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David Ben-Gurion דָּוִד בֶּן-גּוּרִיּוֹן
1st Prime Minister of Israel
In office 2 November 1955 – 21 June 1963
Preceded by	Moshe Sharett
Succeeded by	Levi Eshkol
In office 14 May 1948 – 7 December 1953
Preceded by	None
Succeeded by	Moshe Sharett
Born	October 16, 1886(1886-10-16) Płońsk, Poland (Russian Empire)
Died	December 1, 1973 (aged 87) Israel
Political party	Mapai, Rafi, National List

David Ben-Gurion (help·info) (Hebrew: דָּוִד בֶּן-גּוּרִיּוֹן‎, born David Grün on 16 October 1886, died 1 December 1973) was the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion's passion for Zionism, which began early in life, culminated in his instrumental role in the founding of the state of Israel. After leading Israel to victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Ben-Gurion helped build the state institutions and oversaw the absorption of vast numbers of Jews from all over the world. Upon retiring from political life in 1970, he moved to Sde Boker, where he lived until his death. Posthumously, Ben-Gurion was named one of Time Magazine 's 100 Most Important People of the Century.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Zionist leadership 3 1948 War and the Palestinian exodus 4 Prime Ministership 5 Commemoration 6 Footnotes 7 References 8 External links

Ben-Gurion was born in Płońsk, Congress Poland which was then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Avigdor Grün was a lawyer and a leader in the Hovevei Zion movement. His mother, Scheindel, passed away when he was 11 years old.

Ben-Gurion grew up to be an ardent Zionist and socialist. He immigrated to Palestine in 1906, shocked by the pogroms and horrific anti-Semitism of life in Eastern Europe.

In Palestine, he first worked in agriculture, picking oranges. In 1909 he volunteered with HaShomer, a force of volunteers who helped guard isolated Jewish agricultural communities. In 1912 he moved to Turkey to study law at Istanbul University together with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and adopted the Hebrew name Ben-Gurion (Hebrew for "lion cub"). He also worked as a journalist. In 1915, Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi were expelled from Palestine, then under Ottoman rule, for their political activities.

Settling in New York City in 1915, he met Russian-born Paula Munweis. They were married in 1917, and had three children. He joined the British Army in 1918 as part of the 38th Battalion of the Jewish Legion (following the Balfour Declaration in November 1917). He and his family returned to Palestine after World War I following its capture by the British from the Ottoman Empire.

In 1919, Ben-Gurion and his friend Berl Katznelson created the Labor Zionist movement. In 1920 he assisted in the formation and subsequently became general secretary of the Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine. In 1930, the Zionist Workers party and the Labor Zionists joined forces to create Mapai, the Zionist labor party, under Ben-Gurion's leaderhip. Labor Zionism became the dominant tendency in the World Zionist Organization and in 1935 Ben Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

According to Zeev Sternhell^[1] Ben-Gurion's 'intentions to which he adhered throughout the rest of his life' were well described by a declaration he made in December 1922:

[...] Our central problem is immigration ... and not adapting our lives to this or that doctrine. [...] We are conquerers of the land facing an iron wall, and we have to break through it. [...] How can we run our Zionist movement in such a way that [... we] will be able to carry out the conquest of the land by the Jewish worker, and which will find the resources to organise the massive immigration and settlement of workers through their own capabilities? The creation of a new Zionist movement, a Zionist movement of workers, is the first prerequisite for the fulfillment of Zionism. [...] Without [such] a new Zionist movement that is entirely at our disposal, there is no future or hope for our activities

According to Sternhell 'This concise, concentrated, programmatic and important speech, contained not a single word about equality, justice, universal values, or the creation of an alternative society. Only one objective was mentioned and all the energy, strength and capabilities of the young movement were directed toward achieving it.' Ben-Gurion was committed almost exclusively to building a Jewish state.

During the Second World War, Ben-Gurion encouraged Palestine's Jews to volunteer for the British Army. At the same time he helped orchestrate the illegal immigration of thousands of European Jewish refugees to Palestine during a period when the British placed heavy restrictions on Jewish immigration.

Illegal Jewish migration led to pressure on the British to either allow Jewish migration (as required by the League of Nations Mandate) or quit - they did the latter in 1948 on the heels of a United Nations resolution partitioning the territory between the Jews and Arabs.

