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

“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.

The motivation for building is “aesthetic, religious, and transcendental,” he said, but when it is time to build, “you have to weigh and measure … The same is true with statecraft.”

“I am that I am,”

By the second half of 1943, the Holocaust was no longer considered a big story. Berl Katznelson, the editor of Davar, thought that the public was not interested in reading about the annihilation of the Jews.

“But we must carry on with what we began here sixty years ago, and in doing so save perhaps a remnant.”

His article cited a theory that Spinoza’s ideas derived from Buddhism; he was inclined to agree.

“We must stress the positive,” he said. “It is not good for us to stand in the light of ‘the whole world is against us.’”

“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.”

“You chose God for yourselves” (Joshua 24:22),