David Ben-Gurion Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
David Ben-Gurion (דוד בן גוריון) (October 16, 1886 - December 1, 1973) was the first Prime Minister of Israel.
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2 Zionist leadership 3 Prime Ministership |
Early life
He was born David Gruen in Płońsk;, Poland which was then part of the Russian Empire. Shocked by the pogroms and rampant anti-Semitism that plagued Jewish life in Eastern Europe, he became an ardent Zionist and socialist and moved to Palestine in 1906.
He first worked as a journalist and adopted his Hebrew name Ben-Gurion as he began his political career. He was expelled from Palestine, then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, in 1915 due to his political activities.
Settling in New York City in 1915 he met his future Russian-born wife, Puala Munweis and they were married in 1917, they subsequently had three chidren. The family returned to Palestine after World War I after it had been conquered by the British.
Zionist leadership
Ben-Gurion was at the political forefront of the Labor Zionist movement during the fifteen years leading to the creation of the State of Israel when Labor Zionism had become the dominant tendency in the World Zionist Organization.
He combined idealism with opportunism and a commitment to the establishment of a Jewish state above all other considerations. In 1938, at a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain, Ben-Gurion argued: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel."
Ben-Gurion encouraged Jews to join the British military at the same time as he helped orchestrate the illegal immigration of thousands of European Jewish refugees to Palestine at a time when the British sought to bar new Jewish settlement. He is also considered the architect of both the Yishuv which created a Jewish state within a state and the Haganah, the paramilitary force of the Labor Zionist movement that facilitated underground immigration, defended kibbutzim and other Jewish settlements against attack and provided the backbone of the future Israeli Defence Forces. Both these developments put pressure on the British to either grant the Jews a state in Palestine or quit the League of Nations Mandate - they did the latter in 1948 on the heels of a United Nations resolution partitioning the territory between Jews and Arabs.
During the pre-statehood period in Palestine, Ben-Gurion represented the mainstream Jewish establishment and was known as a moderate, with whose Haganah organization the British dealt with frequently, sometimes in order to arrest more radical groups involved in resistance against them. He was strongly opposed to the Revisionist Zionist movement led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and his successor Menachem Begin.
He was also involved in occasional violent resistance during the short period of time his organization cooperated with Menachem Begin's Irgun. However, during the first weeks of Israel's independence, it was decided to disband all resistance groups and replace them with a single formal army. To that end, Ben-Gurion gave the order to open fire upon and sink a ship named Altalena, which carried ammunition for the Irgun (also called Etzel) resistance group. That command remains controversial to this day.
Prime Ministership
He led Israel during its War of Independence and, except for nearly two years of interruption between 1953 - 1955, became Prime Minister on January 25, 1948 and served until 1963.
In 1953 Ben-Gurion announced his intention to withdraw from government and settle in the Kibbutz Sde-Boker, in the Israeli Negev. Not quite quitting his governmental duties, he nevertheless resided there throughout 1954.
Returning to government, Ben Gurion collaborated with the British and French to plan the 1956 Sinai War in which Israel stormed the Sinai peninsula in retaliation for raids by Egypt thus giving British and French forces a pretext to intervene in order to secure the Suez Canal after Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser had announced its nationalization. Intervention by the United States and the United Nations forced the British, French and Israelis to back down.
Ben-Gurion was among the founders of the Israeli Labour Party which governed Israel during the first three decades of its existence.
He was voted by Time Magazine as one of the top 100 people who shaped the 20th century [1].
| Preceded in first term by: --- |
Prime Minister of Israel | Succeeded in first term by: Moshe Sharett |
| Preceded in second term by: Moshe Sharett |
Succeeded in second term by: Levi Eshkol |
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