David Gruen

Term Paper Title	David Gruen
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# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.22

David Gruen

     On October 16, 1886 David Gruen was born, the son of an advocate  who was an active

Zionist later on in his life. He was born in the town of Plonsk, then part of Russia now part of

Poland. Gurion was actually born a runt. He was quite frail and his parents feared he could die at

any  moment.1 In 1898 his mother died of blood poisoning. This left a serious imprint on him.

Later he would understand that the creation of a new life often canceled out an existing one. His

mother gave herself to the lives of her children and in turn lost her own.2

     It wasn�t Gruen�s father who gave  him his love for Zionism but his grandfather. His

grandfather contributed to him the two main ideals of Zionism: the love of Hebrew and the love of

the Torah.3 Thus Gruen was a Zionist before there even was Zionism. Together these two loves

implanted the idea of Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) in Gruen�s mind. In his younger years he

became politically active. In 1900 he founded the Ezra youth group in Plonsk. In 1905 he joined

Paole Zion a Marxist Zionist party.

     In 1906 he arrived in Jaffa, Palestine. Shortly he was elected to the central Committee and

the Platform Committee of Palestine Poale Zion. Then he  moved on into a small agricultural

settlement in Sejera. In 1910 he gave up farming to edit the Zionist workers' Hebrew-language

newspaper Achdut (Unity).By this time, he had adopted the surname Ben-Gurion, Hebrew for

�son of the young lion.�

     In 1912 he enrolled in Istanbul University Law School. Early in World War I, he was

expelled by the Turks, he left Palestine, and in 1915 he arrived in New York City. In 1916 he

published the Yizkor in New York, an album in Yiddish in memory of the workers and watchmen

in Palestine who had given their lives in the Service of Hashomer. With the publication of the

Yizkor he begins work on Eretz Israel.

     In 1917 he married Russian-born Pauline Cora Munweis in New York. During his stay in

New York he accomplished many pro-Israel activities. 1918 was a particularly busy year for

Gurion. First he founded and lead the American Jewish Legion Committee. Afterwards he joined

the Jewish Battalion of the British Royal Fusiliers. He then sails to Egypt to join an expeditionary

force in Palestine. In 1919 the Achdut ha-Avodah is founded and Gurion becomes the dominant

member of its secretariat. By the time he reached Palestine, however, the war was over, and the

British were in control. In 1922 the British mandate to govern Palestine became official.

     For nearly two decades the British generally supported the Jewish cause, in which Ben-

Gurion remained active. In 1921 he became the general secretary of the Histadrut and the three

man secretariat, a confederation of Jewish workers that was in effect a Jewish state within a state.

In 1923 he visited Moscow to change the Kremlin�s hostility to Zionism, but he failed. In 1930 he

builds his home in Tel Aviv and he formed the Mapai, the Zionist labor party. In 1931 he

published We and Our Neighbors a collection of his views on the Arab problem, that he hoped

would begin diplomatic talks, which instantly became a best seller. In 1933 he was elected to the

Jewish Agency Executive at World Zionist Congress. By 1935 he was chairman of the executive

committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, official overseer of the Jews in the Holy Land.

Also in 1935 a turning point in the evolution of the State of Israel occurred; Jewish immigration

reaches its peak of more than 60,000 people.

     In response to increased immigration in 1936 an Arab revolt against Jewish immigration,

which lasts three years began. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended partition of Palestine

and termination of the British...

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