So we have this this tendency, right? Maybe it's
just a human nature thing. We turn our founding
fathers into statues before the cement is even
dry. We do. We polish them up. We put them on
currency and we kind of forget they were actual,
you know, people with flaws and contradictions
and everything. Right. And usually the rougher
the history, the shinier that statue needs to
be to cover it all up. Exactly. But today we
are stripping all that away. We're going to be
looking at a figure who is. I mean, arguably
the most significant Jewish leader since the
biblical era. But if you actually look at the
source material, the diaries, the recently declassified
archives, he. barely resembles the nice old man
you see on the Israeli banknotes. Not at all.
We are talking, of course, about David Ben -Gurion.
And to really understand him, you have to get
comfortable with some pretty extreme contradictions.
Yeah, that's putting it mildly. I mean, this
was a man who called himself a socialist, but
then built a Western -aligned capitalist -leaning
economy. He was a self -declared atheist who
studied the Bible every single day of his life.
And maybe the most important one for our discussion.
He was a man who genuinely seemed to want peace.
but was prepared to be absolutely ruthless to
get a state. Utterly ruthless. And not just to
his enemies, sometimes to his own people. And
when we say ruthless, we're not using that word
lightly. We're going to get into some... Some
pretty heavy stuff today. We're talking about
things like political extortion, assassinations,
even some really disturbing allegations of biological
warfare. It's all in the record. That's the key
thing here. We're working from some really heavy
-hitting biographies, Tom Segev, Shabtai Teveth
Plus, and this is crucial Israeli Defense Force
archives that were sealed until the 1980s. And
these documents just... They dismantle the mythology.
They do. So the mission for this deep dive is
pretty clear. We want to figure out how this
specific guy, short, kind of grumpy, obsessed,
managed to will an entire country into existence.
Was he a hero? A villain? Or was he something
else? Something that just doesn't fit neatly
into either of those boxes? He was, I think,
above all, a pragmatist. A Zionist Lenin, as
some historians call him. That's a fascinating
comparison. It is. But to understand what that
means, we have to go way, way back. Before the
state. Before the army, before the famous wild
hare, we have to go to a small town in Poland.
Right. Let's set the scene. He's born David Gruen
in 1886. The town is Puszcz, which today is in
Poland, but back then it was part of the Russian
Empire. And his upbringing? It wasn't exactly
typical, was it? No, it was political from day
one. His father, Avigdor Gruen, was what the
sources call a secret advisor. Which sounds like
a spy, but what does that actually mean? It meant
he was a fixer, a navigator. The Russian legal
system was just an incredible maze of corruption
and bureaucracy. If you wanted anything done,
you couldn't just follow the rules. You needed
a guy. You needed a guy. And Avigdor was that
guy. He knew who to bribe, which forms to file,
how to work the system. So David, young David,
grows up watching his dad basically maneuver
around the law. He learns very early that the
law isn't this sacred, immutable thing. It's
an obstacle. An obstacle to be overcome. Exactly.
And on top of that. He grows up with a lot of
tragedy. His mother dies of sepsis when he's
only 11. It's a devastating loss. And I was surprised
to read this. He actually had a twin brother.
He did, yes. Who died shortly after birth. That
was a detail confirmed fairly recently from family
records. So you have to imagine this young man.
He's dealing with profound loss. He's living
in a deeply anti -Semitic empire. And he's watching
his father manipulate a corrupt legal system
just to survive. It's a recipe for radicals.
Well, a perfect recipe. And radicalized he did.
By 14, he's starting a youth club called Ezra.
to promote speaking Hebrew. I mean, at 14, I
was collecting baseball cards. He was trying
to revive an ancient language, and then by his
late teens, he moves to Warsaw and gets swept
up in the 1905 Russian Revolution. He's arrested
twice. And this is where I want to pause for
a second, because there is a story from this
period that just, it floored me. It completely
reframes how you see the man. You're talking
about the gunpoint incident. I am. I mean, we
think of prime ministers and statesmen. We think
diplomacy, negotiation. We do not think of armed
robbery. Can you break this down for us? So David
Grin, as he was then, is an organizer for the
Polay Zion Party, a Marxist Zionist group. There's
a big garment workers strike. The workers are
starving. They have no money for the strike fund.
