David Ben-Gurion, the State of Israel, and the Arab World 1949-1956

228 Pages·2002·4.233 MB·English

by  Zakai Shalom

DAVID BEN-GURION, THE STATE OF ISRAEL AND
THE ARAB WORLD, 1949-1956

David Ben-Gurion,
the State of Israel
and the Arab
World, 1949-1956
ZAKI SHALOM
sussex
A C A D E M I C
PRESS
Brighton • Portland
Copyright © Zaki Shalom 2002
The right of Zaki Shalom to be identified as
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
2468 109753 1
First published2002 in Great Britain by
SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
PO Box 2950
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and in the United States of America by
SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS
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criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shalom, Zaki.
David Ben-Gurion, the state of Israel, and die Arab world, 1949-1956 / Zaki Shalom.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-902210-21 (he : alk. paper)
1. Ben-Gurion, David, 1886-1973—Views on Arab-Israeli conflict—1948-1967.
2. Arab-Israeli conflict—1948-1967. 3. Prime ministers—Israel—Biography.
I. Title.
DS125,3.B37 453 2002
956.04—dc21 2002018726
Printed by Bookcraft, Midsomer Norton, Bath
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Foreword by Avi Shlaim vi
Preface viii
1 Israel and the Arab World - Strengths and Weaknesses 1
2 The Vision and Reality of an Arab-Israeli Peace
Agreement 31
3 The Limitations of a Political Arrangement 76
4 Israel’s Perception of the Arab Threat - The Dilemma
of Daily Security 115
5 The Territorial Status Quo and the Armistice Borders 147
6 Advantages of a Settlement and the “Lost” Peace 177
Notes 192
Bibliography 209
Index 212
Foreword by Avi Shlaim
No other Middle Eastern leader has written as much, or been written
about so extensively, as David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of
Israel. Yet, he remains a deeply controversial figure. Traditional Israeli
historians have written about the man and his achievements in the most
glowing terms. His Israeli biographers, Michael Bar-Zohar and Shabtai
Teveth, have produced multi-volume hagiographies. Since the late 1980s,
however, revisionist Israeli historians have subjected Ben-Gurion and espe­
cially his policy towards the Arab world, to a critical re-examination.
Zaki Shalom, a senior researcher at the Ben-Gurion Research Center,
clearly belongs to the first group of scholars. But his aim in writing this
book is not so much to defend or criticize Ben-Gurion as to give a detailed
and accurate account of his attitude towards the Arab world in the period
between the 1948 war and the Suez war of 1956. Shalom recognizes at the
outset the distinction between policy and statements, between the opera­
tional and the declaratory levels of policy. He is concerned not with
Ben-Gurion’s practical policy towards the Arabs in the period under inves­
tigation, but with his views, his attitudes, and his statements.
The book is underpinned by careful and comprehensive archival
research, and nearly every statement, whether it is controversial or not, is
fully documented. Shalom uses to good effect the whole panoply of
primary sources available at the Ben-Gurion Research Center. These
include Ben-Gurion’s Diaries from 1915 to 1964, his correspondence, his
speeches, his publications and protocols of meetings of the countless
policy-making bodies of which he was a member.
Although the book deals primarily with Ben-Gurion’s worldview, it
provides the essential background for understanding his policy towards the
Arabs. In this worldview, the Arabs, and especially the Palestinian Arabs,
posed a permanent threat to the Jewish community in Palestine, to its aspi­
ration to statehood and to the survival of the fledgling Jewish state. As
Ben-Gurion confided to his diary on 23 October 1950: “Before the estab­
lishment of the state, I lived for several years with the nightmare of the
possibility of our extermination ... the danger was actually made more
vi
Foreword by Avi Shlaim
acute by the establishment of the state and by our military victory [in the
1948 war].”
