Shmirat ha-Teva Hero: David Ben-Gurion
David Ben-Gurion was born in Poland. He became the first prime minister of Israel. In 1906 he was inspired by the Zionist dream and moved to Palestine. Israeli Leader During the time of the Holocaust, 1936 to 1947, while millions of Jews were rounded up and murdered by the Germans, Ben-Gurion worked in two different directions. On one hand he got tens of thousands of young Jews from Palestine to join the British army to fight the Nazis. At the same time he created an underground agency to sneak past the British (who ruled Eretz Yisrael) and illegally bring Jewish refugees from Europe into Palestine. On May 14, 1948, in accordance with a U.N. resolution, Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence. He became the first prime minister of Israel. The Negev His Later Years
The Negev is the southern sixty percent of the state of Israel. It is a beautiful, difficult, stony desert. While Abraham spent time in the Negev and kings David and Solomon had copper mines there, it was never a place where many people lived. When Ben-Gurion was founding the state of Israel the people in the Negev were primarily Beduoins who wandered with their flocks from place to place.
In 1953, David Ben-Gurion was exhausted by years of public service, and he resigned from the government. He settled in Kibbutz Sde Boker. In 1955 he returned to politics. Finally, in June 1970, Ben-Gurion retired forever and returned to Sde Boker. He was known for writing a great deal, for having a unique philosophical outlook, for being an activist and an optimist, for being stubborn and for being an old man who cared about physical fitness. Because of the fitness commitment he stood on his head a lot. BenGurion died in 1973.
Ben-Gurion believed two things about the Negev. First, it was a good place for Jews to settle because it was wide open and few people lived there. Second, he believed that the Jewish people would become stronger if they made the desert bloom. He set a personal example by choosing to settle in a kibbutz at the center of the Negev. Ben-Gurion worked to establish the National Water Carrier, a huge engineering project to bring water to the area.
While Ben-Gurion’s public life was devoted to the political challenges that faced Israel, his private life was lived in the desert. He was really concerned with shmirat ha-teva and with working with the environment to turn the desert into a place where people could live. 13
