A life of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 816 pages; $40. Head of Zeus; £30.unprepossessing figure: short, with a large head and a squeaky voice. Self-centred and humourless, he used people, including women, then discarded them. He was dogged by self-doubt.How David Ben-Gurion, a flawed and in many ways unattractive man, created the state of Israel is the theme of Tom Segev’s fascinating biography. Ben-Gurion’s career began unpromisingly.

The story takes off when, not yet 20, Ben-Gurion arrives in Palestine in 1906. Life for the early Zionist settlers was hard, and he was not cut out for it. His route to power was as a brilliant labour leader. The trade-union federation that he helped establish, the Histadrut, became an essential building-block of the future Jewish state.

Mr Segev is one of Israel’s “new historians”, who have stripped away the mythology around its birth. One legend that he skewers is that Ben-Gurion believed in the possibility of peace with the Arabs. “There is no solution,” he declared as early as 1919; the Arabs wanted Palestine as their state, the Zionists wanted it as theirs. The answer to Arab hostility lay not in compromise but military strength. Though he paid lip-service to peace initiatives, he never changed his mind.

Ben-Gurion dominated the new country’s politics into old age; his two stints as prime minister amounted to over 13 years. Mr Segev describes the fierce opposition to two of his most important policies—securing German reparations for the Holocaust and launching a nuclear-weapons programme. His achievements and energy were undeniable—but so were his failings. He had an authoritarian streak, wanting, in Mr Segev’s words, to be a “Zionist Lenin”. Politics took precedence over everything.

The dilemma of every biographer is what to put in and what to leave out. Mr Segev’s focus is on Zionism and its politics; the Arabs are mostly present as a problem, the British hardly at all. Even at more than 800 pages, the author has evidently found it hard to squeeze everything that matters into “A State at Any Cost”. The result, though, is a masterly portrait of a titanic yet unfulfilled man.

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