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BEN GURION, DAVID.   Term Paper ID:28688 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Discusses his life, political activities & style; Zionism & WWII. Key role in formation of Israel, contributions to country's development. Annotated Bib.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Discusses his life, political activities & style; Zionism & WWII. Key role in formation of Israel, contributions to country's development. Annotated Bib. Paper Introduction: This research examines the life and work of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of the modern state of Israel. The research will set forth the historical and cultural context in which Ben-Gurion emerged and flourished and then discuss contributions he made in shaping his society and directing the course of history, with reference to the judgments of contemporaries and historians. The fact that David Ben-Gurion is so strongly identified with the creation and early nurturance of the state of Israel must be set beside the fact that Ben-Gurion was not born in that country. Instead, he was born David Gruen in 1886 in a small town in Polish Russia, where pogroms were as commonplace as the contemporaneous rise of Zionist discourse. Ben-Gurion came from a secular (nonobservant) Jewish family steeped in that disco Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. France's cooperationwith Israel at the time must be understood in relation to France's conflictwith Algeria, another Arab state (and France's former colony). European Jews who shared withBen-Gurion the vision of a Jewish Palestine were members of the workingclass. He urged the payment of Germanreparations for victims of the Holocaust, many of whom had come to Israelby the early 195 s. (1996). Oz, A. References Ben-Gurion, D. Arab StudiesQuarterly, 18, 1-16. It is not to be expected that the Arab view of Ben-Gurion would besympathetic. The fact that David Ben-Gurion is so strongly identified with thecreation and early nurturance of the state of Israel must be set beside thefact that Ben-Gurion was not born in that country. That would help explain anti-Jewishrioting by Arabs over the years. Teveth, S. He died in 1973. He could never quite recover and indeed was foundtrying to form a new political party in response to the final partyhumiliation. Lavon readNasser, accurately, as a practitioner of raw power politics and unable toovercome a strong geopolitical finesse conducted in secret. Only the Jews themselves could turn the endorsement into atangible fact. Annotated Bibliography Ben-Gurion, D. New York: Columbia University Press. But Arab mobs riotedagainst Jews in 192 and 1921, and again in 1929 and in many yearsthereafter, making assimilationist position difficult to sustain publicly. This was opposed by partisans of the opposition, led byMenachem Begin, because it involved Ben-Gurion's signing an agreement withwhat was then West Germany, in 1952. Thus it was that Ben-Gurion made a project of returning to Palestinein 192 , where he again resumed labor-union activity, this time by forminga coalition of unions within the socialist ideological ambit. In part thiscan be explained by what seems to have been Ben-Gurion's confrontationalpersonality, toward both friend and foe. Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From peace towar. This book is an account--and critique--of the ill repute in which thesecular Zionist Ben-Gurion was held, especially by Orthodox Jews whodeplored Zionist disregard for the plight of their European brethren,during World War II. Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From peace towar. Zionism, socialism and United States supportfor the Jewish colonization of Palestine in the 192 s. This research examines the life and work of David Ben-Gurion, thefirst prime minister of the modern state of Israel. Instead, he was bornDavid Gruen in 1886 in a small town in Polish Russia, where pogroms were ascommonplace as the contemporaneous rise of Zionist discourse. It turns out that the weightof documentary evidence is on the side of the view that Ben-Gurion andcompany were uniquely venturesome, among other Jewish-identity groups, inattempting to find practical ways of saving Jewish lives in Europe duringHitler's activities there. But it turned out that Ben-Gurion wasalso working back channels, always with the object in view of formalproclamation of the state of Israel: 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. Ben-Gurion rejected Jabotinsky's demand for an "Iron Wall," that is, that only under the shield of an armed force could Zionism achieve its aim. This appears tohave been the basis on which Ben-Gurion would be regarded as the architectof modern