THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

ad fortune, to express anger, to remember and never forget, by reincarnating theNazi spirit into the Arab body.What can you say to a boy like this? What he and his friends experienced inJerusalem no one in the West had experienced for years. A terrorist attack in NewYork almost brought the greatest superpower to its knees, unleashing from itfrightening aggression. That despicable act caused the American president to lie to hispeople and to the world, to declare a war of deceit and treachery on a weak statelike Iraq in order to satisfy his urge for revenge and maintain the “American way oflife.” If a president breaks down in panic, how can we blame the children ofJerusalem, Kiriat Shmona, or Sderot? What else could one expect to hear from ateenager who experiences fear on a daily basis over the course of several years?Exploding buses, cafés, pizza parlors, car bombs, potential death traps on the way toschool and back home. There is a limit to the amount of forgiveness and compassionthat you can expect from a teenager, whose blood is boiling anyway. I wished to planta seed for thought. I followed him after class and tried to engage him. I told him abouta nightmarish ride that turned to a magical one in Jerusalem many years before.One evening before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I drove throughJerusalem. The traffic was heavy, as it usually is on the eve of holidays. Suddenlytraffic went from slow to still. I heard on the news that there had been a terror attack.With me in the car were my father and my elder son, still very young. We listened tothe news, sent our wishes to the victims and hoped we would arrive home on time.But as the traffic jam dragged on, my son asked: “How could you even begin to thinkof making peace with these Arabs?” These Arabs is an expression in spokenHebrew—all Arabs, always generalized, always disdained. Our existential fear of thedark, hidden, unknown and foreign among us.I thought of how I might answer him, without seeming annoyed by the question, thetraffic, and this life in general, when my father replied from the back seat. “Yengele(boychik),” my father said, “When I fled from Germany in the early days of theSecond World War, I did not know where the war would lead and what it wouldbring. When the war ended, I discovered that my mother died in Teresienstadt, mygrandmother was murdered, shot in the Sobibor ghetto, many of my friends andfamily had perished, and the whole culture of my childhood had gone up in flames tothe sky. I never thought I would ever forgive ‘these Germans.’ Now, look at ourrelationship with Germany and how we regard them. ‘These Arabs,’ as you call them,