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“THREE GREAT TASKS WITH WHICH WE ARE FACED,
SECURITY, ALIYAH AND SETTLEMENT”
264
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(ISRAEL.) BEN-GURION, DAVID. Typed Letter Signed, “D. Ben-Gurion,” as
acting Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, to the Farmers’ Federation of Israel
Convention, in Hebrew, declining invitation to attend the Convention inauguration
because the annual budget is to be considered by the First Knesset at the same time, prais-
ing the revolutionary spirit of the Convention’s pioneering founders, suggesting that Israel
owes its success partly to the Hebrew Labor movement, recalling his days as an agricultural
laborer, and encouraging the Convention to adopt as goals
aliyah
and settlement and secu-
rity. Several scattered manuscript corrections and additions in an unknown hand. 5
1
/
2
pages,
4to, written on one side of each sheet, “Prime Minister” stationery; two small holes
punched in right margin, horizontal fold, staple holes at top right.
Np, 10 May 1950
[1,000/2,000]
“
. . . All the heroic efforts of our defenders and fighters would have been insufficient, and all the
political and diplomatic assistance of our friends and supporters in the UN would have been as
naught, if not for land and labor—the two underpinnings of our national revival, and the two
main decisive factors behind the founding of the Hebrew State.
“
. . . The founding of the State did not bring us to our ultimate historical destination; we
stand, rather, at the start of the path. . . . [E]ach one of us will henceforth be judged on . . .
what contribution he makes to the three great tasks with which we are faced, security, aliyah
and settlement, since it is on these that the survival of the State of Israel and the future of the
Hebrew nation depend.
“
. . . [The] Farmers’ Federation . . . must issue a binding demand that the youth of the
moshavot rise to the challenge of settling the Negev and training the immigrant multitudes for
agricultural settlement. . . . [T]he farming youth will join forces with the entire pioneering camp
in the effort to absorb immigrants and make the wilderness bloom—efforts on which our secu-
rity depends as well. . . .”