Adrian’s Cathy officially became a Brit. This is very strange for me. I’m happy for her, of course. It is a very exciting thing to happen. But it’s been making me think.

I was born a Brit, you see, and I still have the passport to show for it. I even occasionally trot off to the British consular place to renew my passport and the girl’s passports. I politely wait there for hours and hours while they process what seems like thousands of would-be immigrants or foreign workers or something from the far east or somewhere who are probably being thrown out of Israel and would rather go somewhere better than back home (at least, that was what happened last time I was there).

I always have a funny feeling at the British consular place because they have this big picture of the Queen, which seems strangely out of place on the (can’t remember which) floor of the Migdalor Building on 1 Ben-Yehuda Street.

When I find myself actually in England it’s all very familiar. The smells and the sights seem like home. But then again they’re not.

I can hardly understand the accent spoken in the city of my birth and I find it very difficult to handle things like the strangeness of the money, trying to work out which way to look when I’m crossing the road, etc, although these are things I feel I should be able to manage, and that don’t bother me at all, when I’m in other places that aren’t Israel. Do you know what I mean?

What happens when I go to England, I think, is that I feel disoriented. I should feel at home, and I don’t. And I do, sort of. Like it was a place I dreamt this very vivid dream about. It’s too loaded and weird to be a holiday.

That’s probably why I haven’t been for a while. In case anyone was wondering.

All this has nothing to do with Adrian’s Cathy, of course. I’m happy for her, only I'm finding it difficult to identify.

I think I’ll just send Our Sis as my emissary to England, for now (I’m not paying, though). Have a good time, Our Sis.

Afterthought: Maybe I should just go and stop l'balbel bamoa'ch.

I can't believe I didn't see this before. It's Gil. Yes, our Gil.

Scroll right down for the photo of Elysa, who is incredibly beautiful. Or just click here.

New blog and I'm on it!
Israel21c has started a blog. It's a group blog. I've just posted my first post there. I've never been on a group blog before. This is fun.

Hmmm. I wonder if it's too long.

Help!
I’m in hysterics. Youngest has her bi-annual piano recital this evening. She’s quite happy, reading her Einayim quarterly (this is a wonderful magazine for children, published in cahoots with the Israel museum, highly recommended). Why do I always have to be the one who has the butterflies? (Butterflies?! Now isn’t that an understatement? A minor heart attack would probably be more accurate).

I am silly. It’s quite a friendly event. First of all it usually takes place, as it is this evening, in my in-laws’ apartment. Their daughter, Youngest’s cousin, is this amazingly talented pianist of twelve and a half. So Youngest feels quite at home there, and so do we, naturally.

There are usually about six other little girls (there used to be a boy once, we’re told, before Youngest started playing, but he grew up and went into the army). The girls are of varying ages, all lovingly instructed by teacher Tanya. Talented, dedicated, and a really nice person, albeit completely incapable of ever arriving on time, Tanya is a good example of the immense contribution the immigration from the former Soviet Union countries has made to Israel (besides the influx of piano teachers bringing the prices of private piano lessons way down to something reasonably affordable).

Youngest isn’t a bad little pianist for her age, so after I’ve got over my (?!) stage fright it is an opportunity to kvell. Our Sis and I always have tears in our eyes, thinking how Mum would have loved it. Our Sis says it’s alright. She’s sitting up there with her parents, looking down, nudging everyone and saying “Look, that’s my granddaughter”.

I haven’t forgotten a gift for Tanya. I’ve been known to do that. We’ve noticed that Russian students (who arrive dressed in beautiful little dresses with white ribbons in their hair, while our kids are in blue jeans and T-shirts) always bring flowers for the teacher, so I did that for the last few recitals. This time I got her something that won’t die after a few days (unless she drops it).

Update: There were far more than seven this time. And a far larger audience than usual, what with grandparents, uncles, aunts, distant cousins from Ashdod, the guy from the grocery store across the road. You get the picture. Anyway, that would all have been okay if some nasty little girls and their parents couldn't extend to Youngest the same courtesy everyone else had extended to them when they played. It was their horrid parents fault, of course. All things considered, Youngest played beautifully. Knowing her fiery temperament, I was actually surprised she didn't turn round and wallop them.

Ynet in English, at last.

Hat tip, Allison.

