A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev (review)

Born in 1945, Tom Segev is an Israeli journalist and historian widely associated with Israel's so-called New Historians, a group that challenges many of the country's traditional narratives. In his previous book, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (Macmillan, 2007), Segev controversially denies any existential threat to Israel from a military point of view and believes that its Arab neighbours would not have attacked Israel in 1967. Segev argues that because major parts of the Israeli population feared Egypt and Syria, pressure increased and led the Israeli government to a preemptive attack. In his critique, Michael Oren subsequently disregarded Segev, despite his doctorate in history, as a journalist: "He's not really a trained historian."¹ Oren asserts that Segev "contradict[ed] himself" and committed "glaring oversights."² In the same vein, Benny Morris called Segev's analysis "essentially false," contributing to the "contemporary delegitimation of Israel" while pointing "readers and scholars in no worthwhile direction."³

Segev describes Ben-Gurion as a humorless, pork-eating, Shabbatworking atheist—a man who suffered from depression, spent weeks in bed, lied, forged academic documents to get into university in Istanbul, and ran away from his responsibilities. Segev faults Ben-Gurion for security failures, as well as for dismissing Holocaust survivors as disappointing "human capital" and Sephardi Jews as "primitive." He tells of a Ben-Gurion who excitedly waited to see Trotsky on the Red Square in Moscow and bought Mein Kampf at a train kiosk in Munich; of a man of moods and outbursts, one who was always between supreme happiness and suicidal depression; of a man who consulted a Romanian fortune teller, and once claimed to have seen a flying saucer.

The book focuses in great detail on the four women with whom Ben-Gurion allegedly had extramarital affairs. Segev defends his focus on these affairs arguing that they are of genuine historical value rather than mere gossip: "The first answer is the standard one—that if the leader isn't faithful to his wife, maybe he's not faithful to his voters, either. If he cheats on her, maybe he cheats on them, too […] I don't think it's unreasonable to know about his weaknesses and distress, and about the women whose company he enjoyed while making important decisions."⁴ Whether or not it is persuasive to deduce that an individual who cheats on his wife is more likely to lie to voters, or to assume a politician would necessarily be persuaded by women with whom he shares his bed, Oren's critique of journalism versus academic analysis comes to mind. Following such logic, one might be inclined to ask Segev whether a politician who is faithful to his wife is less likely to lie to his voters.

Segev's book sees women simply as historical bystanders in the formation of the Jewish state. Unfortunately, women are described only in relation to their male counterparts: "His young wife took down the rifle and rushed after him [farmer Shimon Melamed] to give him the weapon. She went home to watch their child, and her husband went up to the farm" (94); "He [Ben-Gurion] handed over most of the money to a woman who was also a party member, in exchange for which she cooked his dinners" (102). Segev's book often seems to adhere to a tradition of narrating Israeli history in which women are depicted as artists, martyrs, or grieving mothers, with the exception of Israel's only female prime minister, Golda Meir. Too often, the contributions of women who participated in the development of the State of Israel and its institutions—the "state at any cost"—have been buried in archives or remain family stories. Only recently has this participation begun to slowly appear in the literature. And it is about time: the year A State at Any Cost was published in Israel marks...