THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

meaning of the place, however, has become deeper. The heroism of the ghettorebels, said the guide during my first trip, was the heroic spirit that founded ournation. I bought the Zionist goods without much rummaging and checking. I loved mychildhood heroes, leaned on them and trusted them, knowing they would always beavailable to me. They included the legendary IDF soldier Meir Har-Zion and hiscomrades, the heroes of Unit 101; and Mordechai Anilevich, of whom I learnedfrom Leon Uris’s book Mila 18. Other heroes were the Maccabees and theHasmoneans, the Massada faithful and Bar Kokhva’s brave fighters. The historictruth, if history can be regarded as truth, came later, bit by bit; it slowly seeped in,eroding the fanatical Zionist patina. I experienced it, as did my friends.The influence of heroic legends on everyday life became apparent to me in oneoccasion when I was serving as chairman of the Jewish Agency and the ZionistExecutive. I wanted to cut the budgets of the youth movements, which were alsofinanced by the national institutions. “You can’t do this. This is anti-Zionist,” the Likudrepresentative objected, shouting. He was serving then as the Betar commissioner,the senior leader of the rightwing youth movement founded by Vladimir ZeevZhabotinsky.I told him that I myself was also a graduate of a youth movement, the Zionistreligious Bnei Akiva. “Don’t I know what Zionism is?” I asked him.“We have to maintain the youth movement,” he hollered. “The youth movementsrebelled in the Warsaw ghetto and saved our national honor. The Shoah can happenagain. Who will then fight back?”I was speechless. It couldn’t be that in the last few years of the twentieth centuryone would use such an argument when discussing a budget cut. I asked for time todecide, and then used a tactic borrowed from Levi Eshkol, my favorite primeminister. I compromised and compromised until they accepted my position. I recalledthe incident with the Betar representative on another occasion, while I was attendinga relative’s funeral. She was a Shoah survivor. The funeral took place in a southernkibbutz near Yad Mordechai. Among the mourners was a teenage boy, who wore asweatshirt that read “The journey to discover the roots of the Zionist Revolution andthe Zionist youth movements’ rebellion in Poland.”In the face of such a slogan I could not hold back.“The roots of the Zionist revolution started hundreds of years, or dozens of years