David Ben-Gurion

Summary

Zionist leader cited by Kanafani for the slogan of no alternative, for the mobilisation of a military society in 1936-1939, and as a source for the strength and training function of the British-backed Zionist police forces.

Details

• The continuous internal mobilisation of Zionist settler society ran under the slogan adopted by Ben Gurion at the time, no alternative, emphasising the necessity of laying the foundations of a military society and of its military and economic instruments (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28 / printed p.55).

• Kanafani says Ben-Gurion tells only part of the truth in admitting Jewish recruits in the quasi-police force armed with rifles rose to 2,863 in September 1936, since there were also 12,000 men in the Haganah in 1937 and a further 3,000 in Jabotinsky’s National Military Organisation (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.57).

• Ben Gurion is cited affirming the additional Zionist police force made an ideal framework for the training of the Haganah (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.57).

• He is also cited on British efforts to establish a Zionist Air Force to safeguard imperial interests in Palestine (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.30 / printed p.58).

• Sayegh quotes Ben-Gurion, from Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p.489 (Note 2), as the settler-state’s veteran Prime Minister: the State of Israel is part of the Middle East only in geography, and part of world Jewry in the decisive aspects of dynamism, creation and growth, from which it will draw all its strength (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.8 / printed p.213).

• Sayegh lists Ben Gurion, with Herzl, Weizmann and Goldmann, among the Zionist leaders who preached that the chief enemy of Zionism is not Gentile anti-Semitism but Jewish assimilation (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214).

• In Said, Chapter Three II: at the Congress of the World Council of Po’ale Zion, July 29 to August 7, 1937, Ben-Gurion spoke of how the vicinity of Lebanon constitutes a tremendous political support for the Jewish state and called Lebanon the natural ally of Jewish Eretz Israel, its Christian people facing a destiny similar to that of the Jewish people (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.167 / printed p.146).

• In Said, Chapter Four II: when Ben-Gurion declared the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, he deliberately left out of his declaration any statement about Israel’s borders; Menachem Begin took the much neater step of securing the legality of those ever-expanding borders (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.227 / printed p.206).

• In Pappe, Ben-Gurion is the architect of the ethnic cleansing: he told the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.14), and, writing to his son in 1937, “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.47)

• Pappe presents him as the indisputable leader in whose private home all early and later chapters in the ethnic cleansing story were discussed and finalised, aided by the Consultancy; he exercised complete control over security and defence, and around 1937 the words Force and Opportunity emerged under his guidance for winning a purely Jewish state and dealing ‘militarily’ with the presence of a non-Jewish native majority (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.27, p.48).

• At Paris in August 1946 he accepted partition’s principle but not its dimensions (“We will demand a large chunk of Palestine”), holding eighty to ninety per cent of Mandatory Palestine enough provided Jewish predominance was ensured; the Jewish Agency’s 1947 map anticipated almost to the last dot pre-1967 Israel (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.50).

• His obsession with Bitachon overshadowed all other issues; given the defence portfolio by the 22nd Zionist Congress in 1946, he began, as the fateful decisions neared, to ignore the official structure and rely on clandestine formations (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.51-52).

• On the UN plan he led his associates simultaneously to accept and ignore Resolution 181: already in October 1947 he had said the Jewish state would not be obliged to accept an unsatisfactory map, told the Consultancy on 7 October 1947 that there “are no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish State”, and held that the borders “will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.62-63).

• In Pappe, Chapter 11: the Lausanne conference of spring 1949, based on Resolution 194 and centred on the refugees’ return, was deliberately torpedoed by Ben-Gurion and King Abdullah, who had set their minds on partitioning what was left of Palestine between them (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.274). In Chapter 12 Pappe recalls Ben-Gurion’s December 1947 position that there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent, and calls the ethnic cleansing he instigated the following year his ‘new approach’ to that problem (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.288).

• In Manna, the interim government that oversaw the war effort after May 1948 was led by Ben-Gurion; its minister of police and minority affairs, Bechor Shitrit, received a letter of appointment clear regarding the desired demographic objective for the expanded borders (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.31).

• Even Ben-Gurion and his advisors’ agreement on the return of thousands of Palestinian refugees after the war was, in Manna, an attempt to serve regional and international political interests (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.26).

• In Manna’s Chapter 1 (part 2), Ben-Gurion grasped the consequences of backtracking on partition, ordered Operation Nachshon and the implementation of Plan Dalet after the Soviet-backed Czechoslovak arms deal, whose first batch landed at Bayt Daras on 31 March 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.59).

• His diary for 1 May 1948 records: “There are now less than ten thousand [Palestinians] in Haifa, perhaps six thousand.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.62).

