Word: ben-gurion
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...Ben-Gurion soon left the land for the labor movement. He started out organizing Jewish workers and wrote for a small labor weekly. Eventually his political activities on behalf of Zionism so angered Turkish authorities that they exiled Ben-Gurion and forbade him ever "to set foot on Palestinian soil." He went to the U.S., met and married a Polish-born Brooklyn nurse named Paula Munweiss. After he became famous, she liked to tease him by saying that he had spent part of their wedding night at a Zionist meeting...
When the British replaced the Turks in Palestine, Ben-Gurion returned. His work gradually shifted from labor activities to Zionist planning. By 1920 he was helping to found the Jewish Labor Federation, which would become the all-encompassing Histadrut (labor federation) of modern Israel. He was elected chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, political arm of the World Zionist Organization. At one point in his career, Ben-Gurion believed that Jews and Arabs could live side by side in peace; but extremist passions on both sides made such a plan impossible, and he soon sensed it. After 1935 he thought...
...Ben-Gurion who created the Haganah, the underground Jewish army. In 1942, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, he was able to get unqualified financial support for it from Jews abroad. Under Ben-Gurion, the Jews of Palestine following World War II developed a double strategy to end the British mandate over the territory that had been granted by the League of Nations. They stepped up the illegal immigration of Jews from Europe in the face of stern British measures to prevent it. Meanwhile, Jewish terrorists carried out a continuous assault on British personnel and bases. This desperate...
...People. The Jews of this newly created nation of Israel danced for joy. Ben-Gurion knew that five Arab armies were massed against his people, and he realized that the proclamation he had read was their call to war. Ben-Gurion acted as Defense Minister as well as Prime Minister and shrewdly defended his fledgling country on four fronts. At the same time, he prevented civil war by ordering Israeli soldiers to fire if the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) attempted to land weapons for itself from the freighter Altalena in defiance of a Ben-Gurion...
Died. David Ben-Gurion, 87, a founder and the first Prime Minister of the state of Israel (see THE WORLD...