From the outset the dream of a Jewish home in Palestine permeated the public life of She'erith Hapleitah. The bitter fate of the Jewish people during the war was accounted for in terms of the vulnerabilities of minority life; Jewish resistance to the Nazis was celebrated as a primarily Zionist enterprise while the creation of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel was taken to be the last will and testament bequeathed by the dead to the living. The frameworks set up by the survivors in and around the DP camps – local and regional committees, the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews in Bavaria, political parties, youth movements, schools and training farms – were infused with the same spirit. For many, their almost intuitive Zionism stood for the warmth, unquestioning acceptance and security of home; for the more politically minded it signified the only real hope for the rescue and rehabilitation of the little that remained of European Jewry and, in the longer term, the promise of the Jewish future.

Edward Shils has suggested that