THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

from Europe, and concentration-camp survivors who were shipped to battle in thenew state joined them. The Six-Day War was different. The 1967 victory should havebeen a shared victory, a uniting one, belonging to both the veteran Israelis and thenewer immigrants. Yet something went wrong. The old-timers and the religiousZionists snatched the victory and claimed it for themselves.Most of the Jews from Muslim countries arrived here by surprise. It seems to methat the Zionist political and cultural preparation process skipped over most of theJews who emigrated from Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Iran, India, and othercountries. While in Europe, especially in the east, national sentiments brewed fordecades in newspapers, literature, language conflicts, uniting unions, and congregatingconventions, Middle Eastern Jews went on living as usual. Messianic Zionism andpolitical activism had always existed there, but not on the same scale as in Europe. Iam not sure that the Jewish public in the Muslim world was as thoroughly politicallyprepared as the European Ashkenazis. Perhaps this was for the better.In the three-year window between World War II and the creation of the state ofIsrael, it became obvious that the world had changed. The Zionist establishmentrealized that the major human reserves of the stateto-be had perished in the Shoah.The dream of founding the State of Israel with the human, cultural, social, andpolitical forces of the Jews of the Pale of settlement—Poland, Russia, and Ukraine—had gone up in flames.David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues in the Jewish settlements in Israel, theYishuv, understood that the only replacement for human loss could be found in theMuslim world. The Middle Eastern Jews had become “spare parts”—vital substituteswithout whom the Israeli state could not exist. At the same time, the War ofIndependence underscored the violent nature of Arab-Jewish relations. Although thealienation of Jews in the Muslim countries was already widespread—roused locallywith European help—the war of 1948 established new rules. Many years of livingpeacefully alongside the Arabs ended. It became unbearable for Jews to live with thebrethren of the enemy of his Jewish brethren. The Arabs expelled their Jews; theAshkenazi Israeli community absorbed them willingly. Mass immigration took place.As Middle Eastern Jews were reluctantly adjusting to the new reality, tremorsshook the old Zionist leadership in the new state. The liquidation of Eastern EuropeanJewry also liquidated the cultural and human foundation from which they drew theirpower. The local leadership of Ben Gurion and his colleagues in the Labor