Word: eshkol
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Jerusalem Earth. If any reminder of Israel's siege mentality were needed, it was provided in the tight security surrounding Eshkol's state funeral. The Premier had wanted to be buried at Degania B, a kibbutz he helped to found near the Jordanian border. The Cabinet decided for security reasons to bury him instead on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, named for the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who is buried there. For the funeral, reservists were called up and extra police posted in Arab sections of the city. After a service in the Knesset plaza, the procession...
JUST as David Ben-Gurion has been compared to a modern Moses who led his people to the Promised Land, so Levi Eshkol made a credible Joshua as Ben-Gurion's successor in the premiership of Israel. Chosen in 1963 for what many believed to be a transitional tenure, Eshkol presided over the defeat of Israel's enemies and its coming of age as an industrial state. When he died last week at 73, he left behind a government more unified than at any time in Israel's 21-year history, and one that rules over...
...larger sense, Eshkol was indeed a transitional leader, overseeing the changing of the guard from the dogmatic Zionist pioneers to the pragmatic new heirs of an established state. Always the patient man of compromise, he provided an elastic framework of government wherein Israelis' divergent political passions could coexist. "Put three Zionists in a room," Eshkol used to say, "and they will form four political parties." Israel has no fewer than 13 parties, and it is a measure of Eshkol's talent as a moderator that eight of them, representing 93% of the electorate, were in his coalition government...
Prosperity and Pogroms. Eshkol himself was probably the last long-term leader from the old guard, meaning, in Israeli terms, the early European immigrants who have long provided the nation's elite, often to the frustration of the impatient native-born sabras. His early years in the Ukraine were spent amid both prosperity and a continual fear of pogroms. At 19, he landed at Jaffa in the aliya, or immigrant wave, of 1914, and hiked across the sandhills to a farming village. As the need arose, he became in turn a farmer, soldier, irrigation expert and labor organizer...
...chief lieutenant to Ben-Gurion, Eshkol served the government first as Director-General of the Defense Department, then as the Agriculture Minister, meanwhile heading the agency charged with settling the successive waves of immigrants on the land. But it was as Finance Minister from 1952 to 1963 that he most indelibly left his own imprint on Israel. Reining in the country's perennial inflation, he welcomed private investment and restructured the economy toward the technology-based industries that are flourishing today...