David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion was a Zionist politician and trade unionist born on October 16, 1886, in Płońsk, then part of the Russian Empire.
His education took him from the University of Warsaw to Istanbul University's Faculty of Law, a course of study that brought him into contact with the Ottoman world and added Turkish to the several languages he used across his life, among them Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish. He lived successively as a citizen of the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Mandatory Palestine before becoming a citizen of Israel. Among the works associated with his name is the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, a document that stands as the central marker of his public life. He received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University, the Bialik Prize, and honorary citizenship of Jerusalem — formal recognitions that trace the arc of his standing within Israeli public life.
Ben-Gurion died on December 1, 1973, in Ramat Gan. His career moved across the overlapping registers of Zionist politics and labor organization, and it is the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel that the record most directly connects to his name, anchoring his long passage from a small town in the Russian Empire to the founding documents of a new state.
Quotes by David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion's insights on:
Israel has created a new image of the Jew in the world - the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism.
We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.
I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?
We regard it as our duty to declare that Jewish Jerusalem is an organic and inseparable part of the State of Israel, as it is an inseparable part of the history of Israel, of the faith of Israel.
The State of Israel will prove itself not by material wealth, not by military might or technical achievement, but by its moral character and human values.
![If I was an Arab leader I would never make [peace] with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.](https://lakl0ama8n6qbptj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/quotes/quote-1003849.png)
If I was an Arab leader I would never make [peace] with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.
Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it... We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.
Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.