David Ben-Gurion, the Founding Father of Israel
Looking back on the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, a landmark event in Jewish history
The founding father of Israel
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 is one of the landmark events in Jewish history, marking the foundation of the first independent Jewish state in 2,000 years. You can never describe this historic juncture without tracing the life story of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), the country’s first prime minister (1948–1953; 1955–1963).
Ben-Gurion is widely hailed as the founding father of Israel. He was born in Płońsk, Poland, on October 16, 1886 and received his Jewish education in a Hebrew school established by his father, Avigdor Green — an ardent Zionist.
Photo: Ben-Gurion’s birthplace in Płońsk (Poland), where Ben-Gurion met Theodor Herzl
Ben-Gurion became a Zionist and joined the Socialist-Zionist group Poalei Zion at the age of 17. In 1906, Ben-Gurion immigrated to the Land of Israel and became immersed in Zionist politics. In 1912 he began to study law in Istanbul. But following the outbreak of World War I, he was deported to Egypt by the Ottoman authorities on suspicion of being involved in Zionist activity. Ben-Gurion spent the war years in the United States, where he married in 1917 Paula Monbesz (1896–1968), a fellow Zionist who was born in Minsk, Russia.
In November 1917 with the publication of the Balfour Declaration, Ben-Gurion wrote:
“England has not returned the Land to us… A land is not acquired without tribulations of work and creativity, without the effort of building and settlement. The Hebrew nation itself must change this right to a living and existing fact.”
In 1921, Ben-Gurion was elected secretary-general of the national trade union, the Histadrut, and served in the post until 1935. He also served as the Histadrut’s representative in the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency and was elected chairman of these two organizations in 1935.
Three decades of leadership
After proclaiming Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion became the country’s first prime minister and defense minister. He wrote in his diary:
“I arrive in Jerusalem early in the morning and found the city rejoicing and happy. People were dancing in the streets, and a large crowd gathered in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency building. To tell you the truth, the joy was not a part of me — not because I didn’t appreciate the decision of the UN. Rather, I knew what was to come — war with all of the Arab armies.”
In the first five years of statehood, Ben-Gurion provided strong leadership as prime minister and created waves of mass immigration, which led to the doubling of the country’s population. In the international arena, Ben-Gurion laid the groundwork for forging a strategic alliance with France and Great Britain, which strengthened Israel in the diplomatic, economic, and military spheres in the 1950s.
In 1953, after years of intensive public service, Ben-Gurion resigned from the government for two years. He settled in Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev Desert, serving as a personal example to Israel’s youth. Following the 1955 elections, he bounced back to the premiership. In 1963 Ben-Gurion resigned from the government once more — marking the end of almost three decades of leadership, including 13 years as Israeli prime minister. Ben-Gurion retired from public life in 1970 at the age of 84 and returned to Sde Boker where he passed away on December 1, 1973 at the age of 87.
Living history
In a story titled “Living History” in his 2015 autobiography The Outsider, bestselling thriller writer Frederick Forsyth describes his interview with Ben-Gurion at his residence in the Negev in 1968, when the prominent Israeli was writing his memoirs in almost complete isolation.
Over the years he had seen it all: both world wars, the Mandate between them, the rise of Zionism, the utterance of the Balfour Declaration, the creation on a Franco-British map of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. He had seen the dictators and the monarchs come and go, rise and fall, as the Jews pursued their single goal of, one day, a nation of their own. He had not only seen it all, he had been at the epicenter. He had met the generals and the giants, Roosevelt and Churchill.
“A feeling of facing Jewish history in person”
On July 16, 2020, The Jerusalem Post published an interview with Tom Segev, one of Israel’s most prolific and controversial historians, about his newest book, A State at Any Cost, a biography of Ben-Gurion.
Did you ever meet him?
“Yes, I met him in April of 1968, just a month before the 20th anniversary of Israel’s independence. We were three students who went to do an interview with him. He was no longer in office. It was a Friday, and I know now (but I didn’t know then) that at the beginning of the same week, he recorded the interviews for the film…I have met lots of famous people, lots of prominent world leaders, and nothing came close to the conversation with Ben-Gurion. It was a feeling of facing Jewish history in person.”
What personality traits most impressed you?
“He was crazy about books. He was crazy about details. When you look at his diary, there are pages and pages of statistics, like voting results in Rosh Ha’ayin. He was thinking and remembering while he was writing. His chief of staff, Yigal Yadin, once said he never saw Ben-Gurion’s eyes while they were talking to him because he was writing his diary in real time. If the chief-of-staff has a discussion with the prime minister, and he sees that the prime minister writes down every word, he will be careful with what he said.”
The Ben-Gurion House with the shelves stacked with books and four library rooms
Ticia Verveer, an archaeologist, journalist, and writer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, published a substantial article titled “Time Travel” on October 24, 2018 about her visit to the Ben-Gurion House in Tel Aviv.
The rooms are still furnished, with the shelves stacked with books. Ben-Gurion had four library rooms in his Tel Aviv home. The Knesset [Israel’s unicameral parliament] passed legislation to preserve Ben Gurion’s legacy by saving not only his home and books in Tel Aviv but also his shack in Kibbutz Sdeh-Boker as it existed when he died.
Ticia Verveer writes:
His books take up the largest space in both houses. In his Desert Home you will find 5,000 books and in Tel Aviv more than 20,000 volumes, each of them reflects his interests and personality. In the Negev he wrote his memoirs, books, and articles, and in his libraries, you can find the Tanakh [the Hebrew Bible], books on Judaism, philosophy, history, geography, the IDF, and defense strategies.
The Jewish people are called the “People of the Book.”
Once asked by a colleague, “Why do you Jews think you are so special?,” Harry Wolfson, the early 20th century Harvard scholar and historian, is reputed to have answered: “As far as I know, we are the only people who, when we drop a book on the floor, we pick it up and kiss it.”
Ben-Gurion was the unmistakable embodiment of this Jewish quality.
