On the Geneva to Tel Aviv flight in October 2010, I had a window seat and the elderly New Jersey couple beside me were both too tall to be comfortable travelling tourist class. Olga and Paul were on their first visit to Israel at the end of a European tour that had taken them as far as Russia ‘to look at Putin’s AIDS issues’. They were retired physicians and enthusiasts for Obamacare but not sanguine about its chances.

Paul had kind eyes and a slow soft voice. Olga wanted to know all about me; then she expatiated on their three-week, go-slow, self-drive tour of Israel. ‘We’re not typical Americans, we like time, for absorbing.’ A tendency to talk in italics gave Olga’s sentences a peculiar bounciness.

Experimentally, I offered a list of West Bank contacts and agreeable hotels like Al-Yasmeen in Nablus. The couple looked aghast. After a moment of recovery Olga said, ‘We can’t go there! Our insurance – it’s too dangerous!’

Apologetically, Paul added, ‘We’re sorry for those poor Arabs, especially the crowds in camps. They’d surely be better off if they transferred, went somewhere else, left those areas to the Jews.’

Olga nodded vigorously. ‘That makes sense! Jews only have Israel, Arabs have vast countries all over the place – space for millions!’

I looked down at Cyprus, counted ten and began to talk about climate change.

Olga bounced on – they were looking forward to staying with her niece’s family. A decade ago Judith and Jake had made aliyah to bring their children up in the wholesome atmosphere of Hashmonaim, a settlement where the dominant ethos was Moderate Orthodox. ‘You must visit us there,’ said Olga. ‘It’s just round the corner from Jerusalem. And Judith is passionate about travel books!’ She handed me a card which revealed that Jake is a legal consultant.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For me Hashmonaim will be a treat. It must be very unlike the national-religious hilltop settlements.’

‘I suppose so,’ Olga said vaguely. ‘I don’t know anything about those.’ At which point our descent began.

In Sari’s hostel a flattering chorus of ‘Welcomes!’ was followed by anxious enquiries about ‘your sore leg’.

When I asked Sari about buses to Yad Vashem he compressed his lips and sighed heavily before replying, ‘No. 18 from Mamilla. I hear it’s a strange place, full of sadness and fear. Americans tell me it’s very American too and they go on expanding it, spending more dollars. Be careful there, don’t talk about “’48-ers”. Zionists and their friends say “the minority” or “Israel’s Arabs” – as if we were slaves, their property. They never say “Palestinians” – all must remember there’s no place called “Palestine”!’

I nodded. ‘And never was such a place, only “the Land of Israel” recently infested by Arabs.’

Sari smiled slightly and said, ‘Don’t get all upset tomorrow. We’ve seen guests coming back not able to sleep – or waking everyone else with their nightmares!’

In Dublin and London my Jewish friends had reproved me for evading Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial Museum) during two longish stays in Jerusalem. They exclaimed, ‘It’s insulting to ignore it!’ Or, ‘You must go to understand Israel!’ I conceded the first point and promised to be polite on my next visit.

During the bus ride from Mamilla I thought about terminology. In the Holy Land context, many words raise hackles. Claude Lanzmann, the Jewish-French film director, objects to ‘Holocaust’ because its literal meaning is ‘a burnt offering to a god’. He prefers the Hebrew ‘Shoah’, meaning ‘catastrophe’. However, the Arabic name for Zionism’s ‘War of Independence’ – al-Nakba – also means catastrophe. And so I’ve been urged to retain ‘Holocaust’; one must avoid any suggestion of an equivalence between the fates of Hitler’s and Zionism’s victims.

The Palestinian philosopher, Joseph Massad, has strong feelings about ‘conflict’. He sees his people engaged in a liberation struggle against European colonisers – hence ‘conflict’ is misleading and ‘terrorism’ scurrilous. Aida Touma-Sliman, General Director of the ’48-ers’ ‘Women Against Violence’, also rejects ‘conflict’ with its implication of equal forces. The mighty IDF, she points out, is deployed in an on-going conquest of the defenceless Palestinians. In like vein, Avi Shlaim had protested, ‘Operation Cast Lead, to give the war its bizarre official title, was not really a war but a one-sided massacre.’

Then there’s Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose use of ‘purify’ alarms. Gush Emunim’s spiritual leader formally lamented the slaughter of six million Jews but preached that bloodshed on that scale was needed to purify God’s people – so foully contaminated in the twentieth century by the sins of other nations!

From the bus stop a short resin-scented walk took me to Yad Vashem on its 45-acre site near the base of Mount Herzl. At 8.50 I joined a waiting sextet of Australians, newcomers to Israel and astounded by ‘All that’s been achieved since Independence!’ Although the guidebooks advise at least three hours for this ‘experience’ their minicab would fetch them at 10.00 a.m. – ‘Some of us can’t take too much cruelty!’ As we were admitted, two coachloads of schoolchildren arrived. No matter – even during the noon ‘rush-hour’ the vastness of Yad Vashem felt uncrowded.

