In A State at Any Cost, Segev establishes that, from the beginning, Ben-Gurion saw no solution to the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs. As early as 1919, he knew that peace was not possible: ‘We want Palestine to be ours as a nation ... The Arabs want it to be theirs … I don’t know what Arab would agree to Palestine belonging to the Jews.’ Ben-Gurion believed that Arab–Israeli enmity was a permanent condition. To manage it, Israel’s major task was to convince its Arab neighbours that the Jewish state was indestructible, notably by building up its military force and bringing to Israel as many Jews as possible. When war came in 1948, Ben-Gurion hoped for a state containing as few Arabs as possible. If they fled, fine; if they had to be expelled, so be it.

Segev includes two stories that Ben-Gurion often told to indicate that there was no basis for an agreement with the Arabs. The first was the murder of a Jewish farmer before his eyes at Sejera in 1909. The second was shortly before his expulsion from Palestine by the Turks in 1915. When Ben-Gurion ran into one of his university classmates and told him that he was to be expelled, the young man responded that as his friend he was sorry for him, but as an Arab nationalist he was very happy: ‘That was the first time in my life that I heard an honest answer from an Arab intellectual,’ he said many years later. ‘It was etched into my heart, very, very deep.’

As one of Israel’s ‘new historians’, whose work has stripped away the mythology surrounding the birth of the state of Israel, Segev argues that the Zionists always knew they were dealing with a national movement. The hope of emptying Palestine of its Arab inhabitants had been part of the Zionist discourse from its first days in the late nineteenth century. Its earliest incarnation appears in the diary of the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl: ‘We shall try to spirit the penniless populations across the border by procuring employment for them in the transit countries, while denying them employment in our own country.’

Drawing on Ben-Gurion’s prolific writings, historical archives, and previously undisclosed archival material, Segev documents the life of Israel’s most iconic and controversial leader who spurred others to join him in his relentless pursuit of a state of Israel. Both admired and vilified, Ben-Gurion emerges as an enigmatic man of contradictions. He was self-centred, humourless, obsessive, an unfaithful husband, an indifferent parent, and often ruthless in pursuing his political goals, one of which was total power over the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion was deeply moved by his people’s suffering but incapable of showing it. He had trouble reconciling the expulsion of the Arabs with the humanist values he claimed to live by. However, he was at peace with the fact that between five and six hundred thousand Arabs had been displaced: this was the price of Jewish independence.

David Ben-Gurion with Golda Meir at the Knesset in Jerusalem, 1962 (photograph via Fritz Cohen/The State Government of Israel/Britannica)

Originally published in Hebrew and translated well by Haim Watzman, the book begins with Ben-Gurion’s early life in the small town of Płońsk in tsarist Poland, through his emigration to Palestine, to leading the labour movement and organising trade unions, to his leadership role in the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, through the austerity and conflict of the first two decades of statehood – including the 1967 war, which left him worried about increasing the number of Arab refugees – up until his death shortly after the devastation of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

A voracious autodidact, Ben-Gurion read his way to expertise on subjects ranging from Jewish history, ancient languages, and philosophy to modern science and economics. A lingering image from the book is of Ben-Gurion, on the eve of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s move to nationalise the Suez Canal in 1956, poring over Plato’s position that rulers are permitted to lie in the service of their people. But Ben-Gurion also consulted with a fortune teller, claimed to have seen a UFO, and, in search of pain relief for his chronic lumbago, became an early adopter of the mind–body exercise techniques of Moshé Feldenkrais. He even visited Burma seeking serenity with Buddhism.

During the thirty years preceding the foundation of the state, Ben-Gurion played a decisive role in moving the Zionist project forward and in establishing the political, military, social, economic, and cultural infrastructures that made it possible to establish a Jewish state as soon as the British left. Except for a brief period in 1954–55, Ben-Gurion was prime minister from 1948 to 1963. He oversaw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews from around the world, many from Arab countries, whose lives were threatened once the state of Israel was created, and many who had survived the Holocaust. He championed a controversial reparations agreement with West Germany for Hitler’s murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. This saved Israel’s economy in the early fifties. Despite international pressure and internal opposition, he established the country’s nuclear program.

Segev observes that since the beginning of the twentieth century, tens of millions of humans have been murdered or turned into refugees after being expelled from their homes. But the tragedy the world has never ceased talking about is that of the Palestinian Arabs. The only explanation Segev offers is that it’s because people on every continent have displayed a special sensitivity in regard to everything that happens in the Holy Land. Further serious discussion of this perplexing phenomenon is warranted.

The book’s central argument is captured in its apt title – a state at any cost. Ben-Gurion was willing to pay any price to realise the Zionist vision; at the same time, he was prepared to make tactical concessions and pragmatic compromises. Segev has said that together his books comprise a collective biography of Israel. This book makes an excellent contribution to the enterprise. It is a meticulously researched critical biography of Israel’s visionary founding father, but it’s also a critical history of the Zionist project that resulted in the creation of Israel as an independent and sovereign state and the concomitant tragedy of the Arab refugees.