I have met quite a few youngish Syrian-born Israelis in recent years. One is a friend at work. They all tell fascinating stories about how they managed to get out, which I will not repeat here, so as not to spoil it for others. All except one, who completely refuses to say anything at all about his past. He was twenty when he left Syria, so it's not that he's forgotten. The others all say that their families had been wealthy and well-connected in Syria.

My friend at work, who left as a teenager and is now in his twenties, has been rubbing his hands in glee at the rising tension between Lebanon and Syria following the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. No love lost there.

Swinging left again, slightly.
Talking about how the wheel turns, I can hardly read Naomi Ragen’s newsletters any more. She and I no longer have as much in common.

Now that it’s going to happen in the foreseeable future I have no real doubts about disengagement. No, I don’t think the Palestinians are suddenly different, that true peace is around the corner, that they don’t still plan to get Haifa and Jaffa and Tal al-Rabih (yes, I hadn’t heard of this place* either till last week, but apparently it’s where I’ve been living since 1985). However, I do think we have to give them a ladder to get out of this mess. Arafat wasn’t interested in such a ladder. Perhaps Abu Mazen really is.
_________________________

*

Some local history
I have often said here that I regard the Arab uprising in British mandate Palestine between the years of 1936 and 1939 as the real first Intifada. Here is a photograph of houses of Jewish residents on the outskirts of Tel Aviv destroyed by Arabs from Jaffa during the outbreak of disturbances in 1936.


Before 1948, a lot of Jews lived in Jaffa. During the fighting that followed the UN decision of November 1947 to divide British mandate Palestine between its Jewish and Arab inhabitants, the Jews of Jaffa had to flee to neighboring Tel Aviv, which was also under Arab attack. Here is a photograph of a tent camp that was erected to house the Jewish refugees.


Both photographs are from the Israeli National Photo Collection

All very useful stuff.
The weather has been hot and dry for a few days. We’re back in short sleeves.

This morning Bish and I joined my friends from art class in the Friday market in Dizengoff Circle. I guess you could call it a chachke market. It apparently started off a few years ago as a market for people to come and sell their old bits and bobs, but this morning a lot of the vendors looked pretty much like pros to me. It was great fun, looking at all the wonderful old stuff for sale, a stroll down memory lane.

Among other things, there were rows and rows of little porcelain figurines; many, many children’s books we read when we were young; antique-y looking jewelry; heavy old silver cutlery; ugly tea sets; some really cool old handguns; loads of wristwatches (Bish bought one); flea-bitten old clothes (I can’t believe I used to wear nearly only stuff like that at one time); and, of course, more Soviet army medals and insignia than you ever thought existed, never mind being sold on the street in Tel Aviv. We even came across a signed copy of Menahem Begin’s "The Revolt" (in Hebrew).

I think some of the shoppers were just as colorful as the wares on sale.

Shai looks at some things now that it's twelve years snce he came back. Interesting.

Ooh the results of the Jibbies.
Mazal Tov to the winners.

Oh shucks, and I was just about to badmouth my boss. Trust CNN to spoil my fun.

Losing
On the 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a plan to divide British mandate Palestine between its two main groups of inhabitants at the time – Arabs and Jews. Although both groups felt that the details of the plan were unjust, each group reacted very differently. The Jews reacted by celebrating, believing that less than what they thought they deserved was better than nothing at all; the Arabs reacted by attacking the Jews, refusing to even consider compromise.

A terrible, bloody war ensued. Its result was that the Jews got their state. They also got part of the land that the UN had destined for the Arab inhabitants, many of whom had fled, if not involved in the fighting. The rest of the part of the country destined for the Arabs was conquered by their brethren, neighboring Arab states that had marched in ostensibly to get rid of the Jews for them, and had stayed on - Jordan in the east; Egypt in the south west. The Arab inhabitants of British mandate Palestine were left with nothing at all.

We tend to get angry at the repetitive Palestinian victim narrative, but we shouldn’t really. It’s just sad. They’re stuck in this self-destructive blame game. It leads them nowhere. No, it does lead them somewhere. It leads them spiraling further and further downwards.

The reason Zionism survived 1921 and 1929 and 1936 and 1939 and 1948 and 1967 and 1973 and 1987 and 2000 etc etc etc, was that Zionism was about the future, about building, about creativity, about putting the past behind us, about doing something new and better while making the best of some very bad situations, about forgiving, about moving on, about not looking back in anger.

