It seems that the right to hate-so well understood in these parts-is a right not granted the Arabs. We may hate them. In parliamentary elections we m… - Shulamith Hareven

In the short run, the identity of victim does, indeed, pay off. Sholem Aleichem recognized this in his story "Lucky Me, I Am an Orphan." Anyone who is a victim and nothing but a victim-in the sense of "deserving" compensation and forgiveness for everything-usually milks this position for all it is worth, through the end of the generation that witnessed the tragedy. In the longer run, the perpetuation of the victim identity causes complete severance from reality, utter dependence on the past and the past alone, and distortions of all proportions and emphases to the point of warping the personality.

Where, then, in the final analysis, does our identity and our uniqueness lie? Certainly not in our being victims; there have been and are victims, including whole peoples who were wiped out without a trace and not compassionately. We have existed as a people for a very long time, and during this time we have indeed amassed a difficult and tortuous history, and very often we were victims. But our uniqueness lies not in what others do to us, but in ourselves alone, in our selfhood, our character, and our culture. It lies in our reality, which is, perhaps, different from that of others. How is it different? In our "who," in our "how." Not what was done to us, but who we are. The uniqueness of a Jew is not in his being a victim. It is in his being a Jew, a proud son of a people at least four thousand years old, who built a humane present and ask for an attainable future. Not a future of messianic proportions, but one of human dimensions.

there is nothing in the world as morally binding as belonging to a minority.