Israel's nation-state status. Arab StudiesQuarterly, 18, 1-16. This wouldhelp explain Ben-Gurion's surreptitious importing of Jews into Palestine.However, Ben-Gurion appears to have taken a more practical political view:"We must assist the British in the war as if there were no White Paper andwe must resist the White Paper as if there were no war" (Ben-Gurion, 1969).By the time the 1947 UN resolution was passed, however, Ben-Gurion'sapproach to political confrontation was positioned to shepherd the newstate of Israel. (1985). Davidson, L. A popular-magazine portrait of Ben-Gurion that provides a capsulesummary of the leader's life and work, this article is beneficial in givinga quickly absorbed perspective of a political innovator who is famousperhaps only in history books and perhaps only because he was the firstIsraeli prime minister. But embarrassment to the Israeli governmentmandated Lavon's resignation, and in 196 the old issues over Lavon'sactions made new trouble for Ben-Gurion. Seattle:Microsoft Corporation. Further, the very notion that geopolitical maps might beredrawn because of a Jewish state fostered tensions between Jewishnewcomers to Palestine and Arabs who already lived there. David Ben-Gurion, in his own words. According to Tevet, Ben-Gurion saw this view asshort-sighted in the context of the growing Yishuv, especially since theJews were dependent on British military forces for protection: To posit an irreconcilable conflict . However, Davidson's attempt to discredit Ben-Gurion's policiessimply through guilt by association with socialism need not be creditedsimply because it capitalizes on a more general discrediting of theBolshevik experiment in statism by using that phenomenon to somehow provethat Ben-Gurion was politically deficient even though his Zionistorganizations were highly organized and efficient, as well as ideological.It is as if Ben-Gurion can be faulted for not being able to predict thedemise of Leninism, though other sources explain that Ben-Gurion was asfascinated by America as by Russia. Zionism. The point is that Ben-Gurion was forced to rethink the relationship between Jews and Arabs manytimes in order to find a way to justify the legitimacy of an Israeli statein Palestine. Lavon, who was Ben-Gurion's golden boy,overstepped his ambitions by trying to fix everything that was wrong withIsrael's being constantly threatened by its Arab neighbors. (1993-1999). Beginningwith the 19th-century attempts of European Jews to find a way out theretrogression of the 1791 liberation of European Jewry, proceeding throughthe support that the Holocaust gave to the Zionist cause and establishmentof the state of Israel, plus the 1975 UN resolution that equated Zionismwith racism and its 1991 repeal, this article entry resolves with theexplanation that Zionism in its current formulation is wedded first andalways to one notion: the inviolable integrity of a Jewish state and thedeclared access of all Jews (not least Soviet Jews, the remnant of thedisenfranchised Diaspora) to participation in that state. Ben-Gurion'sadmiration of Lenin was "tempered" by admiration of the American politicalsystem (Oz, 1998, p. Ben-Gurion's spy: The story of the political scandalthat shaped modern Israel. This strategy helped bring about the favorable atmosphere that led to the 1947 UN resolution [creating] . Theapotheosis of Ben-Gurion as King David in the heady days of the founding ofIsrael in 1948 inevitably gave way to revisiting of Ben-Gurion's actions inthe war years and in the years after 1948, during which messy details ofgovernance and political management surfaced. If one is aware of the high reputation that the Israeli intelligenceapparatus has in the world community, this book can serve as something of ahistorical corrective. His view of the Declaration wasthat Palestine would never belong to the Jews just because of the BalfourDeclaration. The depth of his idealism comes through when he speaks of Israelas something like the light of the whole world, as if claiming specialmoral provenance for the country. (1997). Balfour in a letter to aBritish Zionist leader that approved in principle of the physical locationin Palestine of a "national home for the Jewish people" (Ben-Gurion, 1969).Now no British or European resources were committed to that principlebecause Balfour also articulated concern that the rights of non-Jews wouldnot be penalized. 134), but his desire to establish a state in the Jews'traditional homeland persisted. Davidson, L. But the government's ignoring of his advice seems to havebeen another index of Ben-Gurion's waning prestige. 136). Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Teveth, S. But those who could really build the nation were capitalists whocould start businesses and recruit Arabs, not Jews, as cheap labor. Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust. (1985). Ben-Gurioncame from a secular (nonobservant) Jewish family steeped in that discourse.Ben-Gurion studied in Warsaw, where he adopted a socialist strand ofZionism. In 1953, Ben-Gurion retired from political life, retreating to life inan agricultural kibbutz, much in the manner he had entered Palestine in1915. That meant that the Jews would have to physically immigrateto the land to make the claim valid (Teveth, 1997). Thequotes vary in length, but they show a persistence of passion about hisbeliefs. In 1917, when Turkish Palestine became British Palestine owing to thefortunes of war, there came the Balfour Declaration, the name given to astatement by British Foreign Secretary Arthur J. 135). Ben-Gurion, the more or less standard Zionist whourged a species of compliance with facts such as British Mandate control ofZionism, was arrayed against the declared Revisionist Zionists, who wereagainst compliance with either British or Arabs of any kind. In 19 6, at the age of 19, he left Poland to join a Zionistfarming settlement in Jaffa, Turkish Palestine. In 1897, Herzl also organized theWorld Zionist Organization, and over the course of the next 2 yearsvarious groups organized around strands of Zionist political thought(unsuccessfully) sought formal international charter from Turkey, Germany,Britain (Zionism, 1993). Besides King David, Ben-Gurion wascompared to George Washington, Moses, Garibaldi [uniter of Italy] to GodHimself. The Balfour Declaration was an importantbeginning, and the fact that Palestine passed into British control afterthe war enabled Ben-Gurion to return there. In any event, Ben-Gurion gave as good as he got, refusing toacknowledge Begin by name in parliament, thus highlighting thecontroversial nature of his decision (David Ben-Gurion, 1993-99). It was Ben-Gurion who, as the country's first-in-historyprime minister, proclaimed the existence of the state of Israel on May 14,1948. . Tevet, S. The clumsy way in which Pinchas Lavon, Israel'sdefense minister attempted, in 1955, to alter the course of the Anglo-American alliance vis-à-vis Egypt drastically illustrated a misreading ofCold War superpower politics. Further, according to Teveth, the Jewish Agency engaged in aseries of attempts to negotiate with the Nazis, including Eichmann, variousransom/rescue deals (for example Jews for trucks for the German army). Encyclopedias may have their limits, but they also have the virtue ofarticulating a structure of events about a particular subject. Oxford University Press. In the event, and in the absence of a Jewish armed force, the British army would have to defend the Yishuv against implacable foes (Tevet, 1985). Relevance to Ben-Gurion resides in his identification with the dominant strand of Zionism inthe 2 th century, vis-à-vis less influential, competing strands of Zionistthought. a Jewish state (Oz, 1998, p. However, neither public life nor its complications were ever far fromBen-Gurion. Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2 . He returned to Palestine,where he resumed labor organizing, for which he and other Zionists wereexpelled in 1915. In 1939, at the verytime the Nazi persecution of German Jews was most visible, and on the brinkof what would become the Holocaust, the British government issued a so-called White Paper, which proposed that Arabs rule Palestine and thatJewish immigration into the Yishuv be programmatically halted. New York: HarcourtBrace. (1993-1999). ThusBen-Gurion's efforts to organize Jewish but not Arab workers would havecontributed to tensions at the time. To begin with, Ben-Gurionappears to have understood that British endorsement in principle could notbecome reality unless the Jewish population in Palestine reached a criticalmass that neither Britain nor the international community could ignore.That would help explain his wish to be perceived as less radical, morepragmatic, in his advocacy of a Jewish homeland, through the good officesof the Jewish Agency for Palestine. In 1955, he was recruited to replace Israel's Minister ofDefense, Pinchas Lavon, a Ben-Gurion political protégé whose efforts tofinesse a diplomatic break between Egypt and the West were exposed, to theembarrassment of Israel's government (Teveth, 1996). David Ben-Gurion: Part Washington, part Moses.Time, 151, 134-6. On the other hand, Davidson'sobservation that Zionist recruitment of Jews to 192 s Palestine was opaqueto the fact that it would foster tensions between Arabs and Jews for awhole range of economic reasons that had nothing to do with interethnichatred per se is valuable. His final retirementwas in 197 . Meanwhile, it would