Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Author:Simon Sebag Montefiore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: General History
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 2011-01-26T15:00:00+00:00

43

THE OUD- PLAYER OF JERUSALEM

1905–1914

DAVID GRÜN BECOMES DAVID BEN-GURION

David Grün’s father was already a local leader of the Lovers of Zion, forerunner of the Zionist movement, and a keen Hebraist, so the boy was taught Hebrew from an early age. But David, like many other Zionists, was shocked when he read that Herzl had accepted the Ugandan offer. At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl tried to sell his so-called Ugandaism but he succeeded only in splitting his movement. His rival, the English playwright Israel Zangwill, coiner of the phrase ‘melting pot’ to describe the assimilation of immigrants in America, decamped to found his Jewish Territorialist Organization and pursue an array of quixotic non-Palestinian Zions. The Austrian plutocrat Baron Maurice de Hirsch was financing Jewish colonies in Argentina, and the New York financier Jacob Schiff was promoting the Galveston Plan, a Lone Star Zion for Russian Jews in Texas. There was more support for El Arish because it was close to Palestine and Zionism was nothing without Zion, but none of these schemes* flourished and Herzl, exhausted by his peripatetic travels, died soon afterwards, aged just forty-four. He had successfully established Zionism as one of the solutions to the Jewish plight, particularly in Russia.

Young David Grün mourned his hero Herzl even though ‘we concluded the most effective way to combat Ugandaism was by settling in the Land of Israel’. In 1905, Emperor Nicholas II faced a revolution that almost cost him the throne. Many of the revolutionaries were Jews – Leon Trotsky being the most prominent – yet they were actually internationalists who despised both race and religion. Nonetheless, Nicholas felt that the forged anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was coming true: ‘How prophetic!’ he wrote, ‘This year 1905 had been truly dominated by the Jewish Elders.’ Forced to accept a constitution, he tried to restore his damaged autocracy by encouraging anti-Semitic massacres by nationalistic revanchists nicknamed the Black Hundreds.

The pogroms encouraged David Grün, a member of the socialist party Poalei Zion – Workers of Zion – to board one of the pilgrim ships from Odessa and set out for the Holy Land. The boy from was typical of the Second Aliyah, a wave of secular pioneers, many of them socialist, who regarded Jerusalem as a nest of medieval superstition. In 1909, these settlers founded Tel Aviv on the sand dunes next to the ancient port of Jaffa; in 1911, they created a new collective farm – the first kibbutz – in the north.

Grün did not visit Jerusalem for many months after his arrival; instead he worked in the fields of Galilee, until, in mid-1910 the twenty-four-year-old moved to Jerusalem to write for a Zionist newspaper. Diminutive, skinny, curly-haired and always clad in a Russian rubashka smock to emphasize his socialist credentials, he adopted the nom de plume ‘Ben-Gurion’, borrowed from one of Simon bar Kochba’s lieutenants. The old shirt and the new name revealed the two sides of the emerging Zionist leader.

Ben-Gurion believed, like most of

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