Seventy-three years ago, in May of 1945 hardly anyone outside of the Jewish diaspora heard of the small town on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean called Tel-Aviv. While its population of two hundred thousand or so was not insignificant for the region, it was a provincial backwater in the British Empire, with its inhabitants traumatized by the recently revealed and utterly incredible dimensions of the Holocaust of their own people, the European Jewry. This unimaginable loss was harder to bear yet, because it was expressly for the salvation of Europe's Jews that the Zionist movement was created, and because it was they who were relied upon to make up the human capital reserves of the as yet non-existent, but much anticipated independent Jewish state.
Tel-Aviv's residents were traumatized by unprecedented losses on both the personal (there was hardly a family who hasn't lost loved ones in the Holocaust) and the communal levels. The British, who as everyone knew, would soon be getting rid of their unsustainable empire, were placing their post-imperial bets squarely on the Arabs, denying the starving, half-dead survivors of the Nazi death camps access their ancestral homeland.
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