Levi Eshkol

Levi Eshkol was prime minister of Israel during the Six-Day War, and is the one leader of that generation whose reputation suffered for having hesitated. He was born Levi Shkolnik in a village near Kyiv, came to Ottoman Palestine in 1914 as a labourer, helped found the kibbutz Degania Bet, and spent thirty years in the practical machinery of the Zionist project rather than its rhetoric - water, settlement, immigration, the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency's settlement department. As finance minister through the 1950s he presided over the absorption of the mass immigration and built the National Water Carrier. He succeeded Ben-Gurion in 1963 and inherited his enmity: Ben-Gurion spent the following years trying to bring him down over the Lavon affair and split the party attempting it. Eshkol established diplomatic relations with West Germany, ended the military administration over Israel's Arab citizens, and secured the first American offer of major weapons systems. In May 1967, with Egyptian divisions in the Sinai and the Straits of Tiran closed, he waited three weeks for a diplomatic solution while the reserves sat mobilised and the country panicked, and he stammered through a live radio address that destroyed public confidence in him. He was forced to give the defence ministry to Dayan and take in a national unity government. The war was won in six days and the credit went to Dayan and Rabin. The hesitation looks better in hindsight than it did at the time, since it bought the diplomatic cover that made the war internationally survivable. He died of a heart attack in office in February 1969 and was succeeded by Golda Meir.

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