David Ben-Gurion: Founding Father of Israel

Today’s video is brought to you by Squarespace. More on them in just a bit.

The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 is one of the 20th century’s most important events. It changed forever the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, triggered the mass migrations of millions of people, and created numerous religious, cultural, and moral questions that the region and the world have been struggling with ever since. The man most directly responsible for that event didn’t initially look like a prototypical national icon. David Ben-Gurion was already an older man at the time of Israel’s founding—a short, balding figure who possessed little personal charisma or charm, earning himself few friends and many enemies. What he did have was dogged determination, decades of experience, and a single-minded focus to establish a country for the world’s Jews, no matter the cost or who had to be sacrificed.

Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first prime minister, leading the new country through the harrowing early days of war, fighting off five different armies attacking from all sides, and then engaging in the precarious practice of building a new nation. Once peace was achieved, the Israel that resulted was far from perfect. The compromises required with various internal factions were never going to make anyone happy, and the decisions made have engendered controversy ever since. But there is no doubt that Israel today would not be in its current position without its founding father, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

The man who would become one of the world’s most famous Jews was born David Gruen in 1886 in the Polish town of Plonsk, then under the control of the Russian Empire. During these formative years, Gruen would embark upon a great love affair that would consume him for the rest of his life—not with a person, but with an idea: Zionism. Founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896, Zionism was concerned with the simple yet profound idea that the world’s Jewish population, which had scattered around the world over the last two thousand years, would never know peace and safety unless they returned to their ancestral homeland, the country promised to the followers of Moses by God. This country went by many names: the Kingdom of Israel, the Holy Land, Zion, and its modern name, Palestine.

Zionism called for Jews to immigrate to Palestine, which at the start of the 20th century was a province of the Ottoman Empire, and to establish a Jewish state there. It was considered a fringe belief among Jews, an impossible fantasy dreamed up by idealists. Most Jews preferred to remain in their traditional homes, enduring the discrimination and occasional violence of their gentile neighbors as they had always done. Those who did choose to emigrate overwhelmingly chose to go to the New World. Between 1900 and 1914, almost 2 million Jews passed through Ellis Island in New York; in that same period, only about 35,000 Jews came to Palestine. One of these hardy volunteers was David Gruen, who arrived in 1906 with some friends from Plonsk. He was not a natural-born farmer, instead taking to political organizing, especially in the labor movement among the small Jewish population of Palestine.

In 1909, he started using the pen name David Ben-Gurion, giving himself a Hebrew surname after a first-century Jewish statesman in Jerusalem. The name would stick for the rest of his life. Despite expressing interest in becoming an Ottoman citizen, he was deported by the authorities during World War I, along with thousands of other enemy aliens, and ended up in America, where he went on a public speaking tour to drum up support for Zionism, usually without much success. He enlisted in the British army as a member of the Jewish Legion in 1918 but never saw combat, as the war ended before he could arrive at the front. He returned to Palestine, which was now under British control, bringing his new wife Paula and their infant daughter from her home in New York to live with him. It would not be a happy marriage; Paula was entirely devoted to him, but he didn’t return the favor.

Throughout the next two decades, Ben-Gurion steadily rose in importance in the Jewish political sphere in Palestine, being elected Secretary of the Histadrut, the labor union that had over two-thirds of the Jewish workforce as members, as well as founding a new political party in 1930, Mapai, a center-left Zionist labor party. In 1935, he was elected to head the Jewish Agency, which made him the de facto leader of Palestine’s Jews.

Ben-Gurion’s power as a leader did not come from personal charisma or soaring speeches. He was very short-spoken, had a shrill voice, and seemed to have trouble relating to people on a personal level most of the time. What attracted people to Ben-Gurion was his dogged determination to get what he wanted. He believed it was his sole mission in life to find a home for the Jews in Palestine and was willing to pay the price to do absolutely anything in order to achieve that goal. While other people only talked, he took action, which made people around him admire him but also scared them, which is why he had few close friends.

Ben-Gurion’s dreams were running into a serious problem, however, in the form of the British authorities who governed Palestine, who were having a very hard time keeping a lid on the province. The central problem was trying to keep the peace between the increasingly militant Jewish and Arab factions in the country, who were engaging in acts of violence against each other and against the British. The unspoken secret of Zionism was that in order for the Jewish state to come into existence, something would have to be done about Palestine’s Arab population, which greatly outnumbered the Jews. It would either have to be forced from their homes, or else so many Jewish immigrants needed to be brought in that they would form a majority population. There seemed to be little chance of the groups cooperating with each other, so idealistic notions of a single country jointly ruled by Jews and Arabs were quickly thrown out.

The outbreak of World War II only increased tensions between the British administration, the Jewish militia, the Haganah, and several Arab militia groups that had risen up in revolt against the British starting in 1936. The British government was worried that unless they made concessions to the Palestinian Arabs, they would ally themselves with Nazi Germany and attempt to achieve independence, so they severely curtailed the number of Jewish immigrants allowed into the country, stymying Ben-Gurion and the Zionists whose aspirations were tied to building a Jewish majority in Palestine by collecting as many Jews as possible from around the world.

