ebooks And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs; 1969- by Elie Wiesel in History

Description

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesIsrael’s current president gives us a dramatic and revelatory biography of Israel’s founding father and first prime minister. Shimon Peres was in his early twenties when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence; the “Old Man;” as he was called even then; was already a mythic figure. Peres; who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion; is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions—a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine; though it meant surrendering a two-thousand-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments; and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust; knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community. A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage; Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion’s life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion’s dream of a modern; democratic Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion; Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.