From the Editor | Searching for Our Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky

This post is part of the Israel Vision Project, a series of pieces about where a diverse set of Israelis envision the country going from here. For the rest of the project, click here.

On a recent trip to Israel, I entered the gleaming new Ben-Gurion Archives in the Negev Desert, wondering what its namesake—the great David Ben-Gurion—would think about the predicament Israel finds itself in today. After a tour through the public exhibit, I followed Flora Pazerker, the archivist at the facility, down to a lower-level chamber and watched as she tenderly removed one of Ben-Gurion’s 1934 journals from a box. Opening it to a page densely covered with his neat Hebrew script, she pointed to a line and translated: “I said hello without reaching out my hand.” The country’s future founding prime minister, a meticulous journal keeper, had carefully recorded everything he did each day, including that he hadn’t wanted to shake the hand of his political rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a man he abhorred.

In the 1920s and 1930s, these two strong-willed, charismatic Zionist leaders clashed over their different visions of how a Jewish state should be established and what it should look like. A fiery orator, a journalist and a soldier, Jabotinsky was the progenitor of Revisionist Zionism, which promoted the establishment, by force if necessary, of a majority Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, including all of what is now the nation of Jordan. He founded the Revisionist Party in 1925 to compete against Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionists in the World Zionist Congress, which determined the leadership and strategy of Jewish settlement in Palestine. In a  controversial 1929 speech, Jabotinsky declared that rapprochement between the Jews and the Arabs was impossible: Their interests were too contradictory, their cultures too different, although he did not call for expelling Arabs, who he thought should be given full rights in a Jewish-majority state.

Ben-Gurion was the less captivating speaker but the superior political tactician, writes Hillel Halkin in his book Jabotinsky: A Life. He and his Labor Zionists, no stranger to using force themselves, would eventually establish a more compact Jewish state west of the Jordan River. Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion also fought over strategies for dealing with the British, who controlled Palestine and set Jewish immigration quotas, and they had diametrically opposed economic visions: Jabotinsky preferred a state founded on the principles of individualism while Ben-Gurion was deeply invested in socialism.

Their enmity had serious consequences. “In the 1930s, the disagreements between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky were tearing apart the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish government, spilling over into chaos and violence,” said archivist Pazerker, the sabra daughter of Bnei Menashe parents born in India. By mid-1934 the conflict had reached a boiling point: In the hope of bridging the gaps between the two movements, a parley was arranged in London, and as Ben-Gurion’s October 10 diary entry makes clear, it didn’t begin well. Jabotinsky offered his hand; Ben-Gurion couldn’t bring himself to take it.

Polarized times, such as 1930s Israel and today, demand leaders who can inspire antagonistic factions to unite by working together themselves.

What followed was pivotal, according to Pazerker. The men met 16 times over the next month and were able to resolve some of their disputes. Their respective followers would rebuff what would become known as the London Agreements, but nevertheless their relationship had changed. “Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to Jabotinsky and told him that he now saw him as his friend, had respect for him and was reaching his hand out to him, and Jabotinsky responded in the same way,” she explained. “I think that it’s something amazing that they could put aside their differences and their hatred and see each other as human beings and as friends.” The easing of this rivalry helped avert outright civil war at the time, although relations between the two men and their factions remained troubled for years.

Pazerker, who lives in the southern Israeli city of Dimona, finds this coming together for the sake of the Yishuv inspirational. “It’s very difficult for me on a personal level to see the next step for Israel today,” she told me. “It’s still too chaotic.” What she can see is that Israeli society is deeply fractured, and perhaps even on the verge of civil war. “I’m secular, and before October 7, I used to talk a lot about the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox] but in a very collective way,” she said. “After October 7, I saw how many of them contributed to the effort to support people and the soldiers, and that some joined the army.” She has come to realize that generalizations reinforce prejudices and prevent giving credit where credit is due. “I’m trying to change the way I talk. If each one of us will change their way of talking about the others and about ourselves, it could change the way we think.” Her vision for Israel today is for people to be able to talk to each other with respect and “really listen,” she said. “We can have different ideologies and different perspectives, but we need to remember that in front of us there’s another person, another human being.”

Jabotinsky died in 1940, and Ben-Gurion’s vision for Israel triumphed, at least for the nation’s first three decades. One can’t draw straight lines from the disagreements between these two men to Israel’s modern-day divides, but Jabotinsky’s views are still reflected in many of the central tenets of Israel’s Likud Party today. (Benzion Netanyahu, the current prime minister’s father, was Jabotinsky’s private secretary, and later the keeper of the Jabotinsky flame, but that’s another story.) Pazerker doesn’t think even Jabotinsky would agree with all that Israel’s right wing stands for now, but the main point, she says, is that these two rivals agreed more than they disagreed.

