David Ben-Gurion

• 1. Introduction

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  David Ben-Gurion was born David Grün in Płońsk, a small town that was then part of the Russian Empire, on the 16th of October 1886. He would die eighty-seven years later as the man most closely identified with the birth of a modern state. But the distance between that boy in Congress Poland and the statesman who signed a declaration of independence in Tel Aviv is not simply the story of one man's ambition. It is a story of forged papers, a borrowed name, a kibbutz hut in the desert, a conviction that was absolute even when the facts were not.

  What drove a teenage shopkeeper's son to leave for Palestine at nineteen, nearly starve as a farm labourer, and then spend the next four decades pushing an idea that most of the world considered impractical? What kind of leader chooses to shell a ship carrying weapons intended for his own people, or orders the bombing of a hotel to destroy documents implicating himself? And what does it mean that the man Time magazine named one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century spent his final years in a modest hut in the Negev, writing history rather than being celebrated for it?

• 2. The Boy from Płońsk

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  Płońsk in the 1890s was a town of roughly ten thousand people, with Jews and Poles numbering about five thousand each. Ben-Gurion later recalled it as a place of relative calm, where Jewish boys could hold their own in a street fight precisely because the Jewish community was concentrated in the centre and could call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. He described it in his memoirs not as a place to flee from, but as a place to leave with purpose.

  His father, Avigdor Grün, was a pokątny doradca, a back-channel legal adviser who navigated clients through a corrupt imperial system. When Theodore Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896, Avigdor co-founded a local Zionist group called Beni Zion, Children of Zion, which had two hundred members by 1900. The household was already Zionist before David was old enough to argue about it.

  Loss arrived early. His mother, Scheindel, died of sepsis following a stillbirth in 1897, in what was her eleventh pregnancy. David was barely eleven. His father remarried two years later. A birth certificate found in Poland in 2003 revealed that Ben-Gurion had also had a twin brother who died shortly after birth. The family he grew up in was already smaller than it should have been.

  His formal education stopped after his bar mitzvah. His father could not afford the beth midrash. So at fourteen, Ben-Gurion and two friends started their own club, Ezra, teaching Hebrew to local youth and collecting funds for victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. One biographer credits Ezra with 150 members within a year; another source puts the number at no more than several dozen. The discrepancy hardly matters. What matters is that Ben-Gurion was already organising, already choosing Hebrew as the vehicle, already treating emigration to the Holy Land as a practical project rather than a prayer.

• 3. Arriving in Palestine

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  He landed in Jaffa on the 7th of September 1906, and immediately set off on foot with a group of fourteen toward Petah Tikva, the largest of the thirteen Jewish agricultural settlements then in existence, with around eighty households and a population of nearly fifteen hundred. He was nineteen and had expected to farm.

  What he found instead was gruelling. Jewish workers competed against local Arab villagers who were more skilled and prepared to accept lower wages. Ben-Gurion was shocked by the number of Arabs employed. In November he caught malaria. By the time he left Petah Tikva in the summer of 1907, he had averaged ten working days per month, which frequently left him with no money for food. His letters home, written in Hebrew, rarely let on how bad things were. Others who had come from Płońsk were writing about tuberculosis, cholera, and people dying of hunger.

  Israel Shochat, who had arrived in Jaffa two years earlier, spotted Ben-Gurion on the dock and recruited him to the founding conference of the Jewish Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Land of Israel, held over three days in October 1906. Shochat then arranged for Ben-Gurion to be elected to both the five-man Central Committee and the ten-man Manifesto Committee, and to chair the sessions. Ben-Gurion conducted proceedings entirely in Hebrew, forbidding translation into Russian or Yiddish.

  The conference produced the Ramleh Programme, which called for political independence for the Jewish people in Palestine, segregation of the Jewish and Arab economies, and the use of Hebrew for all activities. Ben-Gurion then set up the Jaffa Professional Trade Union Alliance, which had seventy-five members. He helped broker a settlement at the Rishon Le Zion winery after six workers were sacked. These were small acts, but they traced the same line he would follow for the next four decades: build the institution, control the language, hold the position.

