David Ben Gurion Quotes

Anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.

In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.

Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.

I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’ David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 19381

It's not enough to be up to date, you have to be up to tomorrow.

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Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.

The comforting idea that “the old will die and the young will forget”—a remark attributed to David Ben-Gurion, probably mistakenly—expresses one of the deepest aspirations of Israeli leaders after 1948. It was not to be.

Today the ministry of culture is the ministry of defense. A hundred thousand Jews are fighting for their people’s freedom—that is the greatest human creation in our era. It will serve as a source for literature and art for generations to come. [Answering question, why the government had not set up a ministry of culture]

Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists.

אם אלוהים רוצה גם מטאטא יורה

We must fight the war as though there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as though there were no war.

It was the Rothschilds who funded the early ‘Jewish’ settlers in Palestine; it was the Rothschilds who helped to create and fund Hitler and the Nazis in the Second World War which included the sickening treatment of Jews, gypsies, communists, and others; it was the Rothschilds who used the understandable post-war sympathy for the ‘Jews’ they had mercilessly exploited to press through their demands for a take-over of Arab Palestine; it was the Rothschilds who funded the ‘Jewish’ terrorist groups in Palestine which bombed, murdered, and terrorised Israel into existence; and it was the Rothschilds who funded and manipulated these terrorists into the key positions in Israel, among them the Prime Ministers, Ben-Gurion, Shamir, Begin, and Rabin. These men would spend the rest of their lives condemning the terrorism of others with an hypocrisy which beggars belief; it was Lord Victor Rothschild, the controller of British Intelligence, who provided the know-how for Israel’s nuclear weapons; it was the Rothschilds who owned and controlled Israel from the start and have continued ever since to dictate its policy; it was the Rothschilds and the rest of the Brotherhood network which has hidden and suppressed the fact, confirmed by Jewish historians, that the overwhelming majority of ‘Jewish’ people in Israel originate genetically from the Caucasus Mountains, not from the lands they now occupy. The Jewish people have been sacrificed on the Rothschild altar of greed and lust for power, but even the Rothschilds take their orders from a higher authority which, I believe, is probably based in Asia, and the Far East dictates to the operational headquarters in London.

Most of the original Jewish freedom fighters who fought to establish Israel against all worldly forces, are now dead. Israel’s David Ben-Gurions and Moshe Dayans are gone. The next generation of Israeli leadership were tough, disciplined and resolute in preserving control over the land that God placed in their hands. Those leaders are now no longer in power. Recently, Israel was led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was, to put it charitably, no David Ben Gurion. He made it clear that he would deal away the land that the Lord granted to Israel, even saying in his final days in office that to attain peace with the Palestinians, Israel would have to withdraw “from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem.

In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish.

In Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Palestine, the Haganah's basic strategy reflected a philosophy propounded by David Ben-Gurion. What the Jews had, they must hold. No Jew was to leave his home, his farm, his kibbutz, his office without permission. Every outpost, every settlement, every village, no matter how isolated, was to be clung to as though it were Tel Aviv itself.

Progressives regarded Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as beacons of hope for mankind—and this precisely because they were considered expressions of nationalism, promising national independence and self-determination to enslaved peoples around the world. Conservatives from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower likewise spoke of nationalism as a positive good, and in their day Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were welcomed by conservatives for the “new nationalism” they brought to political life. In other lands, statesmen from Mahatma Gandhi to David Ben-Gurion led nationalist political movements that won widespread admiration and esteem as they steered their peoples to freedom.

A rare moment of Israeli political honesty came in October 2021 when far-right Israeli parliamentarian Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party and ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in the Knesset to the Arab members, “You’re only here by mistake, because [founding prime minister David] Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job, didn’t throw you out in ’48.” It was an acknowledgment that ethnic cleansing took place in 1948, albeit delivered by one of the most racist and homophobic Israeli politicians.

But the weird thing about apartheid is that in order to practice it you must announce that you are practicing it. David Ben-Gurion once said that unless Israel was successful in ridding itself of the Arabs, ti would become an apartheid state. What he meant was that a government based on ethnic or racial superiority in a land with more than one ethnicity or race can only masquerade as a democracy for so long. Eventually, you need to either get rid of the other races or actually make laws to preserve your own superiority.

We have preserved the book, and the book has preserved us.

Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Trumpeldor. For them the Bible was more a source of poetry and ancestral lore and less a guidebook for keeping house. But their example was waning. For Miriam and Benzion, the poetry and the lore were inextricable from the housekeeping. It was divine, which meant all or nothing. It was holy scripture, not a document to prove hereditary land claims. Which was very well. This line of thinking had always existed and there was space for it. But, increasingly, it left less and less space for anything else.

Even David Ben-Gurion wrote during the 1936–39 Arab uprising against the British that Arabs have legitimate anger against the Zionists. “The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down.

Ben-Gurion himself, writing to his son in 1937, appeared convinced that this was the only course of action open to Zionism: ‘The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.’ The opportune moment came in 1948. Ben-Gurion is in many ways the founder of the State of Israel and was its first prime minister. He also masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.

David Ben-Gurion well understood these contradictory perspectives. As he told his colleagues, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939: "We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [lirkosh] the land from them." Years later, after the establishment of Israel, he expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: "I don't understand your optimism.... Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

From Cairo, Casey’s successor as minister of state, Lord Moyne, argued that both these failings were unwise. ‘Opinion in these countries can hardly fail to draw a comparison with the prompt and stern action taken against the Arabs after the assassination of Mr Andrews in 1937,’ he said.27 A few days later, after he had failed to stir up London, he sent a further telegram. To demonstrate his fears, this time he quoted from a speech just given by David Ben-Gurion, in which the Jewish Agency executive’s chairman stated: ‘We shall migrate to Palestine in order to constitute a majority here. If there be need – we shall take by force; if the country be too small – we shall expand the boundaries.

