After the Great Fall

 This is a somewhat rambling post on the political situation in Rwanda. Outside of the usual scope, I guess, but this is my main (only?) writing outlet these days. And it's still about Rwanda.

Driving around Kigali, it is possible to forget the genocide, to forget the civil war of 16 years ago. The city is relatively prosperous and growing. People smile and volunteer friendly conversations more than a shell-shocked or closed populace would. While there are many organizations, governmental or otherwise, who are headquartered in the center of the city and whose focus is on preventing genocide, aiding survivors, or other related issues, there is not a noticeable survivor presence in the city.

In some ways, the government and the people would like the genocide to be put past them. The country is seeking to gain a reputation as a tourist destination, and they are seeking to grow a modern service economy, and they are seeking to do both these things in part by shedding the main word association publics in the west have with Rwanda, genocide. It is not that the country seeks to forget, of course; many argue that the continuing legitimacy for the Kagame regime is tied as much to the fact that he led the forces that ended the genocide as to the fact that he has rebuilt the country thoroughly since that time. Many in Rwanda would like to remind others that there's more to the country than genocide history, is all.

The memorialization of the genocide is in an interesting transitional period. Many of the sites we visited were preserved monuments to brutality as much as anything else; skulls, bones, clothes, and even in one place full skeletons remained intact and on display as a testament to what happened. This on the one hand is an effort to display the very real effect of the 1994 genocide and to ensure its memory endures; on the other hand, there is not a great amount of respect for the bodies of those who died.

So the memorialization is changing, in part. Our guides hinted to us that sites such as Murambi, Ntarama, and Nyamata (I'll go more into them in the next post) may be radically different in 4-5 years, with the bones finally buried and the focus of the exhibit shifted in some way. The Kigali Memorial Center, whose exhibit was furnished by a company that also organized our tour of the country, is a model for what's to come in many ways: a very informative museum-exhibit combined with mass graves, a wall of names, several symbolic gardens or statues, and a heavy dose of witness testimony. It's a very fine exhibit, as far as that goes, and if the genocide sites can be shifted from bare bones evidence of the genocide, literally, to informative and testimonial based sites that still capture some of the experience of the history, that would be a good thing for the memorialization process. Then again, if they do indeed follow through on their plans to do things like transform the former President Juvenal Habyarimana's (his plane was shot down on 6 April, 1994, triggering the genocide which would start the next day; he had long been aligned with genocidal forces, though his signing of a peace accord may have been the final straw in leading him to sacrifical lamb status) house into a national museum and party site - our visit came during preparations for a wedding later that day - perhaps the memory will not be as well preserved.

But let's go back to the history itself, and the impact it has on the country to this day. Without giving a footnoted, academically cited, and overly detailed summary of Rwanda's history, I hope to not reduce it too much. I also hope not to mess up too much.

In essence, Rwanda was part of a kingdom with Burundi before the arrival of German and, after World War I, Belgian colonizers. The colonizers solidified the vague racial categories of Tutsi and Hutu by formalizing people's identity via identity cards, backing up the categories with pseudo scientific (eugenic) theories on the differences between the two groups, and placing the smaller Tutsi group in power, leading to newly emphasized tensions between the two groups. Towards the end of their colonial reign, the Belgian leaders decided to give up on the Tutsis and backed Hutus for power. Hutu leaders, sensing the opportunity to take advantage of their people's anger over being subservient to Tutsi interests, built their power on racial grounds, and when the Belgians left, they initiated several cycles of violence against Tutsis.

These cycles continued until 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a largely Tutsi-exile army, and the Rwandan national army fought a civil war. The RPF, co-led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was a better organized army and gained ground and leverage. The Rwandan government was also constrained by economic struggles (there was a great drop in coffee prices, an export crop Rwanda relied on) and donor nations eager to see Rwanda make peace, leading to a peace accords. The Arusha Peace Accords didn't include all necessary powers and provided for a shaky power-sharing government, but at least was sensed to be a path forward.

