Sublime

HIS DISAPPOINTMENT IN AMERICAN Jews notwithstanding, Ben-Gurion presided over a project of immigrant absorption of unprecedented proportions. Never in human history had such a small population absorbed so many immigrants so successfully.

The diminished ideological passion of secular Zionism created a vacuum that afforded religious Jews an opportunity to become Zionism’s new leaders, the pioneers of Israel’s third decade. If previous Jewish religious leaders had assailed Zionism because it was overly secular and had sought to create a new Jew, after the war, some religious leaders a

Israel would only build in the settlement blocs and in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem—in accordance with the 2004 Bush-Sharon letter—and proactively improve the lives of the 90 percent of West Bank Palestinians already enjoying de facto independence. “Instead of demanding what each side cannot do, we must ask what each side can,” I concluded

Rafi Eitan, the son of Jewish pioneers from Russia, was seventeen at the time. “Here come exultant Germans, who had been members of the Nazi Party, who enlisted to the Wehrmacht and SS, and they want to return to their property when all the Jewish property outside was destroyed,” he said. Eitan was a member of a seventeen-man force from the Haganah

Yet refuting the Bush-Sharon letter also boxed in the Palestinians.

“Why should terrorists target the Jewish State?” was supplanted by “What has Israel done to the Palestinians to drive them to such desperation?”