Ben-Gurion, who became the Zionist Prime Minister, a position he held until he proclaimed the independence of Israel.
Ben-Gurion assumed the national leadership at precisely the time when practical Zionism, working mainly through the workers' movement, had finished the first stage of its job. The Jewish community in Palestine now numbered nearly 300,000 people endowed with all the attributes of a real nation. Within the next few years, Hitler's regime of terror in Germany drove tens of thousands of German Jews, with their capital and know-how, to Palestine, strengthening the Yishuv still further. The idea of a Jewish state became feasible. Indeed, after the Arab Rebellion of 1936, a British Royal Commission, under Lord Peel, officially proposed for the first time the partition of Palestine and the setting up of a Jewish state in a part of the country.
Ben-Gurion was now the national leader and an international figure. The clash between the emergent new Hebrew nation and the British colonial regime had become inevitable. Yet Ben-Gurion was prudent. He objected to the underground war of the Irgun. He denounced it and even turned the Irgun fighters over to the tender mercies of the British police. But it was no longer a struggle over principles. Ben-Gurion, like Jabotinsky, wanted a Jewish state as quickly as possible. The only argument concerned the most efficient means of achieving it.
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World War II gave the idea of a Jewish state a final and decisive push. The tragedy that befell European Jews, which we call in Hebrew Hashoah, or the Holocaust, completely changed the psychological and political scene.
Throughout the war, nothing much was done by the Zionist leadership to help the Jews in conquered Europe about to be massacred. This is still a controversial issue in Israel, and it has not been laid to rest by the catharsis of