ABSTRACT
Did Ben-Gurion possess the Promethean passion of modern man and the modern era? The ways of modernity are tortuous, and its roots are not to be found in the desire for Enlightenment or in a movement towards progress, but in Western man’s Promethean urge to be his own master, to rebel against the fate which prescribes his present condition, to take hold of history and mold society and not to be content with the situation he has been given. In order to realize the project of modernity, its advocates enlisted the Enlightenment – reason, progress, and science – in the service of the Promethean passion. This passion was the basis of the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and put its stamp on the régimes to which they gave birth in the twentieth. These ideologies and régimes were modern in that they tried to institutionalize the political and social reality in the image of man. In this sense, Zionism was the Promethean passion of the Jews in the modern era. The great revolutions of the modern era – the American, French, and Russian –
were the offspring of this Promethean passion. The praise which Ben-Gurion lavished on these modern revolutions was due to their Promethean character, their attempt to mold a new reality on earth and not in heaven. He saw the American Revolution as a model for the Zionist Revolution, for “no people is liberated automatically.” A country cannot be obtained without effort, willpower, and dedication: “The history of the settlement of America shows how great and difficult was the task of the first settlers who came to seek a new homeland for themselves in the New World, what troubles and agonies they had to suffer, what difficult struggles they had with wild nature and the inhabitants, how many people they had to sacrifice before they were able to make the country fit for mass-immigration and settlement.”1
