“Look at the beautiful view” but don’t see and don’t accept that the children of the old and sick people in the hospital are the ones responsible for uprooting, expelling, exiling, killing, tormenting and humiliating other people’s children.

Re my comment‘perhaps this is what we need’. I don’t know where you’re from or where you live, but German philosophy & culture is conspicuously lacking from British pedagogy. Instead of Heidegger & Nietzsche we are spoon-fed the French post war thinkers who receive a lot of credit for German concepts. In Britain there is a demonization of Germans that you internalise by osmosis (unlike France where they were occupied). Therefore, anything that humanises the German experience, albeit gushing descriptions of locally grown foodstuffs relished by children running in the ‘caressing sun, barefoot and free’ – - might help the British perceive Germans as people rather than Jew-killers.

Your comparison, Paul, is off by a good bit.
The Germans did not exactly invade Brobidjan, did not expulse and ethnic cleanse the local jewish population and then set about to create the beautiful city of Munchen on top of rqzed Jewish villages, claiming the tribes called Germani used to live there thousands of years ago.
Your comparison amazingly ignores no more no less than the whole Nakbah, reducing it to acts of “barbarity and brutality occuring in an anhistoric and amputated context.
Germans were creating beauty, art, science and philosophy long before the holocaust–centuries before. So you can safely admire their cultural products. Admiring Tel Aviv and Israeli architecture is another matter.

I have no problem with the author because she is Jewish. I think that jewishness is not a sentence to permanent blindness without appeal.
The fact that you find the objections expressed here baffling and alarming is a source of sadness and discouragement for me.

“However, perhaps this is what we need.”
What is the “this” that we need exactly, Sarah? Please clarify.

Yes, a lot of what the Israelis have built is ugly but there are things I like very much. I love Tel-Aviv and in Jerusalem, as much as I dislike the politics of it, some of the modern ‘Jewish’ architecture is quite engaging.

Actually, I think the Israelis have quite an interesting ideological visual ‘eye’. And nowhere more so than in the views from Yad Vashem.

Unfortunately for them (unless they did it purposely, but I doubt that), it’s looking straight at Deir Yassin – an irony that they may one day come to appreciate.

So I’m really baffled by what Ariadna, Fool Me Once and, to some extent, Sarah find so alarming.

The landscape around Deir Yassin is truly breathtaking and Esti Rimmer uses that as a metaphor to convey her own feelings of living so close in space, time and spirit to a terrible atrocity.

I think the real reason people don’t like it is because Esti is Jewish and any attempt to engage with any Jewish expression is somehow going soft in our taken-for-granted opposition to Jewish power.

That in itself is, to my mind, nonsense. But in any event, deLiberation is not bound to any particular opinion or ideology other than free, open and hopefully, meaningful thinking.

So what’s the problem?

Like Ariadna I initially baulked at the tone of this piece. I can’t quite imagine (an acceptable) description of Bergen Belsen in the ‘spectacular sunset’, amid rolling fields of sauerkraut and a list of injuries to the ‘tortured’ German soul. However, perhaps this is what we need.