1917, when Turkish Palestine became British Palestine owing to the fortunes of war, there came the Balfour Declaration, the name given to a statement by British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour in a letter to a British Zionist leader that approved in principle of the physical location in Palestine of a "national home for the Jewish people" (Ben-Gurion, 1969). Now no British or European resources were committed to that principle because Balfour also articulated concern that the rights of non-Jews would not be penalized. Further, the very notion that geopolitical maps might be redrawn because of a Jewish state fostered tensions between Jewish newcomers to Palestine and Arabs who already lived there. Davidson (1996) suggests that Ben-Gurion's socialist ideology was a source of tension that began with his recruiting Jewish immigrants. European Jews who shared with Ben-Gurion the vision of a Jewish Palestine were members of the working class. But those who could really build the nation were capitalists who could start businesses and recruit Arabs, not Jews, as cheap labor. Thus Ben-Gurion's efforts to organize Jewish but not Arab workers would have contributed to tensions at the time. Meanwhile, it would have been Arabs and not Jews who were really doing the building of a Jewish state, an intolerable situation for Arabs. That would help explain anti-Jewish rioting by Arabs over the years.
When Ben-Gurion left Palestine in 1915, he landed in New York, where he continued to urge Zionism with a socialist emphasis, especially after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. Ben-Gurion's admiration of Lenin was "tempered" by admiration of the American political system (Oz, 1998, p. 134), but his desire to establish a state in the Jews' traditional homeland persisted. The Balfour Declaration was an important beginning, and the fact that Palestine passed into British control after the war enabled Ben-Gurion to return there. Hi...