There was a moment, when being shown around a new Jerusalem museum exhibit about October 7, that I had to just sit down and weep. All the pain, the murder, the brutality is there – and is impossible to avoid – and the sterile atmosphere of the museum, in the basement of a beautiful building, somehow makes it starker. By collating stories of the Hamas attack and presenting them using the most cutting-edge technology – of course, this is still Israel – at the Museum of Tolerance brings home the huge scale of the horror.
All around me, the European MPs and journalists on the Elnet tour I was on were wiping away tears. There are some who, when contemplating visiting Israel, feel they must go to the kibbutzim on the Gaza border and “bear witness”. Although I wouldn’t stop you, it isn’t necessary for we aren’t the people who need convincing.
Plus many of the people who live on the kibbutzim, while welcoming the support from people around the world, are tired of their homes being used as a living museum exhibit. So if you are planning to go to Israel – and they want and need their tourists back – go to this museum and visit one of the most disturbing exhibitions you will ever see. It opens with a huge clock set to 06.
29. This was the time the invasion started, a time after which when neither Israel nor world Jewry would ever be quite the same again. As you walk through into the first room, you are presented with photographs by photojournalist Ziv Koren who drov.
