Who is Israel's first prime minister: Who is David Ben-Gurion?

David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of Israel, died in Israel on December 1, 1973.

Ben-Gurion was born as David Grün on October 16, 1886, in Plorisk, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. David, whose father was one of the city's Zionist movement leaders, was interested in politics from an early age and grew up in politics.

David, who lost his mother at the age of 11, attended the University of Warsaw after completing his high school education. Here he became a member of the Social Democratic Jewish Workers Party called 'Poalei Zion'. After being arrested twice due to the Russian Revolution in 1905, he immigrated to Ottoman-controlled Palestine in 1906. Here, he started working in the Palestine branch of the Poalei Zion Party, of which he was a member and was elected to the central committee of the party in a short period of a month.

David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün; 16 October 1886 – 1 December 1973) was the primary national founder of the State of Israel as well as the state's first prime minister. Born in Płońsk, then part of Congress Poland, to Polish Jewish parents, he immigrated to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Empire in 1906. Adopting the name of Ben-Gurion in 1909, he rose to become the preeminent leader of the Jewish community in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine from 1935 until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, which he led until 1963 with a short break in 1954–55.

David, who wanted to study law, came to Thessaloniki in 1911 to learn Turkish. When he came to the city with a large Jewish population, Ben-Gurion saw that Jews in Thessaloniki could do all kinds of jobs, from businessmen to professors, from tradesmen to porters; He was very impressed by the activity and free environment in the city. He described it as “a Jewish city like no other in the world.”

He came to Istanbul in 1912 to study law and started studying at Istanbul University with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Meanwhile, he abandoned his surname Grün, and started using the Jewish surname Ben-Gurion.

Ben-Gurion, who thought that the future of Palestine depended on the Ottoman Empire during these years, was in Jerusalem when World War I broke out. Immediately after the Ottomans entered the war, he and Ben-Zvi gathered 40 Jews and formed a militia force that helped the Ottoman army.

Who is Israel's first prime minister?

Despite this, in 1915 the authorities forcibly sent him to Egypt. Ben-Gurion left Egypt for the United States, where he lived for three years. He met and married Russian-born Paula Munweis in New York. The couple had three children in total, a boy and two girls. Ben-Gurion, who did not stay idle in the USA, visited 35 cities with Ben Zvi and formed a volunteer army of 10,000 people to fight alongside the Ottoman army. But somehow, in 1918, Ben-Gurion joined the Jewish Legion in the British army. The reason for this, as anyone could guess, was the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Ben-Gurion's life alone shows us how historical the Balfour Declaration is.

Ben-Gurion, who continued to be interested in politics in Palestine after the war, became the head of the Jewish Agency in 1935. The Jewish Agency was the representative of the Palestinian Jewish community in those years and was the de facto Jewish government before independence. Ben-Gurion, who continued his duty at the Jewish Agency until independence in 1948, made history as the person who declared the Declaration of Independence in 1948 and as the first prime minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion, who was Prime Minister of Israel for thirteen years from 1948 to 1963, except for a two-year separation in 1954, retired in 1970 and wrote an 11-volume book on the founding of Israel, similar to the Speech, at his home in the kibbutz called Sde Boker in the Negev Desert. He worked on a book describing its history. David Ben-Gurion, who lived here until his death, passed away in the hospital to which he was taken on December 1, 1973.