David Ben Gurion, (originally David Gruen) the founder and first Prime Minister of the State of Israel, was born in 1886 in Plonsk Poland. His father Avigdor Gruen was an ardent Zionist who established a Hebrew School and this is where the young David was educated. His mother died when he was 11 years old.
When David Ben Gurion was a teenager he founded “Ezra” a Hebrew youth group and while at University in Warsaw he joined “Poalei Zion” the Zionist Socialist Party. In 1906 he immigrated to what was then Turkish Palestine and worked as a farmhand and a teacher and helped establish “Hashomer” the Jewish Self Defense Group.
In 1912 he traveled to Istanbul to study law; however, he was exiled to Egypt after the outbreak of the First World War after being arrested together with other leading Zionists and accused of conspiring against the Ottoman Empire. He then decided to travel to New York where he learned English without any delay and started the establishment of a group of young Jews to prepare them for settling in the land of Israel.
While in the United States his Marxist ideas waned and his life was impacted by the democratic values that he embraced during his years there and which he held for the rest of his life. While in the United States he met and married a nurse Paula Munweis and she remained his faithful companion until her death in 1968.
After the end of World War 1, Ben Gurion returned to what was then British-controlled Palestine and set about establishing the General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) as he believed this would be the foundation of a Jewish State.
Ben Gurion worked unstintingly to put forward the Zionist Cause in Europe and the United States, whilst at the same time encouraging the idea of the establishment of a Jewish military force in Palestine and at the outbreak of the Second World War he encouraged Jews to fight for the allies but at the same time organizing agencies to smuggle Jews, fleeing the Holocaust, into Palestine.
Despite the opposition of the government of the United States, Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the Jewish State on May 14th, 1948, and became the first prime minister and minister of defense when he insisted that all armed groups be dissolved and become part of the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF was soon in action defending the country against all the enormous Arab Army’s that did their best to destroy the fledgling state.
In 1953 he left government for a short while and two years later he returned as Prime Minister, remaining so until 1963. In 1970 at the age of 84, he finally retired from politics.
David Ben Gurion died in 1973 and will always be respected and remembered as the “Father of the Nation”.