I never went back to school after that. With my parents working so hard and the depression steadily getting worse in Palestine, I did not want to go on to high school. I wanted to earn a living, and formal schooling bored me. I was always getting ahead of my class; the school system seemed a wastefully slow way of acquiring knowledge.

After a highly unsuccessful try at mechanics, I went to work as a lawyer's clerk. Here I began to see life as it really was, the poverty of the many; the difference between the Arabs of Jaffa, where some of the courts were located, and the Jews of neighboring Tel Aviv; the supercilious superiority of our British masters who ran the courts and the police.

One day at court, another lawyer's clerk asked me what I thought about the political situation. 1 said I thought our leaders were disgraceful.

"What are you going to do about it?" he asked. 1 told him 1 did not know.

"Well, some of us think we know," he said. "There is an organization. . .

Thus 1 heard, for the first time, the name of the Irgun -the National Military Organization, which became from that moment the center of my life.

Arab terrorism was raging in the country at the time. Jews were being ambushed and killed every few days. The British seemed to be incapable of putting a stop to these acts, and the Jews, ever suspicious of British perfidy, believed that the British were secretly supporting the Arabs. Much later 1 realized that these "disturbances," as we called them in Hebrew, were in fact an Arab rebellion, a last desperate, and wholly inefficient, try of the Palestinian Arab nation to get rid of the British overlords and the Jewish immigrants, who looked to them like a rabble of foreigners trying to take over their country. But at the time I saw only that our people were being killed, that the hypocritical British were doing nothing to stop them, and it looked to me as if our established leaders,

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