{"id":5644,"date":"2015-01-21T06:19:51","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T11:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martinkramer.org\/sandbox\/?p=5644"},"modified":"2015-01-21T06:19:51","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T11:19:51","slug":"shabtai-teveth-and-the-whole-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2015\/01\/shabtai-teveth-and-the-whole-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Shabtai Teveth and the whole truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0on the <\/em>Commentary blog on January 20.<\/em><\/p>\n

Longtime readers of COMMENTARY might remember Shabtai Teveth, prolific author and the authorized biographer of David Ben-Gurion. Teveth passed away on November 2 at the age of eighty-nine. He had gone silent twelve years earlier, following a debilitating stroke. It was on the pages of COMMENTARY, in 1989, that he launched one of the most thorough broadsides<\/a> on Israel\u2019s \u201cnew historians.\u201d It repays reading now (as does Hillel Halkin\u2019s COMMENTARY review<\/a> of Teveth\u2019s Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust<\/em>). It\u2019s also a reminder of how desperately Israel still needs truth-tellers like Teveth, who knew the flaws of Israel\u2019s founders perfectly well, but never let that\u00a0overshadow the nobility of their cause.<\/p>\n

By the time I met Teveth, in the early 1980s, he was already renowned for his journalistic achievements at Haaretz<\/em>, but also for his best-selling books, most famously his up-close account of the heroic armored battles of the June 1967 Six-Day War. (It appeared in English under the title The Tanks of Tammuz<\/em>.) Approaching sixty years of age, he had set aside journalism in order to devote himself to a monumental biography of David Ben-Gurion, a project he had commenced some years earlier, when the Old Man was still alive and willing to talk.<\/p>\n

I was new in Israel, and the native-born Teveth became a friend and my guide to the intricacies of the country\u2019s history, politics, and journalism. In return, I helped him to prepare an English edition of a spin-off of his biographical project: a book eventually entitled Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs<\/em>, published by Oxford in 1985. In that work, Teveth argued that Ben-Gurion perfectly understood Arab opposition to Zionism, but also recognized the danger of acknowledging its depth. So B-G conducted a carefully calibrated policy that held out the hope of a peaceful settlement, even while preparing for confrontation. The book covered the 1920s and 1930s, but Ben-Gurion would implement the same approach right up to 1948.<\/p>\n

Work on the book became a kind of tutorial course on the history of Israel, taught to me by Teveth. In turn, I taught him some of the odder subtleties of English. For years afterwards, he would call me at some ungodly hour of the morning, to ask how he might best render this or that Hebrew phrase into polished English without sacrificing even an iota of its original meaning.<\/p>\n

Teveth wrote like a journalist up against a deadline. He would rise very early, go for a swim, head for his office (he didn\u2019t work at home, but kept a separate apartment filled to the brim with his research materials), and then would bang out a few thousand words on his typewriter before lunch. I don\u2019t think he ever had a day of writer\u2019s block. Over the years, we developed a regular routine. Perhaps once a month, we would meet for lunch in a restaurant somewhere in north Tel Aviv where he kept his office. By lunchtime, Sabi (as his family and friends called him) had finished a full day\u2019s work, and he was primed for competitive conversation, usually smoothed by a glass of Scotch, for which he had a refined taste. I couldn\u2019t return all of his volleys, and the only real match he had in conversation was the late Zvi Yavetz<\/a>, the historian of ancient Rome and a master raconteur in his own right. When Sabi and Zvi got rolling, showering the table with sparks of erudition and wit, the spectacle inspired awe and envy.<\/p>\n

I once asked Sabi why<\/strong> he had set journalism aside, since his Haaretz<\/em> columns had landed on the breakfast tables of the most influential people in Israel. His many books, prior to the Ben-Gurion project, had been contemporary reportage of the highest order, attracting large numbers of readers. (These included a biography of Moshe Dayan, a book on the first years of Israel\u2019s post-1967 policies in the West Bank, and an exploration of poverty in Israel.) Sabi answered that he didn\u2019t want to spend an entire lifetime breathing heavily over the doings of politicians.<\/p>\n

