Is David Ben-Gurion to blame for Israel’s high cost of living?

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Over a century ago, in 1920, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the historic aspirations of the Zionist movement. Anyone looking through his statements for traces of the program to establish a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel will most certainly be surprised to discover that “the Old Man” had other goals in mind at the time.

Primarily, he was interested in taking his place “at the head of the movement of liberation and revival of the peoples of the Middle East,” while imposing “a dictatorship of the Hebrew worker.” “This mission,” he added, “must not be delayed by democratic aphorisms.”

Did the man who would go on to establish the State of Israel a quarter-century later plan on establishing a communist dictatorship? That is precisely what the late right-wing economist Professor Daniel Doron believed to be the case.

Daniel Doron. A few days after his death in February at age 93, Doron’s last book was published.

A few days after his death in February at age 93, Doron’s last book was published. “Yesterday’s Failure: How the Founders of the Country Created a System that Threatens our Future” (published by Yedioth Books, a subsidiary of the company that owns the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper). Its 500 pages offer a sharply-worded indictment of the country’s founders, tart with the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his sometimes rival, the first president, Chaim Weizmann.

These two men, as well as a series of other Zionist leaders on the left side of the Zionist movement leadership, are responsible, Doron argues, for most of the serious problems from which residents of Israel are now suffering, 120 years after Herzl published his utopian novel “Altneuland,” in which he charted the contours of the model state he hoped to see.

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Modern day Tel Aviv. The most expensive city in the world.

And what does this have to do with present-day Israel? Centralized and monopolistic economy, virulent and all-encompassing bureaucracy, nepotism and institutionalized political corruption – all of these are components, Doron says in his book, of the political and economic system that was spearheaded by Ben-Gurion and his partners in the Zionist enterprise in Israel. Their approach would later come to be known as the “Mapai system” which, Doron writes, “took over our lifestyle here, sowing corruption by means of its total politicization, thwarting any possibility of proper management, destroying competitiveness and encouraging widespread corruption, all of which took hold through its reliance on connections instead of skills, colossal waste, and loyalty to political party above all else.”

Doron believed that because of how deeply rooted it is, this system continues to affect life in Israel to this day, 45 years after the major political upheaval when the Labor Party leaders of the country were supplanted by Likud for the first time.

“Ben-Gurion and most of his colleagues were ardent fans of communism from its very start,” Doron writes in the book. “The facts compel us to recognize that it was not from a moderate socialism, which professed to be democratic, that the Zionist Labor camp drew inspiration for its programs and actions, but rather from the most extreme Leninist type of Marxism, from the totalitarian and violent Bolshevism that waged ruthless class warfare, at first in the U.S.S.R. and subsequently in all of its satellite states in Eastern Europe, in order to establish in them dictatorships of the proletariat.”

‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and Benjamin Netanyahu

Doron was born in Tel Aviv in 1929 as Daniel Halperin. On his mother’s side, he was a great-grandson of Zerah Barnett, a wealthy Jew who was commemorated in a ballad by the writer Yoel Moshe Solomon as one of the founders of Petah Tikva. He studied sociology and economics at Hebrew University, and earned a living from a variety of endeavors. In the field of literature, he published articles in Haaretz and translated two classic works from English to Hebrew: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce and “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. In the world of art, Doron was a sales representative for the young painter Shalom Moskovitz of Safed. Along with the above, he held a position in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Doron lived in the U.S. In 1984, he established the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, which worked to promote free-market principles. In 1996, in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rise to power, he served as his advisor on the Israel Government Council for National and Economic Planning, promoting free-market competition.

In his economic history studies, which are documented in his final book, one may see Doron’s philosophical legacy. He accuses the founders of the country of taking various steps for which Israelis are still paying. This list includes the nationalization of most of the means of production, land, water and natural resources; destruction of the industrial complexes and successful agriculture of the “hated bourgeoisie” through violent strikes; and “the waste of numerous resources on failed attempts to implement a utopian leftist program on kibbutzim and in moshavim, which then went bankrupt.” By means of citations quoted from a variety of sources, Doron attempts to prove the correctness of his words and condemn the leftist founders of the nation.

