David Ben-Gurion Autograph Letter Signed.

BEN-GURION, David.

$5,000.00

Item Number: 104802

Autograph letter signed by and entirely in the hand of the founder of modern day Israel and first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. One page, text in Hebrew, addressed to Eliahu Eliachar, a notable Sephardic Zionist and Member of the Knesset, the letter reads in full, “Greetings, We don’t need separate political lists – not those of independent Yemenite or Sephardic political parties. Those lists can only distort/falsify the democratic process in our country and the process of integration as well. We need only Israeli lists. Too many small political groups can only affect our stability. The only way to resolve it is to change our voting system from relative voting to local voting. With great respect D. Ben-Gurion.” One of Ben-Gurion’s most ambitious goals in the first years of statehood was the unrestricted absorption of entire communities of newly-arrived Middle Eastern and North African Jews into the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli society. Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants fled the inhospitable environment rising in the Islamic countries between 1948 and 1954 in the wake of the burgeoning Arab-Israeli conflict, settling in the economically-ravaged war-torn state. Other European Jewish communities from Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland were also transplanted to the Jewish State where they were forced to reside in transit villages and immigrants camps and became involved in domestic political in-fighting and became vulnerable to enticements from anti-establishment political groupings. Ben-Gurion feared that the plethora of small political parties could potentially destabilize Israel’s precarious democracy and advocated for a radical change in Israels electoral system with a two-party governing system, as opposed to the European proportional representational system. Above all, Ben-Gurion advocated for the swift unification of the numerous ethnic groups and the creation of an integrated singular Israeli identity. In near fine condition. Rare and desirable, offering a unique glimpse into the great leader’s political thought.

David Ben-Gurion 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. Subsequently, he became known as "Israel's founding father."