David Ben-Gurion Quotes
The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.
Ben-Gurion, David. Address to the 20th Zionist Congress, Zurich, Aug. 1937. Quoted in Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. Pantheon Books, 1987.
He was one of the first democratic politicians of Germany who argued for rapprochement between France and Germany and may have been the first to suggest a European Union. Most of the world was very distrustful of German nationalism, and Stresemann presented one of the positive aspects of it. He died of a stroke in 1929 and the political vacuum was eventually filled by Hitler and the Nazis as the Weimar Republic was short lived. As democratic as Stresemann was, he still was preoccupied with German territorial control. Germany’s aggression in WWI led to a peace treaty that fixed borders that were always contested by Germany. The German position was that if there was an area or France, Poland, or other country where there was a community of German speaking people, then that area should be a part of Germany. This was one of the main reasons for Germany’s aggression on WWII.
His definition of Russian territory included any area that the Czars claimed which included Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, the Caucuses, but at the time of the speech, Russia was fighting to keep its existing territory.
David Ben-Gurion, born David Grün, was the primary founder of the State of Israel and the first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion's passion for Zionism, which began early in life, led him to become a major Zionist leader and Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization in 1946. As head of the Jewish Agency from 1935, and later president of the Jewish Agency Executive, he was the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, and largely led its struggle for an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine. On 14 May 1948, he formally proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel, and was the first to sign the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which he had helped to write. Ben-Gurion led Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and united the various Jewish militias into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Subsequently, he became known as "Israel's founding father".; David Ben-Gurion was the primary founder of the State of Israel and the first Prime Minister of Israel.
