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

“I fully understand your concern about the Kinneret operation. I must confess that I, too, began to have my doubts about the wisdom of it. But when I read the full text of your brilliant defense of our action in the Security Council, all my doubts were set at rest. You have convinced me that we were right, after all.”

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.”

“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.

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

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

Jabotinsky identified with liberal democratic ideas, and the free market, but did not reject state-sponsored development and settlement projects; Ben-Gurion called himself a socialist but did not reject private enterprise. He was really a social democrat. Jabotinsky’s movement attracted many workers, and many members of the middle class supported B

“There is a historical philosophy that sees war as man’s highest destiny,” he said. He was referring to the Nazis and Arabs. “This philosophy is an abomination to Judaism as we understand it and as it was understood, I believe, by the prophets and sages of the Bible.” At a Cabinet meeting he remarked, “An army is the most dangerous thing there is i

“What the gentiles say is less important than what the Jews do,”

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