During the pre-statehood period in Palestine, Ben-Gurion represented the mainstream Jewish establishment and was known as a moderate. He was strongly opposed to the Revisionist Zionist movement led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and his successor Menachem Begin.

Ben-Gurion had a realistic view of the strong attachment of Arab Palestinians to the Palestinian soil. In 1938 he said: 'In our political argument abroad we minimize Arab opposition to us. But let us not ignore the truth among ourselves. [...] A people which fights against [what it concieves as] the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily.'^[2]

According to Flapan Ben-Gurions assesment of Arab feelings led him to an even more militant line on the need to build up Jewish military strength: 'I believe in our power, in our power which will grow, and if it will grow agreement will come...'.^[3]

In 1946 Ben-Gurion agreed that the Haganah could cooperate with Menachem Begin's Irgun in fighting the British. Ben-Gurion initially agreed to Begin's plan to carry out the 1946 King David Hotel bombing, with the intent of embarrassing (rather than killing) the British military stationed there. However, when the risks of mass killing became apparent, Ben-Gurion told Begin to call the operation off; Begin refused.^[4]

In September 1947 Ben Gurion reached a status quo agreement with the Orthodox Agudath Israel party. He sent a letter to Agudath Israel promising that the Shabbat would be Israel's official day of rest, there would be no civil marriages, and the Orthodox sector would be granted autonomy in the sphere of religious education.

Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. In the Israeli declaration of independence, he stressed that the new nation would "uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex." During the first weeks of Israel's independence, he ordered all militias to be replaced by one national army, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). To that end, Ben-Gurion gave the order to fire on the Altalena, a ship carrying arms for the Irgun (also called Etzel). That command remains controversial to this day.

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War Ben-Gurion oversaw the nascent state's military operations.

David Ben-Gurion played a major role in the 1948 Palestine War and the Palestinian exodus. The New Historians consider that he personally ordered expulsions but they don't agree whether this was part of a major plan or whether these were decisions taken in function of circumstances.

According to Simha Flapan 'the Jewish army [...] under the leadership of Ben-Gurion, planned and executed the expulsion in the wake of the UN Partition Resolution.'^[5]

In a study published in 1988 and revisited in 2003^[6], Benny Morris studied the events that lead to the Palestinian exodus. Among the different causes, he suggests Ben Gurion could have played a major role in ordering expulsions starting in July 1948. In an interview with Ha'aretz in 2003, he went further and affirmed Ben Gurion had ordered the expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda and from villages attacked during Operation Hiram in October 1948^[7].

According to Shabtai Teveth Ben-Gurion envisaged a unitary Jewish state, even at the cost of expelling Arabs. He concludes that it had always been Ben-Gurion's deepest conviction that the Arabs would only come to terms with Zionism when Jewish strength compelled respect.^[8] but Shabtai Teveth and Anita Shapira 'argued that the Zionist leadership - including Ben-Gurion - had never supported the idea of transfer and had never taken the idea seriously, and that, therefore, there was no connection between the occasional propagation of the idea in the 1930s and 1940s and what happened to the Palestinians in 1947-1949'.^[9].

Ilan Pappé goes further and says the exodus was planned in early 1948 by a group he calls the ‘Consultancy’ and led by Ben-Gurion^[10].

Ben-Gurion led Israel during its War of Independence. He became Prime Minister on May 14, 1948 and would remain in that post until 1963, except for a period of nearly two years between 1954 and 1955. As Premier, he oversaw the establishment of the state's institutions. He presided over various national projects aimed at the rapid development of the country and its population: Operation Magic Carpet, the airlift of Jews from Arab countries, the construction of the National Water Carrier, rural development projects and the establishment of new towns and cities. In particular, he called for pioneering settlement in outlying areas, especially in the Negev.

In 1953 Ben-Gurion announced his intention to withdraw from government and settle in the Kibbutz Sde-Boker, in the Israeli Negev. He had a major role in the reprisal operations that lead to the Qibya massacre at the end of 1953. He returned to office in 1955 assuming the post of Defense Minister and later prime minister.

Returning to government, Ben-Gurion raided Gaza - still under Egyptian rule - in retaliation for the Palestinian guerrilla attacks Israel was sustaining, killing 38 Egyptian soldiers in the process. Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, angered by this hit to Egyptian pride, started building up his arms with the help of the Soviet Union. This scared the Israelis and they started arming themselves with help from the French. Then Nasser ordered the nationalization of the Suez Canal, which was seen as very threatening action toward Israel, France, and Britain. These countries needed the trade route under international control again and so Ben-Gurion collaborated with the British and French to plan the 1956 Sinai War in which Israel stormed the Sinai Peninsula thus giving British and French forces a pretext to intervene in order to secure the Suez Canal. Intervention by the United States and the United Nations forced the British, French and Israelis to back down.

