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own, in which we could achieve the self-determination and security denied to us
elsewhere.
During the 1890s and the early years of the new century, more than a million
Jews fled Eastern Europe, but mostly for America. It was only in the 1920s and
1930s that significant numbers arrived in Palestine. Then, within a few years,
Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Jews of Europe faced not just
discrimination or pogroms. They were systematically, industrially, murdered.
From 1939 until early 1942 when I was born, nearly two million Jews were
killed. Six million would die by the end of the war. Almost the whole world,
including the United States, rejected pleas to provide a haven for those who
might have been saved. Even after Hitler was defeated, the British shut the
doors of Palestine to those who had somehow survived.
I was three when the Holocaust ended, and it was three years later that Israel
was established in May 1948, and neighboring Arab states sent in their armies
to try to snuff the state out in its infancy. It would, again, be some years before I
fully realized that this first Arab-Israeli war was the start of an essential tension
in my country’s life, and my own: between the Jewish ethical ideals at the core
of Zionism and the reality of our having to fight, and sometimes even kill, in
order to secure, establish and safeguard our state. Yet even as a small child, I
was keenly aware of the historic events swirling around me.
Mishmar Hasharon, the hamlet north of Tel Aviv where I spent the first 17
years of my life, was one of the early kibbutzim. These collective farming
settlements had their roots in Herzl’s view that an avant-garde of “pioneers”
would need to settle a homeland that was still economically undeveloped, and
where even farming was difficult. Members of Jewish youth groups from
Eastern Europe, among them my mother, provided most of the pioneers,
drawing inspiration not just from Zionism but by the still untainted collectivist
ideals represented by the triumph of Communism over the czars in Russia.
It is hard for people who didn’t live through that time to understand the
mindset of the kibbutzniks. They had higher aspirations than simply planting the
seeds of a future state. They wanted to be part of transforming what it meant to
be a Jew. The act of first taming, and then farming, the soil of Palestine was not
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