Instead, the President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994. It is still a hot topic of dispute as to who killed the president; Rwanda and its allies, as well as more experts, believe that the Hutu Power movement surrounding the president (who was a Hutu and a hard-liner, at least before conceding to the peace process) killed him as a way to launch a genocidal campaign and consolidate power - they felt that using a scapegoat of the minority Tutsi group (15% of the country's population) would rally the majority behind the government and keep them in control. Many in France (a strong supporter of the genocidal regime) and a few others believe the RPF was behind the assassination. Most circumstantial evidence points to the Hutu Power group being responsible, and I have a hard time seeing why the RPF would have done it, for what it's worth.

Either way, the genocide began the next day, April 7th, 1994. For 100 days, Hutu militias and government military forces killed between 500,000 and 1.2. million (the most common estimate is 800,000) Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, though also moderate Hutu political figures and Hutus who stood in the way. The genocidaires had studied their history well, and used tricks from the Holocaust to Somalia to carry out their genocide and disengage the international community. This was a classic case of the world standing by and watching, at times even doing less than helping - when the UN finally "sent" in a mission, it was a French led army in the Southwest that did nothing more than provide an escape route for the genocidaires fleeing from the RPF forces who had relaunched their fighting in response to the genocide. The genocide only stopped when the RPF won the war and assumed control and power of the country.

The Rwandan genocide was renowned for its brutality. Rwanda is a small country (population between 8 and 11 million over the last fifteen years), and to carry out such a genocide required participation from many people in the country, including ordinary people, neighbors hunting or snitching on their Tutsi neighbors. Families with mixed marriages were torn apart. Major tools for carrying out the genocide included machetes and a local weapon that was basically a wooden stick with a nail on it.

The only other thing I'll say about the genocide before moving to firsthand observations is that it is still unclear how true and how constructed the racial identities are. One popular belief was that Tutsis came from Ethiopia, and so many Hutus "sent them back" to Ethiopia via rivers. Common stereotypes say that Tutsis are taller and more beautiful, while Hutus shorter, stockier, and thinner. Others say that there is, or was, no real distinction between the two groups, and that the term Tutsi was affixed to anybody who had ten or more cattle; as such, Tutsi/Hutu was a class distinction. At this point, or at least at the genocide's point, the distinctions became hardnosed facts, but it should be remembered that there was no primordial, inherent reason for the population in Rwanda to bifurcate into two major groups (there is a third, the Twa, which makes up 1% of the population and is usually considered incidental to the racial politics of the country).

This history also has to be remembered when considering the current political condition of Rwanda. President Kagame has strong control of Rwanda, having recently won re-election with a 93% vote, a number most people consider not to be doctored. But there were a few numerous high-profile disqualifications of opposition politicians from the race, and so 93% isn't a wholly safe number to throw out either; in general, whenever somebody is elected with 93%, there is cause for suspicion.

It is hard to find people who will dispute the notion that Kagame and his team have a strong grasp on the political space in Rwanda. The dispute begins in assessing the implications of that control. On the one hand, Kagame is undoubtedly popular, especially in Kigali - you can't go far without seeing Kagame t-shirts sold or worn, and signs of his campaign hung ubiquitously even a month after the election. Rwanda has grown, Kigali is booming for an African city, and the country appears to be much safer and stabler than most societies would be 16 years after a wrenching social trauma on any scale, never mind one that wipes out an eighth of the population.

At the same time, as my German friend on the trip pointed out, one should get uneasy whenever one man has so much power. Even if the government's intentions are good, it is not healthy in the long term to have such focused control. For example, the government has led a very positive idea of reeducating the people to believe in "banyarwanda", or the people of Rwanda. As in, "we are all Rwandans, not Tutsis or Hutus." A great idea that hopefully will set in to eradicate any racial reasons for Rwandans to discriminate against each other (or for outsiders to encourage dissension and divide and conquer, as was the source of all these problems). But if most people still know who's a member of which group, as we were often told, or if most people perceive the political beneficiaries of the current system, i.e. the people in power currently, to be Tutsis, this system and concept of a new Rwanda hits a blurry border with older systems of privileged people and groups.

