David Ben-Gurion

Trivia

• David Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister of Israel from 1948-53 and 1955-63.
• David Ben-Gurion also led the country during the 1956 Sinai campaign, in which Israeli forces temporarily secured the Sinai peninsula.
• In June 1963 Ben-Gurion resigned as Prime Minister, citing “personal reasons.”
• Levi Eshkol took over the posts of Prime Minister and Defense Minister. But David Ben-Gurion remained active politically, with a rivalry developing between him and Eshkol.
• In June 1965, the Mapai Party split, with Ben-Gurion establishing Rafi (List of Israeli Workers), which won ten Knesset seats in the following election.
• In 1968, Rafi rejoined Mapai and Ahdut Ha'avoda, to form the Israel Labor Party, while David Ben-Gurion formed a new party, Hareshima Hamamlachtit (The State List), which won four Knesset seats in the 1969 elections.
• At the age of 18 he became a teacher in a Warsaw Jewish school and joined the Socialist-Zionist group "Poalei Zion" (Workers of Zion).
• Arriving in the Land of Israel in 1906, David Ben-Gurion became involved in the creation of the first agricultural workers' commune (which evolved into the Kvutzah and finally the Kibbutz), and helped establish the Jewish self-defense group, “Hashomer” (The Watchman).
• Following the outbreak of World War I he was deported by the Ottoman authorities with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (later, Israel's second President).
• Ben-Gurion traveled on behalf of the Socialist-Zionist cause to New York, where he met and married Paula Monbesz, a fellow Poalei Zion activist.

Quotes

• “It is only in Hebrew that you feel the full meaning of it -- all the associations which a different word has.”
• “This is our mandate.”
• “Even if they admit and not all of them do that our immigration brings material blessing to the land, [t]hey say and from the Arab viewpoint I think rightly so `None of your honey and none of your sting.` ”
• “Would convey a blessing to the Arab people.”
• “Thought is a strenuous art -- few practice it, and then only at rare times.”
• “Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist.”
• “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.”
• “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
• “Israel has created a new image of the Jew in the world - the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism.”
• “Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence”