The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/David Ben-Gurion.md

aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations
David Ben-Gurion Ben-Gurion Ben Gurion David Ben Gurion Prime Minister Ben-Gurion Prime Minister Ben Gurion the Old Man	2025-01-09	2026-10-05	Political Figure	Person KeyFigure Israel Nuclear Dimona Mapai Rafi Mossad Kennedy SamsonOption	Israel's first prime minister and defense minister, who started the Dimona project, described it to Washington as peaceful, and resigned on June 16, 1963, the day an American inspection ultimatum was to reach him.	1886-10-16	1973-12-01	Płońsk, Poland (then Russian Empire)	type with start end role fn head_of Israel 1948 1963-06-16 prime minister and defense minister, with an interval from December 1953 to February 1955 1 type with start role fn founded Mossad 1949 directed the creation of the central coordinating institute under Reuven Shiloah 17 type with start role fn appointed Shimon Peres 1953 director general of the Ministry of Defense 1 type with start role fn appointed Moshe Sharett 1953 prime minister during his retirement at Sdeh Boker 4 type with start role fn appointed Moshe Dayan 1953 army chief of staff 4 type with start role fn appointed Pinhas Lavon 1953 defense minister 4 type with start end role fn head_of Mapai Party 1953 1965-06 retained control of the party from Sdeh Boker; resigned from it in June 1965 4 type with start end role fn founded Rafi 1965 1968 led the list in the 1965 elections 13 type with start end role fn participant_in Dimona 1955 1963-06-16 approved the French agreement and the cover story; correspondent of John F. Kennedy on inspections 6

David Ben-Gurion (born October 16, 1886 in Płońsk; died December 1, 1973) led the Israeli government as prime minister and minister of defense from 1948 to June 1963 with one interval of retirement, and was the principal sponsor of the nuclear complex at Dimona. The American record of that project consists of his public assurances of peaceful purposes, the discovery of the site in 1960, and a 1963 exchange of letters with President John F. Kennedy that ended with his resignation.¹²³

Retirement and return, 1953 to 1955

Seymour Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion, "white-maned" and known as the Old Man, repeatedly told visitors in the early 1950s that Israel would build its own reactor from native uranium and locally made heavy water and that nuclear energy would make the Negev bloom; that he oversaw the effort through Shimon Peres, whom he made director general of the defense ministry in late 1953 at age thirty, and Ernst David Bergmann; and that the three accepted from the beginning that the project would have to be privately financed by wealthy American and European Jews.¹ Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion had unsuccessfully sought for years to be included under an American nuclear umbrella, that he secretly offered Israeli troops to the United Nations forces in the Korean War, which President Harry S. Truman declined apparently from fear of a security arrangement, and that most senior members of the Mapai Party regarded an Israeli bomb as suicidal, too expensive and too reminiscent of the Holocaust.¹²

In late 1953 he retired to the kibbutz at Sdeh Boker in the Negev Desert, near the future site of Dimona, while retaining what Hersh called total control of Mapai. He divided his two offices, appointing Moshe Sharett prime minister and Pinhas Lavon defense minister, and arranged for Moshe Dayan to become chief of staff; Peres stayed at the defense ministry.⁴ Hersh wrote that when the Egyptian arrest of an Israeli sabotage ring in mid-1954 produced the Lavon Affair, Sharett accepted Lavon's resignation in January 1955 and Ben-Gurion was recalled from retirement as defense minister; that six days after his return, on February 28, 1955, he authorized a retaliation against an Egyptian camp at Gaza Strip led by Lieutenant Colonel Ariel Sharon, which killed thirty-six Egyptians and Palestinians and ended the secret contacts between Sharett and Gamal Abdel Nasser; and that Lavon, whom a cabinet committee exonerated, accused Ben-Gurion, Peres and Dayan of undermining civilian control of the military.⁴⁵ In Hersh's account, Ben-Gurion refused Lavon's request for exoneration, resigned once again and demanded a judicial inquiry; Sharett's diaries, which Hersh cites, convinced him that Dayan was involved in the original operations.⁴⁵

