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A Civilian Commander in Chief: Ben-Gurion's Mamlakhtiyut, the Army and the Law

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defence minister, is generally seen as a labour leader or a Zionist national leader. Even as a long-term prime minister, he is regarded as a ‘security-minded leader’ more than a ‘civilian leader’. In 1946 he became the director of defence affairs in the Jewish community of Palestine, and served in this capacity from the founding of the state in 1948 until his resignation in 1963. In this position he moulded Israel’s security concept, led the army to victory in the 1948 War (Israel’s War of Independence), laid the foundations of the Israeli army (IDF—Israel Defence Forces) and other security agencies, and was the prime mover behind Israel’s nuclear weapons programme. His image as a ‘military-conscious leader’ is also reflected in his conduct during his fifteenyear tenure as premier and defence minister: his custom of wearing a khaki uniform; his tendency to glorify the IDF as one of the greatest achievements of the Zionist project; his favourable bias towards former army commanders and defence ministry people (‘Ben-Gurion’s boys’) whom he surrounded himself with and promoted at the expense of other equally talented young men who lacked a military background; and, finally, the allpervasive sense of national emergency that he and his close associates inculcated in the country. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion was also, and perhaps chiefly, a civilian leader, who played a major role in designing the fledgling state’s civil institutions and establishing its democratic system and rule of law. Even his attitude towards the army and security issues derived from a wellconstructed civil weltanschauung. An in-depth analysis of Ben-Gurion’s civil ideas and security worldview far exceeds the scope of this article. Instead, it will address these issues through a discussion of Ben-Gurion’s insistent demand for the enactment of a comprehensive, fully outlined criminal code (the ‘Military Justice Law’). The Arab onslaught in the first stages of the 1948 War created an urgent need to formalize military discipline and justice, first in the Hagana (the