THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

into ploughshares and wait patiently for us to do the work for them. We may speakout against war, but in reality we are still over-armed and thus coalesce naturally withthe surrounding enmity. In the high-school yeshiva I attended, I had an extraordinaryHebrew teacher. In the twelfth grade, he disappeared twice for a few days. The firsttime, he was arrested for the attempted arson of a Mount of Olives church; thesecond time, he chased someone—a non-Jew, naturally—with an ax in the Old City.He was detained on suspicion of membership in all kinds of extreme right-wingorganizations. At that time these organizations were small and considered fringegroups. Since then they have grown, in the best tradition of right-wing ideologies.As a schoolboy, I liked my teacher very much. I did not know his ideology welland did not understand it completely. I argued with him, trying to hone my values onhis whetstone. The confrontation with him benefited me and I absorbed some of themost humanistic Jewish axioms that I treasure to this day. At the time I did not knowhow dangerous he was; just that he was a strong opponent, a unique, wise, andoutstanding man in an otherwise rather mundane school. I remember his smile whenhe dictated the essay title for our final exam: “In Wars and Trials a People is Made.”“This one is especially for you,” he whispered to me.As the years passed, he and his friends increased in numbers. The fringes becamethe center while on the left, we decreased in numbers and became marginal. Theirinsane narrative threatened to tear Israel apart. Concepts like expulsion, death,starvation, and persecution have become part of the political dialogue and not eventhe cabinet is exempt. Their voices are heard loud and clear, often from the Knessetpodium, on Gaza, Judea, Samaria, and South Lebanon. The same spirit, the samewords and the same logic: Jews and Israelis have become thugs. The rhetoric had itsimpact on policy. In the summer 2006 war in Lebanon, we crossed a line we had notcrossed before when we bombed the enemy’s capital city, violating Lebanon’ssymbol of sovereignty and national pride, not allowing room for reconciliation the dayafter. We did not do this to any capital city in 1967, or during the Yom Kippur War. Inthe first war in Lebanon, we stopped short of invading Beirut. Now we haveremoved all restraints.It was a government in which both the prime minister and the defense minister werecivilians, with no military careers behind them, that bombed parts of southern Beirutto dust, citing Dresden and Kosovo as precedents. Israeli arrogance in the sky aboveBeirut is the voice of the people at their worst. The guns blasted so loudly that we