David’s Sling.
PERES, Shimon.
David’s Sling.
First American Edition of David's Sling: The Arming of Israel; Inscribed by Shimon Peres
New York: Random House, 1970.
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Item Number: 64048
First American edition of the story of the creation of Israel’s armed strength. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed and dated in 1971 in Hebrew by Shimon Peres on the front free endpaper. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Jay J. Smith Studio. Rare and desirable signed.
Published in 1970, David's Sling is the story of the creation and development of Israel's armed strength by Shimon Peres, who did more than anyone in the country to put weapons in the hands of Israel's soldiers. Writing from the unrivalled vantage of the man who had served as Director-General of the Ministry of Defense under David Ben-Gurion through the formative years of the state, Peres traces the strategic and diplomatic labor by which a small and beleaguered nation built itself into a military power capable of withstanding its larger neighbors. He recounts the painstaking cultivation of the French alliance that supplied Israel with its first generation of modern aircraft and armor, the decision to found an indigenous arms industry rather than rely indefinitely on the goodwill of foreign suppliers, the establishment of Israel Aircraft Industries, and the strategic doctrine - quiet, technological, self-reliant - that came to define Israeli defense thinking. The book takes its title from the Biblical figure of David facing Goliath, and Peres returns throughout to the conviction that the security of a small state depends not on numbers but on ingenuity, alliance, and the will to make decisions before they are forced upon one. Both a memoir of state-building and a work of strategic argument, David's Sling remains an indispensable inside account of how modern Israel armed itself in the two decades after independence.