• 4. Name, Voice, and Print

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  In 1910, Ben-Zvi invited Ben-Gurion to join the staff of Ha'ahdut, a new Hebrew periodical being established in Jerusalem. The invitation came specifically because of his fluency in Hebrew. The first three issues appeared monthly, with an initial print run of one thousand copies, before the publication became weekly at four hundred and fifty copies. Over the first year Ben-Gurion contributed fifteen articles under various pen names before settling on Ben-Gurion, a name he chose after the historic Joseph ben Gurion. Adopting Hebrew names was common practice among those who remained through the Second Aliyah.

  The pen name was not only an identity; it was a political statement. The same impulse drove the American chapter of his life, which began after he was deported to Egypt in March 1915 and made his way to the United States by May. He and Ben-Zvi launched a speaking tour intended to reach Poale Zion groups in thirty-five cities and recruit ten thousand men for a pioneer army called Hechalutz, to fight on the Ottoman side. The tour failed badly. Audiences were small; the organisation had fewer than three thousand members, mostly in the New York area. Ben-Gurion was hospitalised with diphtheria for two weeks and spoke on only five occasions. He recruited nineteen volunteers. Ben-Zvi recruited forty-four.

  Ben-Gurion pivoted to writing. A Yiddish reprint of Yizkor, a volume of eulogies to Zionist martyrs, sold all thirty-five hundred copies of its first edition and prompted a second edition of sixteen thousand. He then effectively took over a planned anthology, writing the introduction and two-thirds of the text himself, spending most of the next eighteen months in the New York Public Library. The resulting book, Eretz Israel - Past and Present, was published in April 1918, cost two dollars, ran to five hundred pages, and sold seven thousand copies in four months. Total sales reached twenty-five thousand copies and earned twenty thousand dollars in profit for Poale Zion. It made Ben-Gurion the most prominent Poale Zion leader in America. Martin Buber wrote the introduction to the 1918 German edition of Yizkor, a detail that shows the wider cultural reach these publications achieved.

• 5. Building the State Before the State

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  From 1921 until 1935 Ben-Gurion served as general secretary of the Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine, an organisation he had helped establish in 1920. In 1930, Hapoel Hatzair and Ahdut HaAvoda merged under his leadership to form Mapai, the more moderate Zionist labour party. By 1935 Labor Zionism was the dominant current in the World Zionist Organization, and Ben-Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency, the position from which he directed the Jewish community in Palestine until statehood.

  He operated in the gap between two imperatives that could not easily be reconciled. The British 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to fifteen thousand per year for the first five years, contingent afterward on Arab consent, and restricted Jewish land purchases. Ben-Gurion responded with what became his defining formula: support the British as if there is no White Paper, oppose the White Paper as if there is no war. About ten percent of the Jewish population of Palestine volunteered for the British Armed Forces, including many women. At the same time, Ben-Gurion facilitated the illegal immigration of thousands of European Jewish refugees.

  After the war, when it became clear Britain would not immediately establish a Jewish state, he approved a secret alliance between the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi, called the Jewish Resistance Movement, in October 1945. When the British launched Operation Agatha in June 1946 and stored captured documents from Jewish Agency headquarters in the King David Hotel, Ben-Gurion agreed to the Irgun's plan to bomb the hotel, aiming to destroy those incriminating documents. He asked for a delay; the Irgun refused. The bombing in July 1946 killed ninety-one people. Ben-Gurion publicly condemned it, and afterward ordered the Jewish Resistance Movement dissolved.

  In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved the partition plan for Palestine. Ben-Gurion's strategy for the Haganah was to hold every position with no retreat and launch a full offensive once British forces had withdrawn sufficiently. By May 1948 Jewish forces were winning the civil war. On the 14th of May 1948, a few hours before the British Mandate officially terminated, Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence in a ceremony in Tel Aviv. He was the first to sign the declaration, which he had helped to write.

• 6. War, Force, and Its Limits

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  In the weeks after independence, Ben-Gurion ordered all Jewish militias unified into a single national army, the Israel Defense Forces. The hardest test of that principle came with the Altalena Affair, when a ship carrying arms purchased by the Irgun arrived off Tel Aviv. Ben-Gurion insisted all weapons be surrendered to the IDF. When fighting broke out on the beach, he ordered the ship shelled. Sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers died. He also disbanded Palmach headquarters and integrated its units into the IDF, over the objections of many of its members.

