While the realities in Europe proved to be complicated enough, Menachem Begin proclaimed an open “rebellion” against “Nazo–British” rule in Palestine in defiance of the Jewish Agency's policy in January 1944. This was another form of terrorism – following the peculiar kind of Sternist activities that were “stamped out” by the Yishuv and the British in 1942. Thus, so we were told previously by our Agency source, “Resolutions against terrorism were adopted by all Jewish public bodies. The public was taught to understand the great harm caused by these terrorist activities (italics added), both from the human point of view as well as from the Zionist political point of view.” The role of the Labor elite in its own eyes as the “teacher of the public” or as a mobilizing elite becomes clear here. The Labor elite pursued a degree of control over the Yishuv, which in retrospect seems to have required almost antidemocratic regimentation. Indeed Ben-Gurion and his Mapai associates, such as Berl Katzenelson (who died later in 1944), tried to influence the Hebrew media and had a variety of media at their disposal, but they never succeeded completely due to the rather heterogeneous character of the Yishuv. Nor would Ben-Gurion go beyond certain democratic practices. He was aiming at this stage at the unified Labor base, and later at a direct public campaign – general elections to the Palestine Jewish National Committee – which in fact had not taken place in the Yishuv proper since the 1930s.