A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion

He saw Zionism as “the light secreted in the soul” of the Jewish people.

“In my opinion, Judaism is a historical experience,”

“One doesn’t receive a country, one conquers it,” he declared a few weeks after the outbreak of the Great War. “We will conquer Palestine by developing it,” he wrote.

Both his admirers and his rivals agreed that he was his generation’s most singular man. But, paradoxically, his uniqueness was almost a norm for many members of his generation. As Jews, they were anomalous in their non-Jewish surroundings; as Zionists, they were anomalous among Jews; as Israelis, they were anomalous in their Arab surroundings; as s

Weizmann continued to meet with MacDonald; Ben-Gurion said that it was “psychologically impossible” for him to do so. “In my view, he is like a member of Hitler’s gang, and our friends need to know that no Jew can meet with him.”

“Five or six million Jews are being crushed and we have no guarantee that Palestine will not be dragged into the war,” he said in April 1941. “There are things over which we have no control. We cannot eject Hitler from Europe, we cannot prevent him from getting to Egypt.”

“When the United States revokes its own statehood, I will revoke the Jewish state.”

“If we must offend one side,” Chamberlain told his Cabinet, “let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.”

A few days after he arrived in Salonica, Ben-Gurion received a piece of advice: under no circumstances should he reveal to his Jewish landlady that he was Ashkenazi. There were many Jews in the city, and nearly all of them were Sephardim. Young Ashkenazi men like Ben-Gurion were thought to be involved in trafficking women.31 From time to time he ha

Jibli recalled that Ben-Gurion loved her traditional Yemenite jahnun, served with a tomato sauce.