7 David Ben-Gurion 7oppressed Jews of eastern Europe the idea of the return to
their original homeland of Israel. Zionism fascinated the
young David Gruen, and he became convinced that the
first step for the Jews who wanted to revive Israel as a
nation was to immigrate to Palestine and settle there as
farmers. In 1906 the 20-year-old Gruen arrived in Palestine
and for several years worked as a farmer. There he adopted
the ancient Hebrew name Ben-Gurion and joined the
Zionist socialist party, Poale Zion (“Workers of Zion”).
With the outbreak of World War I, the Turkish gov-
ernors of Palestine—their suspicions aroused by his
Zionist activity—arrested Ben-Gurion and expelled him
from the Ottoman Empire. During the height of the war,
he traveled to New York, where he met and eventually
married the Russian-born Pauline Munweis. Following
the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which
promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, he joined
the British army’s Jewish Legion and returned to the
Middle East to join the war for the liberation of Palestine
from Ottoman rule.
The British had already defeated the Turks when the
Jewish Legion reached the battlefield, and, when Britain
received the mandate over Palestine, the work of
realizing the “Jewish national home” had begun. For Ben-
Gurion, the “national home” was a step toward political
independence. To implement it, he called for acceler-
ated Jewish immigration to Palestine in the effort to create
a Jewish nucleus that would serve as the foundation for
the establishment of a Jewish state. In the 1920s and 1930s,
Ben-Gurion led several political organizations, including
Mapai (the Israeli Workers Party) and the Jewish Agency—
world Zionism’s highest directing body.
As the Jewish settlement strengthened and deepened its
roots in Palestine, anxiety mounted among the Palestinian