The older I grow, the more I appreciate that decision to move from punditry to history. Teveth came to recognize the ephemeral nature of most journalism. He believed he was fortunate to have witnessed the last chapter in the founding of Israel (as a young soldier in the Palmah and then as an army journalist), and that this was a story that would be told again and again by future generations, each time from a point still more remote from the events. If he wrote that history now, meticulously and honestly, that telling would last beyond him.<\/p>\n

The Ben-Gurion project, which ultimately reached four volumes (3,000 pages) in Hebrew, belongs to the genre of the big-canvas biography, of the sort exemplified by Robert Caro\u2019s study of Lyndon Johnson or Martin Gilbert\u2019s official biography of Winston Churchill. Indeed, it was Teveth\u2019s finest hour in 1987 when the 967-page English version of the B-G biography (pre-1948) received a glowing review<\/a> from Gilbert on the front page of the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, accompanied by a photograph as well as a short profile of Teveth (written by Tom Friedman). This was before the internet, and I remember rushing over to Sabi\u2019s home to see the review section, urgently dispatched by his New York publisher.<\/p>\n

The Friedman profile includes an odd quote. \u201cIsrael has been going through a difficult period during these last thirteen years,\u201d Teveth told Friedman. \u201cBut all this time I feel as though I have been working in a bunker full of light and hope. In my bunker the Jewish state is yet to be born. The Jewish people have a strong leader and the world is huge.\u201d I personally never heard Sabi talk of his historical work as a nostalgic retreat from contemporary Israel. He regretted the diminished quality of Israel\u2019s leaders, but this only fortified his determination to remind Israelis of a moment in living memory when they had a leader equal to world history at its most demanding.<\/p>\n

There had been a leader who might have risen to that stature: Moshe Dayan, Ben-Gurion\u2019s favorite, who seemed poised to succeed the Old Man as the very personification of Israeli grit. Teveth had written a biography of him\u2014admiring but not reverential\u2014that appeared in 1971, while Dayan still basked in the glow of the Six-Day War. Dayan\u2019s prospects were dashed by the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when suddenly he became the clay-footed personification of Israeli hubris. Teveth nevertheless remained loyal to Dayan, and it was he who mediated between Dayan\u2019s longtime admirers and Tel Aviv University, to bring forth the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.<\/p>\n

The monumental biography of Ben-Gurion secured for Teveth the National Jewish Book Award in 1987 and the Israel Prize, Israel\u2019s highest civilian honor, in 2005. But the project remained unfinished, in part because every few years he would suspend it to write a spin-off. He wrote a book on the 1933 murder of Chaim Arlosorov. (Its conclusions so enraged the then-prime minister Menachem Begin that he appointed an official commission of inquiry to refute it.) He wrote another book on Ben-Gurion\u2019s response to the Holocaust, and still another on the 1954 Lavon Affair (both also appeared in English). And there was that book on Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs. These digressions, while important works in their own right, took time from the biography, and when Teveth suffered his stroke, he hadn\u2019t yet gotten to the year for which Ben-Gurion\u2019s life had been a preparation: 1948.<\/p>\n

We are fortunate, then,<\/strong> that one of those digressions took the form of a direct confrontation with the so-called \u201cnew historians.\u201d Avi Shlaim, one of Teveth\u2019s targets, later called him<\/a> \u201cthe most strident and vitriolic\u201d critic of the self-declared iconoclasts who set about smashing the conventional Israeli narrative with reckless abandon. In the spring of 1989, Teveth fired off a barrage of full-page critiques in three consecutive weekend editions of Haaretz<\/em>. (These pieces formed the nucleus of his later COMMENTARY article.) Teveth pummeled the \u201cnew historians\u201d (Shlaim and Benny Morris), whose indictments of Israel\u2019s conduct in 1948 he described as a \u201cfarrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications.\u201d I recall waking up early each Friday morning and rushing down to my doorstep to grab the newspaper and flip to that week\u2019s installment.<\/p>\n

