The smell of monstrous pity remained in the empty room. - Shulamith Hareven

And yet, thought many of the camp dwellers without saying it, and yet we should have had a god to show them. So as not to be shamed. (p 32)

These two societies do not need any more probing of their pasts; they do not need to be shown what "really" happened, nor do they need a painstaking examination of protocols and documents. They need only one thing: healing. Anyone who does not bring them succor, or balm, who does not help them bind their wounds and find common ground, would do best to keep his silence.

One of the things Zionism was meant to make from scratch was a Hebrew present. Not only in reality; in the language, too. In ancient Hebrew, there was very little grammatical present. There was a past and a future--that is, memory and longing. We almost never said "I go," "I do." It was necessary to make the present a linguistic habit, a routine part of life. Perhaps Zionism came into being primarily to create for us a present tense. To say at long last that the Jews, too, have a present. Whoever now denies this present has forgotten the whole lesson of Zionism; he would send us back to the days of remembering and longing of the Diaspora. We came to Israel so as to not wait for a messiah who is yet to come; rather, we came to be here now, today. That is Zionism in a nutshell. ("Life Is Now, Mr. Shamir")