Prophet with a Gun

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All through Israel raged a debate of a kind new in its young history. Eight years ago this tiny state, the size of New Jersey, had elbowed itself into being in a hostile part of the world and had done so by a combination of its own energy and the world's sympathy. Israel came into existence defiantly in 1948--by force of arms and by proclaiming its own independence, by defeating five encircling armies and forcing the signatures of neighboring Arab lands to a U.N.-sponsored armistice. Israel had won its first papers in nationality at the insistence of one uncompromising man, David Ben-Gurion.

Now Israel was involved in another crisis, brought on by its own fears for its survival, and the means by which it had chosen to "defend" itself--including the deliberate Israeli Army raid on Syrian outposts near the Sea of Galilee border in which 56 Syrians and six Israelis were killed (TIME, Dec. 19). Before the U.N. Security Council is a Syrian resolution asking sanctions against Israel and its expulsion from the U.N.; the official U.N. mediator has denounced the Israeli raid as disproportionate to the provocation, and Britain, France and the U.S. agreed last week to censure Israel in "strong and unequivocal terms."

The Axis of Defiance. The crisis is part of a larger one--the Middle East is now the liveliest front of the cold war--but it had disturbing perplexity all its own. Israel itself was agitated by the consequences of its policy. The question before the Israeli leadership in essence was how best to survive. By defiant militancy that disregards world opinion, or by securing world, and especially Western, sympathy? The question had a false simplicity, because the partisans of securing sympathy, led by Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, agreed on the need of military readiness: in fact, their argument was that the Syrian raid, happening as it did in the midst of Sharett's delicate negotiations with the U.S. State Department, had "wrecked" the chances of getting U.S. arms. Public opinion abroad, argued Sharett, "is a precious moral and political asset which we must reassure and protect." The partisans of militancy, led by Ben-Gurion, also care what the world thinks--but, says Ben-Gurion, "Israel will stand or fall by what is achieved in Israel, not by what is said abroad."

Last week the debate was resolved. Ben-Gurion, wearing battle dress, and Sharett in his lawyer's business suit went to the Knesset (Parliament) together. Speaking before a packed assembly in Jerusalem, less than 500 yards from Jordan sentries' rifles, Ben-Gurion acknowledged that "security problems are bound up with foreign policy" and implied that he might have erred in ordering the Syrian raid when he did. But he defended Israel's determination to strike out at its enemy "with all the means at our disposal," whenever it felt the need. Ben-Gurion thus was firmly in control, with his ministers behind him. The government was speaking again with one voice, and that voice was demanding arms. Israel had chosen to stand tough.

The decision owed much to the powerful will of David Ben-Gurion, who, at 69, looks like an Old Testament patriarch with white hair foaming up from each side of his thrusting head. A Zionist and Socialist visionary, a prophet who packs a pistol, Ben-Gurion led the republic for its first six years until, frustrated by party niggling in his coalition, he retired to live in the pioneer settlement of Sde Boker on the southern desert. Eleven months ago he dramatically returned to politics on the eve of elections, hoping to win decisive control of Parliament but achieving only a narrow majority.

Out of the Cemeteries. Ben-Gurion is the kind of man who provokes strong reactions. "He is a man nobody can talk to, reason with or deal with," says Jordan's Education Minister Auni Abdel Hadi. Admirers call him another Churchill; others, like one State Department official, consider him "the most dangerous man in the Middle East." "Ben-Gurion is not a full man," says Sheik Farouki, leader of Arab refugees in Jericho. "He is a poet . . . not a man of facts. He wanted to build a new nation by raiding cemeteries and making a people from the bones of history." Says Foreign Minister Sharett: "People call Ben-Gurion an extremist. He is not. He is a radical who advocates all his policies with extremism--even a moderate policy."

B-G, in fact, gives the impression of a headlong man in a hurry, and his strength among his own people is that this headlong quality has often proved right. Years ago, when a British White Paper restricted further Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine on the eve of World War II, he decided that Jews must be brought to Palestine in large numbers in defiance of the British rule. "We shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war, and the war as if there were no White Paper," he said. The illegal immigration, the organization of which he left as always to enthusiastic young followers, helped build a solid, well-knit and trained community to fight for the state after World War II. When Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's independence in 1918 (against the advice of U.S. Secretary of State George

Marshall), his ill-armed, illegally trained Haganah forces smashed the Arab invaders and carried off his big gamble with stunning success. Then, as soon as the new state was formed, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the Ingathering of the Exiles, leaving it to his young followers to find ways to take in 770,000 immigrants in five years.

