David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Renaissance
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The ultimate aim of the Zionist renaissance – the national rising of the Jewish people in its homeland – will ascend from the process of building the future Land of Israel. The Land of Israel will be a Jewish land insofar as the will and ability of the Jewish people will make it so. A Jewish state, a labor society, and Jewish–Arab cooperation are the three goals that conflate in the actions and aspirations of the Jewish worker in his land.
The “renaissance generation,” as the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik termed it, produced a colorful pantheon of personalities – including authors, poets, teachers, pioneers, and activists who were products of reading and who produced books as trees produce leaves. The Second Aliyah (wave of immigration of Zionists), which after many incarnations and augmentations would beget the State of Israel and was a manifestation, as it were, of Bialik's poetry, used the term renaissance a great deal and saw itself as a practical revival movement. Secular Zionism at large grew accustomed to using the term Jewish renaissance to describe its endeavors.
One who speaks of Ben-Gurion has to note that his long life included different periods with different emphases and priorities. I cannot discuss all of them in this monograph. I will try to examine some of the issues that occupied him and mention several sobriquets that he adopted or that others proposed in order to define his motives and deeds.
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