For Ben-Gurion the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was the
cultural gulf that separated the two sides, the gulf in values, norms and
aspirations: “We live in the twentieth century,” he said on one occasion,
“they - in the fifteenth.” In every respect he saw Israel as the antithesis of
the Arab world. Deep-rooted forces in the Arab world will not be satisfied,
he believed, until Palestine’s entire territory is recovered, and its Jewish
population destroyed. Consequently, the campaign that Israel had to wage
was not about land, or borders or spheres of influence, but about her
survival, about her very right to exist in the Middle East.
Ben-Gurion’s pessimistic appraisal of the chances of real peace between
Israel and its neighbours followed logically from this analysis of the sources
of Arab antagonism and the uncompromising character of Arab aims. The
implicit conclusion was that Arab society would have to change beyond
recognition for peace with Israel to become a realistic possibility. Israel,
according to Ben-Gurion, had no way of changing the Arab position,
because any map it offered as a basis for a settlement was bound to be
rejected by the other side as inadequate. The only realistic option left for it
in this uniquely harsh regional environment was to build up its military
power in order to deter the Arab states from launching a second round, and
in order to cope with the manifold challenges to its everyday security.
Some scholars view Moshe Sharett, Foreign Minister until June 19S6
and Prime Minister between 1953 and 1955, as the antithesis to Ben-
Gurion’s distinctly deterministic view of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shalom
does not agree. He sees no significant difference between the two men on
the terms of peace settlement: Both were opposed to territorial concessions
and to the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees. The only real difference
between Ben-Gurion and Sharett, argues Shalom, related to the policy of
military reprisals as a means of preserving Israel’s everyday security. Ben-
Gurion favoured hard-hitting reprisals, whereas Sharett wanted to limit the
scope, frequency and intensity of the resort to force.
The importance of the debate on reprisals should not be underestimated
since reprisals were the crux of Israel’s strategy in the conflict in the early
1950s. Another significant difference concerned the territorial status quo.
Both Ben-Gurion and Sharett were willing to conclude peace with the Arab
states on the basis of the territorial staus quo enshrined in the 1949
Armistice Agreements, and this was indeed the official policy of the Israeli
government. The difference was that Sharett was consistent in his commit­
ment to the Armistice Agreements whereas Ben-Gurion was not.
Ben-Gurion made a distinction between the borders of the land of Israel
and the borders of the State of Israel, and he harboured ambitions to push
the latter to the limit of the former. Although Ben-Gurion did not advo-
• •
VII
Foreword by Avi Shlaim
cate going to war to expand Israel’s territory, there was a persistent expan­
sionist steak in his thinking. In a scarcely veiled reference to his senior
colleague, at a meeting on October 1952, Sharett stated that the seeking of
opportunities to extend Israel's borders is not a peace policy: “Maybe, it is
the good and right policy, but it is not a peace policy.” And maybe the real
difference was that Sharett was averse to any action that diminished the
prospects for peace, which he knew to be slim anyway, whereas Ben-Gurion
felt that Israel was entitled to act as she pleased given the state of neither
war nor peace imposed on her by her Arab neighbours.
One of the merits of Zaki Shalom’s approach is that, for the most part,
he allows the protagonists to speak for themselves. He illuminates every
aspect of Ben-Gurion’s thinking about the Arabs and about Israel’s
relations with them with a great wealth of material, much of which is used
here for the first time. While basically sympathetic to Ben-Gurion’s point
of view, he makes a conscious effort to be objective and fair-minded. His
scholarship is certainly of a high order. The result is an important contri­
bution to the literature of one of the leading protagonists in the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
The value of the book is not limited to the light it sheds on Israel's
founding father during the first eight years of statehood. By focusing on
David Ben-Gurion during this crucial period, the book highlights some of
the central dilemmas with which the Zionist movement has had to grapple
ever since its inception towards the end of the nineteenth century. These
issues include the moral case for a Jewish state, the extent of its territorial
claims, the nature of the conflict with its Arab neighbours, the use of force,
and the possibility of peaceful coexistence. All these issues remain of
burning interest and importance today, following the breakdown of the
Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising.
