This research examines the life and work of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the modern state of Israel. The research will set forth the historical and cultural context in which Ben-Gurion emerged and flourished and then discuss contributions he made in shaping his society and directing the course of history, with reference to the judgments of contemporaries and historians.
The fact that David Ben-Gurion is so strongly identified with the creation and early nurturance of the state of Israel must be set beside the fact that Ben-Gurion was not born in that country. Instead, he was born David Gruen in 1886 in a small town in Polish Russia, where pogroms were as commonplace as the contemporaneous rise of Zionist discourse. Ben-Gurion came from a secular (nonobservant) Jewish family steeped in that discourse. Ben-Gurion studied in Warsaw, where he adopted a socialist strand of Zionism. In 1906, at the age of 19, he left Poland to join a Zionist farming settlement in Jaffa, Turkish Palestine. There, he adopted the name Ben-Gurion By 1910, having worked as a labor organizer, he was writing for a local Hebrew-language newspaper, Adhut, and by 1914 he had received a law degree from the University of Constantinople. He returned to Palestine, where he resumed labor organizing, for which he and other Zionists were expelled in 1915.
The development of Zionism as an international movement was taking place in parallel Ben-Gurion's first 30 years. In 1896, Hungarian Jew and journalist Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, which deconstructed European anti-Semitism and articulated the Zionist answer, constructing a state in what was then Ottoman Palestine. In 1897, Herzl also organized the World Zionist Organization, and over the course of the next 20 years various groups organized around strands of Zionist political thought (unsuccessfully) sought formal international charter from Turkey, Germany, Britain (Zionism, 1993).
In ...