Published: 30 October 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
“The major theme in my life is scepticism. I am sceptical of everything,” he admits later.
Segev, 73, was in Australia this month as a guest lecturer at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. It’s his second visit to Melbourne and Monash.
“I have a great time. It is so relaxing, it is so quiet. But I am trying hard to understand if Australia has any problems at all, anything to argue about and anything to discuss. I really envy you.”
Over the past four decades, first as a journalist with the newspaper Haaretz and later as a historian, Segev has continually stripped away the romantic ideals and mythology surrounding Israel’s establishment. His first two books, 1949: The First Israelis (1984) and The Seventh Million: Israel Facing the Holocaust (1993) confronted Israelis with the record of discrimination of Sephardim, the mistreatment of Holocaust survivors and the state’s earliest contradictions.
His latest book is about Israel’s mercurial founding father. Ben-Gurion: A State at All Costs (to be published in English in 2019) sheds light on his inner life: his many extramarital affairs, intimate relationships and personal turmoil. Much of the detail has never been published. The book has enjoyed almost universal praise.
“[Ben-Gurion] appears in all my books. I was always aware that he is a very central power and element in our history. [The book] is a very different picture of him; it’s a tri-dimensional picture.”
Segev discovered a writer and a poet, a sentimental friend, a needy lover and an unfaithful husband. He was obsessed with detail (diaries filled with election results from obscure polling booth results, reams of economic data) matched by a grand vision for Israeli demography (one in which the Arab population of Israel would only ever remain a tiny minority).
“What surprised me was his ability to move from a very deep depression – suicidal depression in fact – to uncontrollable happiness. Sometimes over weeks. He knew this about himself. At one point he writes in his diaries “If anyone ever reads this they will think it was written by at least two different people,” Segev says.
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Ben Gurion has been an abiding curiosity (Segev first interviewed him as a young reporter when the former prime minister was living out his twilight years on a kibbutz in the Negev desert).
Just as Segev’s earlier books remain provocative, Ben-Gurion similarly sparked a public conversation in Israel about the much loved and revered founding prime minister.
Yet Segev doubts the lasting impact of his writing. “I have no illusions about the power of books to change. Or the power of newspapers to change either,” he says, before adding with a laugh: “I wrote for a newspaper that has had absolutely no effect over the last 30 years.”
Books usually take him five years to complete. Ben-Gurion took six, during which he made several separate trips to the British National Archives, searching for a single item - a coveted map drawn by Ben Gurion and handed to the British before the partition of Israel. When he discovered the map at the end of another long day of research, Segev rejoiced alone. Archival research is a lonely endeavour.
This commitment to archival research has seen him identified as a member of Israel’s “New Historians” a loosely categorised group who mined the state’s declassified state documents during the 1970s and 1980s. The group challenged popular understandings of Israel’s early history. They have been accused of distorting the record and their scholarship derided as ideologically motivated.
“Israeli democracy is under heavy attack – more than ever before. The systematic violation of Palestinian human rights has become routine.
Segev remains unperturbed by such accusations made over many decades. Although he spent many years writing for the left-wing Haaretz, unlike his contemporary Ilan Pape, his political learnings are not clear cut. Instead the hunt for a good story has remained his primary motivation in researching and writing.
Born in 1945 to communist German parents who fled the political turmoil of pre-war Europe, he has lived to see the emergence of the State of the Israel, it’s reckoning with its Holocaust past, the decline of its collectivist spirit and kibbutzim. Now, the decay of civil liberties under Benjamin Netanyahu has Segev troubled.
“I am very pessimistic. In fact, I am very depressed about it,” he says.
“Israeli democracy is under heavy attack – more than ever before. The systematic violation of Palestinian human rights has become routine. There is second or third generations of Israelis who go to the army as a gendarme oppressor. They oppress the Palestinian population. There is no way out of it.”
IN THE 1980S, while working as a columnist for Haaretz, Segev was posted to Ethiopia to cover Israel’s rescue of the country’s Jewish community. On the flight returning to Israel with hopeful Ethiopian migrants, he encountered a young boy named Itay who remembered Segev from his assignment. Itay and his mother warmed to Segev, and with their permission, he decided to write about the family’s integration into Israeli life. They would become a regular subject of his columns over several years.
When Itay was 14, Segev and Itay journeyed back to Ethiopia to track down the grave of Itay’s father. They walked for 18-hours. It was, Segev, remembers “very dramatic, very emotional.” When they eventually found the grave, a lifelong bond was forged.
“When we came back [to Israel] we knew – we are father and son. It was the most natural thing in the world,” Segev says.
No papers were signed and no social workers involved. The two, a middle-aged Israeli historian and journalist, and an Ethiopian-born teenager, were family.
Itay finished high school, completed his national service and entered the air force. He is now an electronic engineer, married and a father of three children. Segev, is now Sabba (Hebrew for grandfather) Tommy.
“Sometimes I think it would have been nice if my parents had settled in Australia instead of Palestine. But then I think, I would never have met my Itayu.
For the historian, who is unmarried and has no birth children, it was a profound awakening. His face softens. “It changed my outlook. It made very happy; less cynical and more considerate.”
Very often he thinks of his grandchildren, including the youngest, a three-year-old boy.
“What is his future? Where in the world will he find his happiness? Wherever he does, I will be happy for him. “What I wish him most, is that his country won’t force him to become a refugee, like what happened to my parents.”
“Sometimes I think it would have been nice if my parents had settled in Australia instead of Palestine. But then I think, I would never have met my Itayu.”
He pauses, before pressing on. “I really think that those [Jews in pre-war Europe] who chose not to live in Palestine very often made the right decision. Ben-Gurion was wrong [to assume that Jewish life could only ever flourish in the Israel].”
