The unspeakable, overwhelming evil of the Holocaust is a necessary element in any attempt to understand the history of modern Israel. The deliberate, systematic annihilation of six million Jews in Europe, after centuries of intermittent persecution and pogroms, led many Jews around the world to conclude, along with those who had already moved to Palestine since the late nineteenth century, that only in a homeland of their own would they have security.…The fundamental problem that haunts Jews and Palestinians to this day is that the land was already occupied, and the Jewish immigrants had to take it by force. | more…