Love That Man. The devoted loyalty of the able young implementers still shines around him. Of the three closest to him now, one says simply: "I adore him"; another: "I love that man." Ironically enough, this mesmeric lawgiver who commands such loyalty is a lonely man without real friends and apparently without desire for any. He has no small talk, and no interest in anybody else's. He is aloof from most of his colleagues, including veteran Zionists with whom he has marched since, an immigrant from Czarist Poland, he began his career as a plowboy in 1907 in a struggling settlement in Galilee.

His private passion is reading philosophy--Spinoza, the Greeks, the Bible, the ancient Buddhist writings. It is part of his search for what he calls "universal truth." When he met Einstein, he was interested only in what the great man could tell him about universal truth. When Burma's Prime Minister U Nu visited Israel, he went down to see Ben-Gurion at his desert retreat. They talked Buddhism. Afterward Ben-Gurion snorted: "The man knows nothing about Buddhism."

Kitchen-Table Autocrat. He is innocent of humor. His only joke that associates can recall was a remark made when he arrived at a Labor Party meeting from a diplomatic reception wearing striped trousers and a morning coat. He began his address to the meeting: "Comrades, please forgive my working clothes." In his old

Socialist simplicity, he is happiest in the three-room prefab that is still kept for him in the Negev pioneer settlement of Sde Boker. Even in his state residence in Jerusalem, he goes about in shirtsleeves and prefers to eat with his wife, son and daughter-in-law in the kitchen. His wife still cooks his meals and darns his socks. His personality and manners, his leisured kindliness, have remained utterly unchanged by a generation in power. But he likes power, and he knows how to wield it. "The world," says Ben-Gurion, "is not yet accustomed to the revival of a sovereign Jewish state after 2,000 years of its suppression. Even the Jews are not yet convincingly accustomed to it." The key to his vehemence today is that this visionary leader, as fiercely perfectionist as any prophet of old, has come back from the wilderness north of Sinai in the stark conviction that his people have not yet gained the Promised Land, and can never finally win it until they have overcome the enemy without and the enemy within. He is genuinely worried about the durability of Israel, and fears that the state founded in 1948 may only be a historical episode.

The Enemy Within. Since his return, the old man has aged fast. In conversation, he sometimes repeats himself. Last September he suffered a mysterious dislocation in the inner ear that some have reported as a slight stroke. Over him hangs a somber sense that time is short and that like Moses he can only point the way to the Promised Land. Delivering his first speech after his return, he seemed even more wrought up about the enemy within than the enemy without, as he denounced his people for putting Zion's cause second to their own comforts and bowing down before "the golden calf." Later, addressing the Labor Party executive, he said: "There are too many gathered in the cities and towns and too few in the outlying places and along the border. There are too many middlemen and not enough productive workers. There is too much chasing after comfort, profit and riches, and not enough devoted work or pioneering or thought for the morrow. There is too much talk about brotherhood and the unity of the Jewish nation and not enough helping hands stretched out to newcomers. There are too many claims made on the state, and too few on ourselves, too much talk of rights and too little performance of duty."

No Longer a Minority. Dynamic Israel indeed faces problems, but its achievements have been tremendous. The Israel of 1956 is strikingly different from the newborn republic of eight years ago. Only 20% of the 717,997 immigrants who arrived from Europe, North Africa, Yemen and Iraq between 1948 and 1953--at the rate of one every three minutes--still live in temporary accommodations, and the dominant feature of the Israeli landscape is no longer the tent camp of the first years of statehood but the ubiquitous, neat, garage-sized concrete houses--the longed-for "permanent" housing. Along the Jerusalem Road, where village after village of red-roofed one-room houses have been set up, the majority of settlers have built on an extra room at their own expense and are cultivating gardens among the rocks. Says a 20-year-old Iraqi girl who married on her arrival three years ago: "We hadn't even money to buy a blanket to cover us on our wedding night. We couldn't speak Hebrew. We were frightened of everyone who tried to help us. Today we have a two-room apartment, a dining-room table with four chairs, a wardrobe with three doors, an icebox, a radio, two babies, two cots and a double bed. We speak Hebrew, and my husband has a good job. Of course we feel we are Israelis."

Under the New Economic Policy laid down in 1952, a conspicuous group of near-millionaires has arisen. A "Gold Coast" of California-style villas has sprung up north of Tel Aviv, where the wives of the new $50,000-a-year men vie in entertaining ambassadors or ministers at lavish dinner parties. Bustling crowds, looking like anything but refugees from East European ghettos in their crisp frocks or open-necked, short-sleeved shirts tucked into belted slacks, hurry through the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa, bent on marketing by day, on moviegoing by night (Israel's per capita cinema attendance is the world's highest). Over their cheesecake and Nescafe, young apartment dwellers talk about new cars and skin-diving. Out in the older collective settlements, where palm-shaded bungalows hedged by bright bougainvillea and hibiscus have long since supplanted the rude huts, basketball courts and swimming pools indicate that the new generation of native-born Israelis prefer sports to politics.

The Big Gap. Israelis who have money can now buy pretty much what they want --Paris silks, sail boats, U.S. breakfast cereals. On the land, output rose 23% in 1954. Per capita income is $450, highest in the Middle East. Water now flows through 65 miles of 66-in., Israeli-made pipe to irrigate 50,000 Negev desert acres planted to cotton and grain. Israel has struck oil near Beersheba. Though foreign estimates indicate that Israel will be lucky if the find cuts her present $35 million-a-year petroleum imports by much, the first well is already producing 300 barrels a day for Haifa's refinery. Though foreign firms have not exactly broken down Israel's doors in answer to the Socialist government's invitation to invest, the $200 million that U.S. Jews have spent for state-development bonds have made Israel one of the leading lands for private U.S. investment.

Back to the Bible. The new Israel strives obsessively for the forms and spirit of national unity. So far Israel's citizens have been unable to agree on a constitution, because the dominant Socialists refuse to accept rabbinical sway in the state. With only 20% of the population Orthodox, religion has not proved a cementing force. Because rabbis exercise absolute control over marriage and divorce laws, some Israelis have already found a Reno in Cyprus. Israel's state-owned trains do not run on the Sabbath, and the citizen who drives his private car through Orthodox districts on the holy day is apt to hear an outraged cry of "Sabbath" from the curb. Yet the prevailing spirit in Israel remains the old-fashioned buoyancy of 19th century Zionist Socialism, with all its emphasis on sentimental nationalism, Utopian pioneering of the land, and a generous belief in the nature of man. Israel's 300,000 elementary-school children attend either religious or "general" schools. In the one case they learn the Bible as God's Word, in the other more as folk literature. But always it remains at the forefront of the classroom, a reminder of "the stirring history, the spiritual greatness and the uniqueness of the Jews."

The 70-Nation Look. The most startling phenomenon in today's Israel is that there is not yet a recognizable Israeli. It is as false to picture him as a tough colonizer as it is to think of him as an ascetic-looking, hollow-cheeked, dark-skinned Yemenite or ringleted old Jew straight out of a Polish ghetto. The Ingathering of the Exiles crammed the new republic with people from 70 lands, without mutual understanding, unable to speak to each other, refusing often to pray together. Half the population is now composed of Oriental Jews, many of them near-primitive savages from darkest Arabia who had never sat down to a table.

To unite these elements Ben-Gurion called for "tremendous educational effort, superhuman patience and boundless love." Within a day's walk of Tel Aviv's neon lights are villages where babies are still painted to ward off the evil eye. Said one social worker: "The 20th century is living next to the 10th." In a village near Beersheba, a group of five young Israelis who answered Ben-Gurion's call to live with the newcomers found a group of Jews from Cochin China--dark-skinned, resigned, pious and poor--who seemed to share nothing with the new state except the blue sky above. Said the nurse: "They were as foreign to us as the hinterland of India."

