How David Ben-Gurion Felt about the Size of the “Tablecloth”

I have no bones to pick with Martin Kramer’s essay, “The May 1948 Vote that Made Israel.” He probably has it right: in the People’s Administration meeting on May 12, there was in fact no vote on whether or not to declare the establishment of the state of Israel on May 14-15—but there was a vote to omit from the forthcoming Declaration of Independence any mention of the new state’s boundaries.

David Ben-Gurion, who chaired the meeting, certainly hoped that by the end of the ongoing war with the Arabs, Israel would emerge with more territory than the UN had apportioned to the Jewish state in its partition resolution of November 1947, and was convinced that not defining the state’s borders prematurely would facilitate such an expansion. In fact, at the cessation of hostilities and the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and its neighbors in 1949, the Jewish state would end up with 78 percent of the land mass of Mandatory Palestine, as opposed to the 55 percent accorded it in the UN resolution.

This expansion was rooted in how the war ended militarily—but also in the nature of Zionism. Zionism was an “expansionist” movement in the sense that its practice was expansionist. From 1882, when the movement arose, until 1948, that practice consisted of planting settlements in the Land of Israel and then planting settlements around the original settlements to give them greater security, and then planting a third ring of settlements for the same purpose, and so on. It was a continually “expanding” enterprise.