Ben-gurion

Drawing on his own close personal relationship and on previously unavailable firsthand sources - including David Ben-Gurion's secret files - Michael Bar-Zohar, Israeli scholar and official Ben-Gurion biographer, has written the definitive biography of Israel's Founding Father. David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) emerges here as a determined, complex and highly dedicated man, a man whose power and vision did much to shape the State of Israel, when he led the country from 1948 to 1986 as Premier and Defense Minister. After a historical portrait of Ben-Gurion's middle-class childhood and Zionist background n Polish Russia, his hard times as a pioneer in pre-World War I Palestine and his legal studies in Turkey, Bar-Zohar concentrates on B.G.'s role in creating the Labor movement in Palestine, conquering the Zionist movement, establishing the State of Israel, and guiding the new state through its rocky first fifteen years. Using recently declassified State documents, as well as Ben-Gurion's own archives, Bar-Zohar illuminates the dramatic struggle of Israel for survival during the Independence War. He describes in detail the English-French-Israeli plot to launch the Sinai Campaign and the Suez War in 1956; it was this war that led to the golden age of Ben-Gurion's political career. Ben-Gurion's private diaries and intimate letters reveal a lonely man who outlived his closest friends. Disclosed for the first time are many details of Ben-Gurion's personal life, including his relationship with his wife and children, and the story of the other woman in his life, an Englishwoman. Shedding new light on Ben-Gurion's impossible feud with Chaim Weizmann, on the secret pact he concluded with Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia, on the transformation of Israel into a nuclear power, and on Ben-Gurion's own human vulnerability in personal relationships, this compelling work explains one of the most important world figures of our time.