Approximately 10,000 Eastern European Jews immigrated to Palestine, as compared to nearly a million Jews who immigrated to the United States.5 Most of the Jews of the First Aliyah had no realistic hope of establishing a Jewish nation in Palestine. Although some Jewish intellectuals, such as Leo Pinsker, had advocated “autoemancipation” as early as

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However, there is already a fundamental difference from the past. In the past, a threatened Jewish community in Diaspora could hope only to sustain bearable losses and to live on by sufferance or flight. Israel has—and, through it, all Jews have—a major voice in its own fate. In the past, when Jews were destroyed, their wealth and achievement enric

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