In August 1906, a 19-year-old Polish Jew called David Gruen boarded a ship in Odessa and came ashore at Jaffa nine days later. He headed for Petah Tikvah, one of the first Zionist settlements in Ottoman Palestine. Gruen, who later changed his surname to Ben-Gurion, would often reminisce about his arrival – and his repulsion at the Arab boatmen and stevedores who greeted the new immigrants in their promised land.
Exactly 30 years later, when an Arab strike erupted in Jaffa in protest at Britain’s pro-Zionist policies, Ben-Gurion exulted at the prospect of establishing a new Jewish port in nearby Tel Aviv, and predicted that it would mean a state, too. He had long been convinced that there was no chance of peace with the country’s Arab majority. “We want the Land of Israel to be ours as a nation,” he concluded. “The Arabs want the land to be theirs – as a nation.”
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