DAVID BEN-GURIAN

There is a sense in which David Ben-Gurian, the pioneer founder and first prime minister of Israel, could be regarded as an Israeli Lenin. For he was certainly a socialist who fought long and hard for the birth of a state which the tragedy of the holocaust made all the more poignantly imperative.

Like Lenin, Ben-Gurian was small in stature but large in mind, and also, like Lenin, his mind encompassed several languages and a great deal of scholarly reading. He was, moreover, a prolific author, writing on the need for a Jewish homeland and, later (when such a dream had been at least partially realized), on the history of the Israel he had created and, for a number of difficult years, successfully led.

Yet Ben-Gurian's Israel, unlike Lenin's Russia, was not to be a Godless state, but one sympathetic to the Jewish religion and capable of encouraging a religious rebirth, of serving as the physical cradle, so to speak, for the future realization of Jewish spiritual hopes. Thus it could never be a communist dictatorship, officially atheistic in its ideological posture; for atheism is a philosophy of the Devil or, more literally, of his followers on earth, and the Jews have always been aligned with God, even if only with the most primal stage of God ... in the Creator as Jehovah.

Doubtless the coming of the Messiah will alter all that, transmuting Jewish religious allegiance from the most primal to the most advanced stage of divinity via the enlightenment of the Second Coming, not to be confounded with Christ but a sort of minor transcendental divinity approximating to the Jewish concept of a true world messiah, a messiah whose teachings really could apply to the entire world in the course of time, as, globally considered, the world is led towards a universal religion.

But atheism denies God all along the line, including the concept and realization of a Second Coming and its corollary of an aspiration towards the establishment and furtherance of pure spirit in the Universe. Atheism appertains to the Antichrist, that proton-particle diabolism of Marxist communism, and, as Lenin reminded his followers, there could be no 'God building' in the Soviet Union or, indeed, anywhere where communism had established its materialist hegemony. Materialism and idealism are antithetical, not contiguous, and therefore we cannot expect the Devil to further God's work. It isn't for the Antichrist to build the next civilization but, so far as he's concerned, to destroy the existing or Christian one. What he puts in the place of the latter would bear little resemblance to a spiritual aspiration, an aspiration towards Holy Spirit. So much for socialism!

Yet Ben-Gurian, whom we were discussing, was not interested in destroying a civilization but only in establishing a state, and to that extent we must account him a realist, if one with strong left-wing sympathies. And the Jews needed his realism at that time, besieged as they were from all sides, hunted in Europe and opposed in the Middle East, a ramshackle garrison under permanent siege. Ben-Gurian had no illusions about the situation, nor about the need of the Jews to fight tooth-and-nail for their right to a homeland. For the tragedy of the holocaust, whilst it might evoke pity and sympathy in some Gentile hearts, wouldn't automatically lead to a Jewish state. Only the Jews could finally determine whether or not they were to get one, and under Ben-Gurian's dauntless leadership the life-and-death struggles which ensued with their Arab opponents duly led to Jewish victory and to the foundation of the State of Israel, a foundation upon which subsequent leaders were to build and are still building today. For Israel can never take chances, slacken its will to survive, else the winds of Arab nationalism may blow across it to devastating effect! It must be strong, and in this strength, coupled to future messianic insights, lies its destiny ... in opposition, if necessary, to Islamic reaction.

No, one cannot be surprised that the West didn't hand Israel to the Jews on a plate; for the West, with particular reference to Britain, was itself an old civilization ... forced onto the defensive by implacable opponents and mindful of its imperial interests vis-à-vis certain Arab countries. Yet whereas the democratic West was confronted, in its materialist decadence, by the Devil, the Islamic East, with its resurgent fundamentalism, may eventually find itself being confronted, in an ideological manner of speaking, by God, in order that what is potentially the true world religion ... of Social Transcendental Centrism ... may be spread as widely as possible ... to the lasting advantage of the Divine.

Doubtless the Israeli Right, particularly in its extreme manifestation, would be more sympathetic to this prospect than the Left, and it is particularly to them that supertheocratic appeals should be made. The time of God's establishing a 'Final Covenant' with the 'House of Israel', the Knesset, through the agency of the Second Coming has still to arise. But when it does, the transformations in Israel may be so profound that it is doubtful that Ben-Gurian would recognize the country, were he to return from the grave. Realistic materialist that he was, the founder of Israel could have had no inkling of the ideological superstructure to come; for he was, after all, a modern Samson struggling in the wilderness against inclemencies of one sort or another in the name of solid foundations. We need not doubt their strength!