David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion led the Jewish community of British-ruled Palestine from the mid-1930s, proclaimed the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 and served as its first prime minister for most of the years until 1963. Israelis regard him as the country's founding father. His record is also bound up with the war of 1948, during which a majority of Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel, a subject historians continue to debate.

He was born David Grün on 16 October 1886 in Płońsk, in the part of Poland ruled by the Russian Empire. In Warsaw he joined the socialist Zionist party Poale Zion, and was arrested twice in the 1905 revolution. In 1906 he landed at Jaffa, in the Ottoman province of Palestine, and worked as a farm labourer. From 1910 he wrote for a Hebrew labour paper in Jerusalem, taking the name Ben-Gurion. He went to study in Istanbul, hoping Zionists could work within the Ottoman system, but was deported in 1915.

In the United States, where he raised support and wrote, he married Paula Munweis in 1917; in 1918 he enlisted in the Jewish Legion of the British Army, though illness kept him from the fighting.

Back in Palestine, by then under British rule, he helped found the Histadrut labour federation in 1920 and served as its general secretary from 1921 to 1935. In 1930 he became leader of the new Mapai party, and in 1935 chairman of the Jewish Agency executive, making him the effective leader of the Jewish community. He backed the Peel Commission's 1937 proposal to partition Palestine. After Britain restricted Jewish immigration in 1939, he urged Jews to fight alongside Britain while opposing its policy, and aided illegal immigration. After the war the Haganah militia he oversaw briefly joined the Irgun and Lehi in attacks on the British. He condemned the Irgun's bombing of the King David Hotel in July 1946, which killed 91 people, although he had approved the plan beforehand and then asked for it to be delayed.

When the UN voted for partition in November 1947, the Jewish Agency accepted and Arab leaders rejected the plan, and civil war followed. On 14 May 1948 Ben-Gurion read the declaration of independence in Tel Aviv, and neighbouring Arab states invaded. As prime minister and defence minister he merged the militias into a single army, the Israel Defense Forces, shelling the Irgun arms ship Altalena when its fighters refused to hand over weapons. Israel won the 1948 war, during which most of Palestine's Arab population fled or was expelled. Historians disagree over his role: Benny Morris argues that he encouraged expulsions without written orders, and the purpose of the Haganah's Plan Dalet remains disputed. Morris has also said that Ben-Gurion covered up for officers responsible for massacres.

After Mapai won the first election in February 1949, Ben-Gurion oversaw the building of state institutions and the absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, and championed settling the Negev. He also concluded a reparations agreement with West Germany for Jewish property seized by the Nazis. Raids against Palestinian militants included the 1953 attack on Qibya, in which 69 villagers were killed; he publicly blamed Israeli civilians rather than the army. He withdrew from government in 1954 and settled at kibbutz Sde Boker, but returned in 1955. In 1956, in secret coordination with Britain and France, Israel invaded Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in the Suez Crisis, withdrawing under American pressure. He ordered the capture of Adolf Eichmann, wanted for his part in the Holocaust, who was seized in Argentina in 1960, tried in Israel and executed in 1962.

He resigned in June 1963 and fell out with his successor, Levi Eshkol, forming the breakaway Rafi party in 1965. He retired in 1970 to Sde Boker to write history. He died on 1 December 1973 after a stroke and was buried in the Negev beside his wife.

Our 1945 map shows British-ruled Palestine before independence, and the 1960 map shows Israel during his second period as prime minister.