Working on a water drilling pump.
Zoltan Kluger/GPO

The Ramle manifesto

Doron goes all the way back to the start of the previous century, describing the roots of the problem as arriving upon the immigration to Palestine of David Ben-Gurion in 1906, when he was 20 years old. That year, the founding conference of the Poalei Zion (“workers of Zion”) party took place. It was initially to be convened in Jaffa, but was later moved to Ramle, and was called by its members “the conspirative congress.” Doron offered this explanation for the choice of location: “An Arab city, due to concerns that if they assembled in a Hebrew-speaking city, they were liable to be eavesdropped upon, and have the contents of what was said publicized to the masses. All of them were zealous communists, who wished to set up an underground here.”

Highways and construction sites in Tel Aviv.
Tomer Appelbaum

Thus, toward the end of the years of Ottoman rule, Ben-Gurion began to shape what Doron calls “the Bolshevik ‘Mapai system,'” in a document known as “the Ramle platform.” The founding principles of this ideology were drafted in the spirit of Marxism and the Communist Manifesto. “The chronicles of humanity consist of national and class wars,” is how the platform opens, a phrase reminiscent of another, more famous manifesto.

Nevertheless, the two documents are subsequently differentiated from each other because of one crucial factor. As opposed to the Communist Manifesto, which negated national identity, the Ramle manifesto imparted a Marxist validation to nationalism, and established that “under certain conditions, when the means of production are no longer sufficient for the development of creative forces, the nation is forced to seize a foreign economic-based territory – that creates resistance on the other side; thus, a war between nations ensues,” in Doron’s words. In the case of the Jewish people, he writes, “Jewish capital is being squeezed out in the lands of exile because of national competition. Jewish migration must necessarily be concentrated in Palestine.”

Workers return home after working in the fields in Emek Hefer.
Zoltan Kluger/GPO

Another section of the manifesto included its program for action. It opened with the statement that the party being formed, the Poalei Zion party, aspired to “amass the means of production for the building of society on socialist foundations.” In other words: nationalization. “The party views class struggle as the sole mechanism for doing so,” the manifesto plainly states. That, the society that arises in the Land of Israel must necessarily be communist, a society in which the bourgeois class will be eliminated by means of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

In order to realize this vision, the young people who gathered in Ramle issued an unequivocal demand for the establishment of workers’ associations – labor unions. “Ben-Gurion explicitly said that the Histradrut [labor federation] and similar institutions of the party organizing the lives of the immigrants and the workers would arrange for their critical dependence on the party and thus make it easier to enlist them in its activities,” Doron writes.

‘Dictatorship of the Hebrew worker’

In 1919, another important congress took place, this time in Petah Tikva. The Ahdut Ha’avoda political party was founded at this congress. Members of Poalei Zion also joined this new party. “A Jewish economy, a Jewish society and a Jewish state as a class-free workers’ society,” urged the statement that was drafted at the congress.

That same year, Ben-Gurion declared: “We are not only a party of workers. My plan is a dictatorship of the Hebrew laborer in all of the national affairs of the Jewish people. And when the workers take control, they will tax the bourgeois for the benefit of all national interests.”

Upon the establishment of the Histadrut labor federation in 1920, Ben-Gurion sought to realize his argument that “we cannot create discipline when there is no control of the economic side.” Furthermore, he said, “all members of Ahdut Ha’avoda are committed unquestioningly to following the orders of the executive of the workers’ military in regard to location, profession, and the order of labor.” Thus, Ben-Gurion referred to the Histadrut as if it were a military organization, and to its members as if they had been enlisted to obey its orders without hesitation.

