cover image David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State

David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State

Allon Gal. Indiana University Press, $44.95 (284pp) ISBN 978-0-253-32534-1

One week after the outbreak of WW II, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) presented to Haganah, a clandestine defense organization, his proposal for the establishment of a Jewish state through force of arms. Ben-Gurion pinned his hopes on the backing of American Jewry, having watched the British equivocate in their support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. How the Polish-born founder of the Mapai (later Labor) party swung Zionist foreign policy away from Britain and toward a growing reliance on American Jewry is the focus of this plodding, partisan study. When Ben-Gurion, future prime minister of Israel, visited the U.S. in 1940, anti-Semitism was resurgent, the country was neutral in the war and American Zionism was at its nadir. His ties with the Roosevelt administration and his battle against elements within his own party are ably illuminated by Gal, a historian at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. (Dec.)