David Ben-Gurion and The Jewish Renaissance (review)

When Israel won its independence, its most powerful founding father, David Ben-Gurion, became a more hallowed figure outside than inside the newly-born Jewish state. Surprisingly, the most storied leader of Israel, the one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, was held in contempt by many Israelis for poorly managing the traumatic process of securing Jewish sovereignty. Prime Minister for the first years of Israel's independence, Minister of Defense during two of the country's wars, and the main architect of its mixed economy, Ben-Gurion fully and self-consciously lodged himself into the story of building the Jewish state. But if the name is indelible, the image is still hotly contested. Although he consciously tried to control not only Israel's history but also, through his diaries and speeches, how that history would be understood, he was not able to prevent the emergence of other narratives of Jewish state-building. Perhaps because he was unable to cement his reputation during his lifetime, many scholars and politicians continue to contest both his version of Israel's founding as well as his own role in the state's development.

Some describe him as authoritarian and responsible for suppressing efforts by the founders of Israel to put their high ethical purpose into practice. More nationalist than socialist, Ben-Gurion, it is claimed, made the Jewish state less egalitarian, more unjust, and much less democratic. Heavily involved in planning military operations during Israel's War for Independence, Ben-Gurion is charged with waging epic battles that left the kinds of casualties still weighing on the country's collective conscience adding to what became for some an indictment against the first Prime Minister's reckless embrace of power.

Perhaps because most of the Israelis who write about Ben-Gurion understand they are telling their own story, they may attribute to him the successes and failures they find in their own society, leaving many of the country's citizens still wondering why the moral standards articulated by Israel's early generations were never fully made real by any of the country's dominant social or political organizations. Israelis cannot avoid writing the history of their own country as an intellectual enterprise that springs as much from the fascination with self-discovery as from national self-imaging.

To understand Ben-Gurion and turn him from legend into historical figure, then, is as much to uncover the facts as to peel away the tendentious language used to describe his role in the making of the Jewish state. To do this is to restore the intellectual context in which Ben-Gurion operated, insists Shlomo Aronson, who defines that context in this very learned book as the Jewish Renaissance. Ben-Gurion launched himself into history by embracing Zionism as the only means of reinvigorating Jewish life and culture because it would return the nation to what he believed to be its rightful homeland and win for it political sovereignty, the instrument with which it could shape its future. According to Aronson, the Renaissance rubric explains Ben-Gurion's achievements and also the reasons for his mistakes and political losses. The notion that Zionism could resurrect and empower a people subjugated for centuries provided the guidelines for Ben-Gurion's positions during the very dark periods of Israel's history when anxiety engulfed the population and when his rhetoric and seeming certainty about the future strengthened the will of the country's citizens to carry on the daunting project of sustaining the Jewish state.

For Aronson, the Zionist Renaissance project was itself a tangled web of ideas woven from major philosophical European trends and classical Jewish texts. Ben-Gurion drew from these philosophies in his own idiosyncratic way, but the mixture, according to Aronson, produced a philosophy of action. Here are just some of Ben-Gurion's prominent sympathies: his dedication to science, to democratic practices and the rule of law, and above all, his admiration for British political practices. It is worthwhile...