• On Nazareth he issued strict written orders — a telegram to Moshe Carmel setting up a special administrative team and prohibiting desecration of monasteries and churches and looting — and, when Carmel ordered the city’s expulsion on 17 July and Dunkelman refused, intervened to prohibit it; in the same days he reversed his initial approval of expelling about four thousand remaining residents of ‘Akka after an official insisted on a written order and Bechor Shitrit objected (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.72-74). Manna asks whether Carmel and Laskov could have acted without his knowledge, and whether his Nazareth intervention was genuine opposition or fear of scandal (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.74).

• At the 26 September 1948 cabinet meeting he proposed resuming fighting to occupy the rest of the Galilee, saying “we will clean central Galilee in one stroke; to cleanse it, including the refugees … that will not be possible without war”; a majority of ministers voted against, but a month later he commented on Ezra Danin’s statement: “There is only one task left for the Arabs in Israel: to run.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.85).

• In Manna’s Chapter 2 in full (part 3), the contrast is explicit: a hundred days after his strict orders protecting Nazareth, Ben-Gurion allowed the army to act entirely differently in Muslim and Christian villages, wanting upper Galilee totally void of its Arab inhabitants (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.86).

• He reiterated on 21 October 1948 that there was nothing left for the Arabs in Israel to do except flee, recorded Carmel’s 31 October report that about half of the occupied area’s 60,000 residents remained with the comment “Many will migrate later”, and on 24 November explained the ratified border-strip policy: “As for the Arabs, we shall not bring them back” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.102, 109-110).

• Manna’s conclusion from Chapter 2 is that Ben-Gurion’s top-level decisions played the most important role in the army’s conduct in the Galilee, in both directions — the written orders that spared Nazareth and the wish to complete the Galilee’s occupation without its Arab population that governed Operation Hiram (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.112).

• In Manna’s Chapter 4 (part 4), Ben-Gurion is the leading proponent of violent confrontation and the critical decision-maker on return: in a 1950 cabinet discussion he declared Israel should not allow 600,000 to return, ‘not even 600’, and in 1951 summed up that it was better for Arabs to be in an Arab state, though not by force unless war broke out (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.154).

• Ben-Gurion settled the debate over Druze arms/searches by ordering extreme caution, Druze friendship inside and outside the country being important for Israel (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.158).

• Ben-Gurion excluded both Maki and Mapam from his first government, and quickly allowed Haifa and Galilee remainers to vote in the January 1949 elections (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.147).

• In Manna’s Chapter 4 remainder (part 5), Ben-Gurion, in his answer to Tubi’s questions, denied any knowledge of orders being issued to expel the inhabitants of Tarshiha; in December 1949 there was talk of expelling the inhabitants of Tarshiha, al-Jish, Hurfaysh, Fassuta and Mi’lya, which Ben-Gurion and most ministers in his cabinet approved, but others opposed, mainly Moshe Sharett, and the final outcome was that the villages survived (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.178).

• In the same part, Sharett objected to Ben-Gurion over the 18 June 1949 Nazareth eastern-quarter operation, expressed fear of its repercussions for Israel’s image in the world, and asked the prime minister and defence minister — Ben-Gurion — to conduct an investigation into the harsh treatment of the population (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.180).

• In late 1949, answering Tubi’s Knesset speech on army searches in Arab villages, Ben-Gurion expressed astonishment the session allowed the statement, accused Tubi of maligning the state and its army and of defamation continuing his party’s incitement in cooperation with the Mufti, asked that the defamation be stricken from the Knesset record, and told Tubi: “Shut up. You are sitting here thanks to us.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.180-181)

• In Chapter 4’s conclusion, Ben-Gurion agreed with the foreign ministry and military government pressure to finish the census so infiltrators could be identified and expelled, and wrote in his diary: “We should not expel any Arab if there is any doubt whether he is an infiltrator or an original resident. If it becomes clear that he is an infiltrator, then he should be expelled.” On General Avnir’s 17 January report that the census had been completed, he wrote in his diary (7 February 1949) that there were 102,000 Arabs living under Israeli rule, including 14,000 Druze, and, of the 9,000 prisoners of war, that there were “about 5,000 local Arabs” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.183).

• In Manna’s Chapter 5-6 (part 6): Ben-Gurion announced the investigation results in the ‘Ara shootings of June 1952 — the soldiers guilty of no criminal offense, “just an unpremeditated error” — and spoke at length on the army’s burdens (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.212); he answered MK Moshe Aram’s questions on Subhi al-Ayyubi only by deferring to the judiciary (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.234); and, as the official responsible for the army, he habitually received Minister Shitrit’s complaints about army and military-government conduct and supported the army, covering up its actions (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.222).

• Makdisi quotes Ben-Gurion presenting the Law of Return to the Knesset in 1950: a Jew’s right to live in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel or the occupied territories “is inherent in being a Jew” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.149) — set against the “Center of life” proof demanded of Jerusalem Palestinians.

Related pages

The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Haganah, Zionism, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine