Ben Gurion had an appreciation of the necessity of anchoring a modern, even secular Israeli state in Judaism and Jewish tradition. After Abraham arrives in the Promised Land, he is faced with a dilemma. His wife Sarah is barren, and she wants Abraham to have an offspring. So she suggests that Abraham take a surrogate wife, Hagar, who joined Abraham's camp when he passed through Egypt. Hagar is the daughter of the Pharaoh and she had elected to travel with Abraham as Sarah's maidservant.
Great people have great servants.
And so Abraham takes Hagar as his second wife and from that relationship is going to come a child by the name of Ishmael. Ishmael will not want to carry on Abraham's mission. Christianity and Islam. The Arabs, according to their own tradition and to the Jewish tradition, are the descendants of Ishmael. Islam is a religion which originated with the Arab peoples.