Ben Gurion
In 1797, George Washington retired to Mount Vernon, the first president of the United States. Until Mr. Ben Gurion resigned the prime, ministership of Israel last Sunday, George Washington had no close parallel. It is probably true to say that without Ben Gurion, there would be no State of Israel, and when history comes to judge him, it will have to do so in those terms. For it was he who, as Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive in Palestine, was determined to transform the Jewish National Home into a Jewish National State embracing the largest part of the Mandated territory. When Hitler began his pogrom against the Jews, Ben Gurion began his movement to ingather " all the exiles. He led the denun- ciation of the White Paper of 1939, which contained the British Government's decision to limit immigration in belated recogni- tion of the Arab point of view. He personally raised and trained and led the military Hagannah. In May, 1948, he read the Declaration of Independence in the Art Museum at Tel Aviv, he gave the new State its name, and he became its first Prime Minister, and Minister of Defence. With his depar- ture for the wilderness, the first stage, the foundation stage, of the history of modern Israel comes to an end. The other great founder, Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann, died in 1952. A gentler, less militant, Zionist, whose work began not in Palestine but among World Jewry outside, Weizmann quarrelled often and bitterly with Ben Gurion and Ben Gurion's campaign for the State. But for four years, those two men guided the new State through war to comparative peace, and to the beginnings of a modern economy; and they gathered in, in that time alone, 700,000 exiles or half the present population. Mr. Sharett, the new Prime Minister, is a fitting Elisha. He was head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency during most of Ben Gurion's tenure; like Ben Gurion, he is a member of the IVJapai (the Israeli Labour Party); he was chief Jewish spokesman at the United Nations when the final resolution was passed terminating the British Mandate. 'Unlike either Weitzmann or Ben Gurion, he spent his childhood in Palestine. His task will be no easier than theirs, though less dramatic. It is to make the State, which they created in war and maintained with foreign aid, consistent with the peace of the Middle East and able to support itself.
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