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

“We, who want to build a new land in a wilderness out of ruins, need to learn how the deportees and persecuted people from England founded a huge, rich country with unparalleled treasures and creative power.”

Jibli recalled that Ben-Gurion loved her traditional Yemenite jahnun, served with a tomato sauce.

A few days after he arrived in Salonica, Ben-Gurion received a piece of advice: under no circumstances should he reveal to his Jewish landlady that he was Ashkenazi. There were many Jews in the city, and nearly all of them were Sephardim. Young Ashkenazi men like Ben-Gurion were thought to be involved in trafficking women.31 From time to time he ha

“I did not give up on the whole land; rather, I thought that bringing two million Jews was worth more than fine rhetoric about the integrity of Palestine,”

Weizmann continued to meet with MacDonald; Ben-Gurion said that it was “psychologically impossible” for him to do so. “In my view, he is like a member of Hitler’s gang, and our friends need to know that no Jew can meet with him.”

His article cited a theory that Spinoza’s ideas derived from Buddhism; he was inclined to agree.

“It is easier to swim in the sea than in a bathtub.”

At the beginning of 1911, the Jewish world and Ben-Gurion himself were scandalized by an article the Hebrew novelist Yosef Haim Brenner published in the newspaper Hapo’el Hatza’ir. The subject was Jews who had converted to Christianity.22 Brenner maintained that there was a Jewish national identity independent of religion and that this identity had

“War is a nation’s supreme test …,” he wrote. “Not a test of strength, but a test of will.”