Green was a Zionist. Why? Possibly because of a strong traditional Jewish background, which made Zionism more attractive to him than Bolshevism; perhaps, too, because Zionism, being the most radical remedy, appealed to his extremist nature. Be that as it may be, for Ben-Gurion the national revolution always came first, with the social revolution a very poor second.

* * *

Zionism, for young people in Eastern Europe at the time-a time of unrest and pogroms throughout Russiameant: Go east, young man. And east he went.

On a sunny Mediterranean day young Green arrived in the Palestine seacoast town of Jaffa. It was awful. A vivid description of this experience appears in his first semiofficial biography, A Man and His Generation, written by a gushing lady admirer, Bracha Chabas. The description is profoundly significant because it could have come only from Ben-Gurion himself, as he remembered it many years later and told it to his biographer. It must express for many who underwent the same experience their whole attitude toward the reality of Palestine.

Here was a young man of eighteen, already a veteran of Zionist politics, who had dreamed and talked for years about Palestine, approaching its shores for the first time, seeing the outline of Jaffa with its citadel and minarets rising along the horizon. In his mind Palestine was real, yet what he pictured was not the real Palestine, but rather a Palestine of the past, present and future-all three of which bore no resemblance to what he was going to see within the next few hours. His Palestine of the future was a wonderful land of liberty, equality and Jewish resurrection, the utopia of Herzl overlaid with the dreams of eastern European socialism. His Palestine of the present was a scattered handful of isolated settlements, created since the 1880's by the pioneers of the first aliyah, places of heroic struggle where Jewish workers toiled and Jewish

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