The other day, a group of us visited David Ben-Gurion’s house in Sde Boker, the kibbutz in the Negev where he retired with his wife Paula in 1953, when the former prime minister was 67. The place is now a museum. I found the house charming, though friends pointed out that the site had a colonial element– the age of the olive trees suggesting that it was built on Palestinian lands. Not to mention the stone tablets on the walkways with Ben-Gurion quotes, urging Jews to colonize the Negev.
I missed some things in this tour. The portrait of Gandhi on the bedroom wall. The book, the Indestructible Jews on the bedside table. As Allison Deger pointed out the other day, the couple kept separate bedrooms, Ben-Gurion liked to stay up late reading. I believe I entered his bedroom at :40 or so. Notice his slippers by the bed. Paula Ben-Gurion died in 1968, David Ben-Gurion in 1973.
From wikipedia:
Phil, I appreciate your going there but given the heavy issues that we slog through here could you not have provided tidbits that were a bit more, ahem, salacious? Like about Mr. BG’s girlfriends or what an insufferable busybody Paula was.
One story I know, not salacious, occurred in the late sixties when he met with MK Tewfik Toubi. They had tangled for years in the Knesset and the first thing Mr. BG asks Toubi is about how Arabs name themselves.
Great, he’d lived in Palestine/Israel for how many decades and he still knew so little about the culture. That is very telling to me.
I’m drawn to Ben-Gurion precisely because his personal character seems so out of date in our vanity-driven politics. He was an introvert who was not driven by status or wealth.
This is reflected in the manner how he retired, a modest man of letters living a quiet life among his fellow people.
Compare to current pols like Blair or Clinton who can’t even hide their own greed or vanity and neither have much ideological grounding.
He was ultimately driven by convinction more than anything else and he was an intellectual in a way that is perhaps not possible for a politician today to be(Obama seems to be the exception to the rule).
Of course, his ideology was a disaster, but there’s something attractive to the personal qualities he exhibited as a politician and a statesman that is today mostly lost.
I feel similarily about Abba Eban, a man who graduated with a triple first from Oxford and makes the Liebermans and the Dayons of today look like simpletons, in large part because they are.
When seeing BG’s home in Sde Boker, one is always impressed by the modesty, even frugality of the place, especially in comparison withe the lifestyle of today’s leaders.
Ben Gurion wasn’t good looking, wasn’t much of an orator, was a mediocre writer -yet he had a quality called “leadership”. People trusted him to make big decisions, and he made some which were breathtakingly audacious, (and made some really big mistakes, too…)
His move to a kibbutz in the Negev was, in itself, a leadership moment: he sought to set an example to encourage settling in the Negev.
As to this: “the age of the olive trees suggesting that it was built on Palestinian lands. ” Strikes me as an automatic compulsion to say something negative…