The Desert Sage

The hundreds of vehicles that wound their way through Israel's Negev Desert last week formed a kind of mobile Who's Who. Led by President Zalman Shazar and Premier Golda Meir, the pilgrims were bound for the Negev kibbutz of Sde Boker to pay homage, on his 85th birthday, to former Premier David Ben-Gurion.

Ben-Gurion, the founder-father of Israel and its leader for 15 of the 23 years that it has existed, is not only his country's George Washington but its Thomas Jefferson as well. This week a U.S. edition of his 862-page Israel--a Personal History will be published. Already a bestseller in Israel, the book recalls how in 1948, with the country breeching into bloody birth, Ben-Gurion personally wrote its Declaration of Independence. A committee was assigned the task; and Ben-Gurion reminded it that the U.S. Declaration of Independence made no mention of territorial boundaries. When the committee deadlocked over a final draft, Ben-Gurion produced a text that was adopted with only a single small change.

That Man. Recently an Israeli columnist admiringly described Ben-Gurion's "willingness to forgive his foes for everything he ever did to them." Thus it was in the desert last week. Six years ago Ben-Gurion broke with the ruling Mapai party over a Defense Ministry scandal. Mrs. Meir became so angry with him that for years afterward she privately referred to Ben-Gurion only as "that man" (in retaliation, he called her "a one-woman stumbling bloc"). Last week Mrs. Meir invited him back into the Labor Party. Ben-Gurion graciously declined. "I am no longer dealing in politics," he said.

Ben-Gurion's pace has hardly slowed. Visiting him last week in his trim green bungalow in the Negev, TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin found him hard at work on memoirs that will complement his history. Ben-Gurion is writing mainly for the youth of Israel. "I want to tell them what has been done so far, what was good and what was not so good, so that they should know how to continue Jewish history."

In his Personal History, one of the six books he has written in four years, Ben-Gurion shows a deep sense of the continuity of Jewish history. Describing the 1948 war of independence, he writes: "We have more than once met Egypt and Assyria, Babylon and Aram, Canaan and Amalek, but always singly; never in 3,500 years was the whole Middle East united against us." When Ben-Gurion first came to Israel from Poland in 1906 under his original name, David Gryn (his Hebrew name means "son of a lion cub"), he found a land "both loved and desolate"--and underpopulated. "In 1906, my greatest wish was to see a population of 500,000 Jews in this country," he said last week. "Now we need 8,000,000." Noting that the population is currently 3,000,000, Ben-Gurion writes: "Any Jewish woman who, as far as it depends on her, does not bring into the world at least four healthy children is shirking her duty to the nation."

Hebrew Sparta. It is Ben-Gurion's overriding concern that those children be raised in an Israel finally at peace. To achieve that, Ben-Gurion would be willing for Israel to surrender every captured territory except Jerusalem ("the eternal capital") and the Golan Heights. He is thus closer than his successors in Israel's government to the six-point settlement that U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers outlined last week at the U.N. Rogers urged Israel to withdraw from the east bank of the Suez Canal in exchange for an Egyptian pledge of unrestricted passage for Israeli ships.

Ben-Gurion does not believe that peace will result from superpower maneuvers or from any effort by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, whom he does not trust. Rather, he told Levin, it will emerge because of the new generation in Egypt. "There are many Egyptian youths who have finished university. There are some among them who care for their people. There will be peace because they understand what Nasser understood in the last year of his life--that the main problem of Egypt is not how to destroy Israel but how to improve the condition of its own peasants."

At Sde Boker, Ben-Gurion spoke for a full hour to the 2,000 Israelis who had gathered to pay him tribute. "We have always been a people that resides alone, and we can only rely on ourselves and world Jewry," he said. "Our closest neighbors are our bitterest enemies, refusing to accept our existence." But Israel, he went on, "was never intended to become a Hebrew Sparta. Our strength will not be determined solely by our military power and economic wealth, but by the special content of our lives and our capacity to cling to our unique heritage."

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