the armies of the Arab states would interfere in the war between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine which had broken out on November 30, 1947, the day after the General Assembly of the United Nations resolved to accept the plan for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Arab solidarity, the experts said, was a sham. Ben-Gurion did not believe them, and he was right. The old Arab fighter felt there would be a general Middle East war, a new round where tanks and airplanes would supersede the pistols and rifles of earlier rounds of the Zionist-Arab conflict.

By that time, the Hebrew army was already in the field and fighting. Ben-Gurion has been widely acclaimed for creating this army, and he believes this wholeheartedly. In truth, no politician had any great part in it; the army was but a continuation of the Haganah, in spirit and practical outlook an authentic creation of the new Hebrew society. And yet if Ben-Gurion has rightly become an historical figure, it is because of one decisive moment. It was he who decided to proclaim, on May 14, the creation of the State of Israel, against the advice of the foreign policy experts, including Moshe Sharett, who thought that in view of American attitudes, the official proclamation should be delayed. But one should not exaggerate the importance of the proclamation as such; the Jewish state was already in being behind the front line of the Israeli Army. Every Israeli knows that neither the United Nations nor the Zionist leadership created the State of Israel, but the army, which-in an extraordinary fight-crowned the efforts of three generations of pioneers and settlers.

As the Minister of Defense, Ben-Gurion was adequate. There were many arguments between him and the dashing young military commanders, mainly on the spirit of the new army, the tradition of the underground Haganah clashing with the British Army tradition, in which some of the commanders had been trained. Ben-Gurion supported the British school, and, consequently, most of the

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