Ben-Gurion’s doctrine

Ben-Gurion’s doctrine

On February 16, 1973, General Moshe Dayan delivered a programmatic speech at a meeting of the Israeli Bar Association. The daily Haaretz (February 18, 1973) reports that Dayan “surprised his listeners”: the lawyers who had invited him expected that, as minister of defense, he would talk about military matters. Instead, he read a prepared ideological lecture in which he expounded the “doctrine” of his mentor, the founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.
The latter was still alive at the time—he was to die at the end of 1973—and it is fair to assume that Dayan was certain of his approval. (Indeed, it is not too fanciful to suppose that Ben-Gurion was delivering a message to the nation through his favorite protégé.)
Dayan quoted what Ben-Gurion had said many years before, in internal debates about the report of the Peel Commission,⁵ but he stressed that those words, spoken in 1937, were “pertinent also today.” This is the gist of Ben-Gurion’s doctrine, as quoted by Dayan:

Among ourselves [the Zionists] there can be no debate about the integrity of the Land of Israel [i.e. Palestine], and about our ties and right to the whole of the Land....
When a Zionist speaks about the integrity of the Land, this can only mean colonization [hityashvut] by the Jews of the Land in its entirety.
That is to say: from the viewpoint of Zionism the real touchstone is not confined to [the question as to] whom this or that segment of the Land belongs to politically, nor even to the abstract belief in the integrity of the Land. Rather, the aim and touchstone of Zionism is the actual implementation of colonization by the Jews of all areas of the Land of Israel.⁶

This is the Zionist counterpart of the doctrine of “manifest destiny.” Let me spell out what it implies: any partition of Palestine, any “green line,” any accord or treaty that shuts off any part whatsoever of the “Land of Israel” to Jewish colonization is from the viewpoint of Zionism at best a transient accommodation—accepted temporarily for tactical or pragmatic reasons, but never regarded as final.
Of course, this does not mean that the expansion of Zionist colonization is unstoppable. What it does mean is that it will be pursued—as a matter of highest priority—so long as the balance of power makes it possible.