For all this, I would like to return to the history and to the bias of Americans and the West. It's easy for us, feeling ourselves to be in an open, democratic society where the political space is far wider (whatever our problems), to criticize a country like Rwanda (similar issues affect westerners' views on Israel, but this is not the space for that). We did not have a tortuous genocide rip asunder our nation within the past two decades; World War II tore apart Europe and led to change, but the main perpetrators were convicted and the general population (i.e. Germans) atoned for their grievous faults, while many of the victims left (Jews, most obviously). America's genocide happened hundreds of years before and was swept under the rug; the country has survived just fine despite the treatment of Native Americans, thanks.

We should consider, then, what would happen had there not been a strong control of the political space. Everything I heard suggested that there are still people in Rwanda who are eager to stir up racial divisiveness. Without getting on the slippery slope too quickly, we can see that racial divisiveness is the foundation for genocidal ideology. This is the government's justification for the disqualifications from the previous election and other political crackdowns that strike us as overmuch. We could be right in thinking this, but can only reach a fair conclusion if we consider the full context.

Two more points about that context, and here I will draw parallels to the situation in Israel. Interestingly enough, there are many parallels between the two countries, if not quite as much as Rwandans especially would like there to be. But the history, the international position, the internal development, the emphasis on security and independence, the controversial issues hovering around, the kindness and defensiveness of the people, and the beauty of the land are just a few of the similarities that these two countries share. What follows could be said about either.

Rwanda has achieved a lot since the genocide of 1994. Undoubtedly aid has helped, and similarly undoubtedly I haven't actually been to any other African countries to compare Rwanda to. But from all I heard and saw, Kigali especially and Rwanda as a whole has grown substantially in the past 15 years and has surpassed its neighbors in many ways. I never really felt in danger in Rwanda (well, not counting the drive through the mountains of west Rwanda in thundering rain at dusk; I felt fairly in danger then), though the presence of armed personnel around the city and the country was a little alarming. All to say that while it is not unambiguously so, Rwanda is a growing country that has done well, and that has ambitions to do better - Kagame has gone on the record in many places about his desire to outgrow the need for aid. This is commendable, and should at least be weighed against the costs of certain political limits, for the time being. In Israel, this growth is at a far more advanced level, but also should be considered when looking at the country as part of the Middle East and as part of its political issues.

The other point is that when external pressures encourage Kagame and Rwanda to open up, or Israel to achieve peace and make sacrifices towards achieving that peace, for example, they are not just doing it to waste their breath or punish the nation in question. In Rwanda's case, true political freedom and a sense of real unity forged under the label of "banyarwanda", where neither former racial group is benefiting more than the other, would be the true sign of recovery from the genocide and emergence as a modern and rising African nation-state. That is not as easy as it sounds in the sentence above, of course, and outsiders need to be cognizant of the challenges facing Rwanda. That doesn't mean they can't help and prod Rwanda to keep moving forward.

We were in Rwanda for the release of the UN Congo report, a report detailing the many abuses that occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a decade of fighting. Rwanda was implicated in this report, and the wording suggested that Rwanda could be accused of genocide against Hutu forces in the east Congo.

This naturally infuriated just about everybody we met in Rwanda. The report has been accused, justifiably, of poor sourcing and lack of context, and generally appears to be a shoddy effort, for the UN or otherwise. Rwanda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a sharp 30-page document refuting the UN report (which ran 566 pages), and they had every right and justification to refute it (we actually befriended one of the authors of the report during our time there). It should also be noted that just about every other African nation implicated in this report also refuted the findings, and that only Rwanda's role in the report and their reaction has been covered to a significant degree in the international media.

