Ben-Gurion: The Man Who Willed A State

When David Ben-Gurion read Israel’s Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, he did so under a portrait of Theodore Herzl, whom he hailed as “visionary of the Jewish state.” The founder of political Zionism—really the founder of modern Jewish diplomacy and politics—Herzl had died 44 years earlier, in 1904. Though Ben-Gurion had always revered Herzl, proponents of the left-wing Zionism in which Ben-Gurion had grown up had had vicious quarrels with Herzl during his lifetime. Should they accept a British territory in East Africa as a national home? Should Zionism prioritize international diplomacy, as Herzl insisted, or focus on building communities and draining swamps, as many East European Zionists argued? The fights over these questions surely contributed to the health difficulties that sent him to an early grave.

By the spring of 1948, however, the memory of Herzl stood above the partisan disputes that would almost bring the new state to the brink of civil war in the coming months. Everyone assembled in the Tel Aviv museum that Friday afternoon recognized that without Herzl none of what was transpiring would have been possible.

Forty-six years after the death of David Ben-Gurion, a similar process of canonization is underway for Israel’s first prime minister. In the last election, the political party of the Sephardi Orthodox, Shas, long considered hostile to the Ashkenazi secular elite, released a campaign ad featuring footage of Ben-Gurion declaring the Jewish state. Shas, the ad implied, would be the party best positioned to advance Ben-Gurion’s legacy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hails from a very different political family, one which suffered a great deal of uncharitable attacks at the hands of Ben-Gurion and his allies. And yet he too has praised Ben-Gurion as a “great leader of the Jewish people.”