OK. So he goes to the wealthy members of the
Jewish community in Posk and asks for donations.
They refuse. They tell him to get lost. So what
does he do? Well, he doesn't write a strongly
worded letter to the editor. He comes back and
he brings a gun. He literally held them up at
gunpoint. He extorted the money. He basically
said the cause is just the workers are starving
and you have money. You will contribute. And
they did. Wow. And in his mind, and you see this
throughout his entire life, the cause in this
case, the worker's survival justified the method.
This is the seed of his entire political philosophy.
He wasn't interested in being nice. He wasn't
interested in consensus if it meant losing. He
believed that if the goal is righteous, the tools
you use, they almost don't matter. That is a
lot to process, but it sets the stage perfectly
for what comes next. So in 1906, he leaves the
revolution behind and he heads to Palestine.
He has his dream, right? Build a Jewish homeland.
But the reality he finds there is just brutal.
It's a complete shock to his system. He arrives
in Jaffa and he expects this romantic pioneering
life. Instead, it's hot, it's dusty, it's rife
with malaria. But the biggest shock for him was
the labor market. What do you mean? He expected
to see Jews building the land with Jewish hands.
That was the whole idea of labor Zionism. Instead,
he finds that the existing Jewish agricultural
settlements, the colonies, they're almost all
employing Arab labor. Why? Because it was cheaper,
and frankly, they were better farmers. They were
more experienced with the local climate and conditions.
So Ben -Gurion is this ideologue who shows up
and can't even get a job building the Jewish
homeland because he's being undercut. So what
does he do? He becomes a manual laborer anyway.
He tries. He goes to pay to Tikva to work in
the orange groves. And he fails, mostly. The
sources are pretty clear on this. His own diaries
say he worked an average of maybe 10 days a month.
So he was starving. He was literally starving.
He caught malaria. He writes about watching his
friends die of hunger and disease. It wasn't
romantic at all. It was a desperate fight for
survival. And then there's this period where
he goes to a place called Segera, a remote colony
up in the Galilee. And the sources describe him
carrying a gun, standing guard at night. This
feels like the transition from student radical
with a pistol to something more like a soldier.
Absolutely. Segera was the frontier. It was lawless.
The colony was guarded by Circassian mercenaries.
And there was a movement called Hashomer the
Watchmen to replace them with Jewish guards.
The idea being? The idea being that if you can't
defend your own property, you don't really own
it. Sovereignty begins with security. So he's
patrolling at night, gun in hand, living this
very tough militaristic life. But then, just
as he's getting tough. He does this really weird
pivot. It seems to come out of nowhere. He stops
digging ditches and decides he wants to become
a Turkish lawyer. It's pure pragmatism again.
This is the Ben -Gurion pattern. He takes a step
back, he assesses the situation, and he realizes
the Ottomans run this place. If we want a state,
we can't just be rebels in the hills or farmhands
in the groves. That's not a strategy. We need
to understand the levers of power. We need to
work within the system to eventually overturn
it. So he commits to this idea of Ottomanization.
Completely. He starts learning Turkish. He trades
his worker's cap for a fez. He moves to Salonika,
a major Ottoman city at the time. And he even
pretends to be a Sephardic Jew to fit in better.
Wait, he faked his ethnicity? He adapted. There
was a lot of prejudice between the European Ashkenazi
Jews and the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire.
So he just blended in. He changes his mannerisms,
his accent. It's all part of the plan. And eventually
he gets into Istanbul University to study law.
What was the end goal? here to be a lawyer in
Istanbul. No. The goal was to get elected to
the Ottoman parliament. He wanted to be inside
the halls of power fighting for Zionist autonomy
from within the empire. It's amazing how flexible
he was on tactics. But then, as always, history
intervenes. World War One blows that whole plan
up. It does. The Ottomans side with Germany.
They become suspicious of Zionist activity, and
they exile him. He ends up in Egypt, and from
there, he makes his way to New York. And in New
York, he meets his wife, Paula Munweiss. We have
to talk about his personal life for a second,
because he was not exactly winning any Husband
of the Year awards. No. His dedication to the
cause was absolute, which meant that his family
often came second or third. Or fourth. So the
British form the Jewish Legion to fight the Ottomans
in Palestine. And Ben -Gurion signs up immediately.
