Overview
Israel’s current president gives us a dramatic and revelatory biography of Israel’s first prime minister and its founding father.Shimon Peres was in his early twenties when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that he would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the “Old Man,” as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions—a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine, though it meant surrendering a 2,000-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments, and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust, knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community.
A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage, Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion’s life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion’s dream of a modern, democratic, Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion, Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
Part of the Jewish Encounter series
Israel’s current president gives us a dramatic and revelatory biography of Israel’s founding father and first prime minister.
Shimon Peres was in his early twenties when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the “Old Man,” as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions—a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, though it meant surrendering a two-thousand-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments, and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust, knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community.
A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage, Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion’s life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion’s dream of a modern, democratic Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion, Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Peres, president and former prime minister of Israel, provides an intriguing and intimate political biography of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Israel’s first prime minister and his erstwhile mentor. Readers will enjoy Peres’s analysis of his relationship with Ben-Gurion and will find his humility appealing: “Why did Ben-Gurion take to me?” And his emotional admissions—that he had never “met a man with inner strength and determination” as Ben-Gurion and that like “Churchill, the other details of life shrink into insignificance alongside the decisions made at a crucial juncture in Israel’s history”—elevate this book above a standard biography. The author describes their long friendship with warmth, obvious affection, and respect, but readers might be surprised that the book’s brightest spots are when Peres discusses his own life, especially as reminiscences of Ben-Gurion frequently take the format of conversations between Peres and his co-writer, Landau, former editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which are embedded within the text and break up the flow of the narrative. (Oct.)Kirkus Reviews
The current Israeli president teams with a journalist to survey and celebrate the life of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), one of the founders of the State of Israel.
This latest entry in Nextbook's Jewish Encounters series makes no real pretense of objectivity. As a young man, Peres (The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodor Herzl in Israel, 2000, etc.) worked with Ben-Gurion and idolized him (still does), so the narrative is hardly fair and balanced. There are several issues, however, that divided Peres and co-author and Economist writer Landau (once editor-in-chief ofHaaretz), and at those moments the authors step outside the narrative, shifting to a dialogue format to discuss/debate the issues. These include Ben-Gurion's focus on Zionism at the possible expense of rescuing Holocaust victims, the controversial partition deal he accepted in 1948, the decision to align with the West, his determination not to create a theocracy in Israel and the effectiveness of reprisal raids launched against attacking states and political entities. Because Landau crafted the text from a series of taped interviews with Peres, there is a personal, conversational tone throughout, which brightens and sharpens in the dialogue segments. The authors occasionally step outside politics to provide some conventional information. Their subject was born David Gruen in Poland in 1886; an early love affair went sour before his marriage, during which he had children. But this is principally a story about intractable, internecine politics and a fierce politician whose intelligence, will, biblical convictions and courage were fundamental in the successful creation of Israel.
If the authors sometimes soar too high (calling Ben-Gurion a "mythic figure" and a "modern-day prophet"), readers must remember that this is history in the form of gratitude, not a disinterested dissertation.
Justin Moyer
…biased but invaluable…Even readers tired of ideological food fights about Israel…will find something to like in this unusual primer on the birth of a nation and its most important midwife.—The Washington Post