A Tale of Love and Darkness

A FEW YEARS after this nocturnal conversation, eight or nine years after the morning when Menachem Begin and his camp lost me at the Edison Auditorium, I met David Ben-Gurion. In those years he was prime minister and minister of defense but was thought of by many as the "great man of his day," the founder of the state, the great victor in the War of Independence and the Sinai Campaign. His enemies loathed him and ridiculed the cult of personality that surrounded him, while his admirers already saw him as the Father of the Nation, a sort of miraculous blend of King David, Judah Maccabee, George Washington, Garibaldi, a Jewish Churchill, and even the Messiah of God Almighty.

Ben-Gurion saw himself not only as a statesman but also-maybe primarily-as an original thinker and intellectual mentor. He had taught himself classical Greek so as to read Plato in the original, had dipped into Hegel and Marx, had taken an interest in Buddhism and Far Eastern thought, and had studied Spinoza so thoroughly that he considered himself a Spinozist. (The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a man with a razor-sharp mind, whom Ben-Gurion used to enlist as his companion whenever he raided the great bookshops of Oxford for philosophy books, when he was already prime minister, once said to me: "Ben-Gurion went out of his way to depict himself as an intellectual. This was based on two mistakes. The first, he believed, wrongly, that Chaim Weizmann was an intellectual. The second, he also believed, wrongly, that Jabotinsky was an intellectual" In this way Isaiah Berlin ruthlessly killed three prominent birds with one clever stone.)