Please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180403)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180404)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180405)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20180406). (Lily)
Mosaic（https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/）
by Martin Kramer
April 2018
The May 1948 Vote that Made the State of Israel
IV. A Seed of Doubt
And yet one person—David Ben-Gurion—never repeated the story, and historians who sought confirmation from him came away empty-handed. In his laconic diary entry for the day itself, Ben-Gurion didn’t mention this vote. “In the afternoon, a meeting of the People’s Administration,” he wrote:
It was decided to declare statehood and a Provisional Government at four in the afternoon on Friday. Only [Peretz] Bernstein [of the General Zionists] suggested that we just declare the [Provisional] Government.
In 1961, after publication of Sharef’s book, an interviewer pressed Ben-Gurion: would he name those who opposed the immediate declaration of the state? “I prefer not to deal with this question. There are minutes of the People’s Administration . . . and they provide the answer to this question.” But would he endorse Sharef’s account? Sharef was “generally” accurate, Ben-Gurion allowed, but he couldn’t confirm “all the details.”
In 1969, a young graduate student, Mordechay Naor, met with Ben-Gurion at Sde Boker and subsequently wrote him asking for the names of those who had voted for and against the truce. Sharef hadn’t named them, he said, and while some historians had guessed their identities, they didn’t all agree. Ben-Gurion replied:
I am not familiar with this at all, and in the minutes in my possession there is no such resolution, and I do not know on what basis you believe that six voted against it and four in favor. Therefore I cannot tell you the names of those against and those in favor, because there was no vote.
Naor did not publish this letter until many years later.
Then, in 1971, the multi-volume Encyclopedia Judaica appeared, and it included an entry on the “Israel Declaration of Independence” written by none other than Ben-Gurion himself. Once more, Ben-Gurion made no mention of any truce vote. But, as also in his reply to Naor, he did confirm the later vote, in which it was decided to exclude from the declaration any mention of borders.
The most important piece of evidence appeared five years later. In his letter to Naor, Ben-Gurion had mentioned “the minutes in my possession.” These classified minutes were finally published on Israel’s 30th anniversary in 1978, after Ben-Gurion’s death. It turned out that he was right about them: the six-to-four vote against the truce (and, by implication, in favor of declaring the state immediately) is nowhere to be found; only the later vote, on whether to specify the state’s borders, is recorded in the minutes.
Of course, much of what was said during thirteen hours of deliberations could not have been reported in only 119 pages of typed minutes. Sharef included what he thought was important. But even if some arguments fell by the editorial wayside, how could the vote over postponement have been omitted—especially since the same minutes duly recorded the details of the other vote?
Publication of the minutes thus planted a seed of doubt. Some historians nevertheless decided to prefer Sharef’s book of 1959 to the minutes composed by him in 1948. After all, when he published his book, eight of the ten participants were still alive, some even active in politics, and Sharef himself was still a civil servant. Would he have dared to risk his position by fabricating the story of a split vote if there had been none? Also, some participants—notably, Mordechai Bentov and Aharon Zisling (both of Mapam, a socialist party to the left of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai)—reassured historians that there had indeed been such a vote. If so, then perhaps Sharef had simply struck it from the minutes because Ben-Gurion, eyeing posterity, wanted to minimize the depth of internal divisions.
This speculation, presuming a sort of soft conspiracy, allowed historians to continue telling the story as they always had. But seeds of doubt have a way of germinating.
An early dissenting voice was that of the military historian Meir Pa’il in his 1983 contribution to the monumental Historiah shel Eretz-Israel (History of the Land of Israel, volume 10). There he wrote that the People’s Administration “reached a general agreement, without a vote, to declare an independent state upon the British evacuation” (emphasis added).
“Sharef was astonished and at a loss when he examined the minutes and discovered he had erred,” wrote an Israeli historian who confronted him.
Another historian, Yoram Nimrod, reached the same conclusion, and even went to Sharef to confront him with the minutes. “Sharef was astonished and at a loss when he examined the minutes and discovered he had erred,” wrote Nimrod. “We discussed this a few times, without reaching a solution, but by the time I found a reasonable explanation and asked to present it to him, he had fallen ill and died shortly afterward.”
In Nimrod’s own posthumously published thesis (which finally appeared in 2000), he became the first to assert unequivocally that the alleged vote never occurred, and to attempt to explain the discrepancy. In 1998, Israeli state television broadcast the controversial series T’kumah (“Resurrection”) on the history of Israel. Here, for the first time, a wider public would have heard this:
Contrary to the accepted version, there was no vote on whether or not to declare political independence. The only question on which the members voted was whether to define the borders of the state according to the [UN] partition plan. By a majority of five to four, it was decided not to include the matter of the borders in the declaration.
Later, in 2005, the historian Yigal Eilam (who had been a consultant for T’kumah) published a detailed article aggressively accusing some historians of “laziness” in accepting the “myth” of the dramatic vote. He, too, tried to explain why the “myth” arose—his theory: Sharef became confused—and why the vote wasn’t necessary in the first place.
By now, the seed of doubt was in full flower. But because Nimrod and Eilam were regarded as gadflies, some dismissed their version as a post-Zionist assault on a story of heroic Zionist leadership—in this case, Ben-Gurion’s. (This, despite Eilam’s insistence that, in his eyes, his correction of the record “doesn’t detract in the least from the historic value of Ben-Gurion and the importance of the role he played at that moment.”)
It was only in the wake of this controversy that the dissenting version finally received a major endorsement from the “establishment.” Mordechay Naor, the one-time student who had asked Ben-Gurion about the vote, had gone on to a prolific career, even serving as chairman of the public council of Independence Hall. In 2006, he finally published Ben-Gurion’s letter to him and stated his own view plainly: “I wish to add my own humble voice to those who deny that any vote was taken.”
Naor later assumed the task of preparing an authoritative account of the declaration co-sponsored by Independence Hall. Published in 2014, and promoted on the official website of Independence Hall in both Hebrew and English, it includes a facsimile of Ben-Gurion’s letter along with Naor’s reiterated view that the vote never took place.
(To be continued.)