In 1953 the Knesset proposed a memorial to the Holocaust victims and to all gentiles who had risked their lives to protect fugitive Jews. The most recent of several developments is a history museum opened in 2005 in the presence of forty national leaders plus Kofi Annan, then UN General Secretary – who might have excused himself, citing the innumerable UN Resolutions scorned by Israel since 1948. This building, designed by Moshe Safdie, is 180 metres long, has ten underground chambers and cost US$40 million. Another Safdie creation, dug into the bedrock, commemorates 1.5 million murdered children. Here a solitary flame is reflected in hundreds of mirrors, a weirdly moving conceit marred by gimmicky voices intoning children’s names.

Another jarring note is struck by an invitation to parents to ‘twin’ a son or daughter with a junior Holocaust victim. ‘At the end of a customised tour of Yad Vashem, accompanied by a professional photographer, an enhanced twinning ceremony, with the participation of a senior representative of Yad Vashem, will take place in the Synagogue. At the conclusion of a meaningful ceremony, designed especially for you, a framed commemoration certificate will be presented to the Bar/Bat Mitzvah child marking his or her pledge to perpetuate the memory of a child who perished in the Holocaust. A beautifully bound personalised photo album recording your family’s experience will provide a unique memento of the day’s visit.’ There follows an e-mail address, ‘for pricing information’. Most ‘twinners’ are US residents.

Observing those around me, I marked a generational difference; the under-40s seemed on the whole more detached than the over-70s. To the young all this is (or should be) in the past, inexpressibly tragic and evil but ‘history’. To my age group it is a tangible part of our ‘now’, though so distant. And perhaps, by Irish standards, I am exceptionally Holocaust-aware because a close friend of my father’s spent six years in Dachau. (Anton was a gentile but implacably and vocally anti-Nazi.) In 1938 I heard one of Hitler’s tirades live on the wireless; my mother took an interest in current affairs and understood German. She remembered my being so scared of what was coming over the airwaves that I retreated under a table, whimpering. One doesn’t always have to speak the language to get the message. Now it was eerie to hear again Hitler’s voice and the multitude’s savage response when he vowed to free the Reich from all Jewish influences.

Seven years later the Allied forces liberated the camps and I have never forgotten those press photographs, especially that picture of bulldozers shovelling emaciated corpses into a deep wide pit. Another seven years later Anton came to stay with us in Ireland for two months. When we went swimming I saw the numbers on his forearm and felt a frisson of horror. He never sat down to a normal meal: had to eat little and often. And he never spoke about Dachau, not even to his wife who became a close friend of my mother’s. He apparently concentrated on his academic work, to the exclusion of everything else. Then in 1959 he took an overdose. In Yad Vashem his shade walked with me.

I remember cycling past Dachau only five years after its liberation and gritting my teeth and pedalling faster when I saw the signpost. Yad Vashem taught me that this first concentration camp was set up, in March 1933, to silence political enemies: trade union leaders, Communists and social democrats like Anton. The SS initially claimed to be holding these people in ‘protective custody’ while ‘educating’ them to ‘think Nazi’. By the time of Anton’s imprisonment, in April 1939, several of his friends had been locked up for years amongst thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals and clergymen. Later came POWs, mainly Russians and Poles. And of course Jews, usually in transit, as Dachau was not a death camp. Exact statistics don’t exist; the generally accepted estimate is 200,000 held between 1933 and 1945, of whom 41,000 or so died – of diseases, starvation or lethal medical experiments. Those last involved prolonged and extreme suffering and were carried out by brilliant physicians /scientists. One evening Anton’s wife recalled how many such ‘researchers’ escaped punishment and were then – even as we spoke in 1952 – respected senior faculty members at German universities. I’ve never forgotten that evening; the sheer hatred in her voice unnerved me.

In my 1985 book on race relations in Britain I severely shocked many readers by suggesting that successful extermination camps could be set up in Britain, given a peculiarly unfortunate convergence of socio-economic crises with a Cliveden Set/Mosley-flavoured leadership. Although presented by Zionism as a unique anti-Semitic crime, that Holocaust is potentially repeatable. Only the technology and bureaucracy were unique; to that the Armenians and Tutsis can bear witness. Recognising this, in 1948 Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ and pressured the UN to introduce the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Unfortunately, as so often happens with UN Conventions, no teeth have yet come through and by now dim-witted journalists are depriving ‘genocide’ of its meaning by applying it to mass killings in general, whatever their motive.

One grim truth is prominently displayed on a Yad Vashem wall, above relevant photographs. ‘In the 1930s the rest of the world considered the persecution of the Jews to be an internal German matter.’

