The Legacy of Joshua

JUST as David Ben-Gurion has been compared to a modern Moses who led his people to the Promised Land, so Levi Eshkol made a credible Joshua as Ben-Gurion's successor in the premiership of Israel. Chosen in 1963 for what many believed to be a transitional tenure, Eshkol presided over the defeat of Israel's enemies and its coming of age as an industrial state. When he died last week at 73, he left behind a government more unified than at any time in Israel's 21-year history, and one that rules over a territory three times as large as he inherited.

Yet in a larger sense, Eshkol was indeed a transitional leader, overseeing the changing of the guard from the dogmatic Zionist pioneers to the pragmatic new heirs of an established state. Always the patient man of compromise, he provided an elastic framework of government wherein Israelis' divergent political passions could coexist. "Put three Zionists in a room," Eshkol used to say, "and they will form four political parties." Israel has no fewer than 13 parties, and it is a measure of Eshkol's talent as a moderator that eight of them, representing 93% of the electorate, were in his coalition government.

Prosperity and Pogroms. Eshkol himself was probably the last long-term leader from the old guard, meaning, in Israeli terms, the early European immigrants who have long provided the nation's elite, often to the frustration of the impatient native-born sabras. His early years in the Ukraine were spent amid both prosperity and a continual fear of pogroms. At 19, he landed at Jaffa in the aliya, or immigrant wave, of 1914, and hiked across the sandhills to a farming village. As the need arose, he became in turn a farmer, soldier, irrigation expert and labor organizer. In the 1930s, he was sent to Germany to help Jews emigrate to Palestine. In the '40s, he was a member of the high command of the Haganah, responsible for buying and manufacturing arms.

As a chief lieutenant to Ben-Gurion, Eshkol served the government first as Director-General of the Defense Department, then as the Agriculture Minister, meanwhile heading the agency charged with settling the successive waves of immigrants on the land. But it was as Finance Minister from 1952 to 1963 that he most indelibly left his own imprint on Israel. Reining in the country's perennial inflation, he welcomed private investment and restructured the economy toward the technology-based industries that are flourishing today.

According to a cruel gibe at the time, Eshkol became Premier "to prove that Israel could get along without one." Lacking flair and unabashedly heimish (just plain folks), he ventured no flamboyant new policies but rather consolidated and institutionalized the investment of blood, money and effort of the earlier years. Under his leadership, Israelis fulfilled the ancient Jewish promise of meeting "next year in Jerusalem." His dream of seeing a new wave of immigration from Russia proved as elusive as peace with the Arabs, but he came somewhat closer to his political ambition of forging a single majority labor party.

Military Melting Pot. Eshkol's successors inherit the complex social task of fully integrating what has been called the "Other Israel"--the Oriental Jews, comprising 52% of the population, who were born or whose parents were born in underdeveloped Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries. By means of crash education programs and the use of the army as a melting pot, Eshkol sought to end the cultural and economic gap between European and Oriental Jews. Providing a framework for political unity to that end will perhaps prove his most important legacy. Carrying on the task will require, above all, compromise and moderation, talents that, to many Israelis, make Eshkol's death leave a gap larger than the space he appeared to fill in life.

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