Ben Gurion: An Anecdote

By sheer coincidence, I read today two pieces whose subject was the first prime minister of Israel .

This is one:

"In his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications), Pappé reported that in a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion wrote the following: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

It's a damning quote and is featured prominently in With God on Our Side. But it does not appear in any of the sources Pappé cites.

In his book, Pappé provided two references for this quote. The first reference is the July 12, 1937 entry of Ben-Gurion's diary. The second is page 220 of the August-September 1937 issue of New Judea, a newsletter published by the World Zionist Organization.

CAMERA provided electronic copies of both of these sources – neither of which include the quote attributed to Ben-Gurion – to Speakman earlier this week.

In response Speakman issued a press release that states in part:

… this quote cannot be found in the original sources of Ben Gurion's diary and therefore cannot be verified as authentic. While references to this quote exist, we could not find it in its original form. In an effort to be transparent and accurate, the producers have decided to take the extra step of removing it from future printings of "With God On Our Side." We apologize for this change.

The quote attributed to Ben-Gurion also appears in a 2006 article published in The Journal of Palestine Studies. In this article, Pappé provides another source for the quote. He states it appears on pages 167-168 of Charles D. Smith's Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New York: Beford/St. Martin's Press, 2004.

The quote does not appear here, either."

This is the other:

"[S]ome of Mr. Peres's personal reminiscences of Ben-Gurion and his entourage are delightful. One tells how, in 1956, Ben-Gurion, with Mr. Peres present as his aide, met secretly with French prime minister Guy Mollet and his generals to plan the joint Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt after Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal. "They were plainly eager to get to know their prospective ally," Mr. Peres relates, and Mollet encouraged Ben-Gurion to open the discussion:

Ben-Gurion took his time. He thought deeply, and then looked up. Mr. Prime Minister, he said, I would like you to explain to me when you in France stopped teaching Latin and went over to French. An argument over French linguistics developed from there, and . . . the whole evening went to hell.

A voracious autodidact always looking for useful information, Ben-Gurion may have been wondering whether there was a parallel worth pursuing with modern Hebrew. Any politician who would rather discuss the development of spoken vernaculars than an attack on Suez is indeed worthy of every bit of admiration that Mr. Peres has for him."