Because anger paralyzes you. Then it kills you.

With all the cynicism of this day and age, I believe Zionism is still going strong, un-cool as this may sound, and what’s more, it’s still about all those things. It’s not about the Babylonians, and it’s not about the Greeks, and it’s not about the Romans, and it’s not about the Spanish Inquisition, or Martin Luther or the Cossacks or the Nazis or the fedayeen or terrorism (this list goes on and on). It’s about us and doing our best for today and for tomorrow.

Yes, you’re right. We do tend to wallow in the Holocaust, among other things. But we mustn’t forget that back in the nineteen fifties, just a few years after the fact, our leaders bravely decided that now there was a new Germany, and they publicly created a new dialogue and a new relationship with this Germany and quite a warm one at that. There was a great deal of angry public debate on the Israeli street about this issue at the time, but they did not back down, those tough leaders who made this country a reality, and now we take it for granted.
I’m so grateful we didn’t get stuck in the Holocaust. I’m so grateful we took the horror and devastation and built ourselves a brave new world out of the ruins. And there were quite a few other things we didn’t get stuck in, as well.

The minute the Palestinians, as a people, can put their anger and their indignation and their victimization behind them, and start building, the sky’s the limit. They’re every bit as capable as we were, are. And they’re lucky enough to have the whole world rooting for them. That’s a damn sight more than we ever had.

And do you know what? I bet you any money, the minute it happens, when it really happens, even with all our past disappointment in them, even with all our pain and all our dead, seventy percent of Israelis, if not more, if not far more, will be there at the sidelines, cheering them on, ready to lend a helping hand if asked, and if I know my fellow countrymen and women, if not asked, as well. (Maybe that’s part of the problem. We tend to rub their noses in it, even when we really don’t mean to.)

We’re not perfect, far from it, but at least we’re trying.

Some politicians and ministers from the Likud have been complaining of threats to their lives and the lives of their children. Bibi Netanyahu had a car tire punctured at a wedding last week. This is all very worrying.

These threats are coming from the extreme right wing opposition to disengagement. However, Tzvi Hendel, Knesset member from the National Unity party, told Yediot Aharonot that he thinks it is a conspiracy to de-legitimize the far right. Bish chuckled at this and said he remembered Arik Sharon saying exactly the same thing before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. How the wheel turns.

Remember Zakaria Zbeidi? Tali Fahima’s ...erm... friend from Jenin, and, by the way, also charismatic commander of the Al-Aqtza Martyrs Brigade in the north of Samaria? Well, since peace has broken out the Israeli media is all over him, much to the frustration of the families of his victims.

Here is an amusing excerpt from an interview in Maariv’s weekend magazine:

Do you know "Eretz Nehederet" ("A Wonderful Country" – a popular Israeli TV satire)?

"Yes. I laughed when I saw what they did with Suha Arafat and the money, and that they laughed about Arafat that he was dead, not dead, dead, not dead. I heard that they want to do a character of me on the program. If they do something like that I’m stopping the hudna."

Reading this, Eldest said that now they have to do him. I said you never know. They’re probably all lefties on Eretz Nehederet. They mightn’t want to have it on their conscience. It’s on tomorrow night. Not to be missed now.

Sharon or Peres?

"Arik Sharon is a gever (a real man). When there was war in the Jenin (refugee) camp he came here to the headquarters himself. With a weapon, a helmet, everything. He was up front, like me. He killed us, yes, but I see him as a military commander. He’s not a liar. He puts everything on the table, like Abu Mazen (PA chairman Mahmud Abbas). Shimon Peres is weak. He’s like a critically ill patient in hospital with an oxygen mask."

Oh dear, oh dear. What will the Europeans say?

I love the "like me" bit.

It’s silly I know, I don’t know anything about the new Shabak (Shin Bet) head Yuval Diskin, but there was something about how he seemed slightly embarrassed by the media interest in him on the item on channel one’s newsreel, last night; about how he mouthed ‘Ma ha’inyanim?’ (‘How are things?’) to an unseen journalist he obviously recognized standing next to the cameraman, that made me feel reassured that this guy got the job, that people like him are still looking after our safety.

