by Shimon Peres
•••
After graduating from Ben-Shemen in 1941, a group of us were sent to Kibbutz Geva in the Jezreel Valley for further training. At Ben-Shemen, we had learned the skills we would need to cultivate the land. At Geva, we were to learn what it took to succeed on a kibbutz. I had two jobs. My first involved working the cornfields. Only when I was finished—usually after sundown—would I turn to my next job, as a coordinator of HaNoar HaOved movement across the Jordan and Jezreel Valleys. I was given a large and unwieldy Triumph motorcycle to use so I could meet with members from other chapters. We would hold meetings and debates, organize seminars and public discussions, and dedicate what was left of our waking hours to convincing the others we were right.
At the heart of these discussions lay the issue of territory. In 1917, the British government, which controlled much of the Middle East, issued the Balfour Declaration, which endorsed the idea of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. But many feared our future state would be relegated to a sliver of territory, too small and unnourished to sustain the Jewish people. They believed that we should be uncompromising, calling for a return to our ancient borders—even if such a demand would never be met. I disagreed. Like Ben-Gurion, I believed the dominant moral consideration was the survival of the nation, rather than the size of the state that would house it. And I feared, as he did, that the greatest danger of all was to reach for a state and fail.
The debates raged on from kibbutz to kibbutz. In the meantime, my circle of friends set off on the mission we’d been training for—trekking twenty-five miles north of Geva to the peak of Mount Poriya, where we were to become members of Kibbutz Alumot.
From the moment we arrived, I was in awe. I could look out in every direction and see something extraordinary. At the base of Poriya was the sparkling Sea of Galilee in all its beauty, its far banks stretching well beyond the horizon. There were magnificent mountains to the west, painted purple in long brushstrokes. There were rows of young saplings, newly planted, that would one day grow into groves of olives and dates. From the right vantage point, I could watch the pale silver bands of the Jordan River snaking its way through the valley. To the north, I could see the towering Mount Hermon—and, unobstructed, it could see me. All at once I felt I was at the center of the world. For so long I had imagined a life like this, and now it was realized in front of me, a most elegant argument for the virtue of dreaming.
Once I was settled into Alumot, I was assigned a job that would give me my first true experience as a leader—not of men, but of sheep. Yet there were striking similarities: a shepherd, for example, may have authority over his flock, but that alone does not mean he can control it. There were many times when I would lead the herd down the hill, intent on having them follow me, only to find them scattering across the fields, paying no mind to my commands. It took time and patience to master the skill. We had to find a common language, a common understanding. I had to know their fears as if they were my own, so I could understand where they could not be led—or at least, when I’d have to move with more deliberateness. I had to be both empathetic and insistent in stating my intentions—a figure they would follow, even reluctantly, if only out of trust.
On the good days, it was a beautiful dance, its own piece of poetry and a lesson in leadership that I’d long remember. But hard days, though less frequent, proved unavoidable facts of nature—these were beasts, not men—that could not be cured with sharpened skills. At my best, I could still experience the worst, and that was a lesson I took with me, too—in patience if nothing else.
Life at Alumot was not easy. Because of its location, the winds traveling through the valley would gain lift and power as they approached our settlement, tearing through the barns with incredible violence. The soil beneath our feet was saturated with salts that choked off our crops and, for the first several years, forced us to heavily ration our harvests. And for a time, the few members of Alumot resided in a cluster of sinister black basalt ruins of a previous settlement, one that had failed catastrophically twenty years earlier. It was as though we were living among tombstones, constant reminders that our efforts could fail.
It would have been easy for an outsider to measure Kibbutz Alumot by what it lacked. We lived in tents. There was no electricity or running water. Each person was given one pair of work boots, two pairs of khaki pants, and two shirts—one for work and one for the Sabbath. The kibbutz owned one pair of gray trousers and one British Army–issue battle-dress jacket, which were lent out to the men only on the most special of occasions. And yet those of us who lived there measured Kibbutz Alumot by what it offered. It gave us a sense of meaning and mission. It gave us a family larger than any we had known and a purpose that was greater than ourselves. The hardness wasn’t an inconvenience; it was the reason we were there.
