SHLOMO BEN-YOSEF   Shlomo Ben-Yosef had only the year before made his way from Poland “illegally” across the Syrian border into Palestine, and had at once been absorbed into the pelugah.   He was a quiet, unobtrusive Young man from a typically poor Polish family, without the benefits of a higher education, and with a simple direct understanding.   Choking with bitterness and frustration in the face of the continuous permitted aggression, he recognized that the Rosh Pina trap was the microcosm of the larger trap in which Zionism itself was to be crushed.   He was oppressed by the failure of the Jewish youth to take fate in its hands and fight back.   He decided that he must do something, by some demonstrative act make a protest somehow to rouse his generation to the mortal danger and to their duty.   Together with two younger members of the pelugah, Avraham Shein and Shalom Zuravin, he went out one afternoon in April 1938 to the main road and fired at an Arab bus.   Nobody was hit.   He then went back with his friends to a shed in the village, and waited, rifle in hand, to be arrested.    For this, two months later, the British hanged him.   The forty-eight hours before the execution were hours of intolerable tension.    Demonstrations were organized in the cities and clashed with the police.   People left their work and their business, formed little knots in the streets that developed into spontaneous demonstrations.   Posters and placards, appealing, denouncing, calling to prayer, appeared on walls and windows.   Cafes shut.   Cinemas did not open.   The hours passed.   As each new edition of the newspapers announced a new refusal of the British to revise, to reopen the trial, to allow an appeal, at least to delay, the air was filled with rage and despair.   Ben-Yosef alone remained calm and poised.     When a group of journalists were allowed to visit him on the eve of the hanging at Acre Gaol, it was he who comforted them.             “Do not console me, I need no consolation.”               “I am proud to be the first Jew to go to the gallows in Palestine.”   “In dying I shall do my people a greater service than in my life.”   “Let the world see that Jews are not afraid to face death.”   In his cell the journalists saw that he had written on the wall –   “To die or to conquer the height.”   Called in the morning for his last steps on earth, he washed meticulously, brushed his teeth, and drank a cup of tea.   As he walked the few yards to the death cell he sang the Betar hymn, and on the gallows he called out -             “Long live the Jewish State.  Long live Jabotinsky.”             *        *        *   *I will assemble the lame, and I will gather those who have been driven away and those whom I have afflicted.  And I will make the lame a remnant, and those who were cast off a strong nation; and the Lord shall reign over them in Mount Zion from this time forth and forever. (Micah 4)