Word: gurion
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...Israel's 25th anniversary in Jerusalem last May were neither for tanks and paratroopers passing the reviewing stand nor Phantoms whooshing overhead. Instead, the crowds cheered loudest for a slight, aging, white-thatched man being helped to a seat of honor among the dignitaries. He was David Ben-Gurion, Israel's longtime leader, first Prime Minister and, in a sense, its George Washington. Out of the Prime Minister's office for ten years and in complete retirement for three, Ben-Gurion, in that appearance, gave Israelis a fitting chance to acclaim his role in the birth, growth...
...turned out, the independence-day parade was their last chance. Even then, Ben-Gurion's health had begun to fail. Too feeble to stay at the Sde Boker kibbutz in the red-roofed bungalow he had occupied alone since Wife Paula's death five years before, he returned two months ago to his other home in Tel Aviv. He was working there on the third volume of his collected letters when he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage two weeks ago that left him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak. He was rushed to Tel Hashomer...
Even more than many of his famous contemporaries, Ben-Gurion seemed to personally represent the history of the people he led. Born in Czarist-ruled Poland, he bacame a Marxist in his teens, and helped found the Workers of Zion party in Palestine. Throughout his life he sought to build a "light to the nations," an Israel that would be a model of social justice and democracy. From the earliest years of his Zionist agitation Ben-Gurion pleaded for agreement between Jews and Arabs, provoking right-wing attacks that called him a doctrinaire socialist and deracinated cosmopolitan. In the last...
...That Ben-Gurion felt this way was a measure of the tragedy of his country's history almost as striking as his failure as Prime Minister to find a way to reconcile Israel with its unremittingly hostile neighbors, or the Palestinian refugees who lost their homes as a result of its establishment. Today, after another bloody war, it seems as though Arabs and Jews--victims of historic developments they didn't initiate or choose--may be a little closer to reconciliation, but only a little...
...Gurion is dead. But in the long run, the dreams he had as a young man--of a Middle East at peace, with justice, freedom and self-determination for all its inhabitants of whatever background and religion--remain the dreams that will have to inspire any lasting Middle Eastern settlement...