| AL: What was the end of my family? Poland! That could serve as a very type of the tragedy of the Jewish people. We are always on the outside. Believe me, it was very, very hard when I came here. But we pioneers did something to change our objective conditions. But when the land was ready, the preponderance of Jews still did not come. |
| The fighting, the squabbling, the endless divisions of our political parties, really don't you see why it continues? Each blames the other for the simple failure of the Jews to come. Because we are still only a very few people here. Do you think that if we were ten million Jews it would be like this? Both from the Jewish and from the Arab point of view, everything would be objectively and subjectively different. |
| HC: You sound so certain? |
| AL [ laughing]: Of many things I have my human doubts, but yes, of this I am certain. I have lived here now for sixty-six years. If only ten million Jews were living here, working here, raising their children here, filling the land with Jewish sweat and lives, all the factionalism, the division, the discord would qualitatively alter. And I include in this the Arabs. Unlike many "theorists," I talk with them. I know. What keeps them so hostile and stubborn is that they are keenly aware that the Jews don't want to come. They are counting on us! It makes me so sad. |
| AL: Though my health is good and my mind is sound, I am now an old man of eighty-four. Yet I have little peace. I wake up in the middle of the night, many nights, trying to understand what has happened to this people. My generation suffered and made a revolution for this people. It is impossible not to see it, not to feel it. And yet still the Jews don't come, and still Jews here leave this land. What kind of people is this? |
| You read my story, "Master of His Fate," about Benjamin Goldwasser. It's a true tale. In the 1920s many Jews actually left Palestine to fight for the Soviet Union, to fight for the idea of brotherhood which they said would also be good for the Jews. |
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