Another grim truth is glossed over. In the 1930s the persecution of the Jews elicited little sympathy from Palestine’s Zionist colony. Under Ben-Gurion’s leadership the Yishuv, with considerable help from the mandatory power, was narrowly focussed on nation-building. Political Zionism was all about breeding a ‘new man’ who would have nothing in common with degenerate Diaspora types. Therefore the Jewish Agency (JA) was consistently logical as it chose who to rescue from Nazism. ‘Sound human material’ was sought – young, vigorous, hard-working individuals capable of nourishing the embryonic Israeli state. Ben-Gurion’s Yishuv had not time for dependent refugees needing physical and/or psychological support. Even after September 1939 the JA insisted on selecting ‘the good’ from amongst ‘the rabble’. (So Moshe Sherett expressed it, in his diary.)

In 1945 Yishuv envoys began to tour the hellishly overcrowded Displaced Persons (DP) camps, helping to organise the flow of God’s Chosen People to their Promised Land. It alarmed these officials to find that most of these people, feeling let down by Zionism, longed to return to their homes instead of being shipped off to Palestine where they were now very welcome. As widely publicised survivors, on their behalf the Yishuv could expect to do well in the US fundraising arena. (So much for the myth that Diaspora Jews had spent 2,000 years yearning to return to Abraham’s bequest.) Several envoys describe the majority of the displaced persons as ‘defective human material’ – a chilling phrase, often used in JA reports. Some foresaw such people ‘poisoning Zionism’, undermining its wholesome socialist-agricultural foundations. When one envoy referred to them as ‘scum’ Ben-Gurion did not disagree. Then, being desperate for an increase in Palestine’s Jewish population, he quickly calculated – ‘Yes, they will make trouble, but at least the troubles will come from Jews.’

Of the 90,000 who arrived in Palestine during the latter half of 1945 some were concentration camp survivors and all had endured Nazi occupation. Over the next three years, the British would admit only 60,000 more, lest the Palestinians’ rage might run out of control. However, as the mandatory power weakened, the underground Zionist militia smuggled boatloads of destitute Jews past British coastguards. The Yishuv could have done more for those hundreds of thousands still languishing in European camps but Ben-Gurion and his officials were determined not to antagonise their British allies.

The first year of Israel’s existence saw 200,000 arriving and by the end of 1949 Holocaust survivors made up about one-third of Israel’s Jewish population. During the Nakba, one in three fighters was a survivor (22,000) – usually enlisted, before leaving a DP camp, by Yishuv agents who promised ‘a warm home in their new country’. Because they spoke no English most were deployed, after a few days’ training, as front line combatants and found themselves killing Palestinians against whom they bore no grudge in ‘defence’ of a country of which they knew nothing.

Those Yishuv leaders responsible for newcomers’ welfare noted how few long-settled Zionists opened their homes to refugee relatives. Tom Segev has described the Nakba’s stark drama:

Studying Yad Vashem’s displays of enlarged 1930s photographs, and reconstructions of street scenes in Eastern European villages, I wondered how many of those depicted had escaped and been able to benefit from the Nakba desolation. One slightly blurry film recorded in some detail the Allies’ shameful refusal to put the whole Auschwitz complex and its rail links out of action though they were bombing targets only five miles away. Both Roosevelt and Churchill coldly emphasised their one objective: the total defeat of Nazi Germany. No side-issues could be taken into account. Those crematoria a side-issue …? Significantly, Churchill had always cheered for Zionism. To my universalist Jewish friends, Zionists ‘are among the worst anti-Semites’. Back to terminology – one measure of the reach and power of the hasbara machine may be found in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961, reprinted 2002) where anti-Semitism is defined as ‘opposition to Zionism: sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel’. Truly this is immoral – to equate anti-Semites with those who seek justice for the Palestinians.

On my way out I passed one of the original cattle-wagons in which Jews were close-packed: for me by far the most disturbing exhibit, its material presence – so much more immediate than any film, DVD or panorama – inducing a moment of physical nausea.

Outside, I slowly paced around the ‘Valley of the Communities’ where, on a two and a half acre site, the names of 5,000 erased Jewish communities have been carved out of the valley floor. When will the Palestinians be free to commemorate their hundreds of erased villages in a similar manner? Some of those stood for many centuries on the now-forested slopes of Mount Herzl. Up there, amidst the cedars, lies Theodore Herzl who begot what is now being seen as a major international problem. Really it’s all a bit freakish. A Hungarian-born, secular, Swiss-based Jew, shaken by the Dreyfus trial and infected by the European nationalist virus, decides Europe’s Jews need their own nation. He and a few other seculars get together and three years later the first World Zionist Congress is held in Basle. It all went on from there, the socialist/secular ideal readily adapting to Judaism the religion, as expediency dictated. When Herzl died young in 1904, he couldn’t possibly have foreseen the nightmare that would evolve out of his dream.

Finally I paid my respects to the Righteous. In 1963 many trees (they remain rather spindly) were planted along the Avenue of the Righteous, a dreary concrete walkway commemorating those gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews. This encouraging cross-section of heroes and heroines includes Muslim Albanians, Armenian Christians, Polish housewives, German nannies, an Italian diplomat, a Dutch farmer, an Egyptian doctor, a French railway porter, a Danish king. Saluting their memories, I recalled Zygmunt Bauman’s concluding reflections on the Holocaust: