It’s time to recover from the Holocaust. First, we had Zionism, before my family came here. When Palestine was only favored by crazy young people from Europe. People stricken by dreams and ideals, stricken by stories about socialism, agriculture and an exemplary society.

Few people had formed a national perspective before the Holocaust. The masses developed a herd mentality: The free people pursued the idea of integrating into their surroundings. Be a Jew in your home. And outside? Act like the gentiles. The religious pursued the belief that charity and prayer could make the evil go away. Any evil, any tyrant, any danger. Zionism was a minority, the Zionists were a handful, but both they and it were created before the Holocaust, when anti-Semitism and pogroms were still a bearable price—though an incomprehensible one—for most Jews.

And then the Jewish state was established. The United Nations made a decision under the shadow of the Holocaust, the masses arrived under the shadow of the Holocaust, and the war of survival against the Arabs was waged under the shadow of history in general with the Holocaust as part of it.

At first, the new Israelis ignored it: The Sabra built homes and gave birth to a new type of Jews, from the sea and from the land. The horrors of the Holocaust were concealed. The history of the Diaspora disappeared, and Israel connected to the days of the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba, to Jewish force. Reparations from Germany were a bone of contention. Survivors were something to be ashamed of. The Holocaust was preserved for avengers who killed Nazis, for the Eichmann capturers from the Mossad and for people who came from “there” without saying where “there” is.

Read the full article in YNet.