He sees it as the chance to get back. But he
leaves Paula behind while she's pregnant with
their first child. He doesn't see his daughter
Gula until she's over a year old. That's cold.
The cause came first. Always. But for all this
soldiering and dedication, there's a really funny
detail in the records about his time in the British
Army. The AWOL incident. Yes. The great disciplinarian,
the man who would demand absolute loyalty, goes
AWOL. He was a corporal stationed in Egypt, and
he just sneaks off to visit friends in Jaffa.
And he gets caught. He gets caught, court -martialed,
and busted down to private. The future defense
minister of Israel. It's incredibly humanizing
in a way. It shows he was still just this stubborn
guy who thought the rules didn't really apply
to him. That never changed. But let's fast forward.
The war ends. The British take over Palestine
under the mandate. Ben -Gurion comes back and
starts his real rise to power, not through the
military, but through the labor movement. Right.
He becomes the head of the Histadrut. And we
really need to define that because labor federation
sounds kind of boring. Yeah. To a modern listener,
a union boss doesn't sound like a state builder.
But the Histadrut wasn't just a union. You have
to think of it as a state in waiting. How so?
It wasn't just about collective bargaining. The
Histadrut ran its own banks. It ran the biggest
construction company in the country. It ran the
health care system. It ran bus cooperatives.
It even had its own secret militia, the Haganah.
So by controlling the history, he controlled
the entire economic and social infrastructure
of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv,
and he ran it with an iron fist. This is really
where that Zionist Lenin comparison comes from.
Tom Segev uses that term extensively in his biography.
What does it actually mean? He wasn't a communist,
was he? No, not at all. He was a socialist, but
he despised Soviet communism. He saw it as a
tyranny. The comparison is about method. It's
about how you achieve power and what you do with
it. There's a fantastic story where someone asks
Ben -Gurion why he admires Lenin so much more
than, say, Trotsky. And Ben -Gurion says, you
know, Trotsky is brilliant. He's an intellectual,
a great speaker, a great maneuverer. But Lenin,
Lenin cuts the Gordian knot. Meaning he just
makes the decision that solves the problem no
matter how messy or brutal it is. Precisely.
Ben -Gurion didn't want to maneuver. He wanted
to decide. He admired that ability to be decisive
and, yes, ruthless. And he needed that ruthlessness
because his biggest fights weren't always with
the British or the Arabs. They were with other
Jews. This is a huge part of the story that I
think gets lost in the simple version. We assume
the entire Jewish community was united in this
goal. But you had the revisionist Zionists led
by Zia Jabotinsky. Who were they? They were the
right -wing opposition. They saw Ben -Gurion
and the labor movement as too soft, too socialist,
too willing to compromise with the British. They
wanted a more aggressive militaristic approach.
And by the 1930s and 40s, they had their own
paramilitary groups. They did. The Ergon and
the even more extreme Lehigh or Stern gang. And
they were actively fighting a guerrilla war against
the British. And this leads to something called
the Cezanne. Or the hunting season. It just blew
my mind when I read about it. Ben -Gurion actually
ordered his people to kidnap other Jews. He did.
It was essentially a civil war fought in the
shadows. The Irgun was carrying out attacks on
British targets bombing police stations, government
offices. Ben -Gurion was convinced this was going
to ruin their chances of getting international
support for his state. So his logic was that
they were undermining the entire project. His
logic was there can only be one authority. So
he ordered the Haganah, his militia, to systematically
hunt down Irgun members. They kidnapped them.
They set up secret interrogation centers. And
in some cases, they tortured them for information.
And then why? And then they handed lists of names,
hundreds of them, over to the British colonial
police. Handing Jews over to the British. In
the middle of World War II, no less. That must
have been seen as the absolute ultimate betrayal
by the other side. It was. They called him a
collaborator, a traitor. But for Ben -Gurion,
it was that Leninist logic again. You have to
crush internal dissent to achieve the main goal.
If you have rogue militias running around, you
are not a state. You are a collection of gangs.
He was establishing the state's monopoly on violence
before the state even existed. Which brings us
directly to 1948. The British are leaving. The
UN votes for partition. War is imminent and Ben
-Gurion has to make the call. Do we declare independence
now or do we wait? And it was not an easy call.
