Biography

At the age of 20, he emigrated to Palestine, where Ben-Gurion worked on farms and joined the Zionist movement. From 1910 he called himself David Ben-Gurion. He subsequently also studied law at the universities of Constantinople and Salonika. Because of his Zionist views, Ben-Gurion was then expelled from Palestine by the Turkish government. After the outbreak of World War I, Ben-Gurion joined a Jewish battalion in the British army to fight for the liberation of Palestine from Turkish rule.

After the war, his socialist convictions led him to join the ranks of the Jewish Workers' Movement, for which Ben-Gurion served as general secretary in Palestine under the British mandate from 1921 to 1935. In 1930 he was also promoted to head of the socialist "Mapai" party. In 1933, Ben-Gurion was accepted into the leadership of the World Zionist Organization. From 1935 to 1948, Ben-Gurion presided over the Jewish Agency, the most important Jewish representative body during the British mandate over Palestine. In this role, Ben-Gurion gained important experience in local self-government and in diplomatic exchanges with the British authorities.

The "Jewish Agency" and its chairman were therefore considered the core of the political leadership elite of a future state of Israel. Indeed, after Israel's proclamation in May 1948, Ben-Gurion rose to become its first prime minister. The conflicts with the Arab world that immediately followed prevented his government from fully implementing the economic policy program that the statesman had prepared to promote industry and agriculture. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion was able to promote significant infrastructure measures and the economic use of natural resources.

After the statesman initially withdrew from politics in 1963, just two years later he joined a splinter group that had split off from the "Mapai" party. This political commitment was followed by his final withdrawal into private life in 1970. He has since been recognized as one of the founding fathers of the State of Israel. In 1973 he published the book "Israel, the History of a State".

David Ben-Gurion died on December 1, 1973 in Tel Aviv.

- IMDb mini biography by: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth