Historians in Israel are debating whether David Ben-Gurion believed in trading land for peace as the left insists he did

by Avi Shilon

Avi Shilon, a historian and political scientist, is the author of Menachem Begin: A Life (2012), Ben-Gurion: His Later Years in the Political Wilderness (2016), and, most recently, The Left Wing’s Sorrow: Yossi Beilin and the Decline of the Peace Camp(Hebrew, 2017). He teaches at NYU’s Tel Aviv campus and Ben-Gurion University, and contributes op-ed pieces to Haaretz.

I read “The May 1948 Vote that Made the State of Israel,” Martin Kramer’s fascinating account of the story behind Israel’s declaration of independence, with much pleasure and interest. The essay has much to teach us not only about the annals of the Jewish state in its formative years but also about how history in general gets written (and rewritten).

Here I’d like to respond to what emerges as the main topic of Kramer’s essay, namely, David Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward the issue of the Jewish state’s borders, how that attitude was reflected in his handling of the pre-state deliberations over whether or not to specify those borders in the declaration of independence, and the extent to which his position on the issue may or may not have changed over the ensuing decades.

In exploring these matters, Kramer begins with the footage of a 1968 interview with Ben-Gurion that recently aroused much talk in Israel when it was included in the documentary film Ben-Gurion, Epilogue. As the author of the Hebrew book on which the film was based, I have a special interest here.

In that1968 interview, the then-eighty-two-year-old Ben-Gurion did indeed say that “If I could choose between peace and all the territories that we conquered last year [in the Six-Day War], I would prefer peace.” As Kramer notes, reviewers of David Ben-Gurion, Epilogue and various press commentators immediately pounced on this statement in order to claim Ben-Gurion posthumously for Israel’s left-wing “peace camp”—a claim that Kramer rightly proceeds to demolish by, among other things, retrieving the Ben-Gurion of 1948, whose attitude toward captured territory was decidedly different.

In agreeing with Kramer about Ben-Gurion circa 1948, I would add that even in 1968, not only was his stated choice of peace over territory seriously qualified by his simultaneous insistence (as Kramer notes) on retaining the Golan Heights and all of Jerusalem, but he included Hebron as well. By the early 1970s, moreover, he also favored keeping the settlements that had started to develop in the conquered West Bank, explaining that under conditions of “true peace” there should be no problem of Jews living under Arab rule just as Arab Israelis lived in the Jewish state.

Of course, Ben-Gurion could not have been foreseen the eventual magnitude of the settlement project. Even so, however, it’s hard to associate his position with that of the current Israeli left. If in principle he might have preferred true peace over “all the territories,” in practice he was unwilling to surrender all of them. Even today, Jerusalem, Hebron, and the settlements remain among the most contentious items in Israel-Palestinian negotiations, and the status of Jerusalem in particular is so vexed as to have been repeatedly deferred till a later date. ...

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