  |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)Israeli leader. Born David Gruen on 16 October 1886, in Plonsk, Poland, he became a Zionist and emigrated to Palestine in 1906. Because he favoured the use of Hebrew as the Jewish national language, he changed his name to Ben-Gurion in 1910. He was active in trade unions and worked as a journalist until he went to the University of Constantinople (Istanbul), in the Turkish Ottoman empire, in 1912. He graduated as a lawyer in 1914, but was expelled by the authorities for his trade union activities. In 1917, during World War I, he joined the Jewish Legion, which helped Britain liberate Palestine from Turkish rule. After the war, Ben-Gurion became one of the organisers of the socialist Mapai (Israeli workers party) and of Histadrut (Jewish Federation of Labour), the latter providing – in the absence of a Jewish state – essential social and economic services for Jews, such as poor relief and banking. Between 1921 and 1935, he was Histadrut's general secretary. In 1935, he became chairman of the Jewish Agency, and thus leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. He opposed the radical actions of the Irgun, an underground guerrilla organisation that targeted British colonial forces as well as local Arabs. Instead, he preferred to organise large-scale immigration, which made a Jewish state both more inevitable and more workable. On 14 May 1948, Ben-Gurion became the prime minister of the newly founded state of Israel. Under his leadership, the country survived attacks by Arab neighbours and built up its military forces. He established agricultural and social reforms that did much to stabilise a state whose population was extremely diverse, having arrived from all parts of the world, often with grim memories of persecution. Ben-Gurion remained in power until 1963, except for two years in the early 1950s when he chose to retire from public life. He remained in parliament until 1970, and died on 1 December 1973. |
|
