Ben gurion biography book
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David Ben-Gurion
Prime Minister of Israel (–; –)
"Ben Gurion" redirects here. For other uses, see Ben Gurion (disambiguation).
"David Gruen" redirects here. For the Australian statistician and mathematician, see David Gruen (economist).
This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
David Ben-Gurion (ben GOOR-ee-ən; Hebrew: דָּוִד בֶּן־גּוּרִיּוֹן[daˈvidbenɡuʁˈjon]ⓘ; born David Grün; 16 October – 1 månad ) was the primary national founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel. As head of the Jewish Agency from , and later president of the Jewish Agency Executive, he was the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, and largely led the movement for an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine.
Born in Płońsk, then part of Congress Poland, to Polish Jewish parents, he immigrated to the Palestine distrikt of the Ottoman Empire in Adopting the name of Ben-Gurion in , he rose to beco
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Book Review &#; A State at Any Cost
A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion
(Tom Segev: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux: )
Translated by Haim Watzman
Reviewed by Peter Eisenstadt
During the years Tom Segev was writing his indispensable biography of David Ben-Gurion, A State at Any Cost, he records that he was confronted by a Ben-Gurion revival in Israel; new books, plays, films, documentaries about the former prime minister. Many of them looked at him nostalgically, eager to recall a time when Israel’s leaders were not personally corrupt, did not see public service as an excuse for private enrichment, and when Israel and “unending moral quagmire” were not yet synonyms. (Ben-Gurion did have an unfortunate habit of making extravagant book purchases on the government’s shekel, which is, I must say, for me anyway, the most forgivable of all forms of venality.) And it is certainly true that during Ben-Gurion’s era, Zionism, outside of the Arab world of course, had far more la
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Berl Katznelson, one of Labour Zionism’s ideological founders described David Ben-Gurion as ‘history’s gift to the Jewish people.’ Anita Shapira rightly describes Israel’s first Prime Minister as a Jacobin – a product of revolutionary fin de siecle Eastern Europe, a cold enigmatic figure lacking charisma who changed the flow of Jewish history and redirected it into a national channel. As Shapira remarks, ‘people admired Ben-Gurion, but did not really like him.’
Ben-Gurion’s story began as David Gruen (Green) in the township of Plonsk, marooned on the highway between Warsaw and Gdansk. Over 60 per cent of its inhabitants were Jews and many of them were Gerer Hassidim. Ben-Gurion’s father was a mitnaged, an opponent of Hassidism and a member of the early Zionist group, Hibbat Zion. An outsider from the very beginning, he grew up imbibing the writings of the founders of Zionism. He joined Poale Zion at a founding meeting in the Warsaw home of the Marxist Zionist, Yitzhak Tabenkin an