Word: ben-gurion
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...through Israel's Negev Desert last week formed a kind of mobile Who's Who. Led by President Zalman Shazar and Premier Golda Meir, the pilgrims were bound for the Negev kibbutz of Sde Boker to pay homage, on his 85th birthday, to former Premier David Ben-Gurion...
...Ben-Gurion, the founder-father of Israel and its leader for 15 of the 23 years that it has existed, is not only his country's George Washington but its Thomas Jefferson as well. This week a U.S. edition of his 862-page Israel-a Personal History will be published. Already a bestseller in Israel, the book recalls how in 1948, with the country breeching into bloody birth, Ben-Gurion personally wrote its Declaration of Independence. A committee was assigned the task; and Ben-Gurion reminded it that the U.S. Declaration of Independence made no mention of territorial boundaries...
Bandits in Eden. Elon quotes the letter Ben-Gurion wrote to his pregnant wife when in 1918, with the British organizing the Jewish Legion to occupy Palestine, he temporarily abandoned her for the cause: "I did not want to give you a small, cheap, secular kind of happiness. I prepared for you the great sacred human joy achieved through suffering and pain." From such moral heights as well as a rightful sense of wrongs endured, passionate Zionists could not take seriously the half-million Palestinian Arabs who were viewed merely as a harassment in Eden. Arab attacks, which began...
YOUR hair is too familiar and too tempting a target," General Haim Bar-Lev gently suggested. So David Ben-Gurion, 84, obediently accepted a beret and pressed it down over his distinctive white mane. That done, Israel's first Premier and Defense Minister last week followed Chief of Staff Bar-Lev on a tour of Suez Canal fortifications...
...Ben-Gurion was impressed but occasionally baffled. Inside one of the intricate bunkers along the Bar-Lev line, he demanded: "What kind of Hebrew word is 'bunker'?" An escort explained: "We use 'bunker' because we have not yet got around to Hebraizing defense terminology. On offense we have no foreign words." The old lion stopped before a group of soldiers and fixed his eyes on one. "You're younger than I," said Ben-Gurion. "Perhaps you can tell me when there will be peace." "I?" responded the soldier. "Who knows? It depends on the Arabs...