have been Arabsand not Jews who were really doing the building of a Jewish state, anintolerable situation for Arabs. The development of Zionism as an international movement was takingplace in parallel Ben-Gurion's first 3 years. (1996, June). In fact,Teveth suggests that had the 1939 White Paper not appeared and had theBritish instead made good on their endorsement of an Israeli nation-stateat that time, millions more Jews might have been spared the Holocaust(Teveth, 1997). New York: HarcourtBrace. And in later years, he had toadmit that Arabs did have a nation-state sensibility. Seattle:Microsoft Corporation. In retrospect, Lavon's efforts in 1955 to split Egypt from the Westcan be interpreted as simply the obverse of Egyptian leader Nasser'sefforts in the Suez 1956 to play Cold War geopolitical rivals against eachother for Egypt's benefit. Any cooperation between Israel andGermany, given the German record in the war, was unthinkable from the pointof view of so-called hard-liners of Israeli nationalism. (1969). Oz presents Ben-Gurion as a visionary whounderstood that completion of a vision of a Jewish state demanded real-world appreciation of a practical response (tangible state and populationand military presence) to contingencies of opposition to that vision. (1997). The Revisionist Jabotinsky took a "blunt approach" to the issue ofcoexistence and assimilation, saying that "a voluntary settlement betweenus and the Arabs in Palestine is unthinkable, now and in the foreseeablefuture" (Tevet, 1985). This led tothe formation of the Israel Workers Party (Mapai), which under hisleadership pursued Zionist activities pursuant to the British postwarmandate but also in keeping with the revolutionary example in Russia(Davidson, 1996). New York:Fleet Press. Tevet, S. (1969). David Ben-Gurion: Part Washington, part Moses.Time, 151, 134-6. Zionism. Revisionist activities, sometimes violent but always openlycontemptuous of British rule of Palestine, may actually have hardenedBritain's policies there. . . would have deepened Arab hatred and could have cost the Jews the sympathy of world public opinion. The real intent of the volumeappears to have been to function as a valedictory for a leader whoseefforts were indispensable to the project of founding an Israeli state. New York:Fleet Press. (1998, April 13). Zionism, socialism and United States supportfor the Jewish colonization of Palestine in the 192 s. This is a compendium of Ben-Gurion's most quotable statements andwritings as an advocate of Zionist socialism as the best mechanism forgoverning a state of Israel in Palestine. This put Ben-Gurion in conflict with the more radicalRevisionist Zionists, who opposed conciliation for the British, and withRevisionist leader Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky and his protégé MenachemBegin, whose partisans opposed conciliation with either the British or thePalestinian Arabs. As the British were intercepting, deporting and locking away these survivors of the Nazi inferno in barbed-wired detention camps, world opinion grew more and more sympathetic to the Zionist prescription for the plight of the Jews. The crux of his leadership was a lifelong,partly successful struggle to transplant a tradition of binding majorityrule in a painfully divided Jewish society that for thousands of years hadnot experienced any form of self-rule" (Oz, 1998, p. Equally, Ben-Gurion turns out to have been arrayed against whatever rival Jewishconstituencies might have considered his failings toward the EuropeanDiaspora that were murdered by the Third Reich. Ben-Gurion's position with regard to Palestinian Arabs was morecomplex, driven less by firm principle than by what was revealed byunfolding events, of which the White Paper was one example, in MandatePalestine. Davidson (1996)suggests that Ben-Gurion's socialist ideology was a source of tension thatbegan with his recruiting Jewish immigrants. Though Tevet's series of biographies of pieces of Ben-Gurion's life islargely laudatory, the author does not present defenses of Ben-Gurionwithout appropriate documentation. There, he adopted the nameBen-Gurion By 191 , having worked as a labor organizer, he was writing fora local Hebrew-language newspaper, Adhut, and by 1914 he had received a lawdegree from the University of Constantinople. Oz, A. . Oxford University Press. In 1967, Ben-Gurion urged (in vain) a victoriousIsrael to withdraw from all territories taken during the Six Day War; hehad done much the same thing in 1956, when during the Suez crisis Israeloccupied the Sinai Peninsula until Egypt agreed to open traffic in thecanal (Oz, 1998). Ben-Gurion's prestige and accomplishments as founder of a nation-statedid not prevent controversy from stalking his