B. was born in Płońsk, Congress Poland which was then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Avigdor Grün was a lawyer and a leader in the Hovevei Zion movement. His mother, Scheindel, passed away when he was 11 years old.

B. grew up to be an ardent Zionist. As a student at the University of Warsaw, he joined the Marxist Paole Zion movement in 1904. He was arrested twice during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He immigrated to Palestine in 1906, and became a major leader of Paole Zion with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.

In Palestine, he first worked in agriculture, picking oranges. In 1912 he moved to Turkey to study law at Istanbul University together with Ben-Zvi and adopted the Hebrew name Ben-Gurion, after Yosef ben Gurion, a general of the Jews during the First Jewish-Roman War. He also worked as a journalist. In 1915, B. and Ben-Zvi were expelled from Palestine, then under Ottoman rule, for their political activities.

Settling in New York City in 1915, he met Russian-born Paula Munweis. They were married in 1917, and had three children. He joined the British Army in 1918 as part of the 38th Battalion of the Jewish Legion (following the Balfour Declaration in November 1917). He and his family returned to Palestine after World War I following its capture by the British from the Ottoman Empire.

The left-wing and right-wing of Poale Zion split in 1919 with B. and his friend Berl Katznelson leading the right faction of the Labor Zionist movement. In 1920 he assisted in the formation and subsequently became general secretary of the Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation in Palestine. In 1930, Poale Zion Right and Ahdut HaAvoda joined forces to create Mapai, the right-wing Zionist labor party, under B.'s leadership. The left-wing of Labour Zionism was represented by Mapam. Labor Zionism became the dominant tendency in the World Zionist Organization, and in 1935 B. became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, B. instigated a policy of restraint ("Havlagah") in which the Haganah and other Jewish groups did not retaliate for Arab attacks against Jewish civilians, concentrating only on self-defence. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and B. supported this policy. This led to conflict with Jabotinsky who opposed partition and as a result Jabotinsky's supporters split with the Haganah and abandoned Havlagah.

The British 1939 White paper stipulated that Jewish immigration to Palestine was to be limited to 15,000 a year for the first five years, and would subsequently be contingent on Arab consent. Restrictions were also placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs. After this B. changed his policy towards the British, stating: "Peace in Palestine is not the best situation for thwarting the policy of the White Paper". B. believed a peaceful solution with the Arabs had no chance and soon began preparing the Yishuv for war. 

During the Second World War, B. encouraged Palestine's Jews to volunteer for the British Army. About 10% of the Jewish population of Palestine volunteered for the British Army, including many women. At the same time B. helped the illegal immigration of thousands of European Jewish refugees to Palestine during a period when the British placed heavy restrictions on Jewish immigration.

In 1946 B. agreed that the Haganah could cooperate with Menachem Begin's Irgun in fighting the British. B. agreed to Begin's plan to carry out the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. The British left Palestine in 1948 on the heels of a United Nations resolution partitioning the territory between the Jews and Arabs. In September 1947 B. reached a status quo agreement with the Orthodox Agudath Israel party. He sent a letter to Agudat Israel promising that the Shabbat would be Israel's official day of rest, there would be no civil marriages, and the Orthodox sector would be granted autonomy in the sphere of religious education.

B. declared the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. During the first weeks of Israel's independence, he ordered all militias to be replaced by one national army, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). B. played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the Palestinian exodus. He personally ordered expulsions.

B. became Prime Minister on May 14, 1948 and would remain in that post until 1963, except for a period of nearly two years between 1954 and 1955. On the 19th-20th July, 1956, America and Britain withdrew their offer to fund the Aswan High Dam project on the Nile. A week later Nasser ordered the nationalization of the Suez Canal. B. collaborated with the British and French and stormed the Sinai Peninsula thus giving British and French forces a pretext to intervene in order to secure the Suez Canal. Intervention by the United States and the United Nations forced the British, French and Israelis to back down. 

B. retired from politics in 1970 and spent his last years living in his home on the kibbutz.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe proved from official records how the Israeli state came into being with blood on its hands from lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who'd lived on it for hundreds of years previously. According to Pappe, they were ethnically cleansed since the 1940s, and slaughtered without mercy so their homeland would become one for Jews alone.

Pappe documents how it all began. He designates the politicians who devised the plan and the generals who carried out the ethnic cleansing naming the guilty, the villages and urban areas destroyed, and the cruelest crimes committed against defenseless people only wanting to live in peace on their own land. 

Pappe describes the origins of Zionist ideology. Following Theodor Herzl's death in 1904, Zionists decided goal was to colonize Palestine because of its biblical connection that happened to be land occupied inappropriately by "strangers" meaning anyone not Jewish having "no right" to be there. Zionist leaders wanted a complete dispossession of indigenous Arabs to reestablish the ancient land of Eretz Israel as a Jewish state for Jews alone. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, said already in June, 1938 to the Jewish Agency Executive and never wavering from later: "I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it."  He played a central role planning and executing the crime. 

The whole business took six months in 1948 to complete. It expelled about 800,000 people, killed many others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. The action was a clear case of ethnic cleansing for which Germans at Nuremberg were hanged. It included cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes, villages and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless people given no quarter including women and children.  

Ethnic cleansing completed, Palestinians' agony and hardships were only beginning. Beginning 1949, and continuing to this day. Refugees were put in prison camps while many others escaping cleansing were physically abused and harassed under Israeli military rule. Other kinds of Israeli harshness were also introduced, now that all Palestinians are subjected in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. There are roadblocks that include checkpoints and curfews with violators shot on sight. These conditions were imposed to make life so unbearable, those subjected to them might opt to leave the territories for relief elsewhere. 

That works because the US supports and funds the Jewish state allowing it to get away with mass-murder, property destruction, land theft and denial of everything Palestinians hold dear including their lives and freedom. Nothing has changed since 1948. Palestinians have no bargaining power and can do nothing to alleviate their plight. The UN world body should have aided them but never did.  

Literatur über / Writings concerning B.: 

Letzte Änderung / Last update: 07.01.2009 

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