Word: gurion
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...First. Even though his political influence had waned, Ben-Gurion was mourned all over Israel. He was the realist and visionary who had dreamed of and worked for a Jewish state through half a century of Turkish, British and international rule in Palestine. He had suggested the name for the new country. He had carried out hard or unpopular decisions in the state's early days and inevitably left on Israel the strength of his own personality...
...quite a personality. Ben-Gurion's moods covered the full range from stormy to stoical. He was at times arbitrary, vindictive and magnanimous. He had a disarming smile, but the deep-set brown eyes under the delta-like shock of white hair always burned. He believed in direct answers to direct questions, and his allegiance was unquestioning. "I am a Jew first and an Israeli afterward," invariably said the man who came from a nonobservant family...
...born David Gryn, and that was his name when he set out from Russia in 1906 and landed illegally at Jaffa to begin a new life as a Zionist pioneer. Once in Palestine, Gryn followed a practice of the early settlers and changed his name to Ben-Gurion, which in Hebrew means "Son of a Lion Cub." The new arrival was anxious to work the land ("That was the ideal life I wanted for myself," he would recall. "I saw in that the renewal of the Jewish nation"). He settled in the Galilean village of Sejera and insisted in later...
...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...