The U .S. State Department, George Marshall himself,
warned him not to. They told him, you will face
a second Holocaust. The Arab armies will sweep
you into the sea. His own military advisors were
split. They were. Some said they weren't ready.
But Ben -Gurion looked at the situation, this
very narrow window of opportunity after the British
left and before the Arab states could fully coordinate,
and he decided to jump. So on May 14, 1948, he
stands up in Tel Aviv and reads the Declaration
of Independence. But he wasn't celebrating, was
he? Reading his diary from that time is sobering.
It's chilling. His diary entry from that day
isn't about joy or triumph. He basically tallies
up the Jewish forces versus the invading Arab
armies and is intensely worried. And elsewhere
he wrote, the war shall give us the land. What
a line. He knew that the nice borders drawn on
the UN map didn't matter. What mattered was where
the front lines were when the fighting stopped.
And once the war starts, we see the Zionist Lenin
in full. terrifying effect. We have to talk about
the Altalena affair, because if the Cezanne was
a shadow war, this was, well, this was open fire
and broad daylight. It's June 1948. The state
is just weeks old. The War of Independence is
raging. And a ship, the Altalena, arrives off
the coast of Israel. It's been sent by the Ergun
from France. It's loaded with weapons. Loaded.
Thousands of rifles, machine guns, millions of
rounds of ammunition, and hundreds of volunteer
fighters. Now, at this point, the Israel Defense
Forces, the IDF, has technically been formed,
but the Irgun is still acting as a semi -independent
militia. You'd think in the middle of a war for
survival, any guns would be welcome. You would
think. Ben -Gurion's government wanted the guns
desperately, but he demanded that they be handed
over to the IDF unconditionally. And the Irgun
leader... Menachem Begin, who would later become
prime minister. He refused. He agreed to give
some of the weapons to the IDF, but insisted
on keeping about 20 % to distribute directly
to his own Irgun battalions fighting in Jerusalem.
Ben -Gurion saw this as a direct challenge to
his authority. He saw it as the beginning of
a coup. So what did he do? He ordered the IDF
to take the ship by force. There was a firefight
on the beach in Tel Aviv, and when the ship tried
to resist, he gave the order to shell it. He
shelled a ship full of Jews carrying weapons
for the war effort while the ship was sitting
off the coast of Tel Aviv for everyone to see.
Yes, the ship caught fire and eventually sank.
16 Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers were
killed. It was the closest the country ever came
to a full -blown civil war. Menachem Beginin
went on the radio screaming and crying that Ben
-Gurion was a madman. And Ben -Gurion's reaction?
He went to the provisional government and said,
blessed be the cannon that shelled that ship.
That is just... ice cold. It's the one state,
one army principle taken to its absolute extreme.
He was willing to kill his own people to ensure
that the new state had a single, unified chain
of command. He believed that without that discipline,
Israel would fracture and collapse like so many
other revolutionary movements. So he's ruthless
internally. But we also have to talk about his
conduct toward the Arab population during the
1948 war. This is obviously one of the most heavily
debated aspects of his legacy. Sources bring
up something called planned dallet. Right. Plan
D. Officially, this was a military plan drafted
in early 1948, a set of guidelines for IDF brigades
to secure the areas of the Jewish state allocated
by the U .N. ahead of the expected Arab invasion.
It sounds defensive. The language is defensive.
Yeah. But historians like Benny Morris, who has
spent his life in these archives, argue that
in practice it functioned as an operational manual
for the expulsion of Arab civilians from large
parts of the country. So was there a signed written
order from Ben -Gurion saying kick everyone out?
No. And that's the crucial nuance here. Morris
argues you will not find a piece of paper signed
by Ben -Gurion that says expel the Arabs of Lydda
or expel the Arabs of Ramel. But, and this is
Morris' thesis, Ben -Gurion projected what he
calls a message of transfer. A message of transfer.
His commanders on the ground, people like Yegal
Alan and Yitzhak Rabin, they knew what he wanted.
They understood, without it needing to be written
down, that a viable Jewish state required a decisive
Jewish majority. And they acted on that unspoken
understanding. So it was a wink and a nod policy.
