95 Facts About David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion was the primary national founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel.

David Ben-Gurion returned as minister of defence in 1955 after the Lavon Affair and the resignation of Pinhas Lavon.

David Ben-Gurion backed Israel's reprisal operations to Arab guerrilla attacks and its invasion of Egypt, along with Britain and France, during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

David Ben-Gurion stepped down from office in 1963, and retired from political life in 1970.

David Ben-Gurion then moved to his modest "hut" in Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert, where he lived until his death.

David Ben-Gurion's father, Avigdor Grun, was a pokatny doradca, navigating his clients through the often corrupt Imperial legal system.

David Ben-Gurion was the youngest of three boys with an older and younger sister.

Between the ages of five and 13 David Ben-Gurion attended five different heders as well as compulsory Russian classes.

In 1904 David Ben-Gurion moved to Warsaw where he hoped to enrol in the Warsaw Mechanical-Technical School founded by Hipolit Wawelberg.

David Ben-Gurion did not have sufficient qualifications to matriculate and took work teaching Hebrew in a Warsaw heder.

David Ben-Gurion organised a strike over working conditions amongst garment workers.

David Ben-Gurion was known to use intimidatory tactics, such as extorting money from wealthy Jews at gunpoint to raise funds for Jewish workers.

David Ben-Gurion travelled with his sweetheart Rachel Nelkin and her mother, as well as Shlomo Zemach his comrade from Ezra.

Immediately on landing in Jaffa, 7 September 1906, David Ben-Gurion set off, on foot, in a group of 14, to Petah Tikva.

David Ben-Gurion found work as a day labourer, waiting each morning hoping to be chosen by an overseer.

David Ben-Gurion wrote long letters in Hebrew to his father and friends.

On his disembarkation at Jaffa, David Ben-Gurion had been spotted by Israel Shochat who had arrived two years previously and had established a group of around 25 Poale Zion followers.

Shochat engineered the elections so that David Ben-Gurion was elected onto the five-man Central Committee and the 10-man Manifesto Committee.

David Ben-Gurion arranged that Ben-Gurion was chosen as chairman of the sessions.

David Ben-Gurion walked to the meetings from Petah Tikva until he moved to Jaffa where he gave occasional Hebrew lessons.

David Ben-Gurion set up the Jaffa Professional Trade Union Alliance with 75 members.

David Ben-Gurion made detailed plans with which he tried to entice his father to come and be a farmer.

In October 1907, on Shlomo Zemach's suggestion, David Ben-Gurion moved to Sejera.

David Ben-Gurion immediately deserted and returned to Sejera, travelling, via Germany, with forged papers.

David Ben-Gurion contributed 15 articles over the first year, using various pen names, eventually settling for Ben Gurion.

David Ben-Gurion chose Ben-Gurion after the historic Joseph ben Gurion.

Ben-Zvi and Shochat planned to study law at Istanbul University; David Ben-Gurion was to join them but first needed to learn Turkish, spending eight months in Salonika, at that time the most advanced Jewish community in the area.

Ben-Zvi obtained a forged secondary school certificate so David Ben-Gurion could join him in Dar al-Funun.

David Ben-Gurion was entirely dependent on funding from his father, while Ben-Zvi found work teaching.

David Ben-Gurion was at sea, returning from Istanbul, when the First World War broke out.

David Ben-Gurion was not amongst the thousands of foreign nationals deported in December 1914.

David Ben-Gurion was hospitalised with diphtheria for two weeks and spoke on only five occasions and was poorly received.

The follow-up was conceived as an anthology of work from Poale Zion leaders; in fact David Ben-Gurion took over as editor, writing the introduction and two-thirds of the text.

David Ben-Gurion suspended all his Poale Zion activities and spent most of the next 18 months in New York Public Library.

In May 1918 David Ben-Gurion joined the newly formed Jewish Legion of the British Army and trained at Fort Edward in Windsor, Nova Scotia.

David Ben-Gurion volunteered for the 38th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, one of the four which constituted the Jewish Legion.

David Ben-Gurion's unit fought against the Ottomans as part of Chaytor's Force during the Palestine Campaign, though he remained in a Cairo hospital with dysentery.

David Ben-Gurion had been five days absent without leave visiting friends in Jaffa.

David Ben-Gurion was an Irish gentile, and although Reform rabbi Joachim Prinz converted her to Judaism soon after, neither the Palestine rabbinate nor her mother-in-law Paula Ben-Gurion considered her a real Jew until she underwent an Orthodox conversion many years later.

David Ben-Gurion argued that a Parliament, even with an Arab majority, was the way forward.

David Ben-Gurion, already emerging as the leader of the Yishuv, succeeded in getting Kaplansky's ideas rejected.

Labor Zionism became the dominant tendency in the World Zionist Organization and in 1935 David Ben-Gurion became chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency, a role he kept until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas and David Ben-Gurion supported this policy.

David Ben-Gurion lived in London for some months in 1941.

David Ben-Gurion gave him a lift, and out of the blue told him why he preferred Lenin to Trotsky: "Lenin was Trotsky's inferior in terms of intellect", but Lenin, unlike Trotsky, "was decisive".

When confronted with a dilemma, Trotsky would do what David Ben-Gurion despised about the old-style diaspora Jews: he manoeuvred; as opposed to Lenin, who would cut the Gordian knot, accepting losses while focusing on the essentials.

The 1937 David Ben-Gurion letter was written when he was head of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency, to his son Amos on 5 October 1937.

David Ben-Gurion did not give clear or written orders in that regard, but Morris claims that Ben-Gurion's subordinates understood his policy well:.

From April 1948, David Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer.

David Ben-Gurion published two volumes setting out his views on relations between Zionists and the Arab world: We and Our Neighbors, published in 1931, and My Talks with Arab Leaders published in 1967.

