PanThe Wall Street JournalA host of biographies over the years—largely complimentary though by no means uncritical—have recorded the details of Ben-Gurion’s busy life without diminishing his almost mythological status. Still, a group of “revisionist” Israeli academics and journalists seem determined to tarnish his reputation as part of their decades-long project to reinterpret Israel’s founding period. Tom Segev’s A State at Any Cost is the latest such effort ... Mr. Segev lays out some of this detail in a straightforward fashion, but at the core of his chronicle is a desire to cast Israel’s founding father as the destroyer of Palestinian Arab society— that is, as a leader deeply implicated in what Mr. Segev and his fellow revisionists see as the \'original sin\' of Israel’s creation: the supposedly deliberate and aggressive dispossession of the native Arab population ... The lens through which Mr. Segev views his subject is generally polemical ... There are many more such lost subtleties and distinctions in A State at Any Cost. But Mr. Segev, like his fellow revisionists, is not bothered with mere facts in his endeavor to rewrite Ben-Gurion and, by extension, Israel’s history in an image of their own making.