It was more than that. It was what the military
calls commander's intent. And where the archives
get really, really dark is when you look at some
of the specific tactics that were used. You mentioned
biological warfare earlier. I did. Operation
Cast Thy Bread. It sounds like something out
of a spy novel, not a historical archive. Is
this real? It is real. It's documented in the
IDF archives. In the spring of 1948, as Arab
forces were advancing, Ben -Gurion authorized
an operation to poison wells and water sources
in abandoned Arab villages and even some that
were still populated. Poison them with what?
With typhoid and dysentery bacteria. My God.
poisoning wells that's literally a medieval war
crime the stated goal was to prevent villagers
from returning to their homes or to hinder the
advancing egyptian and other arab armies but
yes it happened it just shows the sheer desperation
of that moment and the complete Lack of moral
red lines when they felt survival was at stake?
For Ben -Gurion, survival trumped ethics every
single time. And yet, and here's the contradiction
again, the war ends. Israel wins a stunning victory.
The army is strong. His generals, people like
Yigal Elan, they want to keep going. They want
to conquer the West Bank. They want to push all
the way to the Jordan River. And Ben -Gurion
says... He stops them cold. Why? If the war gives
the land, why stop now when you have the momentum?
Because he was a pragmatist, not a messianic
conqueror. He was always looking at the demographics.
He did the math. He knew that if he took the
West Bank, he would be absorbing a massive, hostile
Arab population. He didn't want to rule over
them. He didn't want Israel to become a binational
state. He wanted a smaller state with a solid,
stable Jewish majority. It was a demographic
calculation, not a military one. He chose Jewishness
over territory. 1949. Now he has a state, but
it's a mess. It's broke. It's flooded with refugees,
both Jewish Holocaust survivors and Jews fleeing
Arab countries. And it's surrounded by enemies
who have just sworn to destroy it. This is the
state builder phase. Yes. And this brings us
to another massive, massive controversy, Germany.
The reparations agreement. This might have been
the most emotional, wrenching, political crisis
in Israel's early history. We're talking about
the early 1950s. The Holocaust is not history.
It is an open, gaping wound. You can still smell
the smoke. And Ben -Gurion decides to do what?
He decides to enter into negotiations with the
West German government, led by Konrad Adenauer,
to accept financial reparations for the Holocaust.
I can't even imagine the public reaction. People
must have called it blood money. It was explosive.
Menachem Begin. His old rival from the Irgun
led massive, violent riots in Jerusalem. They
threw rocks at the Nesset building. Begin got
on a stage and called Ben -Gurion a traitor,
a collaborator with the heirs of the Nazis. He
famously shouted, there will be no negotiations
with Germany. But Ben -Gurion, as usual. He didn't
blink. He couldn't afford to blink. Israel was
bankrupt. People were living in tents. Food was
being rationed. He took a purely utilitarian,
deeply unsentimental view of it. He said famously,
let not the murderers of our people also be their
heirs, meaning they stole our property. They
destroyed our communities. They owe us. We will
take that money and we will use it to build ships
and factories and power plants for the Jewish
state. And that money basically built the modern
Israeli economy. It was the foundation of it.
But it cost him an enormous amount of political
capital. It reinforced this image of him as a
cold, emotionless leader who would trade sacred
memory for German marks. Speaking of cold calculation,
let's talk about nukes. So sources are clear
that he was obsessed. Obsessed is exactly the
right word. From the very beginning, he believed
that Israel's conventional military advantage
would not last forever. He knew that eventually
the Arab states, with their oil wealth and vast
populations, would catch up. He needed an insurance
policy. He needed the ultimate insurance policy,
something to prevent a second Holocaust. And
so in total secrecy, he starts the Dimona nuclear
project in the Negev desert. Even keeping it
secret from the Americans. Especially from the
Americans. The Kennedy administration was furious
when they found out. JFK demanded international
inspections. Ben -Gurion lied. He stalled. He
had his people build fake walls inside the facility
to hide the reprocessing plant from the inspectors.
He risked the entire alliance with the U .S.
He did. Because in his mind, the bomb was non
-negotiable. He believed that without it, Israel
was ultimately living on borrowed time. It's
a pattern. He listens to advice and then he does
whatever he thinks is necessary for survival.
But there's one event in the 1960s that feels
a bit different. It wasn't about survival, really.
It was about something else. The Eichmann trial.
It was about shaping the national soul. In 1960,
the Mossad carries out this incredible operation.
kidnapping Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects
of the Holocaust, from a street in Argentina.
And they bring him to Jerusalem. And Ben -Gurion
insists on a full public show trial. Why? I mean,
why not just, you know, hang him quietly? Why
the big spectacle? Because Ben -Gurion looked
at the younger generation of Israelis, the Sabres,
the native -born kids, and he was worried. He
saw that they were tough and tan and confident,
but they also looked down on the Holocaust survivors.
How so? They saw them as weak. They used derogatory
terms. They didn't understand why the Jews of
Europe went like sheep to the slaughter. There
was a deep psychological disconnect. So he used
the trial to teach them a history lesson. Exactly.
He put the survivors on the witness stand day
after day, telling their stories on national
radio for the whole country to hear. It forced
Israel to confront the horror of the Holocaust
in a way it never had before. It changed the
Israeli psyche. It essentially turned the Holocaust
into the central pillar of modern Israeli identity.
It was a masterclass in nation building through
narrative. But his own political career, it doesn't
end with some grand victory lap. It just kind
of fizzles out in this bitter, complicated mess
called the Levon Affair. So those really complex
historical weeds. But what's the simple version?
The simple version is a covert Israeli spy operation
in Egypt in the 1950s failed disastrously. Years
later, it's still being argued. about who gave
the order. The defense minister at the time,
Pinhas Lavan, was blamed, but he insisted he
was framed by others in the military establishment.
And Ben -Gurion gets involved. Ben -Gurion becomes
obsessed with it. He demands investigations.
He wants to know the absolute truth, who was
responsible. The rest of his political party,
Mapai, just wants to bury it to save face. It
sounds like he just couldn't turn off that fighter
vote. He had to have a final word. He couldn't.
He saw it as a moral crusade for the truth. But
his colleagues saw it as an old man tearing the
party apart over an old grudge. He burned so
many bridges that he was eventually pushed out
of power. He formed his own splinter party, Rafi,
with people like Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan.
But he was essentially isolated. The old man
had become a liability. So he retires. And this
is the image that everyone knows. He goes to
the Kibbutz Tudboker. Right. And for anyone listening
who hasn't been there, Studeboker is not a nice
retirement village in Florida. It is a simple
wooden hut in the absolute middle of a desert
moonscape. Why on earth did he go there? It was
a statement. It was leadership by example. He
passionately believed that the Negev Desert was
Israel's future. That was where the space was.
That was where the potential was. And he figured
if the old prime minister can go live in a shack
in the desert, maybe the youth of the country
will follow him there and build the land. Not
really. But the image, the symbolism was incredibly
powerful. And it's there in that hut surrounded
by thousands of books that you really see his
personal beliefs come into focus. Let's talk
about those beliefs because the contradiction
theme really peaks here. We said at the top that
he was an atheist. A devout atheist. He famously
worked on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the
year. He ate pork. He had absolutely no use for
the rituals and superstitions of organized religion.
But he quoted the Bible. Constantly was his favorite
book. Because to him, the Bible wasn't a religious
text. It was a history book. It was a political
manifesto. And most importantly, it was a land
deed. He loved the stories of King David and
King Solomon and the ancient warriors of Israel.
Why? Because he wanted to connect modern Israelis
directly to that ancient sovereign past. He wanted
to leapfrog over the 2 ,000 years of diaspora
history, the ghettos, the persecution, the rabbinic
Judaism that he saw as weak and passive. He wanted
to create a new Jew who was a farmer. and a soldier,
not a scholar. But wait, if he wanted this new
secular code, this new Shulchan Aruch, as he
called it, why on earth did he sign the status
quo letter? I mean, for our listeners, this is
the document from 1947 that effectively gave
the Orthodox rabbinate total control over marriage,
divorce, conversion, and public observance of
Shabbat in Israel. It seems like the complete
opposite of what he believed. It is one of the
single greatest ironies in Israeli history. In
1947, on the eve of the UN vote, he needed a
united front. The ultra -Orthodox parties threatened
to testify against the creation of a Jewish state
at the UN unless they were given assurances.
