one can easily find in these speeches and writings support for any point of view. But such statements are unimportant, even irrelevant, compared with his actions, and the latter indicated no place for Arabs, no plan at all for dealing with the Arab problem.

Ben-Gurion has always been a pragmatist, with a tendency to identify his own job at any particular time with the immediate, paramount need of the nation. When he was only a party politician, Jewish socialism was proclaimed by him as the only important issue. When he became the General Secretary of the HistacLruth, immediately after the Histadruth was founded (Hanukka 1920) the class struggle, and the special task of the workers in building the country, became his main theme. But in the Thirties, he titled one of his books From a Class to a Nation, saying that the workers' class must now become the nation as such. For by then, Ben-Gurion had risen from the Histadruth to national office.

This came about accidentally. One night in June, 1933, a Zionist leader named Chaim Arlozoroff was murdered on the seashore at Tel Aviv, near the place where the Dan Hotel stands today. Arlozoroff was a brilliant young man who held the office of chairman of the directorate of the Jewish Agency. This, in effect, made him the prime minister of the state-on-the-way. (He was also one of the most progressive Zionists; a few weeks before his murder, he had publicly objected to the view that "what is good for [Jewish] Eretz-Israel is bad for [Arab] Palestine, and what is good for Palestine is bad for Eretz-Israel." He might have been thinking about some way of solving the JewishArab problem.) The circumstances of the murder have never been cleared up. Ben-Gurion and all his friends accused followers of Jabotinsky, who were indicted but finally acquitted after a long and stormy trial. Others believed that Arlozoroff was killed by Arab criminals intent on raping his wife, and more sinister theories abound. Whatever the truth may be, his death cleared the way for

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