David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel and was its first prime minister. Born David Grün in Płońsk in Russian Poland in 1886, the son of a lawyer active in the Zionist movement, he emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906 and worked as an agricultural labourer in the Galilee. He studied law in Constantinople, was expelled from Palestine by the Ottomans in 1915, spent the war years in New York, and returned with the Jewish Legion of the British army. He built the institutions rather than the ideology. He led the Histadrut trade union federation from 1921, which functioned as an employer, health service and welfare state for the Jewish community, and chaired the Jewish Agency from 1935, making him the effective leader of the Yishuv. His policy during the Second World War was to fight the British White Paper restricting immigration as if there were no war, and fight the war as if there were no White Paper. On 14 May 1948, hours before the British mandate expired, he read the declaration of independence in Tel Aviv. Five Arab armies invaded the next day. He merged the underground militias into a single national army by force, shelling the Irgun's arms ship Altalena in June to establish that there would be one authority. As prime minister he oversaw the absorption of some seven hundred thousand Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Arab world within a few years, a population increase without parallel, and built the state's institutions and its nuclear programme at Dimona. He retired to Sde Boker in the Negev in 1970 and died in 1973.
- Lived: 1886 CE – 1973 CE
- Nationality: Israeli
- Roles: First Prime Minister of Israel (1948–54, 1955–63)