But even in this clearly flawed report and justified response, there are gray shades to consider. Rwanda's ire emerges most from the term "genocide" - the report accuses them of killing tens of thousands of people, whereas the Rwandan genocide saw, as I said, 500,000-1.2 million die. Any equivalency of this even on the report's terms would be foolish, and Rwandans fear that were the term genocide to be slapped on the Congo, the international community's opinion would slide back to a "cycle of violence, they are all bad" mode, which would tarnish the Rwandan government's legitimacy and more significantly the nature of the trauma Rwanda suffered. Then when you consider the limited validity of the report, or the many missing contextual factors - for example, the Rwandan report (which I would link, but their site is struggling right now) points out how many Hutus the Rwandans repatriated to their country, and their goal of bringing all Rwandans back to Rwanda, which doesn't easily fit in with genocide. Accusing Rwanda of supporting genocide on any grounds is a wholly dangerous and arguably existential threat to the country and its safety, as Rwandans see it. They are wholly right on this.

At the same time, I have a hard time doubting that atrocities were committed in the Congo, and that Rwanda's troops just like so many others had a hand in committing them. Some transparency is needed in dealing with this problem. As with many situations in Israel (the Goldstone report being the most obvious recent one), just because the report itself was wholly flawed and shoddy doesn't mean it didn't reveal serious issues that need to be dealt with. Israel has dealt with it to some degree; Rwanda needs to figure out if they are ready to as well.

Rwanda has done tremendously in recovering from their genocide, growing their country, and dealing with their internal issues over the past 16 years. Our thrilling and successful visit showed me nothing less. That said, the government still needs to open up and solidify its emerging democracy as a truly free and open place. That doesn't happen in a day; it will be very interesting to see how far along the country gets in the next 7 years before Kagame's term ends and, under constitutional law, he has to step down from the presidency. It will be an important test for the country, to say the least. And progress will go a long way towards breaking any last remnants of the cycle of violence that did lead to the genocide.

We saw it in the Museums, Written in Big Pictures

While it's hard for me to believe each time I'm stuck at a poorly-designed traffic light or a bottleneck intersection, wondering where all those bright young Jewish engineers have gone, Israel stands at the technological frontier. The high-tech industry is a jewel in the country's economic crown (now tarnished a bit by some crisis going on, have you heard?), researchers developed voice mail for cell phones and ICQ (sort of like AIM outside of A) here, and everyday citizens have perfected the technology of transmitting a vulgar gesture while driving crappy boxy cars and talking on a cell phone ear piece here.

So perhaps it's not surprising that technology would transform tourism in Israel as well, and specifically their museum. This country possesses a chain of experiential museums; museums where, instead of walking around and reading information while taking in visual evidence through artifacts or artistic items, the visitor learns about the museum material by watching and listening to a video presentation, a film wrapped around the museum's thesis or message. It's like one of those classes where instead of lecturing about the New Deal, the teacher opts to show a film of FDR and his time.

The first time for me was, as first times often are, unexpected. I had no idea I was in for a whole new brand of museum. Unlike most first times, perhaps, my first time was with my brother, and it was in a small city along the Mediterranean coast, just north of Haifa, a city called Akko.

Akko, a.k.a. Acre, is known for its Fringe Theater Festival, its Crusader history, its mostly Arabic old city, and the mixed population of Arabs and Jews (these elements flared up in riots around Yom Kippur last year). When we went on a damp, cloudy Friday in early January, tempers and temperatures were low, and the port city felt raw and unwelcoming.

Our principal stop was the Turkish Bathhouse, reported by my guidebook to be one of the highlights of a visit to Akko. The book said something about a light show, and between that and my love of saunas, I thought it would be worthwhile. We had a hard time following the confusing signs in the old city were confusing, and we stumbled across the place more than we found it, but at some point a security guard standing beneath an arch pointed out the brown brick hallway we were to walk down and we found the front desk to the museum.

As it was the Friday after New Year's, a crappy day weather-wise, still relatively early, and soon to be Shabbat, it was perhaps not surprising that Mark and I were the only ones there. The man behind the desk offered us admission and handheld audio guides that were required for the exhibit. He then sent us through the open courtyard and to a door with a digital clock counting down in red numbers above it, and when that door automatically swung open, we entered.




