Incomplete account
Harold Beeley
Israel: A Persona/ History David BenGurion (New English Library £7.00)
Official biographies of political leaders used to have the effect of making us believe that their subjects could not possibly have been so uninteresting. From there it was a short step to wishing that the victims had spoken for themselves, and hoping that their successors would learn the lesson. They have indeed, and some of them have devoted immense labour to undermining our optimistic assumptions. I met Mr Ben-Gurion only three or four times, long ago, but it was enough to realise that here was a more complex and arresting personality than emerges from this monumental work.
It is true that he describes it not as an autobiography but as a 'personal history' of his country: the distinction turns out however to be a fine one, leaving him undecided whether to refer to himself in the first or the third person, to the extent of occasionally using both on the same page.
Judged as history, the book is remarkable for its omissions. The most peculiar relates to what has become known as the Lavon affair, by which he is evidently obsessed and to which he devotes no less than fifty-four pages, all basically incomprehensible to a reader who has no other sources of information because he is never told for what error Lavon as Minister of Defence in 1954 was held to have been responsible. It was a' "security mishap," Mr Ben-Gurion says, and leaves it at that. The fact, so well known that discretion can hardly be his motive, is that an unsuccessful attempt was made to damage Egypt's relations with the United Kingdom and the United States by blowing up certain British and American establishments in Cairo.
Similar but more important is the extraordinary lacuna in the account of the Sinai campaign of 1956 and its origins, which are discussed without a single reference to preparatory contacts with the French and British governments or to the relevance of Franco-British operations. The capture of the Egyptian destroyer, Ibrahim al A wal, for instance, is attributed exclusively to Israeli action without the slightest hint that the first and decisive hit was scored by a French warship. Somewhat ungraciously in view of Mr BenGurion's own insistence before the event, if not altogether inaccurately in the light of hindsight, Israel is depicted as having been " encumbered by the military intervention of Great Britain and France almost simultaneously with the Israeli action."
Eleven years later, at the time of the six-day war, Mr Ben-Gurion was no longer in office, but he cannot have been left so completely in the dark as to believe that the following passage is anything other than a travesty of the decision-making process in Jerusalem: " In the early morning hours of June 5, 1967, Israeli radar stations throughout the country showed enemy jets over Egypt heading for Israel. Egyptian armoured vehicles rolling toward the Israeli border in Sinai were also detected. . . . The Israel Defence '..es were ordered to strike."
In the post-war period an event which escapes mention is the Security Council's unanimous vote for the resolution of November 22, 1967. That month of November was not uneventful for Mr BenGurion, since it also brought President de Gaulle's celebrated reference to the Jews Thn elite people, self-assured and domineering." Mr Ben-Gurion was greatly disturbed by this and expostulated in a letter of immense length to the President, who concluded a briefer reply with his "fondest regards for the New Year." It was no doubt natural that Mr Ben-Gurion should be more concerned to correct the views of one whom he recognised as a fellow-exponent of realpolitik than to take accountant of those expressed at the UN.
This indifference to wider international considerations was one of the causes of the eventual estrangement between Mr Ben-Gurion and the man who was for many years his Foreign Minister and who was also Israel's first alternative Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett. The speciqc issue which led to the latter's resignation in June, 1956, was the policy of reacting by massive retaliation against the neighbouring Arab States after Arab incursions across the border. One such retaliatory raid, into the Gaza strip in February, 1955, had occasioned Nasser's first approach to the Soviet bloc for arms he could not obtain from the West. "Do people consider," Sharett asked in 1957, "that when military reactions outstrip in their severity the events that caused them, grave processes are set in motion which Widen the gulf and thrust our neighbours into the extremist camp? . . . If we had not taken the course of . . . Gaza . . . Nasser might perhaps not have been forced into the Czech deal."
Sharett knew well enough that this kind of enlightened patience was totally alien to the mind of his leader.
Mr Ben-Gurion's most recent statements contain evidence of a new breadth of thought. He has come to see that in the long run Israel cannot be made securi? against her neighbours but must seek 'a relationship of mutual security with them. It is late, and his earlier doctrine has been • too well absorbed by his successors; but has place in history will not be fairly Judged if no account is taken of his more Mature reflection. More, in fact, than he has taken himself in this volume.
It is difficult not to be unfair to so disappointing a book. On the credit side is the reproduction of lengthy passages from the author's direct, purposeful and lucid speeches, and of discussions in the Israeli Cabinet. (It is not made clear, however, whether or not these are drawn from official record.) And Ben-Gurion himself, for all his limitations, will be remembered, like Jinnah, as a leader who made a decisive contribution to the creation of a new State — in both cases a State inseparably involved with a religion, though paradoxically neither of them cared overmuch for that.
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