As early as 1942, reports were reaching the outside world of the wholesale slaughter of Europe’s Jewish population at the hands of the Nazis and their allies, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, the catastrophe. The Holocaust was one of the worst atrocities in the history of human civilization. By the time the war ended, an estimated six million Jews had been murdered, a figure representing a third of the entire world’s Jewish population and two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. The worst affected was Ben-Gurion’s home country of Poland, where 90% of the Jews died. In 1939, Poland had 3.3 million Jews living in it; by 1950, there were only 50,000 left who hadn’t been murdered or fled. Ben-Gurion, whose own niece had died at Auschwitz, viewed the Holocaust as a natural culmination of centuries of discrimination and malice against the Jews, which only reinforced his belief that unless they had a country of their own, the Jews would continue to face massacres until none of them were left. Preventing a second Holocaust would be the rallying cry of Ben-Gurion and the Zionists from now on.

Privately, however, Ben-Gurion faced criticism for some of his remarks about the tragedy, particularly his belief that those who died were partly to blame because they hadn’t emigrated to Palestine before the war. There would also be controversy about what, if anything, the Jewish Agency in Palestine could have done to save more Jews from the Holocaust. It is known that Ben-Gurion viewed most of the rescue schemes brought to his attention for bringing Jews out of the occupied countries to be a waste of resources, particularly if it involved settling the refugees anywhere other than Palestine. The cause of Zionism had to come first, he argued; it was just another example of the ruthlessness that would both bore and terrify his compatriots in the years ahead.

By 1947, the British were doing everything they could to disentangle themselves from the trouble in Palestine. They referred the issue to the United Nations, which eventually decided on a partition of Palestine into two countries: one Jewish and one Arab. It was the best of a series of bad options according to experts at the time because there seemed to be no peaceful way to proceed that both sides would agree on. It was now all but certain that the only way to truly settle the issue would be on the battlefield. Violence began in Palestine almost immediately following the announcement of the partition plan. Jewish and Arab militias engaged in guerrilla warfare and acts of terrorism against each other, with countless tales of murder and reprisals, particularly in the countryside. The Haganah had largely suppressed Arab resistance in the areas assigned to the Jewish state in the partition plan by the spring of 1948, but this would prove to be just the first act in the unfolding drama.

On May 14, 1948, as the last British troops were preparing to leave the country, David Ben-Gurion announced to the world the establishment of the state of Israel, the culmination of 40 years of work building to this moment. He didn’t have time to celebrate for long, though; the next day, as expected, the armies of Palestine’s Arab neighbors invaded the country from all sides. The leaders of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq all rejected the U.N. partition plan and were allied together to crush the state of Israel in its infancy. They weren’t doing it out of compassion for their Palestinian counterparts, though; each of the countries that made up the Arab League had their own motivations for getting into the war. Egypt and Transjordan, in particular, hoped to annex large swaths of Palestine for themselves once they conquered the territory.

Despite the fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union quickly gave official recognition to Israel, not many people gave the new country much of a chance against the combined onslaught of five different armies. The Haganah, which would form the core of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), was small, under-equipped, and undertrained in the early stages of the war. Jerusalem was put under siege while the Arab armies advanced from the south and the east, pushing the Israelis back to the Mediterranean coastline. Ben-Gurion, now Israel’s prime minister, and his new cabinet needed to work like a miracle if they were going to survive.

The Haganah had been smuggling weapons into the country for months before the end of the mandate, funded in large part by wealthy American Jews. The Israelis were able to get their hands on a large amount of surplus World War II equipment while agents went around the world recruiting veterans of the conflict to fight for Israel. Much of the early Israeli Air Force consisted of Americans who had been fighter pilots during the war, and the first Israeli general, Orde Wingate, was a New Yorker named Mickey Marcus, who became famous for building the Jerusalem Burma Road to relieve the siege of the holy city before being accidentally killed by friendly fire in June.

The IDF benefited from the poor coordination of the allied Arab armies and overcame the manpower imbalance by conscripting every Israeli citizen between the ages of 17 and 25 into the IDF. Universal conscription is still a cornerstone of Israeli defense policy today. By the time the war ended in March 1949, Israel controlled both the territory designated for the Jewish state and 60% of the Arab state territory, including the western half of Jerusalem and the entirety of the Negev Desert in the south, which would prove crucial when uranium was discovered there later. Jordan would annex the eastern half of Jerusalem and the area known as the West Bank, while the Gaza Strip in the southwest of the country was controlled by the Egyptians.

Ben-Gurion has received mixed reviews for his leadership during the first Arab-Israeli war. He is credited with organizing the infrastructure of Israel after its founding, including successfully concentrating the various Jewish paramilitary groups into the combined IDF. However, he had little experience with military strategy, and his near-constant meddling in the day-to-day conduct of the war infuriated his generals and was considered to be more of a hindrance than a help. One of his most unpleasant traits was his eagerness to portray himself as an expert in subjects that he was not, coupled with a tendency to become irritated when more knowledgeable people contradicted him. Many contemporaries believed that he had an inferiority complex because he never completed his college education and was attempting to overcompensate for this.

