Zionist Epistemology: The Case of David Ben-Gurion’s Politics of Numbers

Abstract

This paper deals with Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his epistemic and political styles of reasoning. By analyzing his famous diary and his intense statistical activity as secretary of the Histadrut, I show that alongside his utopian-revolutionary-transformative political style, an empirical approach can be detected. This approach attributes great importance to data and information (especially numerical) in the process of policy formation. Data and information played a dual role for Ben-Gurion: on the one hand, he regarded them as an important and even crucial resource for understanding and assessing reality (and consequently as a basis for altering that reality); while on the other hand, they were used by the Zionist leader as a technology of trust: that is, as an instrument of persuasion and a tool for establishing legitimacy.

Ben-Gurion’s case is an interesting example of the way in which quantitative reasoning and the ‘discourse of facts’ played a role in Zionist culture and politics. I further claim that Ben-Gurion’s case is part of a wider cultural pattern, and following that I argue that Zionism should be regarded not just as a new kind of Jewish politics, or a new kind of Jewish social policy, but also as a new kind of Jewish epistemology.