There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million.

In general however relations were amicable though distant. He was arrested twice during the Russian Revolution of 1905. 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.

Posthumously Ben-Gurion was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. He worked very well with Konrad Adenauer's government in Bonn and West Germany provided large sums (in the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany) in compensation for Germany's prosecution of the Holocaust against the Jews. Ben-Gurion led Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and united the various Jewish militias into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).