Page 120 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

The newspapers accompanied the leaders' fast day by day
We, the Jews of the Land of Israel, have been faced by an obtuse wall. The living remnants of the Hitlerite destruction are not allowed to make Aliya to their national home and build their future with us. We have banged our head against this obtuse wall.
We have no intention to vex anyone, but rather to bring the condition of those on the ship in Italy closer to the imagination and senses of every Jew in the Land of Israel, and to arouse those who have the power to act before a disaster occurs. Our limited numbers are expressing at this point the sentiments of the entire Yishuv, the entire nation.
Throughout all the years of the war and destruction we were told: Now there is war. There was war then, Hitler was then. Now he’s gone. Now there is a world after victory. The world is sailing, even if the paths are bumpy, towards its future. There was a future for everyone, just not for the Jewish people. Why?
If the world wants to be just – and we as Jews cannot give up on justice in the world – then the redemption of the Hebrew People in its homeland stands at the top of the moral duties of the nations of the world, to one of them. We hope that the cries of the immigrants, symbolizing the cries of the entire nation, shall be heard everywhere.
The hunger strike at the National Institutions Building in Jerusalem drew a great deal of attention in the Land of Israel and the world. One foreign reporter noted in his report that to date, only cases of hunger striking of individual leaders were known, such as Mahatma Gandhi in India, or – conversely– hunger strikes of inmates in prisons. This was the first time in which a broad leadership
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