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

Many people on both sides of the conflict suffered. What distinguished Israeli society then, though, and what would continue to characterize it in years to come was its almost compulsive tendency to self-critique. Still in its infancy, Israel was becoming a highly self-reflective society. Poets and politicians alike insisted that if Israel was to m

Herzl is especially interested in the inhabitants of Palestine and the prospects for colonizing it.

The St. Louis, the Patria, and the Struma brought home a single point with terrible clarity. For Jews who had no place to go, a Jewish state—Herzl’s dream and Balfour’s promise—was more critically necessary than it had ever been before. The creation of a Jewish state was now literally a matter of life and death.

Yet Herzl’s vision of a sovereign state had meaning, increasing numbers of Israelis believed, only if those new Jews rooted themselves and their humanity in the tradition they had inherited. Herzl without Ahad Ha’am was merely political sovereignty—and that, Israelis began to sense, was simply not enough. Theodor Herzl. Ahad Ha’am. Two radically di