B-G Quits

"I cannot continue," wrote 67-year-old Premier David Ben-Gurion last week. "I cannot bear up any more against the mental strain that I suffer in the government . . . For six years I have been working in a state of high tension . . . Mine is no ordinary tiredness." The Mapai Party's central committee heard his letter read in silence, then his comrades begged him to reconsider. But B-G sat still and unmoving. A woman rose; she had lost two sons in the war to establish Israel. "If I gave my sons to the nation," she demanded, "how can you consider abandoning it?" His followers in Socialist Haifa angrily threatened to walk out on strike "unless the Premier stayed at his post."

For the first time in his life, though all Israel called, Ben-Gurion would not heed. He had never failed it before: he went to Palestine in 1906, a boy of 20 from a little Polish village, to help drain the marshes and plant the citrus trees of the promised homeland. To further the Zionist cause, he became an editor and pamphleteer, then a corporal in General Allenby's army, which liberated Palestine from the Turks in World War I. He helped found Histadrut, Israel's largest labor federation, and became Zionism's John L. Lewis; he headed the Jewish Agency, shadow government of the state-to-come, and became the Zionist George Washington. When the British mandate ended, he grabbed a gun, welded his people -- who came from concentration camp, ghetto, bank, theater and factory -- into an army, and gave them the first Jewish victory since Judas Maccabeus defeated the Syrian Nicanor 2,109 years before.

"Ben-Gurion was the flame," said an Israeli, "the other leaders are all moths." Israel's first and only Premier, Ben-Gurion treated his Cabinet like an impatient schoolmaster, required members to carry around the government's Four-Year Plan and invited them to ask themselves each morning what they had done to further it. Amidst acclamation, he never played the hero's role. Evenings, he and his wife Paula (whom he married in Brooklyn) sat at the kitchen table eating a supper of sour cream, cheese, bread and salad. He clung to the white, open-necked shirt that is the unofficial uniform of the Israeli pioneer. Once he turned up at a Mapai meeting after a Soviet embassy reception, still clad in striped pants and morning coat, explained: "Please forgive my working clothes."

Last week Paula laid away his formal clothes in moth balls. The white-haired old dynamo had run down; he was going back to the land, to the pioneer moshave of Sde Boker in the Negeb, Israel's desert frontier, to live in a three-room wooden hut and resume his study of classical and Renaissance philosophy. Paula was not too enthusiastic about renouncing city life, but planned to resume her old occupation and become the colony's nurse.

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