The Life and Work of David Ben-Gurion

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 jo

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r" (Ben-Gurion, 1969). By the time the 1947 UN resolution was passed, however, Ben-Gurion's approach to political confrontation was positioned to shepherd the new state of Israel. It was Ben-Gurion who, as the country's first-in-history prime minister, proclaimed the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. That same day, Israel's five Arab nation-state neighbors invaded it, and for some 18 months there was a "touch-and-go" war during which Ben-Gurion was transformed from "'first among equals' in the Zionist leadership into a modern-day King David. The crux of his leadership was a lifelong, partly successful struggle to transplant a tradition of binding majority rule in a painfully divided Jewish society that for thousands of years had not experienced any form of self-rule" (Oz, 1998, p. 136). This appears to have been the basis on which Ben-Gurion would be regarded as the architect of modern Israel's nation-state status. Besides King David, Ben-Gurion was compared to George Washington, Moses, Garibaldi [uniter of Italy] to God Himself. Ben-Gurion's prestige and accomplishments as founder of a nation-state did not prevent controversy from stalking his political life. In part this can be explained by what seems to have b

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