The Controversy over Ben-Gurion's Interest in the Jewish Messianic Vision

Although it had ended with an Israeli retreat and no palpable results from the standpoint of most of the public, the 1956 war and its aftermath catapulted Ben-Gurion to one of his highest levels of public esteem. Also, however, it helped to widen dangerous fissures in his relations with important elites.

When this period got under way, Ben-Gurion was exuding a conceited if not a condescending mind-set. It went beyond his conviction that his standing allowed, if not required, him to behave in this manner, as though he were an Israeli George Washington who also possessed the intellectual depth that the other Founding Fathers supplied in the American case, making him a cardinal figure in the country's birth and a paragon for posterity. It also seemed to him – for the time being – that Israel was truly a success story despite its horrific difficulties and bumps along the way. The country's population, originally tiny, had doubled and tripled without grave mishaps, at least thus far. Most of the Holocaust survivors had acculturated themselves by their own efforts – more because of their vitality and willingness to immerse themselves in Israeli society than due to society's willingness and practical ability to absorb them – and at the outset of our discussion, we showed that this matter was of paramount concern to Ben-Gurion.