In front of us was a gray, waterless fountain in the center, with gray columns on the outside of the room. The color of the walls was a brownish yellow, and pale transparent sheets hung before the walls, depicting typical scenes of a bathhouse. To our right was a big projector screen, and towards that the guard suggested our eyes should be trained. We each took seat in one of the many white plastic lawn chairs scattered about the room, held our audio guides to our ears, and did as suggested.

Soon a well-dressed middle-aged Arabic man stepped into the screen to greet us. While the screen character spoke in Hebrew (or maybe Arabic, I can't remember now), our guide started chirping in Arab-accented English. This was supposed to be the last bath attendant, or a descendant of that attendant, and he was to tell us the story of the bathhouses in Akko.

So far, things were more or less in order. Yes, the English sounded funny, and the speech was a little corny, full of knowing pauses and verbal winks, but there wasn't anything to make one feel strange. If anything, it was an interesting idea, to center a museum around a random epoch in Israel's history (as a location, not a country), and even more so around the main "other" in the country, i.e. the Arabs during the Ottoman Empire.

But then they went into a flashback scene. From the modern, well-dressed descendant we went to four Arabs from times past, gathered around a table in the bathhouse of the clouds, floating above us. They were all wider, older men, and as the voices switched to cover each of them in a different Arab-inflected English, they smoked the nargila and shot the proverbial breeze. Each told the other a tall tale about El Jazzar, the Pasha who built the baths at the end of the 18th century. They also busted on each other and muttered about the "sneaky Jews", in the way of all locker room conversations.

Fortunately for all involved, Mark and I were alone in the room, as I mentioned. This was fortunate because while even at the beginning we were giggling a little bit about the conceit of the museum (Mark is a notorious giggler after all, and it can be infectious), by the time we got to the "bathhouse" itself, the two of us lost it. Giggles turned continuous, laughter turned uproarious, chairs turned over as we fell to the floor, and the whole thing seemed ridiculous.


This was the general gist of the museum. There was one other room, where the actual sauna was supposed to be. Amidst statues of bathers and another video screen, we felt no more serious than before. The big change was that the voice did not only come from the screen, but also from a statue sitting on a beheaded column, his lips moving by holographic projection. This, needless to say, sent us further atwitter.




I didn't realize then that we were experiencing the cusp of a trend. The whole museum exhibit took just over a half hour, and when we finished, we chalked it up to a pleasantly silly diversion that we probably wouldn't spend money on again. Then we walked along the coast and Mark talked me out of buying something and that was that.

A month later my Hebrew teacher, a colleague at the school, asked me to help chaperone the school Hebrew trip to Jerusalem. At first the plan was to go to the Knesset, which would have potentially been fascinating, considering it would have been two days after the elections. And so it also wasn't surprising that the authorities didn't let us go there.

Option #2 centered on the Jerusalem Time Elevator. Located in the Beit Agron building near the center, the Time Elevator takes the interaction a step further, putting it into a ride jam-packed with excitement. Or something.

Our wise-mouthed British locals bragged about how they had been on the ride three or four times already as we filed into the room, 60 of us in all. I sat with my colleagues, grizzled Israeli natives who nevertheless looked forward to the ride. On the walls there were fake old-fashioned hearths and Roman numerals, and on one side of the screen a timeline went up from 1000 BCE to the present-day. A lady in modern tour-guide uniform came on screen, welcoming us to the elevator and preparing us for the journey, as the room shook ominously. The time elevator was doomed to fall out of its groove, and we to plunge into history. And then the main guy from Fiddler on the Roof came on the screen.

He was dressed in rags and quite old, meant to represent a Jerusalem native cursed to live forever in Jerusalem and to tell people about it in this little film. So he took us through David's founding of the city, the Babylonian exile, the return, the Roman exile, the arrival of the Ottomans, and then the reemergence of a Jewish state. All this came with our seat shaking and at one point, a spray of water from the ceiling upon us. The information presented was analogous to what I saw at the Tower of David museum in the Old City of Jerusalem, if a little abridged, but the entertainment and goofy factors were off the charts.

