It was obvious, with the building of the revamped and extended Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Israel, that Israel was staking its claim to be the keeper of holocaust memory. Chris McGreal, in the
Guardian, puts it well:
A new Holocaust museum, designed to affirm Israel's claim to be the principal keeper and interpreter of survivors' memories, opened in Jerusalem yesterday.
There were many world leaders there, including Kofi Annan. I wonder if anyone told them that they could see Deir Yassin from where they stood. Also I wonder if they were embarrassed when career holocaust survivor and former Irgun member, Elie Wiesel, said that "the Holocaust was not about man's inhumanity to man, but man's inhumanity to Jews." Of course that wasn't the worst. Ariel Sharon graced the opening with his presence:
There are several chambers in the heart of man. In the national Jewish heart, there is a chamber of memory and it is here at Yad Vashem. The state of Israel is the only place in the world where Jews have the right and the strength to defend themselves by themselves. It is the only guarantee that the Jewish people will never again know a Holocaust. It is our historic commitment to the Jewish people.
What a queasy feeling it must have been to be standing at a memorial to the victims of one of the world's worst war crimes while a war criminal justified his own war crimes committed over several decades now.
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