And so we worked. We cleared the rocks and rehabilitated the soil. We cut tracts through barren lands and sowed them with seeds until they had no choice but to yield to our efforts.
Each morning, long before dawn, I would open the pen for the sheep so they could head down the hill of Poriya and graze between rocks on the intermittent pastures. The path down was dangerously steep, even more so in the darkness. But by sunrise, the flies would return to torment the sheep, so it was better to feed them at night.
I didn’t mind. If anything, I preferred the time alone. How many nights did I sit on a rock, watching the stars reflect in the stillness of the water below? Too many to count. In those days I wanted nothing more than to be a poet or an architect, to build something either from words or from stones. And what better place, I wondered, what greater perch in the world, for an aspiring writer to let his poetry take flight?
These were some of the happiest days of my life, and they were made all the more meaningful when Sonia chose to become part of them again. At the beginning of World War II, Sonia had enlisted in the British Army as a nurse, and had been stationed in Egypt. Now, having returned, she had decided to join me at Alumot. We were married under a simple white chuppah on Lag BaOmer, May 1, 1945, in a small ceremony at Ben-Shemen. I had to borrow Alumot’s formal pants and jacket, which were a bit too short for me; I spent the eve of our wedding using shoe polish to dye the jacket black.
Then one morning, Ben-Gurion’s closest advisor, Levi Eshkol, arrived at Alumot from his neighboring kibbutz, with a request from Ben-Gurion himself. Eshkol, the future prime minister, was already a giant in the movement in those days, someone whom we greatly admired, and it was a genuine shock to see him among us—even more so to learn he had come, in part, because of me. Ben-Gurion had grown worried that the youngest generation was drifting too far from his vision for a state of Israel. He believed the fate of the Jewish people rested in his winning the argument. This was why he had sent Eshkol: to request that Alumot release me from my agricultural obligations, turning my evening work with HaNoar HaOved into a full-time job. Ben-Gurion knew the young generation represented the future, and he must have felt they were more likely to be persuaded by one of their peers. At least that’s what I told myself as I struggled to comprehend how it was possible that, of all people, Ben-Gurion had chosen me, in all my inexperience, to participate in such an important mission.
The moment I arrived at HaNoar HaOved headquarters in Tel Aviv, I understood exactly why Eshkol had come to find me. There were twelve members of HaNoar HaOveds secretariat, and it appeared that I was the only member who favored Ben-Gurion’s approach to statehood. The meetings were so one-sided as to be totally useless. I was viewed with suspicion, seen only as Eshkol’s mouthpiece. Any proposal I submitted was voted down immediately. Any argument I started was invariably silenced. It wasn’t long before I decided that the only way to help the cause was to change the makeup of the secretariat itself. This would be possible only at HaNoar HaOved’s national convention, and it would require the support of a majority of delegates in the room. Who those delegates would be—and whom they would ultimately support—was still an open q
uestion. And so rather than be swatted down day in and day out, I stopped going to Tel Aviv headquarters altogether and focused my efforts out in the field.
Again and again I drove the same roads on the same wily motorcycle, meeting with every chapter of HaNoar HaOved that would have me. At each stop I would advocate my own political views, pressing the urgency of Jewish statehood on behalf of all who could no longer afford to wait. I met with hundreds of people, making my case to anyone who would listen. I told them to make sure the delegates they sent to the convention were Ben-Gurionites, and asked them to vote against the secretariat and instead stand with me.
On September 28, 1945, the national convention of HaNoar HaOved was called to order at the Mugrabi Cinema in Tel Aviv. I was deeply nervous. In addition to the delegates in the hall, there were many prominent leaders of Ben-Gurion’s political party, Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael, which meant “Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel,” known colloquially as the Mapai. As delegates flooded into the hall, I stood at the registration desk, preparing a detailed list of who was attending and how they intended to vote. But I still wasn’t certain of the outcome.