On May 14, 1948, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the first in two thousand years. The US government recognized its legitimacy on the same day; but Washington’s backing for Israel was not benevolent. To understand the thinking at the time, the essay by George Biddle, a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, published in the Atlantic in 1949 after his visit to the new nation, is instructive. Biddle was unequivocal in his endorsement of Israel, arguing that Western interests in the Middle East would be assured if the Jewish state was in its orbit. He did not seem to like Jews much, writing that they used to be “grease-spotted” and “moth-eaten.” But after arriving in Israel they suddenly acquired “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were akin to US president, founding father, and slave owner Thomas Jefferson.13 Biddle dismissed the Arabs he saw but thought they were “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians.” Not being white, they were “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.

A special committee was established to give Hebraized versions of the original Arab names to the new settlements-thus, Lubya became Lavi and Safuria was turned into Zipori. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, explained that this was part of an attempt to prevent future claims to these villages. This process was supported also by the Israeli archeologists who authorized the names, not so much as a takeover of a title, but rather as a form of poetic justice that restored to "ancient Israel" its ancestral map. Place names were taken from the Bible and attached to the destroyed villages.

David Ben-Gurion understood that in order to overcome the numerical disadvantage of a tiny Jewish state surrounded by hostile Arab nations, the country must have a scientific and technological advantage.

The Alignment,

The society’s archaeologists and volunteers had discovered a series of remote caves in the Judean desert dating from the time of the last rebellion against Rome (the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–35 CE). The guests included David Ben-Gurion, several cabinet members, and journalists. The highlight of the evening was the presentation by former chief of staff Yigael Yadin, now retired from the army and the leader of the explorations to the remote caves. The caves, Yadin explained, were the last refuge of the remnants of the failed rebellion. Located high on a cliff side and nearly inaccessible, the caves were swelteringly hot and had no water and no sanitation.

When the choice before us was the whole of Eretz Israel but no Jewish state or no Jewish state but not the whole of Eretz Israel, we chose a Jewish state.

January 7, 1952, was the most explosive Knesset (parliament) session in Israel’s history. Even before David Ben-Gurion took the podium, the country was in an uproar. Word had leaked out that Israel and West Germany had negotiated reparations for Holocaust victims, a sum total of $865 million (roughly $8 billion in 2015 dollars). Opponents derided it as “blood money.” Opposition leader Menachem Begin refused to take his seat at the Knesset, gathering a large crowd at a nearby square. Ben-Gurion opened the session by explaining it was not blood money—they were asking for compensation for lost Jewish property during the Nazi era. “Let not the murderers of our people also be their inheritors,” he said, referencing a biblical passage. Many in the Knesset remained viciously opposed. Even as the debate raged in the Knesset, Begin whipped his supporters into a frenzy: “This will be a war of life and death. Today I give the order: Blood!

The Knesset reconvened and approved the agreement by a vote of sixty-one to fifty. The reparations proved key to Israel’s development. Within a few years, the transit camps disappeared, Israel’s industries grew, and the economy improved. In many ways, it was the 1933 Transfer Agreement debate redux. Both times, pragmatists led by David Ben-Gurion argued that Israel’s development and security were more important than emotion and honor. Both times they had been opposed by right-wing parties unwilling to compromise. And both times, the pragmatists narrowly prevailed, allowing the Jewish state’s establishment and subsequent survival.

growing greater by the day, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and delegates from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia arrived in London to meet with the British leadership. They had been summoned by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in order to explain the empire’s new policy toward Palestine. Jewish immigration would end. The Jews would live under Arab rule in an independent state. Ben-Gurion erupted: “Jews cannot be prevented from immigrating into the country except by force of British bayonets, British police, and the British navy. And, of course, Palestine cannot be converted into an Arab state over Jewish opposition without the constant help of British bayonets!

The Labor Zionists of the Mapai Party, the mainstream of the Zionist movement, hoped an accommodation could be reached. Led by David Ben-Gurion, they believed they could work with the Arabs to reach a deal: “If the Arabs agree to our return to our land, we would help them with our political, financial, and moral support to bring about the rebirth and unity of the Arab people.” Furthermore, he explained, we were neither desirous nor capable of building our future in Palestine at the expense of the Arabs. The Arabs of Palestine would remain where they were, their lot would improve, and even politically they would not be dependent on us, even after we came to constitute the vast majority of the population, for there was a basic difference between our relation to Palestine and that of the Arabs. For us, the Land was everything and there was nothing else. For the Arabs, Palestine was only a small portion of the large numerous Arab countries. Even when the Arabs became a minority in Palestine they would not be a minority in their territory, which extended from the Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf, and from the Taurus Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.14

News of the fighting soon reached high command. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzchak Rabin, and Yigal Allon were all unanimous in wanting to expel the population. In a report, Allon explained that by doing so they would relieve a long-term threat to Tel Aviv, clog the routes of any advance from the Arab Legion, and add the burden on the Arab economy of caring for forty-five thousand people.20 Allon refrained from issuing a direct order to expel the residents of the town to the brigade commander, however. Instead, an Arab delegation composed of residents, terrified after two days of fighting, occupation, and killing, requested that the town’s residents be allowed to leave. The military commander agreed, providing the people moved quickly.

June 20, 1977, was a watershed in Israel’s political history. On that day Menachem Begin’s right-wing Likud Party assumed power after defeating the Labor Party in the general elections. For the first time the government was not run by the Labor Party, the party of David Ben-Gurion, which had led the state since its inception in 1948.

Zionism required its supporters to reconsider their Jewish identities and to position themselves between the values of Jewish tradition and a new Jewish nationalism.