DAVID TWERSKY
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runs reddest and thickest , says something to the effect that while he
agrees to hang Jewish fascists in Israel, one should first fight to bring
them there alive. (In 1967, after the war, Tabenkin helped found the
Movement for Greater Israel, in the days before annexation of the
West Bank by the right wing. Years later, Sneh's son Ephraim be–
comes Israel's military "governor" of the West Bank.) On Trotsky,
not surprisingly, the leadership goes with Sneh .
Within six weeks, Mapam organizes the first demonstrations
against Trotsky's presence in the country in Tel Aviv's Mugrabi
Square. Idelson reassures him: Ben-Gurion has no intention of
backing down . Trotsky is bemused that they should think he needs
reassurances, he who. . . .
Ben-Gurion receives him shortly thereafter. Ben-Gurion is
busy, as usual , with the infinite tasks of creating the new society.
What a flash of recognition must have passed between them: Ben–
Gurion filled with the details of newly-born Israel , Trotsky filled
with memories of the infant Soviet state he had done so much to
bring to life. Ben-Gurion wonders about his own future, his own
Jewish skull, the endless and increasingly bitter infighting, the
repeated self-imposed exile into the wilderness at Sde Boker, the
split from the party , and history, finally , passing him by. About
history passing history-makers by, Trotsky might have told him a
thing or two .
With so much in common , small wonder the two do not get
along. "Keep him away from me ," Ben-Gurion tells his aides (who
grow up to be mayors and presidents and prime ministers) after the
meeting. As for Trotsky, he thinks Ben-Gurion is selling out the
workers' movement, and does not neglect saying so in public, to a
chorus of "ingrate" to his right and a deafening and embarrassed
silence on his left. But he has nowhere else to go, geographically or
politically .
After the Slansky trials and the split in
Mapam,
Trotsky and
Hazan meet several times openly, and there is a kind of rapproche–
ment. In his Tel Aviv flat awash with the clear blue light of the Mid–
dle Eastern summer, Leon Trotsky, ne Bronstein, is, after a fashion,
home at last.
There ends the fantasy. Trotsky did die in Coyoacan in August
1940, and we cannot know what might have happened had he lived.
But I would like to end on a different note .
Trotsky , who doubted the possibility that the Zionist solution
would work, failed to see the collapse of the British Empire . He did
