“We must stress the positive,” he said. “It is not good for us to stand in the light of ‘the whole world is against us.’”

Weizmann continued to meet with MacDonald; Ben-Gurion said that it was “psychologically impossible” for him to do so. “In my view, he is like a member of Hitler’s gang, and our friends need to know that no Jew can meet with him.”

At the beginning of 1911, the Jewish world and Ben-Gurion himself were scandalized by an article the Hebrew novelist Yosef Haim Brenner published in the newspaper Hapo’el Hatza’ir. The subject was Jews who had converted to Christianity.22 Brenner maintained that there was a Jewish national identity independent of religion and that this identity had

Jibli recalled that Ben-Gurion loved her traditional Yemenite jahnun, served with a tomato sauce.

“Five or six million Jews are being crushed and we have no guarantee that Palestine will not be dragged into the war,” he said in April 1941. “There are things over which we have no control. We cannot eject Hitler from Europe, we cannot prevent him from getting to Egypt.”

“In my opinion, Judaism is a historical experience,”

“We, who want to build a new land in a wilderness out of ruins, need to learn how the deportees and persecuted people from England founded a huge, rich country with unparalleled treasures and creative power.”

Several plans aimed at saving tens of thousands of children were not implemented, in part because the British refused to grant immigration certificates.

“And you feel totally helpless, you can’t even get furious, and the sun is shining in all its glory,”