Bernard Avishai on the troubled Israeli soul:
…In the early 1960s, Israeli elites saw the Jewish state so much as a pioneering adventure–the culture of Hebrew labor, the dignity of self-defense–that they tended to bury talk of the Holocaust, which seemed to them a symbol of Diaspora Jewry’s woeful path. Ben-Gurion staged the Eichmann trial just to correct what he took to be Zionism’s aloofness from the suffering of Holocaust survivors. Foreign dignitaries, meanwhile, were taken to the kibbutz, or the Hebrew University. Today, guests are whisked off so quickly to Yad Vashem that they cannot tell the difference between its gloom and their jet-lag. Their speeches must include a syllogism in which the “Holocaust” forms the first part and “the Jewish state” the second. They cannot just express their fellow-feeling. They will be graded for levels of sincerity, from “cold” to “understanding.” Mention Iran and you get extra credit.