And yet I didn't realize the common thread tying all these museums together until later that day. We drove up to Mt. Herzl on one of the outer neighborhoods of Jerusalem (and Jerusalem, like few cities I've seen, is a city of neighborhoods, confusing to drive through and weirdly disjointed as you go from north to south or from the Old City up to the hills). The mountain featured a park and the graves of a few famous figures, including Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism himself (and here I was thinking Herzliya was just a funny name for the town I lived in). But we were not to go walking around the mountain, visiting the graves: we had another museum in store, and another historical experience to live.

The schtick at the Herzl museum was as follows: we entered a room meant to model fin de siecle Vienna. On the screen, a young, attractive-looking Israeli actor (very European though) prepares to audition for the role of Herzl in some play. He expresses ignorance about the man, and the full-bearded wide-bodied director suggests that the actor do some brushing up on the founder. They bring in a Herzl expert - a woman whose age falls right in between the 50-something director and the young 30's actor - to advise the actor on the role. Sexual tension and light humor introduced into the plot, the museum takes us through Herzl's Zionist career (1897, sparked by the Dreyfuss Affair, to 1904, when he died) and puts the state of Israel in its historical background, while the rooms we go through are modeled after Herzl's room, a speaking hall, and a Zionist congress. By the time they get to the big clip show about the history of Israel, and whether or not it lived up to Herzl's vision, the whole thing iskind of hopeful and balanced at the same time. In fact, they concede that Herzl saw this as a more egalitarian society, a place where Arabs and Jews would be equal and safe. Utopianistic, surely, but pleasant to keep in mind.

In fact, that's what makes these experiential museums so interesting beyond the gimmickry. For example, I generally prefer reading to watching, whether it's books to movies or the Tower of David museum to the Timeline elevator. But when well done, these types of museums provoke emotions and a greater connection to the material at hand, along with providing a historical education.

Which is also what makes these museums a little bit dangerous. In Israel, a place where everything is political, it's easy to look twice at just about any statement or historical point. So when a "museum" talks about the history of Jerusalem, or the development of Zionism, there's a lot of room to be subjective. If a museum has a certain thesis that isn't wholly declared, it becomes much easier for that message to sink into the visitors' mindsets, as the connection drives the point further home.

The Herzl museum was fairly balanced, I thought. They tried to point out that the Jewish State hasn't been a perfect creation, and that Herzl would not be completely pleased with what Israel has become in 2009 (and mind you, this was pre-right wing government). At the same time, they pointed out the incredible positive changes that this land has undergone in the past 60-100 years, and suggested that Jews and Israelis (and Herzl behind them) have much to feel proud about.

This is mostly a neutral message, a sort of benevolent nationalism, and while those dialectically opposed to the Jewish state or those critical about how the country has conducted themselves in their history might find a lot at fault with that, a neutral clear-headed observer might find a mostly even-handed presentation that raised questions and interesting points. This is the sort of museum that would suit peace-loving Zionists in Israel, which suits Herzl's legacy as I understand it.

It's important to consider, however, that among those groups attending the museum before or after us were groups of soldiers. Israelis a few years younger than me (and even closer in age to our high schoolers) stood in regimented lines and prepared to learn about their history through this experiential fashion. Certainly, this is a more effective way to teach and to push a message across than sending them to a standard, cut-and-dried museum. It's that question about whether it's right to push across a message in a museum, and how hard messages are to keep historical, that I'm asking.

The question becomes even more pertinent at the Palmach museum in Tel Aviv. The Palmach was one of the main Israeli fighting forces before Israel existed. The British established the Jewish units during WWII to fight the Germans if they invaded the British-held territory, but once that threat was subsumed in 1942, the Palmach evolved into an underground force obsessed with paving the way for a Jewish state. If the Herzl Museum tells the story of the ideological underpinnings to the Jewish state and how they came to be, the Palmach talks about the dirty work that made Israel a country.