One of the first orders of business was the adoption of the platform. The delegates were given two choices. The first came from Binyamin Chochlovkin, the secretary-general of HaNoar HaOved, and represented the “Greater Israel” position. The alternative proposal was my own, and reflected the Mapai positon. Binyamin had the backing of the secretariat and the majority of the Zionist movement. But to his surprise, and frankly, to mine, I had the backing of the room. The delegates had determined that a partitioned Palestine today was clearly preferable to a “Greater Israel” tomorrow; when their votes were cast, my proposal carried the day.
Neither side had expected the outcome, which was made obvious by the ensuing chaos in the hall. I was greeted as a conquering victor by the Mapai leaders. By the end of the convention I was a leader in the movement, having been elected HaNoar HaOved’s secretary-general. Suddenly my greatest heroes knew my name. I was no longer the anonymous boy sharing a car ride to Haifa.
•••
On October 20, 1946, we had our first child, Tsvia, a beautiful bundle, whom we named after my beloved late maternal grandfather. We moved out of a tent and into a small house.
Later that year, the Twenty-Second Zionist Congress was to be held in Basel, Switzerland, the first such meeting since the Holocaust. The Twenty-First Congress, which had been held only days before the start of World War II, was adjourned with the foreboding words of Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization and future first president of Israel: “I have no prayer but this: that we will all meet again alive.”
The world had changed irrevocably even before the start of the war. In May 1939, the British government issued the “White Paper,” a policy document that contained an incomprehensible betrayal of the Jewish people. It was a repudiation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, which had favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Having decided that if the Jews were to live in Mandatory Palestine, they were to do so as a permanent minority, the British government now put stringent restrictions on Jewish immigration and froze our ability to continue to purchase land to settle. It was intended to be a death sentence for the Jewish state. And by preventing immigration it would also be a death sentence to countless Jews fleeing the grip of the Nazis. If we wanted our independence, we’d have to take on the British.
In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and began his quest for world domination and Jewish annihilation. Two days later, the British declared war against Germany, becoming, paradoxically, both our most important friend and our second-greatest enemy. Ben-Gurion had crystallized the complexity of the relationship, and the new Zionist challenge, this way: “We must help the British army as if there were no White Paper, and we must fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”
And yet, despite the forces arrayed against the Jewish people, there were many on the left who had opposed Ben-Gurion’s change in posture. They preferred the slow and steady progression of compromise to Ben-Gurion’s more aggressive approach against the British. This infuriated Ben-Gurion, who saw no justification for inaction, certainly not in the midst of an attempted extinction.
By 1946, the war was over, and it had been time again to reconvene in Basel. The Mapai decided to send two of their younger members as part of their broader delegation, and I soon learned that Ben-Gurion had chosen me to be one of them. The other young man was a bit older than me, handsome, brilliant, and every bit as committed to Ben-Gurion as I was. His name was Moshe Dayan.
We boarded a ship together in December 1946, my first trip abroad since arriving in Jaffa more than a decade before. It seemed as though every member of the Zionist leadership was aboard, and somehow, here I stood among them.
On the upper deck, Moshe and I spent a great deal of time together. We were the youngest two on the vessel, and though we were vastly different from each other, we found an immediate friendship and mutual respect.
We spent hours engrossed in conversation about our views of the debate and our expectations for the conference. We both firmly believed in Ben-Gurion’s position, willing to use force to support the unfettered continuation of immigration to Mandatory Palestine, whether the British deemed it illegal or not. At one point, Dayan had even suggested we burn down the camps where the British were detaining Jews who had been captured on the way to their homeland. Part strategist and part fighter, Dayan was both an equal and a mentor, a man I deeply admired.
