The conclave of foreign ministers from the Middle East gathering for what is being dubbed, after its desert location, the “Negev Summit” would be newsworthy no matter what happens. That’s by dint of convening, as it will today and tomorrow, Arab envoys and their Israeli counterpart within the borders of the Jewish state. It’s astonishing and delightful, though, that the meeting will take place at Sde Boker.

That’s the dusty desert kibbutz where is buried the leader who, nearly 74 years ago, proclaimed the independence of the Jewish state. We speak of David Ben-Gurion, who rose from day worker to become Israel’s first prime minister. Not only that but the foreign ministers — from Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, America, and Israel — will pay homage at the grave of the visionary leader. 

If anyone had asked us five years ago, or two years, whether this could happen, we would have chuckled with incredulity. Not that it’s so all-fired unusual for Israeli and Arab leaders to meet, especially after the Abraham Accords. It’s that by going to the final resting place of “the Old Man,” as Israelis call Ben-Gurion, they are acknowledging the very idea, and the success, of the political Zionism that inspirits Israel. 

It is worth, in respect of Sde Boker, recalling the history that this small town outside of Beersheba evokes. David Ben-Gurion — born ​​David Grün — hailed from Plonsk, in what is now Poland, before making his way to the Land of Israel in 1906. Just less than a decade before, a journalist living in Vienna, Theodor Herzl, had convened, at Basel, the first Zionist Congress. 

Ben-Gurion would go on to serve as a defining figure in pre-state Israel. He rose via a leftwing party, Mapai, and allied institutions, such as the Histadrut, or national trade union, that were dominating Israeli politics from the state’s inception until the election, in 1977, of Ben-Gurion’s arch enemy, Menachem Begin. Ben-Gurion was not alone in the Zionist firmament, but to him it fell to forge the state.

Ben-Gurion — who led Israel through the War of Independence, the Suez Canal crisis, and the capture of Adolph Eichmann, among other events in the first decades of statehood — moved to a small house in Sde Boker. Residents of the kibbutz recall him joining in communal tasks like any other schlepper, though his time was spent mostly in penning an 11-volume history of the country that was his handiwork.

The Old Man chose Sde Boker because he famously believed that the future of Israel lay in its ability to make the desert bloom and that it was in the dunes of the Negev, not the hills around Jerusalem or the beaches of Tel Aviv, that the country’s character would be forged. Israel’s advances in agricultural technology and water use have proven him to be a prophet of his time and place.  

So the diplomats assembling in one of the luxury hotels that now sparkle here and there in the Negev would do well to reflect on this man who built a state in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the face of Arab hostility. He was of diminutive stature but of legendary will. That will is what is needed as Israel and her neighbors face their common foe at Tehran. No doubt the Old Man would have been smiling.