Savir cites Ben Gurion as one of Israel’s most influential state builders.

Savir:

The secret to Israel’s success story is that while we were challenged and attacked by our Arab neighbors, and there was a lot of hostility towards Israeli in the international scene, we were always a nation building society. To a large degree, it’s maybe an advantage that Moses took us to the only place in the Middle East where there’s no oil so we had to use our brain power. Israel as a country that had universities before it had a state, and it is very important. It had in economy before it had a state. It had trade unions before it had a state. It had industries before it had a state, and all these institutions developed with Israel’s creation. The fact that Ben-Gurion dismantled militias from the right and from the left and we created one Israeli defense force, the fact that we brought immigrants from all corners of the world together, to live together, to understand each other, the fact that the modern language of Hebrew was renewed based on biblical Hebrew and became a common language is unique in the annals of humanity. No ancient language, not the ancient Greek or ancient Latin or ancient Egyptian survived. Ancient Hebrew did, and it’s being modernized, so we created our culture. We have the highest number of readers per capita in the world.