Ben-Zvi, Itzhak

Itzhak Ben-Zvi, original name Isaac Shimshelevich, (born Nov. 24, 1884, Poltava, Ukraine—died April 23, 1963, Jerusalem [Israel]), second president of Israel (1952–63) and an early Zionist leader in Palestine, who helped create the political, economic, and military institutions basic to the formation of the state of Israel.

A Zionist from his youth, Ben-Zvi in 1905 helped form the Russian Poale Zion, a socialistically oriented Zionist group that set an important ideological precedent for later institutions in Palestine and elsewhere and led to the formation of the Poale Zion World Federation in 1907. He settled in Palestine and in 1908 helped found ha-Shomer, a self-defense organization for Jewish agricultural settlements. In 1909 he founded in Jerusalem the first Hebrew high school in Palestine.

Exiled from Palestine in 1915 by the Turks, Ben-Zvi traveled to the United States, where with David Ben-Gurion, later prime minister of Israel, he founded Heḥalutz, a Zionist pioneer youth organization, and the Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British against the Germans and Turks in Palestine during World War I. He returned with the legion to Palestine in 1918 and two years later helped create the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labour, which became the dominant labour organization in Israel. He served as a member of Histadrut’s secretariat from 1920 to 1929, when he and Ben-Gurion founded the Mapai Party, which became the leading political force in the country. One of the creators of Vaʿad Leʿumi, the Jewish National Council representing 90 percent of the Jewish community during the British mandate in Palestine (1920–48), Ben-Zvi served as the council’s chairman from 1931 to 1944 and as its president from 1944 to 1949.

Ben-Zvi signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, and was elected to the Knesset the following year. He became president of Israel in 1952, a position he held until his death. Also a noted scholar of Middle Eastern history and archaeology, he founded the Institute for Research of Jewish Middle Eastern Communities (now the Ben-Zvi Institute) in 1948 and directed it until 1960. He wrote a history of the Jews, The Exiled and the Redeemed (1958).