  The 1948 war raised questions that remain contested. Israeli historian Benny Morris documented Ben-Gurion's role in operations against Palestinian Arab civilians, including Operation Cast Thy Bread, which involved targeting Palestinian water wells with typhoid and dysentery bacteria, as well as aqueducts in cities such as Acre. Morris also wrote that, while Ben-Gurion issued no explicit written orders for mass expulsion, his subordinates understood his intent: "From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of transfer."

  Ben-Gurion's own 1937 letter to his son Amos, written when he was head of the Jewish Agency executive, has been debated by scholars because of scribbled-out text that may or may not reveal his intentions regarding the expulsion of Arabs, depending on how one reads the deletions.

  In September 1948, after Israeli forces had become militarily superior to their opponents, Ben-Gurion proposed to the Cabinet that Israel attack Latrun and conquer a large part of the West Bank. The motion was rejected by seven votes to five. Ben-Gurion called this decision bechiya ledorot, a source of lament for generations, believing Israel may have permanently lost the Old City of Jerusalem as a result.

• 7. The Prime Minister's Decades

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  Mapai won the largest number of seats in the first national election on the 14th of February 1949, and Ben-Gurion became Israel's first prime minister. He presided over Operation Magic Carpet, the airlift of Jews from Arab countries, the construction of the National Water Carrier, and the establishment of new towns and cities. He called persistently for pioneering settlement in the Negev, and eventually moved there himself, to kibbutz Sde Boker.

  In 1953, he charged Ariel Sharon, then security chief of the northern region, with forming Unit 101, a small commando unit tasked with retaliating for fedayeen raids. He told Sharon: "The Palestinians must learn that they will pay a high price for Israeli lives." One of the unit's operations, an attack on the village of Qibya in the Jordanian-ruled West Bank, ended with the death of sixty-nine Palestinian villagers, two thirds of them women and children. Ben-Gurion denied army involvement and attributed the killings to Israeli civilians, a claim he also made at the United Nations.

  Foreign policy under Ben-Gurion included a reparations agreement with West Germany as compensation for Nazi confiscation of Jewish property during the Holocaust, a decision that was deeply controversial domestically. In 1959 he learned from West German officials that Adolf Eichmann was likely living in Argentina. He ordered the Mossad to capture Eichmann alive for trial in Israel. In 1960 that mission succeeded. Eichmann was tried, convicted of crimes against humanity, and executed in 1962.

  In 1957, Ben-Gurion was injured when a troubled Jewish immigrant from Syria named Moshe Dwek threw a grenade into the Knesset plenum. He survived. He stepped down on the 16th of June 1963. When he resigned unexpectedly, the country, according to historian Yechiam Weitz, seemed to have anticipated the move, and unlike in 1953, no serious efforts were made to persuade him to stay.

• 8. The Desert and the End

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  After leaving office, Ben-Gurion did not disappear into comfortable retirement. He broke with Mapai in June 1965, formed the Rafi party, and continued contesting elections. In 1968 he formed yet another new party, the National List, which won four seats in the 1969 election. He retired from politics entirely in 1970 and returned full-time to Sde Boker, where he worked on an eleven-volume history of Israel's early years.

  His personal views on religion shifted over the decades. He described himself as having developed atheism in his youth and was proud of having set foot in a synagogue only once while in Israel. He worked on Yom Kippur and ate pork. But in a 1970 interview he called himself a pantheist and said: "I don't know if there's an afterlife. I think there is." In a letter to the writer Eliezer Steinman he argued that the Shulchan Aruch was a product of exile and that a nation rebuilding itself needed to compose a new equivalent, which he called a "New Shulchan."

  On the 18th of November 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Ben-Gurion suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and was taken to Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, Ramat Gan. His condition deteriorated on the 23rd of November and he died on the 1st of December 1973. Sirens sounded across Israel. His body lay in state in the Knesset compound before being flown by helicopter to Sde Boker, where he was buried alongside his wife Paula in the Ben-Gurion Tomb National Park at Midreshet Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva, the airport that handles more international arrivals than any other site in the country, and an Israeli modification of the British Centurion tank all bear his name. A blue English Heritage plaque unveiled in 1986 marks the London address at 75 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, where he once lived.