“A Great Man” 

David Ben-Gurion with Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin in the Negev, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Photograph Source: National Photo Collection of Israel – CC BY-SA 3.0

Going through my mother’s papers sometime after her death in 1985, I found an essay by the son of a family friend titled “David Ben-Gurion: A Great Man.” Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister of Israel. The essay was completed as a requirement for the traditional course of classes that the boy attended sometime in the 1960s in preparation for his bar mitzvah, the traditional ceremony that marks the coming of age, religiously, of a 13-year-old Jewish boy. A bat mitzvah is the ceremony for a girl of that age.

In October 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote to his 16-year-old son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places… And if we have to use force… then we have force at our disposal” (Ben-Gurion, Zichronot (Memoirs),Volume 4, 1970). Netanyahu and his gang of thugs must love this founder of Israel.

How the essay came into the possession of my mother is a mystery. The writing was filled with platitudes that needed to be excused because of the boy’s age, but that testimonial is similar to all of the writing and news we had in our small Jewish community in New England at the time. Hidden from us was the reality of the ethnic cleansing Ben-Gurion speaks of that had taken place prior to and during Israel’s founding in 1948. Missing was the incredible level of demonization of the Palestinian people that was reflected in a relative’s pronouncement 15 years ago that “The only good Arab is a dead one.” The Nakba is the formal name that describes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land they occupied that became Israel. The Nakba is defined as “the catastrophe” when 15,000 Palestinians were killed and more than 750,000 were expelled from the land where they lived. Some casual observers might find the current Gaza war that has spread to a huge swath of land including the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Yemen to fit into this colonial drive to return Israel to some kind of delusional greater state or kingdom that is described in the Old Testament of the Bible. Many religious fundamentalists see the mayhem in the Middle East as the beginning of Armageddon described in the New Testament.

I am examining what community meant to me in those days long since past. Part of the loss of contemporary community has led to my examination and consideration of the strong Jewish community where I grew up. The propaganda to which we were exposed was undeniable. No one would have questioned that Ben-Gurion was a great man, or that Israel was an innocent and a great land founded in answer to the horrors of the Holocaust. Absent were the slanders and libels of self-hating Jews, or slurs of antisemitism because any criticism of Israel and its policies toward the Palestinian people did not exist at a noticeable level. As kids we played “cowboys and Indians [sic]” and few knew or commented on the ethnic cleansing and massive elimination of the indigenous people who occupied what is now the US. The elimination of indigenous peoples here was reflected in the Nakba.

On October 8, 2024, Israel announced it sent a new division of the Israel Defense Forces into southern Lebanon in its rampage to go much further than the “river to the sea” chant heard at many now limited protests in the US and elsewhere against the Gaza war that is now a conflagration across a large swath of the Middle East (New York Times, October 8, 2024). Biden utters the same specious platitudes and criticisms of Israel while US munitions and especially unimaginable large bombs are delivered to and by rampaging Israel Defense Forces. Nowhere are there official arguments against proportionality in war or the mass murder of civilian populations in this madness. While an untold number of innocent Palestinian civilians lie under the rubble in the Gaza Strip, only small parts of the US electorate seem to give a damn. The war propaganda coming out of the “newspaper of record” is ceaseless. This propaganda machine is big business within the mass media and great news for weapons manufacturers in the US. On the one-year anniversary of the October 7th attacks, I made an antiwar comment on an article about the anniversary of the attack by Hamas in Israel and as usual that comment, like most of my antiwar comments about the Gaza war, never saw the light of day.

Prior to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the Trump Organization was in talks to develop hotel properties in Israel, including a luxury hotel in Jerusalem (New York Times, October 9, 2024). Recall that it was the Trump administration which moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. Now, this mix of business and government actions could intermingle in a way so filled with conflicts of interest that would even make a diehard capitalist blush.

Israel now threatens to make a new attack against Iran “lethal, precise, surprising” (Guardian, October 9, 2024). Kamala Harris speaks nothing but platitudes as Israel’s war expands.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).