A special Civic Education Department opened 160 centers, taught rudimentary courses in "What are your rights?" and "What are your duties?" in 218 settlements; new vocational schools graduated 61,000 immigrants, including Yemenite welders who man the new $5,000,000 pipe factory at Yuval Gad, carefully tucking their side curls behind their ears before putting on their helmets. In the new immigration towns such as Acre and Jaffa, authorities mix the newcomers to speed integration. One apartment house may hold families from as many countries as there are apartments. Some Europeans complain of being put next door to "blacks," and Israel with all its other perplexities now must worry about the color problem.

The Military Molds. The army, which takes every boy and girl from their differing homes and integrates them into the life of the nation, has done the decisive educational work. Every army commander is told that he is primarily a teacher, and "only when you go into battle are you a military commander." Today five Jews newly arrived from Iraq, Yemen and Libya sit in Parliament, and the first Yemeni boys have won air force pilots' wings. The doubling of Israel's population in its first six years while retaining the form and spirit of Western democracy is a remarkable achievement of internal stability.

But 300,000 Israelis still cannot speak, read or write Hebrew, and it will be a long time before a lad from Morocco living in the arid emptiness of the rocky Hebron foothills wins the same opportunity as the boy from Rehavia, Jerusalem's swank suburb. Last week, calling again on the army to help deal with the social problems of consolidating the new state, Ben-Gurion urged that the conscription period be increased by one year to 3 1/2, the last year to be spent establishing new agricultural settlements in the Negev.

It is such inequalities, as well as the needs of the untended poor, the spiritual indifference of the older inhabitants to new sacrifices, and their unwillingness to populate and plant the open spaces, that most disturb Ben-Gurion as he surveys his country. But what disturbs others in Ben-Gurion's administration is the artificiality of Israel's prosperity. Israel lives on German reparations of about $60 million a year, which will run out in 1965; on U.S. aid ($40 million in 1955); on gifts and loans from world Jewry ($67 million in 1955). Unless economic reforms are made, warns one of Israel's top economists, the country faces an "even more serious inflation than in 1951." Even with exports at record levels, Israel's imports run three times as high. The tremendous trade gap, admits Finance Minister Levi Eshkol, "is causing anxiety." If Israel now gets involved in a sizable increase in its arms spending, its finances will be further out of joint. The question arises, must Israel continue to live requiring help from the outside? If so, can it be indifferent to the opinion of U.S. Jews and of U.S. and world opinion in general?

Economists insist that, ideally, Israel could make its own way if it took its proper place in its own region, and that its manufactures can find their rightful markets in such undeveloped nearby lands as Ethiopia, Eritrea and in the Arab states themselves. But to find such trade in its own area would require a great change of heart among its hostile neighbors and a great change in its own attitude. Ben-Gurion's victory last week was an indication that Israel does not propose to make such a change itself. This was a victory over his own Cabinet, but it was not necessarily a final answer.

A Question of Balance. The state of Israel was born in a wave of U.S. sympathy, when the meaning of the gas chamber and the injustices done to a whole people gave the cause of Zionism a support in the U.S. far beyond the ranks of U.S. Jews. It was also born at a time of American indifference to the Middle East, an indifference reflected both in U.S. policy and the absence of it. The Truman Administration, reflecting not only the Jewish vote but a wider U.S. sympathy, made a policy of supplying as much aid, dollar for dollar, to Israel, whose population then stood at 700,000, as to all seven Arab nations in the area combined, with their 40 million people.

The cold war, bringing jeopardy to the Middle East's valuable oil preserves and a Russian penetration into this strategic area, has forced a reconsideration of U.S. interests. Secretary Dulles now regards the region as the second most important for the U.S., after Western Europe; its loss, he recently said, would be "worse than the loss of China" to the Western cause. The sale of Communist arms to Egypt thus presented an active threat to U.S. interests in the area. It also provided Ben-Gurion with justification for his new militancy: "Israel stands in imminent danger of attack by Egypt," he told his Parliament last week. "The [Communist] arms are intended only and exclusively for an attack against Israel."

But Egypt's Nasser replies that he accepted Communist aid only after Israel's attack on Gaza. Nasser told TIME last week: "Until last Feb. 28 I felt the possibility of real peace was near. The borders between Israel and Egypt had been quiet since 1952, and I felt at peace." When the Jews struck at Gaza, that feeling left. "That is why I bought arms from Czechoslovakia. I would rather have spent the money on social development."

