David Ben-Gurion

Biography

David Ben-Gurion was born David Grün in Płońsk, in Russian Poland, in 1886. Active in the socialist Zionist Poale Zion from his youth, he emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906, worked as a farm labourer, and took the Hebrew name Ben-Gurion. Before the First World War he studied law in Istanbul. The Ottoman authorities deported him in 1915; he went on to New York, where he met his wife Paula, and in 1918 joined the Jewish Legion of the British Army.

He helped found the Histadrut labour federation in 1920 and was its general secretary from 1921 to 1935, and was a leader of Ahdut HaAvoda and then Mapai. As chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive from 1935 he became the leading figure of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine and of the campaign for a Jewish state.

On 14 May 1948 he proclaimed the State of Israel and became its first prime minister and defence minister. During the 1948 war he merged the militias into the Israel Defense Forces, ordering force against the Irgun's arms ship Altalena. In office he built state institutions, settled waves of immigrants, and concluded the reparations agreement with West Germany. He resigned in 1954, returned as defence minister and then prime minister in 1955, led Israel in the 1956 Suez war alongside Britain and France, and stepped down in 1963.

After the bitter dispute over the Lavon affair and a failed bid to unseat Levi Eshkol as Mapai leader, he formed Rafi in 1965 and later the National List, and retired from politics in 1970. He spent his last years at kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev, where he died in 1973 and is buried.