Ben-Gurion stepped down as prime minister for what he described as personal reasons in 1963, and chose Levi Eshkol as his successor. A year later a rivalry developed between the two on the issue of the Lavon Affair. Ben-Gurion broke with the party in June 1965 over Eshkol's handling of the Lavon affair and formed a new party, Rafi which won ten seats in the Knesset. After the Six-Day War, Ben-Gurion was in favour of returning all the occupied territories apart from Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Mount Hebron.^[11]

In 1968, when Rafi merged with Mapai to form the Alignment, Ben-Gurion refused to reconcile with his old party. He favoured electoral reforms in which a constituency-based system would replace the chaotic proportional representation method. He formed another new party, the National List, which won four seats in the 1969 election. Ben-Gurion retired from politics in 1970 and spent his last years living in a modest home on the kibbutz.

Ben-Gurion is buried alongside his wife Paula at a site in Midreshet Ben-Gurion in the Negev desert.

• Israel's largest airport, Ben-Gurion International Airport is named in his honour.
• One of Israel's major universities, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, located in Beersheva, is named after him.
• The main street of the German Colony in Haifa, was renamed Ben Gurion Boulevard.

• "Special Report David Ben-Gurion" BBC News.
• "David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)" Jewish Agency for Israel.
• "The Identity of israel - David Ben-Gurion".
• Biography and quotes of Ben-Gurion PalestineRemembered.com.

• Photos of David Ben-Gurion

Political offices
Preceded by (none)	Chairman of the Provisional State Council May 14, 1948 - May 17, 1948	Succeeded by Chaim Weizmann
Preceded by (none)	Leader of Mapai 1948–1954	Succeeded by Moshe Sharett
Preceded by (none)	Prime Minister of Israel 1948–1953	Succeeded by Moshe Sharett
Preceded by (none)	Defense Minister of Israel 1948–1954	Succeeded by Pinhas Lavon
Preceded by Moshe Sharett	Leader of Mapai 1955–1963	Succeeded by Levi Eshkol
Preceded by Moshe Sharett	Prime Minister of Israel 1955–1962	Succeeded by Levi Eshkol
Preceded by Pinhas Lavon	Defense Minister of Israel 1955–1963	Succeeded by Levi Eshkol
Preceded by new party	Leader of Rafi 1965–1968	Succeeded by ceased to exist
Preceded by new party	Leader of the National List 1968–1970	Succeeded by Igael Hurvitz

Prime Ministers of Israel v • d • e

Ben-Gurion • Sharett • Ben-Gurion • Eshkol • Allon (Acting) • Meir • Rabin • Peres (Acting) • Begin • Shamir • Peres • Shamir • Rabin • Peres • Netanyahu • Barak • Sharon • Olmert

Defense Ministers of Israel v • d • e

Ben-Gurion • Lavon • Ben-Gurion • Eshkol • Dayan • Peres • Weizman • Begin • Sharon • Arens • Rabin • Shamir • Arens • Rabin • Peres • Mordechai • Arens • Barak • Ben-Eliezer • Mofaz • Peretz • Barak

Justice Ministers of Israel v • d • e

Rosen (three times) • Yosef (twice) • Cohen • Ben-Gurion • Shapiro (twice) • Meir (twice) • Tzadok • Begin • Tamir • Nissim • Moda'i • Sharir • Meridor • Libai • Neeman • Netanyahu • Hanegbi • Beilin • Sheetrit (twice) • Lapid • Livni (twice) • Ramon • Friedmann

Education Ministers of Israel v • d • e

Shazar • Remez • Ben-Gurion • Dinur • Aran • Eban • Aran • Allon • Yadlin • Hammer • Navon • Hammer • Aloni • Rabin • Rubinstein • Hammer • Levy • Sarid • Barak • Livnat • Sheetrit • Tamir

Persondata
NAME	Ben-Gurion, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Grün, David
SHORT DESCRIPTION	First Prime Minister of Israel
DATE OF BIRTH	October 16, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH	Płońsk, Poland
DATE OF DEATH	December 1, 1973
PLACE OF DEATH	Sde Boker