I attended the museum a week ago amongst a pack of Australian kids my age or perhaps a little younger. They were in a big group from Masa, an organization that offers programs in Israel to young Jews around the world, to offer them opportunity but also presumably to indocrinate a sense of Jewish pride and an identification with Israel. The kids were loud and rambunctious, and it seemed that a museum could hardly hold them.

An Israeli soldier managed to grab their attention while giving the introduction to the museum. She called out one of the kids, saying, "Purple sweater, you're really annoying," to a girl in the group. Still, in the first room in the museum, somebody from the group was making animals with their hands against the light, so they had an irreverent attitude at the outset, to say the least.

The museum also took a different approach to the translation issues posed by an English-speaking group. Whereas the Herzl museum overdubbed every part in English and played the sound through the stereo system, and the Akko museum did the same overdubbing but played them through headsets, the Palmach museum played through headsets and didn't overdub everything. The screen introduced about ten characters that made up a Palmach unit, yet instead of offering a voice for each of them in English, the display only gave us a narrator who indirectly covered everything they said, either through quotation or through summary. Only when it was completely unavoidable, as when a character was reading a letter, did they allow for a "character's" voice to speak.

Maybe the Palmach was the first experiential museum and so those behind it hadn't mastered the formula, but this weak translation limited the effectiveness of the presentation. All the humor, cheesy as it probably was, bled out of the process, and it was harder to connect with characters when they were largely indistinguishable. (They did have the moving lipped statue trick though, which drew laughs).

And yet, by the time they got to the final fighting that marked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the founding of the state, where the wise-cracking nerdy lieutenant to the main commander begs to go into battle in the Negev and then dies, the presentation hit its mark. Emotions were stirred, connection was made, and all those Aussies were silent as they watched.

But then there's that nagging question. You find out in the museum that the Palmach bombed every bridge connecting Israel to another country in 1946. You hear about the fighting between Jews and Arabs who lived together. You learn about the struggle and the cost and the lives lost. But you hear about this all from the Israeli side.

There is no balance at the Palmach the way there is at the Herzl Museum. And the Palmach's topic is much more controversial on its own. The exhibit then leads a visitor to two likely sets of responses (assuming that they would be the type of visitor that would actually go to the Palmach museum - Hamas members are unlikely to have either of these reactions): the first would be a conscious empathy with the story and the characters they've seen, leading the visitor to a stronger understanding of the history behind the state and hence, subconsciously, a stronger connection with Israel. I may be patronizing in suggesting that the Aussies fell into this category, but I will suggest it ne'ertheless.

The other reaction would be to wonder where the distinctions are drawn in these identities and these namings. Is the bombing of every bridge connecting pre-state Palestine to the countries around it an act of war, an act of liberation, a guerilla tactic, or even a terrorist move? Is the victory over fleeing refugees and hated rivals something to be proud of or something to consider deeply? I'm not trying to jump on Israel and, if I fell on the Israeli political spectrum, it would probably be as a Herzl nationalist type, but watching that history unfold on the screen from room to room leads to either subconscious agreement (since after all, the Palmach soldiers were presented as good guys, and did "win") or substantial questioning.

None of this is meant to imply that somehow the technology or idea of experiential museums was developed in Israel as a way to propogate propaganda. Or that other museums don't exist in Israel, more straightforward exhibits indoors (Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tower of David Museum, Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, Massua near our school, for examples) or set in Israel's natural beauty (Masada is the most obvious example).

It's just that as we propel forward into a bolder, more technological world, the new opportunities that the technology offers are also new opportunities to be misused in some way. Some are more obvious, like mind-reading or students screwing around on facebook on their laptops in class, and others are not quite so obvious, like these museums. This has always been true, of course, but as the technological advances come faster and faster, the questions, challenges, and temptations follow with them at an equally rapid pace. It's just something to watch out for, and it's another place where Israel is at the cutting edge. For better or for worse.