man of contradictions — an advocate of peaceful compromise who was always prepared to go to war, a staunchly secular leader who would have welcomed support from Christian evangelists, and an ardent socialist who could be both pleased and disappointed by Israel’s strength as a world economic power.
Taking time out from preparing his speech, Bar Zohar speculated in an April 12 interview that Ben-Gurion might have taken bold steps toward peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors and possibly even bolder ones against Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the religiously motivated Israeli settlers on the West Bank.
“He tried quite a lot of times when he was in power to get into secret negotiations with the Arabs,” most notably Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, said Bar Zohar. “He was ready to go very far in concessions in order to get peace because he feared very much these very dangerous confrontations.”
On the other hand, “he was very tough with the real enemies of Israel. He would have fought Hamas up to the end.”
During the years of Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestinian people, “Ben-Gurion would never have signed an agreement because Arafat was a liar and a terrorist. [Ben-Gurion] would have signed an agreement with King Hussein of Jordan. He would have signed an agreement with Anwar Sadat,” the assassinated president of Egypt, the author speculated.
“He would have been smart enough not to make the mistake of succeeding prime ministers [Shimon] Peres and [Yitzhak] Rabin, who wanted something very lofty, like making peace with the Palestinians. But unfortunately, Arafat was the wrong partner.”
According to Bar Zohar, Israel’s first head of state “would have been ready to go to great concessions for a real peace. After the Six Day War, when all of Israel was in euphoria, Ben-Gurion was the only one who said, ‘For real peace we should be ready to give back everything except Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.’ He would not have created the settlements — not for a moral reason but for a very simple pragmatic reason. He knew that the demography is going to play against him. He believed very strongly in the traditional right of all of Eretz Yisrael, but he realized that for peace, we have to make concessions. That is why he wouldn’t have permitted the settlements.”
As he considered the Iranian government’s potential nuclear threat to Israel and other parts of the Middle East, Bar Zohar believes Ben-Gurion “would have gone to war against Iran to stop it. But he would have acted with allies. He wanted very much not to act in total isolation.”
Following Einstein
Born in Bulgaria, Bar Zohar made aliya in 1948, studying economics and international relations at The Hebrew University, eventually earning his doctorate at the University of Paris. He served twice in the Knesset as a member of Ben-Gurion’s Labor party and has written some 30 books. His Ben-Gurion: A Biography was first published in 1977.
According to Bar Zohar, Ben-Gurion “was not a religious man; he never ate kosher. He almost never went to a shul except for a special ceremony. But in his last years he said, ‘First of all I am a Jew, then an Israeli.’ Then, about six months before his death, he said to me, ‘I believe in God.’ I said, ‘Ben-Gurion, all your life you were sort of an atheist?’ He said, ‘In the last years of his life, Albert Einstein believed in God, and if Einstein could, I could, too.’”
While some Jews are wary of American-Christian evangelicals’ support of Israel, said Bar Zohar, “Ben-Gurion felt we should befriend everybody we can. The importance of having friends in the world was very important to him. He would have embraced the help of fundamentalist Christians with gusto, with pleasure. He was very pragmatic. If you have 85 million Americans who love you and want to help you, to give them up? Never. Definitely not.”
As a committed socialist, “Ben-Gurion would have prevented most of the social problems in Israel,” chief among them “the widening gap between rich and poor in this era of high-tech, where companies are sold for hundreds of millions of dollars to American mega-companies and banks are giving huge salaries.”
According to his biographer, “If people like Ben-Gurion were still there, they would have convinced Israeli companies that these kinds of gaps between rich and poor cannot exist in a Jewish state. The moral question was extremely important. He felt if we don’t have a state with moral content, Israel is not worth staying in.”
Bar Zohar’s speech will begin at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. For information, contact Joshua Schor at jschor@aol.com.
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