Two Unlikely National Liberation Collaborators: Ho Chi Minh and David Ben-Gurion

How the Left Denies Israel Was Part of the Post-WWII National Liberation Movement

Alex Winston’s riveting article in the Jerusalem Post, “A Tale of two Leaders: The Paris meetings between Ben-Gurion and Ho Chi Minh” exposes the widespread post-war thirst for freedom by the post-World War II anti-colonial movement. It also brilliantly refutes the contention that Israel was a colonial enterprise.

In fact, the Jewish peoples search for repatriation to their ancient homeland was part of a worldwide search by various national liberation movements from the European colonial powers. It was a part of the global effort by countries seeking national self-determination.

This movement was fully embraced by the American Left following World War II. So, it’s ironic that today’s progressive Leftists vilify Israel as colonialism. The David Ben-Gurion-Ho Chi Minh friendship and alliance obliterates that theory.

Ho Chi Minh was considered the father of the Vietnam’s communist-led liberation movement and later became its legendary leader. Ben-Gurion was one of the primary founders of Israel and the signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. He also served as Israel’s first Prime Minister.

According to the Post’s Winston, in 1946 Ho Chi Minh and Ben-Gurion were staying at the same Paris hotel called Le Royal Monceau near the Arc de Triomphe. He describes the hotel as “once a beehive of activity for diplomats, intellectuals, artists, (and) celebrities.”

According to former Israeli Maariv correspondent Shmuel Segev, who wrote a book about Vietnam, “each day for two weeks, Ho Chi Minh would come down to his (Ben-Gurion’s) room or he would climb a flight of stairs to the Vietnamese leader’s quarters, and the two would talk.”

They both talked about freedom from the colonial powers. Ho was fighting the French. Ben-Gurion was fighting the British. Both shared their aspirations for national liberation and for freedom.

Segev wrote that Ben-Gurion said Ho suggested the Jewish leadership relocate to Vietnam to pursue their own national liberation movement.

“During one of those conversations, he proposed that I immediately establish a Jewish government-in-exile on Vietnamese territory. I thanked him and said that when the time came, I would consider his offer.” The Jewish leader eventually rejected it.  Ben-Gurion led the Jewish liberation efforts from Jaffa in what would later become Israel.

“I am certain that we shall be able to establish a Jewish government in Palestine,” Ben-Gurion reportedly said, according toWinston. The reporter added “that if he wrote to Ho Chi Minh, the latter might invite him to visit North Vietnam.” 

The extended conversations between the two post-colonial leaders pummels the current anti-historical theory that Israel and its founders were colonialists. It not only is ahistorical, it is an affront to all of the national liberation movements that emerged after World War II.

In addition, both were political soulmates of sorts. Ho was a nationalist leader but also was a communist allied with Vladimir Lenin and a member of the Comintern.

As the BBC reports about Ho’s political journey: “In 1923, he visited Moscow for training at Comintern, an organization created by Lenin to promote worldwide revolution. He travelled to southern China to organise a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles, and in 1930 founded the Indo-Chinese Communist Party (ICP). He spent the 1930s in the Soviet Union and China.”

Ben-Gurion was not a communist but sympathized with socialism. According to early historical accounts, “He became involved in Zionist politics and in October 1905 he joined the clandestine Social-Democratic Jewish Workers' Party—Poalei Zion.”

Ben Gurion later became a founding member of the Jewish Social Democratic Workers' Party and was elected to its Central Committee. In 1920, Ben-Gurion assisted in the formation of the Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine, and served as its general secretary from 1921 until 1935.

In fact, according to Ben-Gurion’s biographer Tom Segev, the Israeli deeply admired Lenin and intended to be a 'Zionist Lenin'".

Many of the earliest Kibbutzim in Israel were communist and socialist-led enterprises. They were organized by Marxists who sought a socialist paradise in building their rural farms.

Here, however, the two narratives begin to diverge.

In the 1970’s hard-core New Left activists honored Ho Chi Minh as a legendary, almost mythical figure.

I know. In 1971, I served as the international director of the National Student Association. In that capacity I traveled to Paris to attend a pro-communist international conference in which Ho was elevated to a near sainthood.

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda were luminaries at the conference. A formal dinner honored us at the North Vietnamese Embassy in Paris. Like other Communist countries, the North was dubbed the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” even though like many communist regimes, democracy was a just a nasty fiction.

But today Israel is vilified by the Left as evil. The country is tarred and feathered as an outside colonial power occupying Arab land.

Today’s progressives seek to erase from the history books Israel’s roots as an indigenous people tied to the land for more than 3,000 years. But they also wish to ignore that it was part of the many post-WWII national liberation movements in which people sought self-determination

.

We live in Dystopian times where even recent history is rewritten to serve as a political hammer for “progressive change.”

Certainly, rewriting history is easy. But living an anti-historical life is dangerous for its advocates as well as for a healthy society.