Word: ben-gurion
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Born in Poland, Peres was taken to Palestine at eleven. While still in high school, he joined the Haganah, the famed underground Jewish self-defense organization. In his early 20s, he persuaded the Histadrut youth movement to support David Ben-Gurion. The statesman soon began to groom Peres for a political career. Wearying of desk jobs in the newly established Ministry of Defense, Peres took off for a brief vacation in the U.S. in 1950. He learned English in three months and took advanced courses in philosophy and economics at New York City's New School for Social Research...
When Peres, at 29, returned to Israel in 1952, Premier Ben-Gurion appointed him to top posts in the Defense Ministry. For the next 13 years, he played the key role in organizing the Israeli Defense Forces, developed the nation's arms industry and nuclear-research program. He traveled abroad constantly to purchase arms and conduct delicate military negotiations. Peres quickly acquired a reputation as a canny, effective and realistic bargainer. His great coup came in 1955, when he brought off the Franco-Israeli military alliance, involving more than $1 billion in arms purchases from France that made possible...
...lacked the dazzle of his flamboyant predecessor, but his low-key, almost reticent manner and his quiet sense of competence impressed his hosts. By his very visit, so early in the new Carter Administration, he restored momentum to the long-stalled peacemaking process. At Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport he proclaimed that his would "not be an easy task nor one which is quickly achieved." But he arrived in the Middle East when hopes for peace were higher than at any time since...
Helmholz's tonsorial firing for effect is the result of complaints from customers whose fine, flyaway hair made them look more like Ben-Gurion than Ben Gazzara. Helmholz first tried to solve the problem with an old barber's trick: burning the ends with flaming candles. The knobby, stunted ends weighed down the hair and made it lie flat, all right, but Helmholz's Nob Hill clients waxed eloquent about tallow dripping down the backs of their necks. So Helmholz, 33, began experimenting with a small blowtorch and soon found it the perfect tool: "It is maneuverable...
Quiet Day. Compared with other fedayeen terrorist acts in the past, the Ben-Gurion incident was relatively mild; four years ago in the same terminal, members of the Japanese Red Army, allied with the P.F.L.P., killed 28 people. Nevertheless, last week's explosion was one more bloody link in the Middle East's seemingly endless chain of anguish. Another and more important one is the civil war in Lebanon, where almost 20,000 people have been killed in nearly 14 months of inconclusive fighting. That conflict has reached the point where it is considered a quiet...