There was something incredibly moving about entering the hall where the Congress was held. Nearly fifty years earlier, this was the same place that Theodor Herzl had convened the First Zionist Congress. History was alive in the room, and an uncertain future at stake for us all. From my seat I could see Weizmann, Eshkol, and Ben-Gurion on the dais, along with every other major figure in the Zionist movement.
I could also see the visibly empty chairs of those for whom Weizmann’s 1939 prayer had not been answered. In his memoir, he wrote about the “dreadful experience” of presiding over the meeting, of standing before the assembly and “finding among them hardly one of the friendly faces which had adorned past Congresses.” The largest delegations had come from Mandatory Palestine and the United States; with few exceptions, the room was eerily absent of European Jews.
And yet, despite the many thousands of Holocaust survivors who were being denied entry to Mandatory Palestine by the British, the conference had proceeded as though there were no real urgency. There was genuine debate about whether we should do what it took—whatever it took—to get the survivors to their homeland. Ben-Gurion was furious, understandably so—at the tepidity of politics; at the conference’s obsession with the minutiae of bureaucracy; and most of all, at the lack of courage and commitment he knew we required. By the end of the first session, it had become clear that a deeply frustrated Ben-Gurion lacked support for his proposals.
I didn’t see him the next morning, when the conference reconvened. I remember I was seated next to Arye Bahir, a leading voice in the Mapai party and a friend of Ben-Gurion. We were discussing our frustrations with what had transpired when suddenly Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula, entered the hall with a dark look on her face, walking as swiftly as she could directly toward us. She came right up to Bahir and leaned in closely, whispering to him in frantic Yiddish.
“Arye, he has gone mad,” I heard her say. “You have to stop him,” she insisted. “He’s going to leave.”
Though Bahir and I shared Ben-Gurion’s frustrations with the conference, we both instinctively knew that his leaving would present a grave problem. He was viewed, even by his most vehement critics, as a uniquely resilient and visionary leader, the kind the movement could not succeed without. And he was surely the only one who could convince his fellow party members to support his plan for our future statehood. Paula was keenly aware of this. We h
adn’t been summoned to calm an argument; we’d been summoned to save the movement.
Bahir stood up with Paula, then signaled for me to join him. We left the hall and went up to the hotel room where Ben-Gurion was staying—the same room Herzl had occupied during the First Congress, in 1897. When we got to his door, we knocked several times, but there was no response. From somewhere inside me, I found the chutzpah to turn the knob. The door was unlocked. There he was, standing with his back to us, angrily shoving his clothing into an open suitcase.
“Shalom, Ben-Gurion,” Bahir said tentatively. There was no answer. “Shalom?” Again no answer—no acknowledgment at all that we were there. Finally, Ben-Gurion spoke.
“Are you coming with me?” he asked.
“Where are you going?” Bahir asked.
“To form a new Zionist movement,” he bellowed. “I have no more confidence in this Congress. It’s full of small-time politicians, pathetic defeatists. They won’t have the courage to make the decisions that are needed now.
“A third of our nation has been wiped out,” he continued. “The survivors have no hope other than to rebuild their lives in our homeland. It’s the only land that must open its gates wide to welcome them. Do they not see this?”
Then he looked briefly toward me, a wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old boy. “Only the Jewish youth will provide the courage needed to face this challenge.”
Bahir told Ben-Gurion that of course we were with him, that wherever he went, we would go, that there was no hope for Zionism without him. Once Ben-Gurion realized that we were true allies, he calmed down enough that we could have an extended conversation. What we had told him was true: he had become the center of gravity for the movement—the one leader we could not live without. But we also knew that his walking away to start a new movement was not a solution to the problem of urgency. It would surely take years to organize such an effort, years we simply did not have to spare. And so Bahir and I suggested the only option we could think of. Before walking away from the Congress, we wanted Ben-Gurion to try to convince the Mapai faction one last time of his vision. “If there’s a majority there, we’ll all stay; and if not, we won’t be the only ones to leave with you; a great many more will come, too.” After much consideration, and some serious reservation, Ben-Gurion finally agreed.
