and land and the world and the workers and everything, so that I can fix and renew things.” 88 Like the first Soviet generation and the true believers among their American cousins, the first Sabra generation lived in a world where politics was “the metaphor of all things.” The kibbutz, the moshav, the school, the youth movement, and the military were closely interrelated, mutually dependent, and ultimately subordinate to the political leadership and the cause of Zionist redemption. The Sabra loved their teachers, who were prophets, and worshiped their military commanders, who were teachers. Kindergartens had “Jewish National Fund corners” analogous to Soviet “red corners” (Communist shrines), and the Palmach (the elite strike force of the Jewish military organization, the Haganah) had political officers analogous to Soviet commissars. Both generations lived amid relentless and mostly spontaneous political unanimity; both grew up among living saints and proliferating memorials; both drained swamps and made deserts bloom; and both struggled to merge the personal and the communal into one heroic story of timelessness regained. As David Ben- Gurion proclaimed in 1919, “a distinction between the needs of the individual and the needs of the nation has no basis in the lives of the workers in Eretz Israel.” And as one young Sabra wrote in his diary in 1941, the “memories of private events” had begun to overshadow the “national historical background” in the chronicle of his life. “I will now correct this imbalance and write about enlistment and those who evade it, about the death of Ussishkin and the death of Brandeis, about the wars of Russia. . . . Why should I not write about these things in my diary? These facts are history and will always be remembered, while the details of individuals go astray and get lost in oblivion. Get lost and vanish.” 89 The Yishuv was no Soviet Union. It was small, particularist, and proudly parochial. Its unity was entirely voluntary (defectors were despised but free to go), and its warrior energy was directed outward, at the easily identifiable non- Jews. It was messianic but also one among many, unique but also “normal,” in the familiar nationalist mold (which was mostly biblical in the first place). As one Herzliya Gymnasium student wrote in 1937, “this is the nation that has produced great heroes, zealous for freedom, and from whom rose prophets who prophesied the rule of justice and honesty in the world—because this nation is a heroic and noble nation and only the bitter and harsh life of Exile debased it, and this nation is still destined to be a light unto the nations.” 90 Zionism and Soviet Communism were both millenarian rebellions against capitalism, “philistinism,” and “chimerical nationality.” But Zionism belonged to