France and the reactor, 1955 to 1960

Avner Cohen and William Burr wrote that in 1955, soon after Ben-Gurion returned as prime minister and defense minister, he launched a secret feasibility initiative and delegated it to Peres, and that by 1958 France was to be the supplier, Norway the source of heavy water, and the United States the source of a small "Atoms for Peace" reactor "that could serve as the camouflage for the whole project."⁶ Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion had picked a site for the first Israeli reactor in the basement of an abandoned winery at Rishon LeZion near the Weizmann Institute of Science, and that in mid-September 1956, six weeks before the Suez Crisis war, he sent Peres with Bergmann to Paris to ask the government of Guy Mollet for a reactor.⁷ Cohen and Burr wrote that Peres signed the Dimona agreement in Paris in October 1957.⁶

In May 1960, Hersh wrote, French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville told the Israeli ambassador that France wanted a public announcement of the reactor and inspection like that at Nahal Soreq, or it would withhold uranium; Ben-Gurion flew to Paris to meet President Charles de Gaulle. From the notes of Bertrand Goldschmidt, Hersh reported that de Gaulle feared the international scandal of being the only country helping Israel, wanted French help on the underground reprocessing plant to stop, and offered more fighter aircraft; de Gaulle's memoirs say that he ordered the work near Beersheba halted, and Hersh wrote that the order was ignored, Saint-Gobain's work was delayed more than two years until a new French contractor finished it in 1962, and that Peres arranged a compromise in which Israel assured the French that it would not make a bomb or reprocess plutonium and would announce the reactor. Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion "did nothing to change the status quo at Dimona" and that French firms stayed until 1966.⁸

The cover story, December 1960 to January 1961

The documents published by Cohen and Burr show Ben-Gurion's public line after the American discovery. In the Knesset on December 21, 1960 he said that Dimona was "exclusively for peaceful purposes."⁹ On December 24, 1960 Ambassador Ogden Reid reported a long conversation in which Ben-Gurion, "plainly irritated," asked "Why in [the] States is everything being told everybody?", justified the secrecy by the Arab boycott, said the reactor would not produce power but was for research and training, and said that on plutonium safeguards Israel was "three or four years" away from the problem and "we won't be behind any power in the world in respect to safeguards."⁹ An embassy telegram of December 23 recorded an unidentified official "close to" Ben-Gurion telling the Canadian ambassador that the secrecy was "a stupid mistake on the part of Israel."⁹ In early January 1961, according to a State Department chronology, Ben-Gurion told Reid that Israel "has no plans for producing nuclear weapons," would not accept International Atomic Energy Agency inspection "until all reactors are treated as equals," would permit visits by "friendly powers," and had no plan for a third reactor; the department's telegram of December 31, 1960 had called his earlier explanations "evasive" and the "lack of candor" hard to reconcile with traditional confidence.⁹¹⁰

Hersh wrote that the Knesset "was only too eager to accept any government statement denying the intent to produce nuclear weapons," and that Bergmann's categorical public denial was accepted although his involvement was widely known.¹¹ In the May 30, 1961 meeting in New York, Cohen and Burr wrote, Ben-Gurion gave Kennedy the same account: the project was for the development of the Negev, and he assured Kennedy that the program was for peaceful purposes.⁹¹²

The letters of 1963

The National Security Archive's 2019 posting records the confrontation. In April 1963 Kennedy asked through Ambassador Walworth Barbour for semiannual American visits to Dimona; Ben-Gurion on April 2 asked to postpone the discussion until after Passover.¹² On April 17, 1963 Egypt, Syria and Iraq signed the Arab Federation Proclamation, and on April 26 Ben-Gurion wrote to Kennedy proposing a joint United States and Soviet guarantee for the Middle East while ignoring the inspection request; on May 12 he sent a nine-page personal letter that compared Nasser to Adolf Hitler ("knowing them I am convinced that they are capable of following the Nazi example") and asked for a bilateral security agreement and arms equal to those the Arabs received; the diplomat Gideon Rafael advised against sending it because it "looks sick," and Cohen and Burr suggested that the letter was Ben-Gurion's indirect statement of why Israel needed Dimona.¹² A Central Intelligence Agency digest of May 7 reported his statement that "neither a guarantee nor any alliance is sufficient for Israel's protection without adequate independent strength"; on May 14, according to a summary, he asked Barbour whether semiannual visits would be made to Egyptian sites and observed that it was to Israel's advantage if the Arab governments were "worried rather than reassured on Israeli nuclear program."¹² Kennedy's letter of May 17 warned that American "commitment to and support of Israel" would be "seriously jeopardized" if the government could not obtain "reliable information" on the character of Israel's nuclear effort, and his letter of June 15, setting out conditions for visits, was to be delivered by Barbour on June 16, the day Ben-Gurion announced his resignation; it was held and sent instead to Levi Eshkol, who took more than six weeks to reply.¹² At the White House on April 2, 1963 Peres told Kennedy "we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first," a formula Cohen and Burr said was consistent with what Ben-Gurion had already told Israeli newspaper editors.¹²

Rafi and Sdeh Boker

Hersh wrote that Eshkol's deferral of the nuclear decision in return for American offensive arms "enraged" Ben-Gurion, who compared him to Neville Chamberlain, and that in June 1965 he resigned from Mapai and formed Rafi (the Judaica entry dates the new list to July 1965) with a "reluctant but loyal" Peres and Dayan, hoping for as many as twenty-five Knesset seats.¹³ Rafi won ten seats in November 1965; Rafi joined Mapai Party and Ahdut HaAvoda in the merger that created the Labor Party on January 21, 1968, and the State List, led by Ben-Gurion and composed largely of Rafi supporters, won four seats in 1969.¹⁴¹⁵ Hersh noted that Myer Feldman, waiting with Teddy Kollek while Ben-Gurion wrote in his notebook in his last years, asked what he was doing and was told by Kollek, "Oh, he's falsifying history."¹⁶

Intelligence services

The official site of the Mossad carries an image of Ben-Gurion's directive on the creation of the institute and lists Reuven Shiloah as its head from 1949 to 1952 and Isser Harel from 1952 to 1963; the National Security Archive records that in the spring of 1963 Harel, with the support of Foreign Minister Golda Meir, led a campaign of leaks to the Israeli press about German scientists working on missiles and radiological weapons in Egypt.¹⁷

Footnotes

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1. Hersh, Seymour M., The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, chapter 2, "The Scientist," pp. 19-21. Full text read at https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option ↩︎

2. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 2, pp. 21-22 and 27 (Korea, Mapai opposition). ↩︎

3. Burr, William, and Avner Cohen, eds., "The Battle of the Letters, 1963," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 671, May 2, 2019. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-05-02/battle-letters-1963-john-f-kennedy-david-ben-gurion-levi-eshkol-us-inspections-dimona ↩︎

4. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 3, "The French Connection," pp. 33-35. ↩︎

5. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 9, "Years of Pressure," pp. 121-122 (the Lavon Affair and the cabinet committee). ↩︎

6. Cohen, Avner, and William Burr, "The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 510, April 15, 2015. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb510/ ↩︎

7. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 3, pp. 35-40. ↩︎

8. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 5, "Internal Wars," pp. 68-70 (the June 1960 meeting with de Gaulle). ↩︎

9. Cohen and Burr, EBB No. 510: the introduction (Knesset statement of December 21, 1960) and documents 15 (Embassy Tel Aviv telegram 574, December 23, 1960) and 16 (Embassy Israel telegram 577, December 24, 1960). ↩︎

10. Cohen and Burr, EBB No. 510, documents 21 (State Department telegram 502, December 31, 1960) and 22 (summary of Embassy Tel Aviv telegram 625, January 4, 1961, in the chronology enclosed with Benjamin Read to McGeorge Bundy, March 18, 1964, EBB No. 432, document 9). ↩︎

11. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 6, "Going Public," p. 78. ↩︎

12. Burr and Cohen, EBB No. 671, introduction and documents 15, 16, 19 through 21, 23, 25, 26 and 28. ↩︎

13. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 10, "The Samson Option," pp. 138-139. ↩︎

14. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 10, "The Samson Option," pp. 139-141; Israel Democracy Institute, "Rafi," election results for 1965 (95,328 votes, ten seats). https://en.idi.org.il/israeli-elections-and-parties/parties/rafi ↩︎

15. "Rafi," Encyclopaedia Judaica (entry by Misha Louvish), on Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rafi ↩︎

16. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 10, p. 140 (footnote on Ben-Gurion's diaries; Feldman's account). ↩︎

17. Mossad, "History," mossad.gov.il. https://mossad.gov.il/en/history ; Burr and Cohen, EBB No. 671, document 17 (the Isser Harel campaign of spring 1963). ↩︎