Says Nasser of Ben-Gurion: "I have the impression that he is responsible for it. It was not that way when Sharett was running Israel. Sharett is not a cruel man, and it may be that he is a reasonable man. But Ben-Gurion is under the idea that terror must be raised, and he speaks only of force--of forcing a settlement on the Arabs."

Ben-Gurion speaks of Nasser in the same reluctant-enmity fashion. He told TIME: "For a time I considered Nasser a patriot and an honest man. He has a fine figure, a pleasant smile, a nice face--really he gives the appearance of being a nice fellow--and all those people believe he is sincere. But when I asked General Burns [the U.N. mediator], an honest man, to get one little thing from Nasser--an order for a ceasefire, he couldn't get it."

Outline for Peace. As incidents multiply, involving so often innocent women and children on both sides, grievances deepen. Israelis, confined in a land at some points only ten miles wide, feel themselves surrounded by nations that will never accept their existence, but U.S. diplomats in the area say that most responsible Arab leaders had become resigned to Israel's existence until Ben-Gurion began his smashing reprisal raids.

In this increasingly troubled situation, U.S. diplomats have tried to calm everybody down, hoping not to antagonize either side. The result has pleased no one and solved nothing. Inside the State Department and in the U.N. are influential voices saying that something can and should be done if only the West will seize the opportunity: Middle East leaders, these men say, will not make concessions on their own, but would be willing to make concessions at outside insistence if they could show their people that they had to.

Last August, in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, John Foster Dulles outlined a thoughtful plan for Middle East settlement. His proposals:

Refugees: some form of resettlement or compensation for the 900,000 Arab refugees who fled Palestine during the 1948 war and have been encamped in unspeakable bitterness and misery around Israel's borders ever since. Their plight is the Arabs' most effective moral case against Israel. "Israel is not prepared under any circumstances," Sharett reiterated last week, "to return and resettle refugees." His previous offer to accept 100,000 Arab refugees is now withdrawn.

Boundaries: Dulles asks for "mutual concessions," with the understanding that once boundaries are set, the U.S. would guarantee them. Israel has privately indicated its willingness to allow landlocked Jordan commercial privileges at Haifa, and to give Egypt a land route across the Negev to its Arab neighbors, but Israel bristled at references to waste territory that has "only sentimental value," and angrily denounces the British Foreign Office hint that Israel give way in the Negev.

Water: Dulles urged Arab-Israeli agreement on division of Jordan waters to irrigate new land for development and refugee resettlement. Eric Johnston, the U.S. negotiator, worked out an agreement that was mutually advantageous to both sides, but could never quite bring either to sign (Israel is the more cooperative). Said the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem last week: "If the Johnston plan gave 99% of the Jordan water to the Arabs and helped Israel by only so much as one gallon, I would still say no."

Dulles' proposals got no welcome from either side; the State Department's follow-through was woefully inadequate, and the Czech arms deal shortly afterwards queered everything. But the urgency of a solution increases, and so does the difficulty, as the weeks go by. The subject is now high on the agenda of the U.S. National Security Council, and the British Foreign Office last week called home eight Middle East ambassadors for talks. In Jordan, Arab refugees from Palestine, spurred by Egyptian and Saudi Arabian agitators (and also by Communist agents) rioted in the streets and smashed up the U.S. consulate, bringing a protest from John Foster Dulles over Jordan's failure to protect U.S. property.

As passions increase, the West is agreed on one point: it will not finance an arms race in the Middle East. In Israel there is no longer agitation, as there had been a few weeks earlier, for a preventive war. Voices of moderation are being heard. Ben-Gurion himself said last week: "We believe the maintenance of peace is preferable even to victory in war. War is legitimate only in absolute self-defense. It is not legitimate if one's aim is the securing of peace or destruction of an evil regime."

But, though most Middle East experts do not expect a new Arab-Israeli war, there is also little chance (barring a bold and successful diplomatic intervention by the West) of peace. Says Ben-Gurion: "We have come a long way without peace. We can go a long way in the future without it."

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