More on Israel...

Some photos of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. I was based in Tel Aviv and went to Jerusalem (on an all-too-short trip) but this museum was the highlight. The one is DC is great, I think, but doesn't come close to Yad Vashem, mainly because of the attention to detail, the physical layout of the museum, and the Hall of Names (where all the names and information about victims is kept in a huge circular room). The artifacts they have assembled are incredible-- Torah scrolls burnt during Kristallnacht; artwork and stories from underground art communities in the ghettos; personal effects, including diary entries, from untold numbers of victims and survivors; the actual train tracks and train stop from Auschwitz and similar pieces of this history; horribly chilling photos of executions in Poland and Czech, woman and men and children being forced to strip and climb into ditches to be shot; and the overall sense of the world at that time the museum provides--you don't actually get to the camps exhibits until you are about 2/3rds of the way through. I think there is a tendency to gloss over the events leading to the Holocaust, or to look at it through the prism of the war, when in fact there are decades of tangentially-related but important events, trends, and cultural shifts that led to the Holocaust.

The visit to the museum made it all too clear how intractable the Israel-Palestinian situation really is. Being someone whose academic interests touch but do not focus on the Middle East and certainly not this conflict in particular, combined with my sometimes-strange nature to sympathize with the underdog, my feelings would go back and forth depending upon the latest suicide bombing or settlement development. Being there and walking through this museum, you realize very quickly that while Israel may militarily, at the moment, be the stronger of the two, there's no real underdog here. And you can talk about carving up the area---but then you go to Jerusalem and see that not only are these religions co-existing, they're literally on top of each other. Witness the Stations of the Cross which weave through the old Muslim quarter - here's a poster congratulating a family member who made the Hajj literally across from one of the Stations:

It's fascinating and troubling at the same time, because this will outlast the next summit, the next intifada, the next peace process. All I can say is I have less of an idea of how one would go about solving it then I did before, which really only indicates that the posturing and blowhard-ing that surrounds so much of this problem does not even begin to explain the histories, the well-meaning errors, the missteps, and the absolutes of the situation that led us to today.