Adviser to Ben-Gurion and the State of Israel

Chouraqui defended his doctoral thesis on the creation of the State of Israel at the University of Paris in 1949, and in 1955 published The State of Israel in the "Que sais-je?" series. He first met David Ben-Gurion in 1956, the Friday before the Suez Campaign, and during that trip decided to settle in Israel; he moved to Jerusalem in 1958.

After the Wadi Salib riots in 1959, Ben-Gurion met him several times and asked him to become his adviser on the integration of communities — mizzug galuyot — for a symbolic salary of one pound a year. At the Prime Minister's Office he promoted a programme that changed dominant trends in immigrant integration and education, and secured the doubling of the Education budget. His correspondence with Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol from these years is published on this site.

In 1960 he established the first contacts between Morocco and Israel during a stay in Morocco, and published a biography of Theodor Herzl with a foreword by Ben-Gurion. In 1977, at the invitation of King Hassan II, he met the King in Morocco; the site's chronology records that this meeting initiated the process that led to Sadat's visit to Jerusalem later that year.