Martin Gilbert

Ben-Gurion will always be remembered in Israel as the man who transformed a factional, disparate people into a nation, through his insistence on mamlachtiyut—the primacy of sovereign institutions. These included (and still include) the independence of the courts of law, the unity of the Israel Defence Forces, and the primacy of the Knesset and other institutions of Israeli democracy. For having done this, he was rightly called the Father of the Nation. Those who, in most recent years, have belittled the courts of law and mocked at the institutions of statehood when they fail to serve a sectional or political purpose, endanger the structure Ben-Gurion so tenaciously created and sustained.

Many things in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in that history is too terrible to have happened.

the emphasis should be placed on the road we take, and not on the final destination