their departure, there had already been much talk about the great genera-
tional divide that had opened up between the ideologically committed
Labor Zionist founders, who had literally built the country with a plow in
one hand and rifle in the other--and their sons, university-trained authors,
academics, journalists, professionals, and businessmen, whom the novelist
S. Yizhar called "the espresso generation." This generation of the sons cer-
tainly paid its dues in military service, but its members' failure to ignite like
their fathers had for the cause of the Jewish state was gradually to become an
open scandal, perhaps the open scandal of the years after Ben-Gurion had
been expunged from public life. My father knew little about any of this. He
was, after all, a physicist, with little interest in authors, journalists, and busi-
nessmen, and even less in espresso. And unlike so many others of his gener-
ation, he grew up believing in the cause of his own parents, who had
emigrated to Palestine from Kiev in 1924, when there were fewer than
95,000 Jews in the country. It had always been clear to his parents that "it
was going to be bad" if they stayed in Europe, and the Jewish state-in-the-
making was for them, as for the rest of Ben-Gurion's followers, nothing
short of salvation. And in this they were right. Within twenty-five years, vir-
tually all of the family and friends whom they had left behind had perished.

I never knew my grandfather, who died the year after I was born. But I
knew he had joined the Labor movement's first cooperative settlement,
Nahalal, and had even served as a Labor party representative in the Tel Aviv
workers' council, taking Moshe Sharett's seat when Sharett, who later became
Israel's second prime minister, went on to bigger and better things. And since
I also had no difficulty sympathizing with the things my parents believed to be
important, I was able, somehow, to grow up a Ben-Gurionist as my grandfa-
ther had been, even in America. From my childhood, I believed that it was
only because of Zion that my parents had lived and I had been born and that
it was in Israel, where I would learn to fight as a Jew and to create as a Jew,
that I would find my salvation. My father's home was, as it turned out, some-
thing of a time capsule, in which I was able to grow up with such thoughts,
safe in the illusion that these were things that all Israeli children my age be-
lieved. And when, after high school, I went back to Israel and to my uncle's
house, I saw no evidence to the contrary. My cousins were religious children,
growing up in a time capsule of their own--something that neither they nor I
understood at the time--a West Bank settlement called Kedumim, the first
modern Jewish community in the heart of Samaria. And they, like me, con-
tinued to believe that the Jewish state would be the expression of their visions
and their dreams in times of well-being and their strength and shield in times
of suffering. No one in Kedumim ever mentioned to me that there were Jews
in Israel who did not believe in the Jewish state. Immersed in their own his-
torical missions and adventures, I doubt my cousins had even noticed.

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