Misquoting History: The Distortion of Ben-Gurion’s Words

How Anti-Zionists Twist Ben-Gurion’s Legacy

This is a guest post from the JPF family by published author, Gregg Rosenberg. His latest book is Zionism and Anti-Zionism, a very personal work occasioned by the 2023/2024 war in Gaza. It discusses in detail current events and also the history of Israel and Palestine with an explicitly critical eye on the ideological claims made about events.

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The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

The Origin of Accusations

As we start this in-depth journey, I want to provide some context for how these accusations are often manufactured. A typical method anti-Zionists use to delegitimize Zionism is to use “their own words against them” in a kind of game of “gotcha”, and one of their favorite targets is David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the leader of the Zionist defense forces before Israel existed.

According to Ben-Gurion’s 1954 book Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, he wrote an essay in 1917 called “In Judea and Galilee”, in which he wrote about Zionist settlers:

We were not just working — we were conquering, conquering, conquering land. We were a company of conquistadores.

The quote is real and is sometimes used by anti-Zionists to prove the warlike intent of Zionism from its beginning. That is not at all what he is saying though. The context is a young Ben-Gurion writing romantically about the early Jewish settler’s struggles against the literal land, which was unproductive and swampy and malarial, and which the Jews spent decades draining and rehabilitating. It had nothing to do with conquering people. This martial-sounding and heroic language was typical for the time. It, unfortunately, invites misuse by people who do not care about the context.

Ben-Gurion’s realpolitik approach is evidenced almost as early as the quote about tilling land and draining swamps, as in 1918 when Ben-Gurion explained using the exact same romantic language involving “conquer”,

The true aim and real capacity of Zionism is not to conquer what has already been conquered (e.g., land cultivated by Arabs), but to settle in those places where the present inhabitants of the land have not established themselves and are unable to do so.

From (Ben-Gurion 1973, written in 1918 and first published in Der Yiddisher Kempfer), cited from: Daniel E. Orenstein: “Zionist and Israeli Perspectives on Population Growth and Environmental Impact in Palestine and Israel”, In: Orenstein, D.E., Miller, C. and A. Tal (eds.): “Between Ruin and Restoration: Chapters in Israeli Environmental History”, University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 2013.

This less aggressive stance is evidenced by decisions he made later during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence,

At the end of the war, when Yigal Allon, who represented the younger generation of commanders that had grown up in the war, demanded the conquest of the West Bank up to the Jordan River as the natural, defensible border of the state, Ben-Gurion refused. He recognized that the IDF was militarily strong enough to carry out the conquest, but he believed that the young state should not bite off more than it had already chewed.[…]

At the same time, Ben-Gurion was concerned that if Israel attacked Jordan, a European power, Britain, might intervene. He had no territorial aspirations: “At this stage we are not short of territory, but of Jews. And conquest of additional territory will not add Jews, but Arabs,” he wrote to a young man who proposed that he take the West Bank.

— Shlomo Aronson: “David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance”, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, New York, 2011.

This wartime decision is quite reflective of the peacetime Ben-Gurion, a version of Ben-Gurion reflected also in this letter written to his son Amos on October 5, 1937,

We do not wish, we do not need to expel the Arabs and take their place. All our aspirations are built upon the assumption — proven throughout all our activity in the Land — that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.

If you read enough anti-Zionist literature, you will find this very quote is extensively misquoted as, “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” You have to trace it back to its source to discover his sentiment was exactly the opposite.

As ardently as he believed in the Jewish right to a homeland, Ben-Gurion understood the tragedy of the situation and did not make an evil caricature of the Arabs,

Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.

— David Ben-Gurion. Quoted on pp 91–2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141–2 citing a 1938 speech.

Here, he is not saying he himself believes the Jews are aggressors; rather, he is communicating he understands the Arab perspective and urges his audience to understand it too. Because the Jews are newly arriving, the Arabs will experience them politically as aggressors, and that is easy to understand. In the language of today’s Left, Ben-Gurion was not engaged in racist “Othering” of the Arabs. The Arabs were people to hi,m and he could understand their point of view.

So, this is one version of Ben-Gurion, one who was hopeful and wanted the best for the Jewish people but not the worst for anyone else. Where does the anti-Zionist picture of a racist, expansionist, imperial Ben-Gurion come from, the one used as the “go to” figure to delegitimize Zionism in its crib? In addition to the many instances of sentiments like those above, he also said things like these below,

We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.
— David Ben-Gurion May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, a Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement — not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements.
— Ben-Gurion, War Diaries, 12/03/1947 following Israel’s acceptance of the U.N. Partition of 11/29/1947 (Simha Flapan, “Birth of Israel,” p.13)

We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population? ‘Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘ Drive them out! ‘
— Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

Partition: “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine “
— Ben-Gurion, p.22, “The Birth of Israel, 1987” Simha Flapan.