Mother's Day is BACK!
This morning Eldest wished me Happy Mother's Day and gave me a big hug. It took me a while to understand what she was talking about.

Mother's Day? What Mother's Day? Didn't she know they cancelled Mother's day years ago? Now we have Family Day. Political Correctness gone haywire.

Instead of my dear daughters - whom I schlepped around inside me for nine long months; breastfed for about the same; over whom I lost sleep, night after night for years; with whom I rushed to the doctor and to the hospital and to this clinic and that clinic; about whom I will probably worry myself silly till my dying day - bringing me home nice little hand made cards from kindergarten or school on Mother's Day, I had to go in early to said kindergartens and schools on my only free day of the week, with homebaked cakes I had had hysterics over baking because I am such a pathetic baker, to give talks about my work which I had lost sleep over because I am so shy of an audience (even of six-year-olds). Then I would have to grab for food for my daughters from the communal Family Day meal, before it had all gone. Family Day! Bah!

And now Mother's Day is making a comeback. I want my little hand made cards! Waaaaaaaa!

I'm so spoilt. I have the best girls in the world. They always make me little hand made cards for my birthdays. I even still have a few from previous Family Days.

Waaaaaaa!

Update: The girls sent me the most gorgeous bouquet of flowers to work, with Bish's help. Absolutely lovely, all greens and oranges. It brightened up my whole day. Could I possibly be more fortunate? (tfu tfu tfu)

An end to hostilities
Is it over? Can we sigh in relief? I hesitate to say I’m hopeful. We’ve been down that road before. But all of a sudden, there is this tiny little warm spot that I can feel in my heart. Is this hope, after all?

Killian from Cafe Diverso called me today. He’s so nice and so sincere. Worries and upset are in the past.

Update: I'm such a softie. Watching the summaries of the Sharm el-Sheikh speeches on TV I couldn't help feeling a bit choked up. I couldn't.

The Jibbies

And finally: The finals!

So it’s the finals of the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards and guess what? I’m made it to the finals in both categories I was nominated in: Best Overall and Best ‘Life in Israel’. You can go and vote for...erm... whoever you like (looks up at the ceiling and whistles)

Please forgive me for disappearing like that. (Thank you for worrying, David).

I have been worried and upset about a certain aspect of the Cafe Diverso thing. I think it would be disloyal to write about it here. This is difficult because this is a place I should be able to let off steam. On the other hand, I don’t let off steam about work here, and I have quite a lot of steam to let off about work.

Hmmm. Now I realize why I haven’t been writing much lately. I need to get more neutral things to let off steam about.

What I plan to do is post some of the stories I write that are not suitable for Cafe Diverso.

My sample stories were accepted, by the way, and will appear there some time in March. Of course, it’s been so long since I wrote them that by now I’ve decided I don’t like them. By March I will absolutely hate them.

Of course, I did write them in a hurry for my application…

Blogging is so much better. You write something. You let everyone see it immediately, then you forget all about it until two years later you get hate-mail about it from some nutcase, and you have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.

I’ve just found this very interesting and informative site with loads of information about terrorism.

All this running around at night is obviously a shock to my system. Spent today in bed.

I wonder where Rinat is. I don’t know, these media people will do anything for rating.

Update: I think I've guessed.

I was awake at half past four this morning, my mind chattering away, planning my post about our lovely evening with the Bogner's last night. But it's half past six in the evening now, the post isn't written yet, and in any minute my friends are going to pick me up for our art class. We're having an early lesson this week, because we plan to go out on the town afterwards.

Bish and I are going out tomorrow night as well, and the only reason I'm not going out on Thursday is ... no time, I'll tell you later.

And we told the Bogner's we never go out. Oy, the embarrassment. They'll never believe us again in our lives. A week like this hasn't happened since... actually I don't think I've ever had a crazy week like this. And I haven't told you about my weekend yet.

So excuse the non-blogging. I'll be back!

Update: David beat me to it, and did a far better job than I could have. Hilarious.

You'll never guess who Bish and I just had dinner with in a fancy restaurant in Tel Aviv. I'm tired now, I'll tell you tomorrow.

I hope they got home alright.

Hatshepsut supplies us with some interesting statistics.

