Bidspirit auction | David Ben-Gurion - The Eternity

David Ben-Gurion - The Eternity of Israel - Copy Inscribed and Signed by Ben-Gurion and His Wife to a Bar Mitzvah Boy - Netzach Israel, by David Ben-Gurion - the generations-long vision of the Jewish people in the eyes of the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Aynot Publishing House, 1964. Copy inscribed and signed by Ben-Gurion, who presented the book as a gift to a Bar Mitzvah boy in his own name and that of his wife Paula: ”To Michael Levy on the occasion of your Bar Mitzvah, with blessings from Paula and David Ben-Gurion.” ”The Jewish State in our time is perhaps the only state in the world of which it can be said: In the beginning was the vision... The destruction of European Jewry, the rise of American Jewry, and the rebirth of the Jewish State - these are the great transformations that in our generation have changed the face of the Jewish people, its destiny, its status, and its future...” (from the book).  Ben-Gurion's ״Netzach Israel״ is far more than a collection of occasional essays; it is the deepest philosophical and historiosophical manifesto he ever wrote. Here, Ben-Gurion attempted to unravel the secret of Jewish survival and to translate it into sovereign political power. Ben-Gurion opens the work with a question that has troubled historians for generations: how did a small and scattered people manage to survive suffering, persecution, and thousands of years of exile without territory or an army? The answer he offers does not rest upon a mystical miracle, but upon what he calls the ”moral and spiritual superiority” of the people - a resilient inner strength that refused to submit to the physical laws of history. In his view, there is a direct connection between the moral vision of the biblical prophets and the spirit of modern pioneering; the pioneers who drained swamps and defended the borders were nothing less than the practical heirs of the ancient prophetic ethos. The true aim of Zionism, in his eyes, was not merely the establishment of a secure physical refuge from antisemitism, but a total revolution of consciousness - restoring the Jewish people to the stage of world history as a sovereign subject shaping its own destiny with its own hands, precisely as it had done in biblical times. From this rejection of exile, he develops in the book a firm and uncompromising Zionist position toward Diaspora Jewry. He makes clear that complete, creative, and truly free Jewish life can exist only within the borders of the sovereign state, and that the historical mission of the Diaspora is to devote itself to the process of the complete ingathering of the exiles. In this book, Ben-Gurion seeks to present a vision for the years to come. In the important chapter, ”The Enterprise of Our Generation and Its Mission, ” he writes that the young State of Israel must become a social, scientific, and moral model for the entire world - a society founded upon absolute justice, equality, and technological progress that will prove the righteousness of the Jewish path. To bring this cosmic vision down to the level of practical reality, Ben-Gurion grounds his conception in the geographical test of action - the conquest of the wilderness and the development of the Negev. In the book, the Negev is not merely an arid region, but rather the supreme human laboratory in which the younger generation is put to the test. There, in the face of the expanses of the desert, the pioneering spirit is expected to demonstrate its ability to transform a strategic disadvantage into a geographical and economic advantage, and to infuse the concept of Netzach Israel with concrete, physical, and spiritual meaning. In this chapter, Ben-Gurion also devotes several passages to the Declaration of Independence and its treatment of the Arab minority. Ben-Gurion completed the book at Sde Boker, although parts of it had already been written during the 1950s and were published in the Government Yearbook in 1954. 522 pages. A complete copy with the original dust jacket; wear and minor tears to the dust jacket. Good condition.