Avi Shlaim
St Antony’s College
Oxford
February 2002
Preface
This book examines David Ben-Gurion’s views on politics and security, and
the forces that shaped his positions with regard to the Arab world in the
period between the War of Independence (1947-8) and the Sinai campaign
(1956), the first two major military conflicts that dramatically changed
Israel’s basic relationship with the Arab world and the international com­
munity. The focus on BG’s world-view highlights the fundamental
difference between political theory and the praxis of application. The fre­
quent gaps between the two reveal the truism that no policy can reflect in
absolute terms a leader’s “purity” of will and aspiration. Policy may be
regarded, at best, as a trade-off between primary goals on the one hand, and
conflicting interests, pressures, and constraints on the other.
The emphasis here is on BG’s “intentions” rather than a depiction and
analysis of his foreign policy in his capacity as Prime Minister and Defence
Minister. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to delve into the characteristics,
sources and implications of BG’s foreign policy and security strategy in
order to gain an understanding of his political world-view.
Chapter 1 illustrates the vast array of BG’s imagery of the Arabs in his
evaluation of the nature of Arab society - its yearnings, ethos, normative
behaviour, and the character of its leadership. An analysis of BG’s imagery
leaves little doubt of his acute awareness of the huge chasm existing
between the State of Israel and the Arab world. This gap appeared to him
unbridgeable in the foreseeable future.
Chapter 2 describes how BG’s deeply engrained views shaped his atti­
tudes and decisions regarding Israel’s relations with the Arab world,
especially as regards a peace settlement. His basic premise, albeit
restrained, that genuine peace could be achieved between countries only
when similarities were found between their national, social and moral
natures, led him to realize that for all practical purposes true peace between
Israel and the Arab world would have to remain a distant goal. After exam­
ining the factors blocking an Arab-Israeli accord, BG concluded that the
international community and its position on Arab-Israeli relations were
key elements that Israel had to take into consideration.
ix
Preface
Focusing on BG’s political and security outlook has not diverted from
discussing the perspectives of other statesmen in the national leadership,
especially Moshe Sharett (Foreign Minister and intermittent Prime
Minister). The lengthy deliberations between the two leaders sheds light on
a complex, jagged relationship, rocked by personal rancour and clashes of
opinion, together with mutual understanding and close cooperation that
spanned decades of collegiality in the national leadership.
Two main issues dominated the conflicting relations between BG and
Sharett: political settlement and defence policy. In this study, political
settlement will be treated as a separate subject distinct from the general
peace settlement. BG himself consistently distinguished between the two,
with the political settlement being dealt with on a different level. For the
most part it remained on the government’s agenda as a realistic possibility,
and was often discussed in terms of cost and gain, danger versus risk.
Chapter 3 questions the widely accepted belief that BG and Sharett held
contradictory views as to which steps Israel should take to achieve an
Arab-Israeli political settlement. Both men assumed that a peace would
transpire only if Israel surrendered its gains from the War of Independence,
especially its territorial acquisitions (by retreating to the armistice lines)
and its demographic advantage (by allowing a fixed number of refugees to
return to their homes). I find no basis for the claim that Sharett’s view on
these matters was essentially different from BG’s.
Basic differences on defence policy did exist between the two men, as
Chapter 4 shows. Sharett, together with a group of senior politicians who
had no qualms in principle over Israel’s military retaliations, harboured
deep reservations over the manner in which they were being carried out.
Sharett proposed a list of alternatives to the retaliation policy being advo­
cated by BG and Moshe Dayan. His proposals came under review and were
rejected by the framers of state security, probably because they were consid­
ered inapplicable for staunching infiltration and incompatible with
strategic national policy.
The question of the territorial status quo and its danger for Israel after
the War of Independence form the pillar of BG’s security-political con­
cept and his attitude towards the Arab world. There is little doubt of his
willingness, or for that matter the willingness of all of Israel’s national
leadership, to seek a peace settlement based on the 1948/49 armistice lines.
Nevertheless, various factors contributed decisively to creating the
national feeling that the present borders were an undesired result of dic­
tates forced on Israel at the termination of the war. Among those factors
were:
• The differentiation that BG made between “the borders of [historic]
Eretz-Israel” and “the borders of the State of Israel”.
x