Just because some people are technologically primitive doesn't mean that they are socially unsophisticated. Even the most well-meaning people seem to make that mistake, perhaps based on a naive romantic notion that a more simple style of living somehow makes people less complex and therefore better. Besides being incredibly patronizing, this is unwise.

Travelers to societies radically different from their own should always remember that what they see is just the outer surface, like the exterior of a house. Learning to understand a society properly, actually getting into the rooms of that house, requires one not only to live in it but to really invest oneself in it, and a ghetto of foreigners is not good enough, mind.

Bu then again, many people have this tendency to go all starry-eyed about going native. Maybe to really understand a society, a culture, one has to grow up in it.

Then again, I could be wrong.

More on Hannah Senesh
David Boxenhorn (Rishon Rishon) has details of just how they tortured Hannah Senesh, just in case you really feel you have to know.

An Endorsement
Riding home from work today, along the banks of the Yarkon River, I came to the conclusion that the Best ‘Life in Israel’ Blog is, regrettably not Not a Fish, nor any of my other friends on the list, but Anglosaxy.

I know I’m far too emotionally involved in what happens here to do a good job of describing life here. Ashley tells it like it is. Go vote for him.

And while we’re on the subject of doing a good job at describing life in Israel, I hope you’re keeping up with Lisa’s story. I’m finding it hard to read. Some of it touches painful places for me.

Not because 2
I was so unhappy about yesterday’s post that I obsessed about it all through my art class. My fellow students and teacher were very nice about it, although I must have been a real pain. I spent two days on that post and I’m still not satisfied with it. Everything I write seems to come out all wrong.

What used to get me with regard to Hannah Senesh was the old ‘what if’ question: the ‘what if they hadn’t sent her on that fool’s errand’ question; the ‘what if we lost a great poet or playwright’ question; the ‘what a waste’ question.

But that’s all just silly when you think about it. More likely than not, she would never have matured into a writer; more likely than not, she would never have even published any of her poems. I think she was the sort of person that, more likely than not, had she lived, would not have pursued the kind of life that would have made her well-known. She would have been one of those hundreds of thousands of Israelis who, in the early years, quietly and modestly went about building this country. In which case she would never have touched my life, not directly, anyway, not in a way I would have known about.

But she did touch my life and enrich it.

And I only ever heard of her because she was sent on that fool’s errand, and because she ‘didn’t talk’, and because she stood up to the Nazis the way she did.

(So much for being cynical about national heroes, as is fashionable these days.)

Not because
I woke up in the middle of the night, the night before last, and wrote two words on a piece of paper, in large, hardly-intelligible handwriting.

Hannah Senesh.

I don’t know why her name came to me in my sleep, or why it was so urgent for me to get the words down so I wouldn’t forget them till morning.

* * * *

About ten years ago, a fictional play was to be aired on Israeli television based on the story of the famous Kasztner trial. The play twisted historic facts by saying that Hannah Senesh (Szenes) had broken under SS interrogation and had turned in her friends, thus bringing about their capture by the Nazis and their eventual execution, and, of course, the failure of their mission. The whole country was up in arms.

If I remember correctly, Hannah Senesh’s family appealed to the High Court of Justice to try and prevent the play from being broadcast, claiming, if I am not mistaken, that it was libelous. They were turned down for reasons of freedom of speech or artistic license or something. The play was broadcast.

I have a guilty little confession. I couldn’t care less if Hannah Senesh ‘talked’ or not. And another: I could never understand what that parachuting mission in Europe was all about.

I should have had a blog back then, because all the time that the stormy public debate about this issue was going on, I wanted to shout out, I wanted to tell Hannah Senesh’s family how I felt. I wanted to say to them:

Don’t worry. It’s okay. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make her anything less.

(We know she didn’t talk, but even if she did, who could blame her? How could we expect her to withstand the sort of treatment the SS interrogators would have had no qualms at meting out to those with secrets. Just look at what they did to those guilty only of belonging to the wrong race. And she was both.)

Even if she did talk she was still a heroine. But she didn’t talk. And now we have this opportunity to look at just what that really means.

But don't you see that she was, and is, far more than how she died?

At least to me.

* * * *

Hannah Senesh was my most important role model when I was growing up. I felt, and still feel, very strongly about her.