A year later, he published a 35-page review<\/a> of Benny Morris\u2019s Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem<\/em>, pursuing error and bias into the most remote footnotes. This was Teveth at his forensic best: he had read the same documents in the same archives, and he showed that they did not always say what Morris claimed they said. \u201cMorris\u2019s work was received with great expectations,\u201d Teveth concluded. \u201cOn examination, however, these have been disappointed. This problem [of how the Palestinian Arabs became refugees], therefore, will have to wait still further for a more comprehensive and honest study, that would be worthy of the great human and national tragedy it represents.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cnew historians\u201d retaliated by trying to label Teveth as \u201cold.\u201d True, he was a generation older than them, but the \u201cold\u201d-naming could reach absurd proportions. For example, Shlaim once described<\/a> him, repeatedly, as a \u201cmember of the Mapai old guard.\u201d Nonsense: Teveth was famously associated with Mapai\u2019s young<\/em> guard, and indeed built<\/a> his journalistic reputation as a muckraker by attacking Mapai\u2019s veteran party stalwarts.<\/p>\n

Teveth concluded his COMMENTARY article by dismissing the \u201cnew historians,\u201d since \u201chistory, thank goodness, is made of sterner and more intractable stuff than even their wholesale efforts of free interpretation can dissimulate.\u201d This proved to be overly optimistic. Demolishing Israel\u2019s \u201cmyths\u201d and creating new ones turned into a popular pastime for younger academics and activists. Benny Morris\u2019s book on the Palestinian refugee problem has become the most-read and most-cited book on the 1948 war. One hardly need wonder what Teveth would say about the latest iteration<\/a> of \u201cfree interpretation\u201d (pioneered by Morris in the revised edition of his book), accusing Israel of various massacres that somehow escaped notice until just now. Nothing good, I imagine.<\/p>\n

I wish I could announce<\/strong> that Teveth\u2019s legacy will be ever-enduring, but a younger generation of readers will have to discover him first, and that hasn\u2019t happened yet. He wrote mostly in the era before the internet, so his most important writings aren\u2019t accessible at a click. He disappeared from the scene years before he died, so the obituaries were few and perfunctory. And he wrote big books that almost no one has read cover-to-cover. Teveth not only told truths about Israel, he told whole<\/em> truths, and that required a minute retrieval and examination of all<\/em> the evidence. There were reviewers who complained<\/a> that Teveth left his readers \u201cdrowning in a sea of detail,\u201d and that \u201cintimate descriptions of daily doings\u201d caused them to lose the \u201coverall thread.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teveth was familiar with the criticism, and he rejected it. At one point, he had recited the list of groceries Ben-Gurion purchased while in London in November 1938. \u201cTrivial,\u201d he acknowledged, \u201cyet how well this information helps the biographer in describing the loneliness of Ben-Gurion, who ate in his hotel room and there listened to the radio speeches by Hitler and Chamberlain, speeches that decided the fate of the world and the fate of both Europe\u2019s Jews and Zionism.\u201d Such level of detail assures that while the general reader may not persevere, every future biographer of Ben-Gurion will keep those four volumes on his or her desk. Perhaps that was Teveth\u2019s aim all along.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve missed Sabi very much these last twelve years, and suspect I\u2019ll miss him still more with the passage of time. This is not only because he was my friend, but because I see no one who combines his mix of passion, energy, and encyclopedic knowledge in the pursuit of every recoverable fragment of evidence needed to establish the truth. My condolences to Ora, his wife, who sustained him through all the years of his disability and saw the last volume of the Ben-Gurion biography through to publication, and to their children and grandchildren, in whom Sabi took so much pride.<\/p>\n

\"Shabtai

Shabtai Teveth (right) with David Ben-Gurion<\/p><\/div>\n

Go\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0to discuss this post via Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The late Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion’s biographer, was one of Israel’s great truth-tellers. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[101340,101149,2239,101355],"class_list":["post-5644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-benny-morris","tag-david-ben-gurion","tag-israel","tag-shabtai-teveth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}