Orphans from Romania work at the chicken coop at a farm in Petah Tikva.
Zoltan Kluger/GPO

Doron argues that Ben-Gurion’s focus on the Histadrut is rooted in the fact that he did not have the opportunity to force an overt Bolshevik dictatorship under the British Mandate – a dictatorship that would exert control over their way of life, primarily over the economy, in an absolute manner. This explains why, says Doron, Ben-Gurion decided to control the pre-statehood Jewish community by controlling the livelihood of its residents.

Doron spares no criticism of the outcome. The Histadrut enterprises had a low rate of productivity, he writes, and their workers soon understood that they were not being appraised on the basis of their professional achievements, but rather on the basis of their status in the eyes of the workers’ committee and their comrades. “Therefore, a significant percentage of their time at work was devoted to political content instead of toward increasing productivity,” he asserts.

Taxes on the members of the workers’ association paid for “the infamous wheeler-dealers,” Doron writes: high salaries for the organization’s leaders and staff that represented the workers in the governmental and the private-sector monopolies, such as the electricity corporation, the water company, the ports, airports and banks – all at at the expense of the politically powerless manufacturing workers. “High wages for low productivity,” which harmed growth and directly contributed to unemployment, Doron writes. His book describes how Histadrut-owned factories went bankrupt, one after the other, in spite of the capital invested in them.

Herzl and Jabotinsky vs. Ben-Gurion

There were those who opposed this system at the time. One of them was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the rival on the other side of the political divide, who contended that the Histadrut’s monopoly had to be broken in order to create competition between workers’ organizations. In an article published in 1932, he wrote: “No one wants to break the organization of Hebrew workers – heaven forbid. Workers must be organized. There does exist a desire to break … the clamor for monopolies and power.”

In a column that appeared in 1929, Jabotinsky warned against the socialist system that Ben-Gurion was nurturing. “I do not rule out the role played by any class in the building of the country. Without the Hebrew worker, the country will not be built, and without Hebrew property it will not be built, and both are essential,” he wrote. “But it is possible to build the country without tainting the atmosphere with the poison of cynicism and hatred,” he added. “Nothing about my words is an exaggeration. This psychology will poison the Zionist enterprise. It would not be possible to breathe in the Land of Israel if such people had the ruling hand.” On another occasion, Jabotinsky argued: “The individualistic factor in the development of creative output is fundamental and inevitable. Humanity does not march toward socialism. It marches in the opposite direction.”

Orphans from Romania dance the hora at a farm in Petah Tikva.
Zoltan Kluger/GPO

Similarly, Herzl, the father of Zionism, supported private enterprise to build up the Jewish community by means of urbanization and industrialization, with the help of Jewish intellectuals. “He saw how absurd it was to try to turn educated Jews into farm workers, into uneducated people of the earth,” writes Doron, who contrasts Herzl’s dream with the reality dictated by Ben-Gurion.

One practical initiative of Herzl’s was the establishment of the Anglo-Palestine Bank as a developmental arm of the Zionist Organization. Herzl appointed as its head the banker Zalman Levontin, a pioneer from the first wave of Zionist immigration (the “first aliyah”) and a “fervent supporter of private enterprise,” as Doron puts it.

“The country could only be built by those who invest their own money in it, who earn a profit and live on their own account,” Levontin wrote. “But by no means could it be built by those coming without any means of their own and who are financially supported from the start to the end of their settlement here.” He was convinced that only “capitalistic work, clear bookkeeping and healthy work” would lead to a successful outcome, not financial support and loans that would not be repaid.

‘A romantic view of agriculture’

However, the dominant voices in Mandatory Palestine’s Jewish community believed otherwise. In 1908, Chaim Weizmann set up a settlement department that was a counterweight to the entrepreneurial Anglo-Palestine Bank, and was meant to transfer the contributions gathered from Jews of the Diaspora to collectivist settlement. “Ben-Gurion, and later on also Weizmann, suffered from a romantic view of agriculture; they forged an alliance with radical Marxists, whose aim was to settle the land solely with collectivist agricultural settlements that would be underwritten by charitable contributions collected in the Diaspora,” writes Doron.

