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We believed we had returned to Mount Sinai, where our Jewish Torah had been given to Moses 3,300 years earlier. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ecstatically proclaimed the Third Kingdom of Israel. Songs were written about the miraculous return, victory albums were published, memorials were erected. Reality hit Israel in the face when international pressure forced it to withdraw from the Sinai shortly thereafter. During the Six-Day War of 1967 Israel not only recaptured the Sinai but also the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

When the teenage Arik attended school in Tel-Aviv, he went to the beach “to watch the violence of the sky and breakers pounding the shore” (Sharon 2001, p. 28), which echoed his own feelings. Arik’s mother, Vera Schneorov Scheinerman, was a difficult person as well, aggressive, suspicious, and rigid. ” In fact, unlike her husband, Arik’s mother was not a Zionist. She had not planned a pioneer’s life and did not wish to go to Palestine. Coming from the only Jewish family in a small Byelorussian village, she had gone to the university of Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1917 to study medicine.

In 1968 Kahane had founded the Jewish Defense League in the United States, a tiny “self-defense” group listed as a terrorist group by the FBI because it kept physically attacking Arabs in the United States. In 1990 Kahane was assassinated in New York by El-Sayid Nosair, a member of the AlQaeda terrorist group (Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999). In 1968, for his Bar-Mitzvah in Brooklyn, Goldstein had written a pacifist essay saying that God’s greatest commandment was Thou Shall Not Kill. Nonetheless when he grew up, he joined the Jewish Defense League and wanted to kill Arabs, which he later did.