In the memorial park for victims of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, situated on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, there is a special exhibit devoted to children, who comprised about one-quarter of the dead.
It was funded by a Jewish couple who found prosperity in the US but whose small son, Uziel, perished in Auschwitz concentration camp. There is a stone carving of the boy over the entrance, smiling, chubby-cheeked; had he lived he would be around 60 now, perhaps with smiling, chubby-cheeked grandchildren.
The carving is based on a photograph of Uziel, which can be found inside the building, along with other pictures of five-, seven-, and nine-year-olds, all beautiful and bright-eyed with freckles and pigtails. There is a special gleam in Uziel's eye that tells of high-jinks and impish pranks: he must have broken his mother's heart as well as being her pride and joy.
There are only eight or nine pictures, so how to remember one and a half million kids? The architect, Moshe Safdie, has assembled a set of inter-linked glass cases with the pictures suspended inside and an array of candles in memory of the dead. As you walk around the exhibit, the candles multiply almost to infinity in the glass. A voice recites the names of victims, aged five, seven, 10, from places such as Poland, France and Lithuania. There is a long list of countries.
It's a powerful experience. You find yourself walking around and around this monument of glass and candlelight, like a Beckett character, not getting anywhere but unable to think of a reason not to keep going. Anyone looking for ways to remember the victims in the North should visit Yad Vashem.
Curiously, Beckett was also mentioned to me by a Palestinian intellectual, explaining the predicament of his people. Uprooted 50 years ago, and for the second time in 1967, they are scattered throughout the Palestinian territories and the Arab world, living in camps and seeking their right of return and their nationhood. "They are waiting for Godot," my Palestinian contact said.
The Palestinian refugees in the camps at Jabalia on the Gaza Strip and beside the beach at Gaza City are not going anywhere. You can see that just from driving around the mean, sandy streets. This is truly a wasteland: the poverty at Jabalia is obscene but the Beach Camp is even more shocking because it is on the shores of the Mediterranean and in any properly organised and functioning society it should be an international holiday resort.
Instead it is a colony of deprived adults and many, many children. Like the little victims of Yad Vashem, they are bright-eyed and beautiful and their high spirits seem to thrive even in this wan environment. Conditions may be wretched, with little sign of hope or opportunity but I still saw a young girl with a comb in one hand and a large, blue mirror in the other.
The camps were quiet today because all the young men and boys were attending the funerals of three "martyrs" killed the day before in clashes with Israeli soldiers. In contrast with the silence of the camps, the streets of central Gaza were alive with chants and slogans, flags and megaphones. Kids crowded onto buses and lorries and the others, mostly in their teens or early 20s, packed the street and the pavements.
Someone said, "revolution is the festival of the oppressed" and, though ostensibly a sad occasion, there was an air of defiance and even a sense of liberation in the air. There was no weeping and, instead of the measured progress of a comparable Irish funeral, the mourners rushed along the street in a half-sprint as though excited by a sense of possibility.
They don't wait long to bury people in the Middle East. These boys died only the day before from Israeli bullets and now they were being carried on stretchers draped in the Palestinian flag. Light as they are, there was no shortage of volunteers to carry the young men's bodies. Two stretcher bearers would be enough but everyone wanted to be associated with their heroes. The blood was up: orators on a truck took it in turns to shout defiant speeches and slogans into a microphone: "Inti-fa-da! Intifa-da!" A plump boy of 13 held an automatic weapon aloft with his right hand-: he never seemed to get tired.
There are surprisingly few guns overall at the mass funeral, but this doesn't make one feel any safer when you make the short journey from Gaza City to the Erez crossing point that leads back into Israel proper. There have been many deaths at this place since the trouble began five weeks ago. You don't want to hang about, but the Israeli soldiers, apologising for the inconvenience, want to check your bag because word has come through about a possible bomb in someone's luggage. Finally you are through, only to switch on the car radio and hear there has been a bomb in Jerusalem.
A touring German student is looking for a lift. Where are you from? "Nuremberg." Suddenly, unexpectedly, you are transported to a time in the 1930s and footage of the Fuhrer preaching his message of hate against Jews. We know where it ended up, with bright-eyed little boys like Uziel Spiegel sent to an early death. After the war the Jews of Eastern Europe, their confidence in Western civilisation shattered, flocked to a new life in Israel. But instead of opting for a binational society where Jews and Palestinians intermingled on an equal, power-sharing basis and without borders between them, the founding fathers chose the model of a Jewish state. It might have worked if the Palestinians had been less numerous and more willing to accept the lot of a refugee nation and if the rest of the Arab world had the capacity to absorb their new, involuntary immigrants.
To an outsider, it is disquieting how little sympathy there is in Israel for the Palestinian victims and the popular mood seems to favour even harsher action. One also encounters little genuine Arab sympathy for the admittedly less numerous Israeli victims. That's the way it is when two communities get involved in a stand-off. The rest of the world, especially Europe, has a responsibility to help ease the tension in this tragic place. The problems of the Middle East today are the last crime of the Holocaust.