Mosaic（https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/）
by Martin Kramer
April 2018
The May 1948 Vote that Made the State of Israel
A long-accepted wisdom has it that just days before the state’s birth, its founders settled two burning issues in a pair of closely decided votes. The wisdom is half-wrong.
Israel’s 70th anniversary, which falls on April 19 (by the Hebrew calendar), coincides with a resurgence of interest in David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father. In addition to new biographies, most notably by Anita Shapira (2014) and Tom Segev (Hebrew, 2018), the Ben-Gurion revival probably owes most to a 2016 film, Ben-Gurion, Epilogue, directed by Yaniv Mozer. Made up mostly of excerpts from a long-lost film interview given by Ben-Gurion in 1968, during his twilight years, the documentary ran in Israeli theaters and on TV and was screened by almost every Jewish film festival worldwide.
At the time of the 1968 interview, Ben-Gurion was eighty-two and living in Sde Boker, a desert kibbutz where he did chores like any other member. Notwithstanding the occasional pronouncement, often in a prophetic register, he’d faded from public life. Friends looked for ways to mitigate his isolation and boredom; politicians mostly ignored him. Most of his biographers would concur with Tom Segev: “Ben-Gurion’s old age was sad, degrading, superfluous. . . . Like many people, he lived a few years too long.”
Which makes it strange to see a new generation embracing this late-life Ben-Gurion—or perhaps not so strange. He lived long enough, after all, to witness the June 1967 war, and then to issue opinions about what should be done with the territories Israel occupied in that war. There will always be those who, to clinch a present-day argument, resort to citing a long-dead “founding father,” and Ben-Gurion, Epilogue supplies one very useful quotation. In the documentary, Ben-Gurion says: “If I could choose between peace and all the territories that we conquered last year [in the Six-Day War], I would prefer peace.” (He made exceptions for Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.)
Not surprisingly, this provided the theme for most of the press commentary about the film and for its reviews. “Ben-Gurion Favors West Bank Withdrawal in Footage from 1968,” proclaimed the headline of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Screen Daily went so far as to claim (erroneously) that he had predicated peace with the Arabs upon Israel’s withdrawal from “all of the territories” it conquered in 1967.
Thus did the film deliberately summon forth Ben-Gurion’s ghost for a contemporary purpose. “It’s not a film about history, it’s not a nostalgic film,” its director has said. “It’s a film relevant to Israel today.” According to the official synopsis, Ben-Gurion’s “clear voice provides a surprising vision for today’s crucial decisions and the future of Israel.”
But does it, really? It would be an elementary mistake to allow his “clear voice” circa 1968 to muffle his even clearer voice circa 1948, when he was at the height of his powers, both political and analytical. At Israel’s very birth, Ben-Gurion not only advocated territorial acquisition in war. He also fostered the conviction that Israel shouldn’t finalize its borders.
Nor was this just a personal preference. Ben-Gurion put the issue to a vote of the yishuv’s leaders. If any vote may be said to have made the new state of Israel, it would be this one. It was closely ontested—decided, indeed, by a margin of one.
Unfortunately, beyond a small circle of Israeli historians, the details of this vote are little known—the reason being that 1948 was a year of war, and most histories of 1948 are military rather than political histories. (Both Dan Kurzman’s Genesis 1948 and Benny Morris’s 1948, for example, share the same subtitle, “The First Arab-Israeli War,” and both are decidedly military histories.) Then, too, there had been the very public November 1947 vote in the United Nations General Assembly for the partition of Palestine into two states, which had provided a spectacle of high drama before the cameras as well as much lore about behind-the-scene maneuvering.
But while the UN vote licensed the creation of a Jewish state, the UN failed to act to implement its own decision. So it was the voting of the Zionist leaders themselves, behind closed doors, that was both crucial and decisive in the establishment of the state.
The voting took place on May 12, 1948, three days before the end of the British mandate, in the People’s Administration, a kind of proto-cabinet. But here things become complicated. The standard story has it that a vote was held on whether to accept a truce in the fighting already raging between the Arabs and the Jews. That would have delayed the declaration of a state, perhaps indefinitely. Then a second vote was held on the question of the whether the new state should announce its borders.
The UN partition plan included a map, but Israel’s founders decided that it wouldn’t bind them. Ben-Gurion came to regard this vote as one of his greatest political triumphs.
As we shall see, the story of the first vote has almost entirely overshadowed the story of the second. Yet, as we shall also see, the evidence that the first vote even took place is questionable. Not so for the second vote, in which, by five to four, the founders deliberately declined to be bound by the map of the Jewish state that had been included in the UN partition plan, or to delineate any borders for the state at all. Ben-Gurion himself came to regard this latter vote as among his greatest political triumphs, and one he underlined time and time again.
Let’s begin with a sketch of the background.
(To be continued.)
