ABSTRACT
I was seventeen years and six months old when I arrived in what was then Palestine; when I left it almost seventeen years later, it was a different country even in name. The years I lived there were not of equal interest. While the war went on in Europe calm reigned in Palestine, but I discovered a new world, a community, a way of life I had not known before. Then, from 1946 to 1949, the pulse of history quickened, Palestine was suddenly propelled to center stage in world politics, and I could watch from close quarters the establishment of the State of Israel and the war for independence. The years after 1949, important as they were for the formation of the character of the new state, were bound to be an era of anticlimax. For me, for a variety of personal reasons, they were years of stress and strain.