Although Ben-Gurion had stated that “the return to Israel is first and foremost a return to the land,” and that it was essential that “most of these millions be workers and farmers,” his own experience as a worker on the land in Sejera and Pardes Hannah was altogether brief, and he then adopted the bourgeois lifestyle of a businessman.

Nevertheless, in his public statements he preached the virtues of socialism. “Here, the two streams of Zionism part ways: the bourgeois and the socialist. First of all, they disagree on the structure and content of Zionism itself,” Ben-Gurion said. The preferred route, of course, was that of socialism, in which “the Hebrew worker is saturated with a socialist consciousness and would not serve as a tool in the hands of capital,” he wrote. “The building up of a country that is entirely capitalist would not bring with it the realization of Zionism … The Hebrew worker immigrated to the country as an emissary of the people, and as a pioneer of the great enterprise of the Hebrew revolution gained control of his positions in the economy and on the settlement, through labor. In every action and in every enterprise, above the working class hovered the historic objective of the revolution that will instill labor in the life of the people and the country.”

Erecting a pro-Mapai sign, 1951.
Teddy Brauner/GPO

In this content, Yitzhak Tabenkin, one of the founders of the kibbutz movement, expressed his hope that labor strikes would “cause private capital to despair of the possibilities of profitable investment in the land, and that this would perhaps provide a stimulus to the cooperative industrialization of the Histadrut.”

Berl Katznelson, the spiritual father of the Labor movement, shared these views, writes Doron. “The war needs to break out soon at the country’s doorstep, and not within it,” he declared. Katznelson was not speaking of the war between Jews and Arabs over the Holy Land, but about class struggle. “Are we going to sit and wait until capital strikes roots here, and tears our country, the land of the worker, into bits, right before our eyes?” he asked.

Anyone who did not believe in this path earned a sharp reprimand from Ben-Gurion. As early as 1928, he declared that “the objective of Zionism is the conversion of detached, futile masses of Jews, parasites, into fertile labor and a creative, revolutionary, workers’ movement.” He labeled the supporters of the free market “parasites of private enterprise” who were “helpless and impotent,” and “poison[ed] the air with their abominations and cast their foulness into public opinion” as well as a “rabble of profiteers.” He termed the residents of Tel Aviv “soda sellers on whose merit the country will not be built” (one of whom was his brother).

‘The Jews of America have been exploited’

Doron charges in his book that reality proved the opposite to be the case. Collectivist agriculture was a failure from the start, and relied on the financial benevolence of American Jews, supporters of the free market, who “subsidized the failing Bolshevik effort in the Land of Israel,” he writes. They had done so, Doron argues, thanks to Zionist propaganda that included “heartwarming photos of pioneer women in short-shorts, reviving the desolate land as they tilled the furrows of the homeland, or as they flew around a hora circle in a show of exuberant dancing.”

A worker loads fodder onto a camel’s back in Kfar Vitkin.
Zoltan Kluger/GPO

According to Doron, “American Jews were exploited like a dairy cow fed propaganda and lies,” as the established business infrastructure in the Land of Israel was actually located in the new cities, which were built upon private initiative. Without Tel Aviv, without free enterprise, there the Jewish community would have had no chance to prosper and to grow, writes Doron. “How many immigrants could the kibbutzim and moshavim absorb?” he wonders.

In Doron’s view, the path proposed by Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and the left hindered the both desirable and feasible economic and social development of the Zionist enterprise. “It placed it in the hands of dogmatic Marxists who were ignorant of economics or practical life, bureaucrats and wheeler-dealers who stifled every private initiative and were the cause of the economic backwardness and weakness of the Jewish settlement during the Mandate period,” he writes.

This ideology also had ramifications far beyond the economy, and Doron also pins the blame for the exacerbation of the conflict between Jews and Arabs, as well, on the economic approach espoused by Ben-Gurion. He argues that the violence of 1921 broke out in the wake of a May Day demonstration by Jewish leftists and communists in Arab Jaffa, who had attempted to spur Arabs into rebelling against landowners.

