Israel: A Month in the Country

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But there were signs that perhaps it has been tried once too often. Grumbled a top party leader: "B-G is getting touchy in his old age. He's a lonely man with no real personal friends. Maybe a short rest will do him good." Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had enough zeal left last week to take on another opponent. Rising to address the 25th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, he poured out a 100-minute torrent of poetic and apocalyptic Hebrew. Despite the Zionists' impressive efforts in helping create Israel twelve years ago and the nearly $500 million they—and other Jews abroad —have pumped into it since, Ben-Gurion belabored them as cowards and false friends. He described Zionism as "the scaffolding needed to build the state" and then snapped, "there is no need for it now." Instead of money and good advice, cried Ben-Gurion, the Zionists should provide Israel with trained and competent Jewish immigrants from the West. Because the flow of Jews to Israel has dwindled to 25,000 a year, "we are short of manpower." Of the hostile Arab nations surrounding Israel, Egypt alone is growing 24 times as fast. What is more, the new immigrants are mostly dark-skinned, backward Oriental Jews from the Middle East and, unless they are leavened 'by Westerners, he said, nothing can prevent Israel from "developing into a Levantine state." World Jewry owes Israel a debt, he declared, because "there is no doubt that the state has straightened the backs of Jews in every country. ' Ben-Gurion was especially annoyed because not one topflight U.S. Zionist leader has settled down in Israel, and because immigration from the West has never been more than a trickle. "In the free and prosperous countries," warned Ben-Gurion, Judaism "faces the kiss of death, a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation!" Ben-Gurion, whose devotion to Judaism as a religion is something short of wholehearted, did not scruple to quote Jewish scripture for his own purposes. Every day spent abroad, he pointed out, violates the precept of the Talmud that says, "Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God."

Five hundred Zionist delegates from Western countries were grim. World Zionist President Nahum Goldmann, who has threatened to resign if Ben-Gurion does not stop attacking him, admitted sadly that the goal of Zionism is not fulfilled when "less than one-fifth of the Jewish people is concentrated in its homeland." But Rose Halprin, U.S. acting chairman of the Jewish Agency, said flatly: "Mass immigration from the United States is just not in the cards. We will make schizophrenics of our children if we tell them they are not living in their real homeland, that their homeland is really on the other side of the ocean."