Word: ben-gurion
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...Ben-Gurion was the great architect and builder of both. Throughout the tragic years from 1936 to 1947, while millions of Jews were rounded up and murdered by the Germans, denied asylum by almost all nations and barred by the British from finding a home in Palestine, he subtly orchestrated a complex strategy: he inspired tens of thousands of young Jews from Palestine to join the British army in fighting the Nazis, but at the same time authorized an underground agency to ship Jewish refugees into the country. As the British were intercepting, deporting and locking away these survivors...
...even before the British left, attacks on Jews were unleashed all over the country. On May 14, 1948, in accordance with the U.N. resolution, Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel's independence, ignoring last-minute admonitions from Washington and overruling doomsday predictions by some of his closest associates. Within hours, military forces of five Arab nations invaded Israel, joining Palestinian militias in an openly declared attempt to destroy the Jews. It was the worst of several Israeli-Arab wars: 1% of the Jewish population died, as well as thousands of Arabs. More than half a million Palestinians lost their homes; some fled...
...Ben-Gurion's iron-will leadership during the fateful 1 1/2 years of that touch-and-go war turned him from "first among equals" in the Zionist leadership into a modern-day King David. The crux of his leadership was a lifelong, partly successful struggle to transplant a tradition of binding majority rule in a painfully divided Jewish society that for thousands of years had not experienced any form of self-rule, not even a central spiritual authority. In the early years of the state, many Israelis saw him as a combination of Moses, George Washington, Garibaldi and God Almighty...
Between 1949 and 1956, Arab states drew Israel into a cycle of guerrilla attacks and retaliatory raids. In 1956 Ben-Gurion, aware of an Egyptian military buildup, escalated the conflict by storming the Sinai peninsula. The operation was coordinated with a French-British assault on Egypt. To Arabs, this was further proof of Israel as a toll of imperialism. To Israelis, this was Ben-Gurion's way of securing 11 relatively peaceful years...
...time. Keep Jerusalem undivided, he said, but otherwise we must suppress our yearnings for the newly gained regions; we must relinquish them in return for peace. The October War of 1973 came as a nemesis, a harsh slap of reality, undoing the post-1967 Israeli arrogance and moral callousness. Ben-Gurion died a few weeks after that war, while a wounded, deflated Israel was mourning its heavy losses and entering a long period of soul searching...