so that it was now possible to regard the astronauts as some sort of cadre of whites of northern European racial background. In fact, this had nothing to do, perse, with their being astronauts. It was typical of career military officers generally. Throughout the world, for that matter, career officers came from “native” or “old settler” stock. Even in Israel, which had existed for barely a generation as an independent nation and was dominated politically by immigrants from Eastern Europe, the officer corps was made up overwhelmingly of “real Israelis”—men born or raised from an early age in
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