THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Mandatory for official guests to Israel is the visit to Yad Vashem, our state’s mostimportant Shoah museum and memorial. Every nation has a monumentcommemorating the Unknown Soldier, usually portrayed as an individual. We have amemorial to all the victims, for all of us, and all our visitors must come and mournwith us. It is a ritual of the new Israeli religion. If you are an official guest, you land atBen-Gurion Airport, stop briefly in your hotel to refresh yourself, then you don ablack suit and tie, perhaps a large velvet skullcap like that of a rabbi or a cardinal,and you are whisked to Jerusalem, to Yad Vashem.A solemn face, a bouquet of flowers in hand, head lowered. Then a cantor chantsthe awe-filled God Full of Mercy prayer for the dead. Three steps backward andeveryone gets back in the limos, off to the real business of politics and diplomacy.From time to time an especially interesting guest appears and his speech drawsmomentary attention and camera flashes. Such a guest might be a German presidentor the head of a state that collaborated with the Nazis. Yad Vashem is the storefrontand the gateway to the Israeli experience.The Shoah is woven, to varying degrees, into almost all of Israel’s politicalarguments. Unlike other events of the past, the Shoah does not recede but is comingcloser to us all the time. It is a past that is present, maintained, monitored, heard, andrepresented.Speaking shortly after the Six-Day War, one of Israel’s most remarkable doves,the foreign minister Abba Eban, brilliantly argued that Israel must never return to itsprewar borders. He coined a term that is still used today, defining Israel’s boundaries,the 1949 Armistice Line, as “Auschwitz borders,”—tight boundaries that compelledIsrael to act. In retrospect, he associated the miraculous war of wonders andredemption to the dark period that ended a quarter of a century earlier, contrastingthe bright Israeli light with the pitch-black darkness that covered the stateless Jews.Six days of redemption against twelve years of oppression.Of all people, Eban, the ultimate peace-seeking statesman, rendered legitimacy tothe worst argument of the right, as empty rhetoric sometimes carries nations tounwanted destinations. Years later, in the midst of evacuating the Jewish occupiers ofGaza in the 2006 disengagement, this argument came full circle. According to the