Yad Vashem - Sunday 16th Nov '08

Yad Vashem - the holocaust museum is superbly assembled. So much information is clearly presented, balancing facts with emotive responses and the reminiscences of eye-witnesses.

In the final room, a circular room, there are the faces of Jews killed in the holocaust. My question was Where is my photo? Where is the picture of the person who could be me? Who looks like my mother? My grandmother? The photos were there.

Someone said to us 'the Israelis and the Palestinians are competing for victimhood'. But it strikes me that we all have the potential to be victims, but equally, all of us have the capacity for violence, to be the perpetrator.

This was made abundantly clear from the view at the exit of the museum - a fine view of a green valley with a town on the hillside. This town used to be Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village evacuated in 1948 and the scene of a massacre of over a hundred men, women and children, perpetrated by a fledgeling Israeli army.