David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion, who lived from 1886 to 1973 and was born David Grun in Poland, was the primary architect and first prime minister of the State of Israel, having immigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906 and risen to become the preeminent leader of the Jewish community there under subsequent British rule. As chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive from 1935 onward he served as the de facto political leader of Palestine's Jewish population, and on May 14, 1948, he formally proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel and was the first to sign the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a document he had helped draft. He led Israel as prime minister from 1948 to 1963, with a brief interruption in 1954 and 1955, and during that period he unified the various Jewish militias into the Israel Defense Forces, oversaw their role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, worked to absorb large scale Jewish immigration into the new state, and negotiated a reparations agreement with West Germany. His leadership is widely credited with transforming Israel from a fragile new state into an established nation with functioning institutions, and he was later named among Time magazine's hundred most important people of the twentieth century in recognition of his role in founding and building the modern state of Israel.