David Ben-Gurion believed in the equal rights of Arabs who remained in and would become citizens of Israel.

David Ben-Gurion recognised the strong attachment of Palestinian Arabs to the land.

In 1909, David Ben-Gurion attempted to learn Arabic but gave up.

David Ben-Gurion believed a peaceful solution with the Arabs had no chance and soon began preparing the Yishuv for war.

David Ben-Gurion famously told Jews to "support the British as if there is no White Paper and oppose the White Paper as if there is no war".

However, David Ben-Gurion asked that the operation be delayed, but the Irgun refused.

On 14 May 1948, a few hours before the British Mandate officially terminated, David Ben-Gurion declared Israeli independence in a ceremony in Tel Aviv.

David Ben-Gurion feared the reaction of Western powers and wanted to maintain good relations with the United States and not to provoke the British.

David Ben-Gurion was aware that world Jewry could and would only feel comfortable to throw their support behind the nascent state if it was shrouded with religious mystique.

Therefore, in September 1947 David Ben-Gurion decided to reach a formal status quo agreement with the Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party.

David Ben-Gurion described himself as an irreligious person who developed atheism in his youth and who demonstrated no great sympathy for the elements of traditional Judaism, though he quoted the Bible extensively in his speeches and writings.

David Ben-Gurion was proud of the fact that he had only set foot in a synagogue once in Israel, worked on Yom Kippur and ate pork.

In later time, David Ben-Gurion refused to define himself as "secular", and he regarded himself a believer in God.

David Ben-Gurion insisted that all weapons be handed over to the IDF.

David Ben-Gurion oversaw and approved Israel's biological warfare poisoning operations against Palestinian Arab civilians in Operation Cast Thy Bread during the 1948 war.

On 14 May 1948, on the last day of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel.

David Ben-Gurion remained in that post until 1963, except for a period of nearly two years between 1954 and 1955.

David Ben-Gurion presided over various national projects aimed at the rapid development of the country and its population: Operation Magic Carpet, the airlift of Jews from Arab countries, the construction of the National Water Carrier, rural development projects and the establishment of new towns and cities.

David Ben-Gurion saw the struggle to make the Negev desert bloom as an area where the Jewish people could make a major contribution to humanity as a whole.

David Ben-Gurion believed that the sparsely populated and barren Negev desert offered a great opportunity for the Jews to settle in Palestine with minimal obstruction of the Arab population, and set a personal example by settling in kibbutz Sde Boker at the center of the Negev.

In 1953, after a handful of unsuccessful retaliatory actions, David Ben-Gurion charged Ariel Sharon, then security chief of the northern region, with setting up a new commando unit designed to respond to fedayeen infiltrations.

David Ben-Gurion was seen as having protected involved subordinates in the military from accountability.

In 1953, David Ben-Gurion announced his intention to withdraw from government and was replaced by Moshe Sharett, who was elected the second Prime Minister of Israel in January 1954.

However, David Ben-Gurion temporarily served as acting prime minister when Sharett visited the United States in 1955.

David Ben-Gurion had ordered the operation without consulting the Israeli cabinet and seeking a vote on the matter, and Sharett would later bitterly complain that David Ben-Gurion had exceeded his authority.

David Ben-Gurion assumed the post of defence minister and was re-elected prime minister.

In 1957, David Ben-Gurion was injured by a grenade thrown into the Knesset plenum by a troubled Jewish immigrant from Syria, Moshe Dwek, who claimed that nobody was being attentive to his needs.

In 1959, David Ben-Gurion learned from West German officials of reports that the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, was likely living in hiding in Argentina.

David Ben-Gurion is said to have been "nearly obsessed" with Israel's obtaining nuclear weapons, feeling that a nuclear arsenal was the only way to counter the Arabs' superiority in numbers, space, and financial resources, and that it was the only sure guarantee of Israel's survival and the prevention of another Holocaust.

David Ben-Gurion stepped down as prime minister on 16 June 1963.

David Ben-Gurion was asked to reconsider his decision by the cabinet.

David Ben-Gurion's resignation was not an act of farewell but another act of his personal struggle and possibly an indication of his mental state.

David Ben-Gurion had insisted that the operation be properly investigated, while Eshkol refused.

David Ben-Gurion accused Rabin of putting Israel in mortal danger by mobilising the reserves and openly preparing for war with an Arab coalition.

David Ben-Gurion told Rabin that at the very least, he should have obtained the support of a foreign power, as he had done during the Suez Crisis.

David Ben-Gurion subsequently wrote in his diary that he was troubled by Israel's impending offensive.

David Ben-Gurion agreed with him but foresaw problems in transferring Palestinian refugees from Gaza to Jordan, and recommended that Israel insist on direct talks with Egypt, favouring withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace and free navigation through the Straits of Tiran.

David Ben-Gurion argued that no Arabs would have to be evicted in the process.

In 1968, when Rafi merged with Mapai to form the Alignment, David Ben-Gurion refused to reconcile with his old party.

David Ben-Gurion favoured electoral reforms in which a constituency-based system would replace what he saw as a chaotic proportional representation method.

David Ben-Gurion formed another new party, the National List, which won four seats in the 1969 election.

David Ben-Gurion retired from politics in 1970 and spent his last years living in a modest home in kibbutz Sde Boker, working on an 11-volume history of Israel's early years.

On 18 November 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, David Ben-Gurion suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, and was taken to Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, Ramat Gan.

David Ben-Gurion's body lay in state in the Knesset compound before being flown by helicopter to Sde Boker.

David Ben-Gurion was buried alongside his wife Paula in the Ben-Gurion Tomb National Park at Midreshet Ben-Gurion.