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

It is impossible to exaggerate the degree to which Gordon’s worldview would profoundly shape the first decades of renewed Jewish life in Palestine. The centrality of agriculture to the early kibbutz movement, the image of Jews resettling the land as farmers (though even at the peak, only a very small percentage of Jews worked in agriculture), was i

The near asceticism of Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion, A. D. Gordon, or Golda Meir also disappeared. Israel’s early leaders had eschewed physical comforts, and even when they reached the peak of the political ladder, they lived in small, plain apartments with astonishingly few comforts. That, too, was gone. Israeli leaders began to permit themselv

If Herzl had given life to political Zionism, David Ben-Gurion had given life to the State of Israel.

HIS DISAPPOINTMENT IN AMERICAN Jews notwithstanding, Ben-Gurion presided over a project of immigrant absorption of unprecedented proportions. Never in human history had such a small population absorbed so many immigrants so successfully.