cover photo by Leo Rossi & Martin Barnett
~ ~ ~
I've this Vinyl LP series because I have a collection of over 20,000 vinyl record albums I am
selling; each blog entry is about an album from my collection. Inquire
for information here.
~ ~ ~
Well, it been the top news item today: the visit of
Benjamin Netanyahu,
Prime Minister of Israel, to the United States and the controversy it has generated. Netanyahu was invited behind the back of President
Barack Obama by House Speaker
John Boehner (
pronounced: Boner!) to address a joint meeting of congress; a pretty cheezy move by the Republicans (
so what else is new?).
Netanyahu
denounced Obama's dealings with Iran. He said to the U. S. Congress,
"This is a bad deal — a very bad deal," and continued, "We're better off
without it." -
Wall Street Journal.
He
is against a nuclear deal with Iran; he doesn’t want Iran to develop
any nuclear power at all. He said in his address, “To win the war against ISIS and allow Iran to have
nuclear power, would be to win the battle but lose the war.”
President Obama,
Joe Biden and many Washington lawmakers didn't attend the meeting according to the Wall Street Journal (
the list is astonishing). It's created an international embarrassment for the United States.
~ ~ ~
But enough, already, about shady politics, the whole incident snapped me back 60 years or so to the first Prime Minister of
Israel,
David Ben-Gurion, and the interview of him I have on a
vinyl LP.
Israel National Photo Collection, item 69511,
picture code D508-115
Licensed under Public Domain via
Wikimedia Commons
The Interview was recorded on the
Columbia Masterworks
Label ML 5109, that featured the complete unabridged interview on the
release. An edited version of the interview with Ben-Gurion appeared on
CBS TV’s ‘See It Now’ on March 6, 1956.
photos by Leo Rossi & Martin Barnett
Ben-Gurion
was pretty controversial in his time. He pushed for and got land that
Palestinians had owned for centuries turned over to Israelis against the
Palestinians will. The land was taken from them; this is a fact of
history. Of course, what nation hasn't taken the land it has from someone else?
photos by Leo Rossi & Martin Barnett
As head of the
Jewish Agency, and later president of the Jewish Agency Executive, he became the
de facto leader of the
Jewish community in Palestine, and largely led its struggle for an independent Jewish state in
The British mandate of Palestine. On May 14, 1948, he formally proclaimed the establishment of the State of
Israel, and was the first to sign the
Israeli Declaration of Independence, which he had helped to write. Ben-Gurion led Israel during the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, and united the various Jewish militias into the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Subsequently, he became known as "Israel's
founding father".
photos by Leo Rossi & Martin Barnett
Ben-Gurion published two volumes setting out his views on relations between Zionists and the Arab world:
We and Our Neighbors, published in 1931, and
My Meetings with Arab Leaders
published in 1967. To his credit, Ben-Gurion believed in the equal rights of Arabs who
remained in and would become citizens of Israel. He was quoted as
saying, "We must start working in Jaffa. Jaffa must employ Arab workers.
And there is a question of their wages. I believe that they should
receive the same wage as a Jewish worker. An Arab has also the right to
be elected president of the state, should he be elected by all."
He believed that the sparsely populated and barren Negev desert offered a
great opportunity for the Jews to settle in Palestine with minimal
obstruction of the Arab population, and set a personal example by
settling in kibbutz
Sde Boker at the centre of the Negev.
During the
1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ben-Gurion instigated a policy of restraint ("
Havlagah") in which the
Haganah
and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against
Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defense. In 1937, the
Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and Ben-Gurion supported this policy. This led to conflict with
Ze'ev Jabotinsky who opposed partition and as a result Jabotinsky's supporters split with the Haganah and abandoned Havlagah.
In 1955, Ben-Gurion assumed the post of Defense Minister and was re-elected
prime minister. When he returned to government, Israeli forces
began responding more aggressively to Egyptian-sponsored Palestinian
guerilla attacks from Gaza—still under Egyptian rule. The growing cycle
of violence led Egypt's President
Gamal Abdel Nasser
(
see link below) to build up his arms with the help of the
Soviet Union. The Israelis
responded by arming themselves with help from
France. Nasser blocked the
passage of Israeli ships through the
Straits of Tiran
and the
Suez Canal. In July 1956, the United States and
Britain
withdrew their offer to fund the
Aswan High Dam project on the
Nile and a
week later, Nasser ordered the
nationalization of the French and
British-controlled Suez Canal. Ben-Gurion collaborated with the British
and French to plan the
1956 Sinai War in which Israel invaded and occupied
Gaza and the
Sinai Peninsula, thus giving British and French forces a pretext to militarily intervene against
Egypt in order to secure the
Suez Canal.
Intervention by the United States and the
United Nations forced the
British and French to back down and Israel to withdraw from
Sinai in
return for promises of free navigation through the
Red Sea and Suez
Canal. A UN force was stationed between Egypt and Israel.
photo by Styrous®
Ben-Gurion is said to have been "nearly obsessed" with Israel obtaining
nuclear weapons,
feeling that a nuclear arsenal was the only way to counter the Arabs'
superiority in numbers, space, and financial resources, and that it was
the only sure guarantee of Israel's survival and the prevention of
another
Holocaust.
Ben-Gurion stepped down from office in 1963, and retired from political life in 1970. He then moved to
Sde Boker, a
kibbutz in the
Negev desert, where he lived until his death. On November 18, 1973, he suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage and died on December 1, 1970.
Styrous® ~ Tuesday, March 3, 2015
