David Ben-Gurion Favored West Bank Withdrawal, Newly Unearthed Footage Shows
— Newly rediscovered footage of a 1968 interview with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, shows that he opposed West Bank settlements and instead favored returning most of the land Israel captured in the Six-Day War.
The six-hour interview with Ben-Gurion — segments of which appear in a new film called “Ben-Gurion Epilogue” — had been forgotten until filmmaker Yariv Mozer found them in the Hebrew University’s Jewish film archive, according to the Times of Israel.
At the time of the interview Ben-Gurion, a member of the Labor party, had left politics and was living on Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev.
Ben-Gurion said in the interview that Israel should immediately relinquish most of the territories it had taken a year earlier in the Six-Day War.
“If I could choose between peace and all the territories which we conquered last year, I would prefer peace,” he said, adding however that Israel should retain Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Ben-Gurion also criticized efforts to build settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, saying Jews should instead settle unpopulated areas of the Negev.
Ben-Gurion, who was prime minister from Israel’s founding in 1948 until 1953 and again from 1955 to 1963, died in 1973 at 87.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
