Word: holocaust
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recent years, the pluralism prevalent in Israel has been seemingly ignored by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and hence hidden from the world at large. By reminding Gentiles of the Holocaust and constantly invoking solidarity among Jews, the Prime Minister has managed to guide Israel by his firm hand alone. At times, Begin's "the hell with everyone else" attitude was worthy of admiration. By bombing the Iraqui nuclear reactor, for example, Israel sacrificed popularity for safety. As former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban has said, "Better to be unpopular than dead...
...also drove Begin, as he braced for what he knew would be a long struggle with the U.S. over the Palestinian issue, was the firm conviction that God had given the West Bank to the Jews. And there was something else: a determination, born of his experience in the Holocaust, to do whatever was necessary to protect Israel. Begin's father, a leader of the Jewish community in Brest Litovsk, Poland, was said to have been thrown by the Nazis into a river at gunpoint while weighted down with sacks filled with rocks; he died, along with many others from...
Begin's rhetoric was more high-pitched, his images more starkly drawn than his predecessor's. All of Israel's older generation of statesmen had been deeply affected by the Holocaust-many in tragically personal ways, as was Begin-but Begin somehow seemed more indelibly marked by it, almost in fact to the point of obsession...
...trouble is that this world has not provided the Jews with much redemption. Instead, the main events in Jewish history, until the founding of Israel, consisted mostly of disasters: the destruction of the Temple, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, each devastation considerably more terrible and unimaginable than the one it followed. These days Begin cites Genesis as the font of his politics, but his abiding source is the Holocaust, as it is for much of Israel. To the importance of individual death in Judaism, the Holocaust added a national significance. Here was the death of deaths, 6 million gone. Just...
...policies, from Ben-Gurion's to Begin's; in Bad Reichenhall, West Germany. Co-founder and president of the World Jewish Congress from 1949 to 1977, Goldmann negotiated the 1952 reparations agreement with West Germany that resulted in payments of some $822 million to Israel and its Holocaust survivors. Goldmann repeatedly advocated peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Israelis, saying, "There can be no future for the Jewish state unless agreement is reached with the Arabs." And in July he argued for ending the siege of West Beirut and for mutual recognition between Palestinians and Israelis...