Isaac David Knafo was a writer, artist, and activist born in Mogador, Morocco, and educated in Paris. A prominent cultural figure in Morocco, Knafo was well known among the intelligentsia of Mogador for his first book, Les jeux et les rimes and later for his anti-Nazi pamphlet Les Hitlériques. The laws of the Vichy regime increasingly affected the rights and liberties of Jews in Morocco; in 1942, at the urging of the Jewish community, Knafo burned all the available copies of the pamphlet. A sole surviving exemplar was discovered in 1995. Knafo became an active member of the Zionist movement, immigrating to Israel in 1956 and settling on kibbutz Ramat ha-Kovesh. In Israel, he continued publishing poems, stories, and memoirs and exhibited a collection of one hundred paintings in 1973.
Nahal Oz, located in the Negev close to the border of the Gaza strip, was founded in 1951 as Israel’s first Nahal settlement. These were established by soldiers to provide a first line of defense…
Now let us see whether the economic factor has influenced the history of our people in Europe, and in what ways this influence can be seen. [ . . . ]
In the final analysis, the Jews were necessary in…