main factor enabling the Workers' Party, the Mapai, to become the center of power in the Zionist movement, and later in Israel, a position it has held without interruption since the early 1930's.
But long before then the forerunners of this party set the tone in Jewish Palestine. They did things. They represented do-it-yourself Zionism. And no one represented it more than David Ben-Gurion.
As a politician, Ben-Gurion has always had an uncanny knack for sensing where the focus of power is at any given time, a by-no-means easy feat in the changing scene of the Jewish Yishuv. Ben-Gurion was where the power was. Following his turbulent career, you can trace the development of the Yishuv from a tiny community in Turkish Palestine to the militant Israel of the Sinai campaign and after.
According to legend, Ben-Gurion, on his arrival in 1905, became a laborer in the South Galilean village of Sejjera, and a worker in the wine cellar of Rishon-le-Zion. These facts have been disputed by malicious contemporaries, but there is no disputing his main preoccupation: He was a professional party politician, who played a great, but by no means sole, or even main, part in the establishment of the political groups who later merged in the Mapai. These groups quickly became the main force in the Yishuv, thereby exerting a growing influence on Zionist politics in general. While more illustrious Zionist leaders like Weizmann and Jabotinsky stayed abroad making speeches and playing at world politics, Ben-Gurion and his associates created the instruments of action in Palestine which became inevitably the basis of power there.
Because of his Russian citizenship, Ben-Gurion was exiled by the Turks from Palestine during World War I. He went to the United States, married a nurse there, took part in the recruitment of volunteers for the Jewish battalions in the British Army (the Jewish Legion, a project for which Jabotinsky had been agitating in England) and returned with them to Palestine after the fighting there