The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today — but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them. P. 53, “The Birth of Israel, 1987” Simha Flapan

12 July 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple — a Galilee free from Arab population.

On the 6th of February 1948, during a Mapai Party Council, Ben-Gurion responded to a remark from a member of the audience that “we have no land there” [in the hills and mountains west of Jerusalem] by saying: The war will give us the land. The concepts of “ours” and “not ours” are peace concepts, only, and in war they lose their whole meaning
— Ben-Gurion, War Diary, Vol. 1, entry dated 6 February 1948. p.211

Ben-Gurion was a leader, warrior, and politician for a long time. There are many such Ben-Gurion quotes on both sides of most issues: transfer and not transfer; acceptance of partition and rejection of partition; peaceful immigration and war.

What created these contradictions between a proud farmer conquering the land under his feet and a fierce soldier talking about conquering the land on the horizon? The most notable thing about the most aggressive quotes like those above is they were made during times of intense crisis and war. War, and the prospects for war, is the difference between the two versions of Ben-Gurion.

Almost all of the aggressive quotes come from the periods of 1936–1939 when the Arab Revolt in Palestine occurred, in which the Arabs were viciously fighting both British and Jews, and from 1947–1948, when Israel’s Civil War against the Arabs of Palestine and War for Independence against the Arab Legion occurred. These are the quotes that are used the most by anti-Zionists because they speak of population transfers and land conquest.

Some of the quotes come from a private war diary Ben-Gurion kept, where he mused about many things. They are the thoughts and words of a man being presented with what seemed like an unassailable fact that peaceful co-existence with Arabs would be impossible, holding a struggle in his mind to reconcile the facts of the war with the survival of his whole people.

These were periods of violent conflict in which the Arabs carried out wars of aggression against the Zionists in an attempt to exterminate them or drive them out. They were also periods of momentous decisions, in which Ben-Gurion had to use the greatest force of personality and rhetoric to convince his people to accept proposals some did not fully agree with, or to rally them to defense in response to attacks.

In the face of what looked like an utter rejection of Jewish immigration by Arabs, he asked himself and others what solutions existed. Even so, his decisions and actions did not often reflect the most extreme thoughts or words. As we saw, when subordinates demanded he conquer the West Bank, he declined.

The first violent massacre of Jewish immigrants by Arabs occurred in Jerusalem in 1920. By the end of 1939, after twenty years of violent Arab resistance, and at the end of a particularly brutal open war by Arabs against Jewish immigrants and the British, which lasted from 1936–1939, Ben Gurion and many of the other Zionist immigrants became fatalistic, despairing that there was no possibility of ever achieving acceptance by the Arab population. Given the looming Holocaust in Europe, their top priority was to save the Jews of Europe, not to appease fedayeen ( i.e., jihadist ) Arabs ( who by that time were aligning with the Nazis ).

So, for example, as late as 1937, during the Arab revolt, Ben Gurion was writing about how to respond to the fact the 1937 British Peele commission was only allocating a teeny, tiny piece of land where Jews would be allowed to live ( even smaller and worse than the 1948 partition plan ), and it was terrible land with lots of desert.

27 July 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to his 16 year old son Amos: We have never wanted to dispossess the Arabs [but] because Britain is giving them part of the country which had been promised to us, it is fair that the Arabs in our state be transferred to the Arab portion.

Without such transfers, there would be no way both to accept the tiny partition the British were offering and also save the Jews back in Europe, who were facing imminent death at the hands of the Nazis.

And from this, and things like it, we see Anti-Zionists manufacture accusations of ideological racism, imperialism, and so forth. The factory method is to take quotes which represent a fraction of what the man said in his whole life, uttered under the most dire circumstances, in many places contradicted by him and by other Zionist leaders of the early movement, and cast these as the essence which has driven the desire for a Jewish homeland as a whole, guiding all its policies regarding the Arabs, from Zionism’s birth and in its most crucial moments.

Are the anti-Zionists ultimately correct in their accusations? Or, rather than being parts of Zionist ideology, are thoughts like these the product of a never-ending war dynamic that Zionism never wanted?