Does the threat of mutually assured destruction not apply?
Ronen Bergman: I always tell my friends who are not Jewish and not Israelis that if they want to ever understand Israeli character, Israeli nature, if they want to estimate or forecast Israel’s next move, they wouldn’t be able to do so if not getting a deeper understanding of the profound meaning of the Holocaust as a major phenomena in the collective identity of all Israelis, not just as a historical memory but as a living trauma. I’m a second Holocaust to the generation. Both my parents are survivors. So, for someone like me, you would expect to have repercussion of this memory. But even people in Israel who are fifth generation or don’t have any sort of connection, a family connection, to Holocaust victims, they bear this with them day after day. There’s no day that I walk the streets of Tel Aviv and people who deem me as someone who possibly understands something about Iran, asking me not “if” but only “when,” when will President Ahmadinejad drop the bomb? They are completely, posi
