Dr. Yitzhak Attia, the director of French-language seminars
at the International School for Holocaust Studies of Yad Vashem in Tel Aviv, used very explicit language here, writing with a clarity unusual among Jewish intellectuals:
“Even though our reason shouts out with all its might the absurdity of this confrontation between a small people as insignificant as the people of Israel and the rest of humanity,… as absurd, as incoherent, as monstrous as it may
seem, we are engaged in close combat between Israel and the Nations, and it can only be genocidal and total, because it is a question of our respective identities.”