ABSTRACT
The dual lessons about national security policy learned from the experience in Palestine and from the Holocaust were military strength and self-reliance. In the 1930s there emerged among the Jews in Eretz Israel a crystallized conception regarding national security policy. Beginning in the 1930s, the feeling of common destiny among Jews in Palestine became much stronger and, inevitably, problems of national security policy gained salience at the expense of internal Yishuv issues. The Israeli case is a fascinating laboratory for studying how the beliefs and orientations of a political leadership fashioned the way in which the bulk of the country's population viewed issues of national security policy. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Jewish pioneers in Palestine were not only creating an economic, social, and organizational infrastructure for the state which would be established in 1948; they were also molding the ideological postulates which would give their movement strength and direction.