Doron accuses members of the left of hypocrisy in their attitudes toward the Arab worker. As he describes it, the communist worldview was supposed to co-opt the Arab worker into the proletarian revolution, but “the leaders of Bolshevik Zionism, who spoke in high language about social justice and brotherhood of peoples, did talk about their state of distress,” he wrote, in reference to impoverished Arabs who were expelled from their land, the source of their livelihoods – by Jews. “Neither did anyone imagine that they ought to be compensated generously. Thus, hostility to the Zionist movement within the Arab masses took root, and it became a movement of the people,” he writes.

Moreover, the left’s opposition to economic collaboration with the Arab farmers and merchants contributed to the growth of hostility, Doron contends. “Arab peddlers who came to sell produce in Jewish settlements were attacked by leftist activists, were beaten, and their merchandise was destroyed,” he says.

Jewish workers harvest potatoes in Kfar Sava.
Daniel Kaplan/GPO

Doron’s book also criticizes the policy adopted by the Zionist organization, inspired by Weizmann, that sought to ensure that the gates to the country would be shut to anyone who did not conform to the spirit that they preached – “a new Jewish race, which had the exclusive power to build the country in accordance with the ideals of equality, progress and a left-leaning philosophy,” as Doron puts it.

Thus, even after the Nazis’ rise to power, Ben-Gurion declared in 1933 that Zionism’s role did not lie in the success of individual Jews, but in the building of the country: “We have to adopt a general rule: not the country for the immigrants, but the immigrants for the country. We are not engaged in a philanthropic enterprise, and the Land of Israel is not a land of immigration. We have to work out a settling of the historical account, in which every immigrant is examined to see if he is helpful to the land and promotes the realization of Zionism.”

It is here that Doron delivers the sharpest criticism for Ben-Gurion, Weizmann and their colleagues. These words, he says, “show just how much the Marxist ideology to which they were beholden had eradicated within them even the slightest bit of simple humaneness, of empathy for their Jewish brethren and their terrible suffering.”

Perhaps it is possible to attribute this to the admiration that Ben-Gurion showed for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism. Doron found in “the Old Man’s” journal words of praise for the Russian leader, whose rule evolved into the murderous regime of Josef Stalin and cost the lives of tens of millions of people. Ben-Gurion described Lenin as “a man who was at peace with himself, who despised every inhibition, loyal to achieving the goal; a man who knew not concessions and assumptions; a man of iron will who would not show compassion for human life or for the blood of babes in the name of the revolution; and a genius progenitor of the perfect stratagem, who knew how to withdraw and to leave the battle in order to gather forces for a new charge; before his very eyes, the sole and unchanging goal burned with a red fire – the great purpose of the revolution, the fundamental revolution that uproots the existing reality and undermines it down to its roots, to the foundation stones of the languishing and deviant society.”

Hoping for change

Residents of Kfar Sava next to carts hitched to mules for carrying crates of citrus fruits from the orchard.
Daniel Kaplan/GPO

Doron recognizes the fact that Israel is still “an astounding success in certain important sectors,” enumerating many accomplishments in the past few decades. He wrote that Israel “has been blessed with human capital that is among the best in the world,” which should have, in combination with large-scale investments, “raised it to being one of the wealthiest countries in the world.” However, he says, “a sizable portion of the residents of the country remains indigent.” He attributes this to “the roots of our past, firstly to the history of the Zionist movement and the advent of its activity in Israel, “which bequeathed the system that continues to spread its influence until today.”

Although Doron died before he could see the Mapai system passing from this world, as he put it, he maintained his optimism. “One could by all means make fundamental changes that would enable Israelis to realize their colossal potential, and allow the Israeli economy to blossom,” he writes, “You have to understand what our challenging problems are, and want to fix them.”