political life. Teveth, however (1997), cites Ben-Gurion's prescient 1935statement that Hitler's regime was a disaster for Jewry not only in Germanybut also throughout all of Europe and the consistency with which Zionists,almost alone of Jewish political and religious consistencies, urgedEuropean Jews to get out while they still could--and, of course, come toPalestine so that the Yishuv could increase and create that all-importantcritical mass. Oz (1998) suggests that Ben-Gurion's morepragmatic conciliation actually got more results. No one was prepared to impose the Jews on the Arabs by brute force with Wilsonian talk of self-determination in the air. Itturned out that none of the Nazi offers were made in good faith, and in anycase Allied authorities refused to facilitate any such deals. This book explains that Ben-Gurion wasdisingenuous in denying Arab-Jew conflict and anticipating cooperation inthe earliest stages of recruiting Jews to Palestine, and later in assertingthat Jews had a naturally nationalist sensibility while the ethnically andculturally diffuse Arabs did not. Teveth, S. By the time of theSuez crisis in 1956, Ben-Gurion had been reelected as prime minister, andhe took initiative in the Suez, by attacking Egypt in cooperation withBritain and France, over access to the Suez Canal. In 1958,Anglo-American intelligence revealed construction of an Israeli nuclearreactor, ostensibly for power but possibly for weapons development, aprospect that Ben-Gurion never explicitly denied, even as he touted thebenefits of peaceful use of nuclear energy to develop the Negev Desert foragriculture and engage in desalinization of sea water. Ben-Gurion's spy: The story of the political scandalthat shaped modern Israel. (1998, April 13). Teveth takes the view thatBen-Gurion was unfairly tarnished then and has been unfairly tarnished inmore recent years, with regard to whether Zionism in general and he inparticular was callous toward European Jewry. From Ben-Gurion'spoint of view, the Holocaust agreement may have functioned as theencasement of a career of advocacy in behalf of Israel's nation-statestatus. (1996, June). But everythingwas exposed, and one effect, over the long haul, was to discredit Ben-Gurion as well as Lavon. The research will setforth the historical and cultural context in which Ben-Gurion emerged andflourished and then discuss contributions he made in shaping his societyand directing the course of history, with reference to the judgments ofcontemporaries and historians. Whatever one may think of Ben-Gurion's politics or style ofengagement, his role in Israel's formation can hardly be ignored. Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2 . In 1963, he resigned as Israel'sprime minister and became a back-bencher in the Knesset, Israel'sparliament, until 1965, when he made an abortive attempt to found a newopposition labor party. David Ben-Gurion, in his own words. Teveth, S. Plainly there was not a smooth line of action between Ben-Gurion'sconciliatory attitude toward the British and the UN resolution that enabledthe state of Israel to enter the community of nations. (1996). In the first years of British Mandate rule, he urged the viewthat Arab political parties could assimilate into the Yishuv, the namegiven to the growing Jewish community in Palestine. The whole picture of Ben-Gurion's involvement in Holocaust issuesduring World War II has been complicated by accusations that secularZionists in Palestine, mainly Ben-Gurion's Jewish Agency, were complicit inthe Holocaust because they either did little to help European Jews escapebeing murdered by Hitler or tried to negotiate with the Nazis on a good-faith basis. That same day, Israel's five Arab nation-state neighbors invaded it,and for some 18 months there was a "touch-and-go" war during which Ben-Gurion was transformed from "'first among equals' in the Zionist leadershipinto a modern-day King David. In 1896, Hungarian Jew andjournalist Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, which deconstructedEuropean anti-Semitism and articulated the Zionist answer, constructing astate in what was then Ottoman Palestine. When Ben-Gurion left Palestine in 1915, he landed in New York, wherehe continued to urge Zionism with a socialist emphasis, especially afterthe success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. Yet privately Ben-Gurion understood thefact of Arab opposition in the aggregate. However, there is a certainconsistency about Ben-Gurion's political behavior that seems mostsatisfactorily explained with reference to an unwavering commitment toIsrael as more than a safe haven for Jews, i.e., as a full partner in thegeopolitical environment. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.