Final_Judgment

[620] Final Judgment 718
they engaged in a rather lame attempt to discredit the overall thesis of my
book by trying to portray the conflict as less than significant than it truly
was. The librarians wrote as follows:
Piper claims as fact that the "primary reason" for David
Ben-Gurion's resignation as Prime Minister of Israel was
his "inability to pressure JFK into accepting Israel's
demands." He cites Seymour Hersh's The Samson
Option as evidence. As Hersh makes clear, and this is
clearly evident in the quote Piper produces to prove that
the "nuclear option" was the "primary reason," this was
just "another factor."
For the uninitiated—which includes most of those who read the library
review, without having read Final Judgment (or Hersh's book)—this might
sound like quite a damning indictment.
But the truth is that while other factors played a part in Ben-Gurion's
resignation, the final showdown with JFK over the nuclear bomb was the
proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" and, clearly, the "primary
reason" behind Ben-Gurion's resignation.
As all "responsible" and "mainstream" accounts of the Israeli nuclear
bomb program affirm, the drive to build a nuclear bomb was not only a
major aim of Israel's defense policy (perhaps its very foundation) but also a
particular special interest of Ben-Gurion.
The fact is that Seymour Hersh's revelations about JFK and Ben-Gurion
have been easily eclipsed by a more recent volume on the same subject—
this one written by an Israeli scholar, Avner Cohen.
When Cohen released his 1999 book Israel and the Bomb (New York:
Columbia University Press), the book created quite a sensation in Israel to
the point that journalist Tom Segev writing in the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz, declared that "Cohen's book will necessitate the rewriting of
Israel's entire history."
At this juncture, before going into what Cohen has to say, it is
incumbent upon me to advise the readers that Cohen privately told an
interviewer (who then told me) that he (Cohen) had been shocked to learn
about Final Judgment when he was doing an Internet search for information
about his own book.
Cohen also told another person, my aforementioned critic, James K.
Olmstead—who posted Cohen's comment on the Internet in a JFK
discussion group—that he (Cohen) found it "inconceivable" that Israeli
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion would have had anything whatsoever to
do with the death of JFK.
That having been said, let's take a look at what Cohen does say about
Ben-Gurion and his most difficult relationship with JFK over the issue of
Israel's nuclear bomb.