So Ben -Gurion, the atheist, cut a deal? He cut
a deal. He promised them control over all matters
of personal status. Well, why? Why would he do
that if he despised their version of Judaism?
Because he thought they were a dying breed. He
was a modernist, a socialist. He looked at these
men in black coats from the old world and he
thought, in 20 years these people won't even
exist. The new Israeli will be secular, modern.
This is a temporary compromise. Let them have
their little rules for now. History will erase
them. Wow. He could not have been more wrong.
He was spectacularly, monumentally wrong. And
that letter he wrote in 1947 still dictates the
lives of millions of Israelis today. It's why
there's no civil marriage in Israel. All because
of a deal an atheist made to secure a state he
thought would be secular. That brings us to one
last major contradiction. His view on the Arabs.
Publicly, he often spoke about coexistence and
equal rights. But you found a private conversation
he had that tells a very, very different story.
Yes. It was a conversation he had with Nahum
Goldman, another major Zionist leader. And Ben
-Gurion said to him, and this is a direct quote
from Goldman's memoirs, I don't understand why
the Arabs should make peace with us. If I was
an Arab leader, I would never make terms with
Israel. He actually said that. the founder of
the state. He continued, he said, It is true
God promised it to us, but how could that interest
them? We have come here and stolen their country.
Why should they accept that? That is shocking
admission. Stolen their country. It shows that
he wasn't delusional. He didn't buy into the
simplistic propaganda that the land was empty
or that the Arabs would just welcome them. He
knew on a deep level exactly what the conflict
was about. He just believed that the Jewish need
for a home, especially in the immediate aftermath
of the Holocaust, morally outweighed the Arab
claim to the land. But he never lied to himself
about the fundamental nature of the conflict.
Which explains why he was so terrified in 1967.
Exactly. The Six -Day War. The whole country
is euphoric. The IDF has just won this incredible,
shocking victory. They've conquered the West
Bank, Gaza, Sinai, the Golan Heights. Generals
are popping champagne. And Ben -Gurion, he's
horrified. He warned against the war. Before
the war, he fiercely criticized the government
for mobilizing the army. He thought they were
putting Israel in mortal danger without the explicit
backing of a great power like France or the U
.S. And after the victory, while everyone else
was celebrating liberating the biblical heartland,
Ben -Gurion's message was simple. Give it back.
Give back. The guy who said the war gives us
the land. He said, keep a united Jerusalem. Keep
the Golan Heights for security reasons, but give
back the West Bank and Gaza immediately in exchange
for peace. He warned that becoming an occupying
power over a large, hostile Palestinian population
would corrode Israel's soul and ultimately destroy
its Jewish and democratic character. He saw the
trap, the trap that Israel is still in today.
He saw it with absolute clarity. It was prophetic.
He was always looking 50 years down the road.
He died in 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur
War, which was a war that... Kind of proves his
point about the dangers of arrogance and occupation.
He died seeing the country in crisis once again.
And he was buried where he wanted to be, at Said
Boker, next to his wife Paula. Not on Mount Herschel
with all the other prime ministers and presidents,
alone in the desert. So when we step back and
we look at the sledgehammer statue of the real
man. What do we see? Is he the father of the
nation? He's the architect of the nation. And
like a lot of great architects, he was arrogant.
He ignored the neighbor's complaints and he poured
concrete over things that maybe should have been
preserved. But he got the building built. And
the ultimate question. Do you think the state
of Israel would exist without him specifically?
That is the question, isn't it? And I think most
serious historians would say no. You needed someone
with that very specific, very strange blend of
socialist organizing skill, biblical fervor,
and pure Leninist ruthlessness to navigate the
labyrinth of 1948. A nicer man would have failed.
A nicer man would have failed. A more democratic
man would have hesitated at the Altalena. A more
sentimental man would have refused German money.
Ben -Gurion just, he cut the knot. And the knot
is still cut that way today. For better and for
worse. I think if you really want to understand
why Israel looks the way it does today, from
its military ethos to its tangled religious laws
to its ongoing conflicts, you have to start with
Ben -Gurion. And I highly recommend if you're
interested looking up that status quo letter
we mentioned. It is a one -page document that
is a fascinating and deeply consequential rabbit
hole. Absolutely. That's it for this deep dive.
Thanks for listening. See you next time.