Yad Vashem and Foreign Ministry

The most interesting thing that struck me at Yad Vashem was how different it was from the museum in DC.  The DC museum focuses on shock and awe whereas Yad Vashem looks at the causes and motivations of both the heroes and perpetrators of the Holocaust.  While the differences between the two of them are important, it was the impressions among the group that made the most impact on me.  I was personally impressed with the guide, but Liz, one of the two Jewish students in our group, was apparently offended by him.  I don't know if it was the manor in which he approached the subject or some other factor, but I thought it was interesting.  While not Jewish myself, I think that it was a fascinating take on the Holocaust, one that would only come after several generations.  While he certainly made a point about the uniqueness of the genocide, the fact that even as the Nazis were losing the war they still made last ditch efforts to kill every Jew that they could, he was still very adamant about keeping any connection between it and any other event separate for that very reason.  Personally, I thought it was difficult to separate what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, rounding them up with only what they could carry and sending them to live in ghettos, much different from what the Jews did to the Palestinians after '48 and '67.  Obviously the whole genocide part of it is different (though one could make a case that it fits the UN definition if stretched a bit), but there is no doubt that ethnic cleansing took place.

Another parallel that I began to draw from speaking with the Foreign Ministry is that of the religious state.  My basic American values make it very difficult for me to support such a confined nationalistic sentiment in a population.  Only allowing Jews to become new citizens seems more than a little racist to me.  In fact, it's more restrictive than many Islamic Republics.  I respect that the dream of many Holocaust survivors was made reality when Israel was formed, but I personally believe that the idea of a sustainably homogeneous state has died out with globalization.  It is too easy to travel across the world and start a business and raise a family in a new country.  Everyone interacts with everyone.  If a country closes itself off to immigration and restricts itself to such a narrow minded concept, it is doomed to fall behind other countries who are more open.  The whole concept of maintaining an ethnic majority when a quarter of your population is different is ridiculous anyway.  If, in twenty years, a new generation of Israelis haven't taken over from the hardliners, I think that some real problems will manifest themselves in the economy and international opinion of Israeli society.