Word: gurion
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DAVID BEN-GURION was one of the last of the seemingly larger-than-life national leaders who emerged in the 1930s and 40s. A few of these men--China's Mao, Argentina's Peron, Yugoslavia's Tito--are still at the helm, but almost all of them have been replaced by people like Leonid Brezhnev and President Nixon, uninspiring but still dangerously powerful...
...that day-May 14, 1948 -David Ben-Gurion, standing in the Tel Aviv Museum beneath a portrait of Zionism's founder, Theodore Herzl, read the hastily drawn proclamation of the rise of the state of Israel. Four thousand years of Jewish history had passed since, in the words of Genesis, the Lord God told Abraham: "Go forth from your country . . . to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation." After centuries of wandering in the Diaspora, the people of the Covenant had returned to their Promised Land. No longer...
Pressure. The terrible irony of the Middle Eastern tragedy is that the early Zionists actively wished peace and coexistence with their Moslem neighbors. They never wanted the Arabs to pay the price for the creation of a Jewish state. As early as 1924, for instance, David Ben-Gurion declared: "We have no right to deprive a single Arab child, even if through such deprivation we shall realize our aims." In later years, as hostility between Israeli and Palestinian heightened, Ben-Gurion was to remark: "If I were a young Arab, I might also be one of the fedayeen...
...David Ben-Gurion formally proclaims the state of Israel. Next day six Arab armies invade the new nation, but within weeks are defeated by the Jews on every front. All but 160,000 of the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs flee the fighting to neighboring states...
...David Ben-Gurion, Premier and Defense Minister for most of Israel's first 15 years, resigns and is succeeded by Levi Eshkol...