She was my role model not because she didn’t break under the SS torture she went through before her execution; and not because she volunteered to parachute into Nazi-occupied Hungary, against all odds, in order to try and save Jews; and not because I loved the poems she wrote; and not because of her diary, in which she shared, with such youthful enthusiasm, her Zionism and her story of leaving her Hungarian home for a new life in Palestine; and not even because of that one particular little poem she wrote, so simple and lovely, expressing in just a few words her wonder at the precious beauty of the world and man's place in it, as she walked on the beach near Caesarea.

She wrote it just two years before she was shipped off to Europe never to return, never to know that it would become one of the best loved Israeli songs of all times, its wistful innocence an everlasting symbol of the devastation of the Holocaust.

These would have been reasons enough for my admiration of her, more than enough. Probably they should have been the reasons for my admiration of her. But I was a child. I had my own agenda. I didn't see her as the perfect heroine adorning the walls of the hall of fame of Zionism. All that stuff didn’t interest me in the least. Perhaps that is why the question of whether she talked or not hardly mattered to me.

In my eyes, she was a real person, an ordinary person, someone I could touch, and identify with. And that was her magic for me.

You’ll probably think I completely missed the point, and maybe I did. But I’m hoping you will be able to understand, for I was only a child - a little immigrant child who feared that she had lost one language without gaining another to take its place, and who felt as if she had become mute, no longer able to express herself in any language.

The thing that gave Hannah Senesh a special place in my heart, the thing that made me identify with her so much, was a seemingly insignificant biographical detail - insignificant perhaps when considering who she was and what she did, but not insignificant for me - that she started writing in Hebrew just six months after she came to live in Palestine, and in such beautiful Hebrew. This was an important lesson for me.

More than anyone or anything else at the time, she gave me hope. Now isn’t that ironic?

Hannah Senesh showed me, showed us all, in the way she lived her life, and, yes, in the way she went to her death, that if we care enough, if we have enough determination and dedication, we can do anything.

(I think Rinat reminds me of her a bit.)

אלי, שלא יגמר לעולם החול והים רשרוש של המים ברק השמיים תפלת האדם חנה סנש

Afterthought: Aren't these fine words from this underachiever? Well, there's hope yet.

John sent me these words of Hannah Senesh:

There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth
though they have long been extinct.
There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world
though they are no longer among the living.
These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.
They light the way for mankind.

Little did she know.

Update: I have just one more thing to say about this subject.

Oh dear (again)



While I was hibernating the Jewish and Israeli Bloggies were taking form. I was sort of vaguely aware of this, but I was far too sleepy to participate in the festivities and assumed that no one had nominated me for anything anyway. This only seemed fair, seeing as I hadn't been writing anything.

Anyway, voting for the preliminary round, whatever that means, has commenced and it appears someone nice did nominate me and I’m up for two categories: Best Overall Blog (Group A), and Best Life in Israel Blog (Group B).

Competition is fierce and it’s a difficult choice because I really like most of the nominees, and I’m sure you do too. I’m not even sure if I will vote for me myself (just kidding, I already did – couldn’t help myself, isn’t that awful of me?). Anyway, head on over and vote for whoever.

And may the best Jews (or non-Jewish Israel supporters) win!

Thank you Dave, for all your hard work. The logo is great.

Important update: Dave tells me Zahava Bogner (AKA Mrs. Treppenwitz)designed the logo.

Sever Plotzker in this morning’s Yediot Aharonot (Hebrew link):

It was the soldiers of the 107th reconnaissance division of Red Army’s 60th Army, under the command of General Konayev, that at lunchtime of the 27th January 1945 passed through the gates of the complex of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps.

They found only about 7000 shells of human beings, the last survivors of what, for four years, had been the biggest wholesale death factory in history.

One million and two hundred thousand Jews were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau intersection, where they went through a selection which sent the great majority of them straight to the gas chambers – the contribution of German technology to mass extermination. Their bodies were cremated. The few who were found suitable for hard labor died of starvation, frost, torture and, eventually, in death marches.

* * * *

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi

* * * *

Only the sovereign state of the Jewish people,

continues Plotzker,

can insure us that ‘Auschwitz’ will not happen again. Only the existence of a strong State of Israel allows Jews to be masters of their destiny, of their future and the future of their children.

[...]

The State of Israel, and nothing else, is the answer to Auschwitz.

We shall not forget it.

(My translation)

I suggest you read the entire piece, if you can read Hebrew.