Polarized times, such as 1930s Israel and today, demand leaders who can inspire antagonistic factions to unite by working together themselves. Which brings me to one of the young Israelis with whom I’ve spoken recently. Nadav Salzberger, 29, was an organizer of the anti-judicial reform protests and is now a leader of the movement to release the hostages and topple the Netanyahu government. “I think many young people really feel over the past year and a half that Israel is at a crossroads,” he said. “We need to decide whether Israel’s going to be a liberal democracy—a Jewish democracy, where we have a strong independent judicial system, where we strive to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, where human rights are safeguarded—or whether Israel is going in a direction of a Jewish state that is not democratic and that is run by the Messianic, the Orthodox and the settlers who want to drag us into endless war and isolation.”

Salzberger identifies as part of the Zionist left in Israel and wants to see a Jewish state that is based on the principles of humanist Zionism and social democracy. “Israel has to strive for equality in terms of human rights, but also economic opportunity,” he told me. He wants peace but thinks it won’t happen until Hamas’s leadership is destroyed or banished from Gaza, and education and corruption in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority are addressed. He wants a revitalized Palestine Authority and clear borders that Israel can defend. A two-state solution is absolutely necessary, he said, but he can’t imagine it will come about in the foreseeable future. “Any serious attempt to promote a peace process that would theoretically involve evacuating settlements is more than Israeli society can handle right now.”

I asked Salzberger if he knew a young Israeli I could speak to with different views from his, and he introduced me to his friend Evyatar Lipkin, with whom he studied political science and history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The two men come from very different backgrounds: Salzberger is from Zichron Yaakov, a quaint village overlooking the Mediterranean about 20 miles south of Haifa, and Lipkin grew up in Ofra, a well-established West Bank settlement about 20 miles north of Jerusalem. One is secular, one is religious, although not ultra-Orthodox. One is a social democrat, the other politically conservative. “I don’t agree with Nadav on basically anything,” Lipkin informed me when we began to talk.

Lipkin thinks Donald Trump, if elected, would give Israel more space to pursue the war against Hamas and would promote a strong Middle Eastern coalition against Iran, Russia and China. He supports reforming Israel’s Supreme Court, although not in the way that it was approached by the current government, which he says was “like a bull in a china shop.” He describes himself as a strong-minded libertarian who wants to minimize the presence of the government in civilian life. He wakes up in cold sweats at night thinking about the recession of “biblical proportions” he expects after the war because of the amount of money the government is throwing at soldiers, victims and refugees.

When we spoke, Lipkin was in his eighth month of serving in a military reserve unit, which had delayed his starting a new job as an assistant to a Likud member of the Knesset. While he respects “religious study, Torah learning and yeshiva education,” he told me that he’s lost patience with the ultra-Orthodox’s lack of participation in the Israeli social contract. “I do believe there is a metaphysical value to prayers, but God commands us to protect ourselves with weapons and to fight, not just to sit and study.”

Both Lipkin and Salzberger are considering entering politics. “If I was running the country and had to talk with the opposition,” Lipkin told me enthusiastically, “I’d love the opposition to be Nadav, because he’s such a great guy.” It’s not just the two of them, he said; he knows many young people who are excited to work together to come up with solutions for Israel’s problems. “We may be on completely different sides ideologically, but we can speak with each other and work with each other,” he said. “I’m extremely optimistic about that.”

After talking with Lipkin and Salzberger, I could see that it’s not true that they don’t agree on anything. True, they do have competing economic visions, they don’t see eye to eye on judicial reform and they prefer different candidates for the American presidency come November. But neither is an extremist and both want a democratic Jewish state to survive. Salzberger wants a secular government and Lipkin, as a libertarian, has no problem with ending the Orthodox rabbinate’s control over marriage and domestic issues. Lipkin would like the ultra-Orthodox to be drafted into the IDF; Salzberger thinks that they could also perform public service in education, agriculture or the like so that their presence doesn’t suppress women’s leadership in the military. Both men believe Benjamin Netanyhau should cede power so that new leaders can emerge. And while Lipkin believes that Judea and Samaria belong to the Jews, he agrees with Salzberger that a two-state solution could, in theory, protect Israel’s democracy and Jewish identity, although, given the nature of the conflict, would not guarantee Israel’s security. 

Neither Salzberger nor Lipkin has formally entered the political fray, and I don’t mean to equate either young man with complex historical figures. But for now I find hope in the fact that the two of them, like Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion in the 1930s, have more in common than separates them, and are willing to come together to build an Israel for the future.

Opening picture: Left: David Ben-Gurion in 1920. Right: Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1929. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / GPO)

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