David Ben-Gurion was the primary national founder of the State of Israel as well as its first prime minister. 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 the movement for an independent Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine.
Ben-Gurion in 1960
Poalei Zion's "Ezra" group in Plonsk, 1905. David Grün (David Ben-Gurion) in the first row, third on the right
Ben-Gurion with Rachel Nelkin and members of Ezra on eve of their departure to Palestine, August 1906; his father and step-mother sitting in the windows
Ben-Gurion working at Rishon Lezion winery (front row, 6th from right), 1908
Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. It is bordered by Lebanon to the north, Syria to the northeast, Jordan to the east, the Red Sea to the south, Egypt to the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and the Palestinian territories – the West Bank along the east and the Gaza Strip along the southwest. Tel Aviv is the country's financial, economic, and technological center. Israel’s governmental seat is in its proclaimed capital of Jerusalem, although Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem is of limited international recognition.
The Merneptah Stele (13th century BCE). The majority of biblical archeologists translate a set of hieroglyphs as Israel, the first instance of the name in the record.
3rd-century Kfar Bar'am synagogue in the Galilee
Jews at the Western Wall in the 1870s
The First Zionist Congress (1897) in Basel, Switzerland
