AP David Ben-Gurion was prime minister of the state of Israel when it was founded in May 1948

Monday, April 13, 1998
Ever since he was a frail child with a disproportionately big head, David Ben-Gurion was always clear about his next move, about the Jewish people's destination, about the link between his steps and the deliverance of the Jews in their biblical homeland.

Ben-Gurion ached to be an intellectual; during the most dramatic years of his leadership, he gulped philosophy books, commented on the Bible, flirted with Buddhism, even taught himself ancient Greek in order to read Plato in the original; he had a relentless curiosity about the natural sciences (but no taste for fiction or the fine arts). He would quote Spinoza as if throwing rocks at a rival. Verbal battle, not dialogue, was his habitual mode of communication. Rather than a philosopher, he was a walking exclamation mark, a tight, craggy man with a halo of silvery hair and a jawbone that projected awesome willpower and a volcanic temper.

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He came from the depressed depths of small-town Polish-Jewish life, which he left behind in 1906. Inspired by a Hebrew-Zionist upbringing, shocked by anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, he went to Turkish Palestine "to build it and be rebuilt by it," as was the motto of those days. He became a pioneer, a farmhand, active with early Zionist-socialist groups. At age 19 he was what he would remain all his life: a secular Jewish nationalist who combined Jewish Messianic visions with socialist ideals, a man with fierce ambition for leadership, extraordinary tactical-political skills and a sarcastic edge rather than a sense of humor.

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