David Ben-Gurion

He married Paula Munweis in 1917 and the couple had three children.

Towards the end of his life, he lived in a desert in Negev, where he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and passed away due to a stroke on December 1, 1973.

The ‘Ben Gurion International Airport’ in Israel is named after him and one of the major institutions in the country, ‘Ben-Gurion University of Negev’ also bears his name.

David Ben-Gurion was born on October 16, 1886 in Plonsk to Avigdor Grun and Scheindel. His father was the leader of the Hovevei Zion movement, which became a major influencing factor and led him to adopt Zionism. His mother passed away when he was just 11-years-old.

At the age of 14, he co-founded a club, ‘Ezra’, which promoted Hebrew studies and the ‘promised’ Holy land.

As a student at the University of Warsaw in 1905, he joined the Social-Democratic Jewish Workers’ Party known as ‘Poalei Zion’. Twice arrested for the Russian Revolution, he finally immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906.

In Palestine, he was appointed as the chairman of the central committee of the newly formed branch of the group ‘Poalei Zion’, in Jaffa, the port city of Israel

Apart from being the party’s chairman, he worked as an orange-picker and in 1907, he moved to Galilee, where he worked as an agricultural laborer. It was during this time, he decided to break away from politics.

On April 12, 1909, he was involved with an armed group who staged an attempted robbery, who ended up murdering a farmer and a watchman. In the same year, he joined the ‘HaShomer’, a Jewish defense organization, which helped safeguard local Jewish communities.

In November 1911, he moved to Thessaloniki, which he believed was one of the best Jewish cities he had ever seen. He learned Turkish in order to be able to study law. He moved to Istanbul in 1912, where he joined Istanbul University.

Gurion and another friend, Ben Zvi, recruited around forty Jews into a Jewish militia to assist the Ottoman Army during World War I, however, despite his efforts, he was deported to Egypt in March 1915.

During 1936–1939, when the Arab revolt was taking place in Palestine, he introduced a policy of ‘Havlagah’, a set of actions to be taken against Arabs who were attacking Jewish settlements. He also supported the Peel Commission when they suggested that Palestine be split into Jewish and Arab settlements.

At the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he was responsible for overseeing the state’s military operations. He unified all the Jewish militias of the state into one national army, the ‘Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF).