backed down. Allon flew up from the front to persuade Ben-Gurion not to lose this historical chance-in vain. The army was called back, and the first Armistice Agreement was signed with Egypt.
By the end of the war Israel had assumed the form Ben-Gurion wanted. It had become a homogeneous Jewish state, with only a small Arab minority, after hundreds of thousands of Arabs had left the conquered territories in circumstances to which a later chapter will be devoted. The state was much larger, with less ridiculous frontiers than envisioned in the United Nations Partition Plan. It was in close alliance with the United States and in good relations with the other Western powers. The short honeymoon with Soviet Russia, whose vote for the Jewish state in the United Nations had been a world-wide surprise, was drawing to a close, but this did not particularly worry Ben-Gurion, who did not like the Russians anyhow. In all these respects, Ben-Gurion can be called the architect of the State of Israel, yet in all these respects, Ben-Gurion only followed and continued the traditional lines of Zionist policy.
He never waivered in his belief that Israel must remain a homogeneous Jewish state, that it must align itself with the West, and that peace with the Arabs is impossible. After the Sinai campaign of 1956, which was his brainchild, he backed down when faced with another American ultimatum, and again called upon the army to retreat from Sinai. When some politicians demanded that he at least retain the Gaza strip, he retorted that this would be sheer lunacy, in view of the fact that there were more than 300,000 Arab inhabitants and refugees in the Strip. An addition of so many Arabs to the population of Israel would have changed, in his opinion, the demographic situation in Israel, endangering its Jewishness.
The same views animated Ben-Gurion during the 1967 crisis. By now out of office, over eighty and considered eccentric by many, he objected to the Israeli attack, be¬