the Eichmann trial. Many people believe that things should and could have been done: Hundreds of Haganah and Irgun fighters could have been parachuted into Europe; the British and American governments could have been pressured into bombing the railways leading to the death camps; the British in Palestine could have been compelled by force of arms to open the doors of the country to tens of thousands of Jews who could have been rescued from Europe by bribery and smuggling.

As a matter of fact, all the Zionist leaders, including the two dissident underground groups, the Irgun and the Stern group, conducted Palestinian, not Jewish, policies. The Jewish Agency recruited the young men of the Yishuv for the Jewish Brigade in the British Army. While they could expropriate arms for the Haganah, they could do nothing about the lot of the Jews until after the war. The Irgun leaders concurred in this policy until 1944, which was the year they renewed the fight against the British.

It took some time, until nearly the end of the war, before the news of the Holocaust finally filtered through. (It seems to have been held up on the way by the Zionist leadership, who did not want to aggravate the mood of the Yishuv.) When its dimensions emerged in all their horror, the news created a shock in Israel that will last for generations.

Nothing in Israel today can be completely understood without taking into account the shadow of this genocide. It hangs over every single act and decision. It creates an outlook, a morality, a form of instinctive reaction, which can be summarized in two words: Never Again. Immediately after the end of World War II, Never Again meant that the hundreds of thousands of Jews left stranded in Europe, after the murder of nearly six million people, must be brought to Palestine immediately, into a Jewish state where these wrecks could become human beings again. Never Again meant: A state has to be set up so that never again will Jews be helpless, without the instruments

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