ABSTRACT
Scrutiny of the very extensive documentation that Ben-Gurion left behind him brings to light his intensive preoccupation with the international situation along with Hitler’s rise to power and the consequences he foresaw for the fate of the Jewish people and the Zionist movement. This preoccupation of his is revealed in an analysis covering a number of motifs extensively documented and referred to in a variety of ways: an inevitable world war; a disaster of enormous dimensions in store for the Jewish people; the Jewish people, caught in a terrible trap, bound to be abandoned; the only basic Jewish solution is the Zionist one and the Yishuv has the historic duty and mission to carry it out. This chapter deals with the questions raised in the perspective of the settings in which Ben-Gurion said or wrote the things that illustrated his feelings towards the Jews of the Golah in the Holocaust period.