The biggest controversy of the nascent Israeli government during the war was the mass exodus of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from the country. By the time the war ended, it is believed that up to 75% of those who fled were compelled to leave by the Israeli military as part of an official policy that went all the way up to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion himself. He had always believed that it was impossible for Jews and Arabs to coexist peacefully in Palestine and at times made controversial statements about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, viewing them as primitive and foreign. Hundreds of towns and villages were emptied out, their populations replaced by new Jewish immigrants. Even large cities like Jaffa were decimated; the ancient city, whose origins date back to 1800 B.C., went from 60,000 Arabs to 4,000 over the course of the war and would eventually be absorbed into the neighboring city of Tel Aviv.

Palestinians who fled as part of the Nakba, or “disaster,” found themselves in a bad situation. Most of them ended up in refugee camps in neighboring countries, where they lived in squalid conditions. Nobody wanted to be responsible for them; the Arab states refused to assimilate them into their own countries, preferring to use them as a bargaining chip for future wars with Israel, while Israelis denied them the right to return to their former homes or to receive compensation for their lost property. The plight of the Palestinians continues to be a sore point in the Middle East to this day, a troubled legacy that Israel has struggled with ever since. Ben-Gurion’s active participation in the expulsion is one of the biggest criticisms of his time in office, seen as yet another example of his willingness to make ruthless decisions to achieve the goal of a Jewish state, no matter the cost.

Things didn’t get any easier for Israel following the 1949 armistice. Ben-Gurion’s government now had to forge an entirely new kind of nation—the only one in the world where the majority of its citizens were Jewish. Things could have very easily slipped into the kind of chaos that often surrounds the foundation of new states, especially surrounded by hostile neighbors. There were tensions not only between Arabs and Jews but also between the Jews themselves, with hostility between Jews who immigrated from different parts of the world, a constant tug of war between followers of Orthodox Judaism and secular Jews, and political conflicts between left-wing and right-wing coalitions.

The leadership of David Ben-Gurion is credited with helping to stabilize the situation following the war and setting Israel up for future success. His most prominent achievements include the establishment of a national education system that would become one of the finest in the world, striking a balanced policy between Orthodox and secular Jews that rallied both factions behind him, the construction of the National Water Carrier that continues to bring vital supplies of water from the Sea of Galilee to the arid central and southern regions of the country, and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of a stable democratic form of government that includes civilian control over the military.

Ben-Gurion was also responsible for ordering the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, to capture the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, where he had been living in hiding. Eichmann, an SS officer considered to be one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, was convicted of crimes against humanity in a widely publicized trial in Jerusalem in December 1961 and was executed the following June. His shadow would loom over the country for decades after.

Ben-Gurion achieved many of his policy victories through sheer force of will, even when faced with popular opposition, such as when he made a much-criticized deal with the West German government in 1952 that would see the Germans pay billions of Deutsche Marks to Israel as reparations for the Holocaust, which ultimately pulled Israel out of its post-war economic crisis and helped build up its industrial infrastructure.

At the age of 67, Ben-Gurion professed an interest in retiring from government, citing ill health and fatigue. He officially stepped down in January 1954, retiring to a communal farming community, or kibbutz, in the Negev Desert called Sde Boker. His colleagues weren’t sure if he was actually serious about retiring, as he seemed bored in his remote cottage and had frequently threatened to quit in the past. It was just one of his most popular ways of coercing people into giving him what he wanted.

He wasn’t out of government for long. Following a scandal that forced the resignation of Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, his successor as prime minister convinced him to take up the post himself in February 1955, and in November of that year, he was re-elected as prime minister. Ben-Gurion would take his country to war again in 1956 in a secret alliance with Great Britain and France to unseat Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Suez Crisis ended in humiliation for the two European countries and a major image boost for Nasser, but Israel did win some concessions, including the reopening of the Straits of Tehran at the southern end of the country to Israeli ships and the establishment of a U.N. peacekeeping force along the Egyptian border that helped prevent hostile incursions by Arab militants.

In the later years of his time in office, Ben-Gurion increasingly began to show signs of his age, particularly a diminished mental capacity that led many in the cabinet to fear that he was losing his grip on reality. Despite Israel’s increasingly strong position and military, he continued to fear that his country would be wiped out by the hostile Arab nations that surrounded it and made a strong push for the development of nuclear weapons, believing them to be the only guarantor of Israeli safety. This caused a standoff with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who believed that allowing Israel to acquire the bomb would only escalate the situation in the Middle East.

In June 1963, after serving as prime minister for a total of 13 years, Ben-Gurion retired for good. He lived long enough to see Israel achieve its greatest military victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 when it decisively defeated the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, capturing the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Back in 1948, Ben-Gurion had cautioned against additional territorial conquests because of the number of citizens living there, which could potentially destabilize the country,