CHAPTER 6
There was nothing extraordinary about the youngster who arrived in Jaffa one day in 1905. He was short of stature, not very handsome, yet there was a determined air about him. His name was David Green. He soon gave himself another name: Ben-Gurion.
Attlee said of himself, in comparison with Churchill, "There are men born to greatness. I am not one of them." Neither was David Green from Plonsk. But he was born to politics, and he became much more than an ordinary politician. He had the ability to completely identify himself with whatever seemed important to most people at any given time, managing to be a little bit-but not too much-ahead of them. The story of Ben-Gurion, therefore, is a mirror of Zionism. As such, it is worth contemplating, not because Ben-Gurion shaped his time, as his idolators believe, but because his time shaped him.
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Plonsk, his birthplace, is a little town not far from Warsaw. The name sounds so comical in Hebrew it has become the butt of innumerable jokes and limericks in Israel (some of which, I am immodest enough to admit, were written by me).
For a Jewish boy born in Plonsk in 1886, under czarist rule, there was a limited range of possibilities. If he was ambitious, rebellious, idealistic, he could become a Bolshevik, a Bundist or a Zionist.
The Bolsheviks believed that the great communist rev7*