While Tel Aviv is Israel's "hip" city: vibrant, techie and relatively liberal, Jerusalem is really where it's all at!

Israel, the US government and Guatemala consider the entire city and not just West Jerusalem to be Israel's capital. The US government recently "moved" its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem although this has mainly involved changing the sign on what was the American consulate and providing the ambassador with a small flat. The new embassy, we're told doesn't meet the security requirements of a full blown embassy, so other than the sign on the door, not much has changed operationally at what is now the US consulate in Tel Aviv. It may be another ten years before before land is purchased and a purpose built embassy is up and running.

As well as being the seat of Israel's government, Jerusalem is bigger, more modern (at least the west side of the city) and with so many religious and historic sites a far more interesting place to visit than Tel Aviv. Jerusalem is also far more conservative than Tel Aviv and its large, prominent population of ultra-religious Jews adds to the colorful (although not literally!) and varied ambience of the city. The difference between modern, thriving West Jerusalem and Arab East Jerusalem though is depressingly stark. East Jerusalem still looks much like Jordan which it was a part of until the 1967 Six Day War - decrepit, run-down, trash-lined streets - and the difference between the two sides of the city is further underlined by the vast gap in GDP per head of population between them (<$10,000 vs +$40,000)

Much of our visit to Jerusalem (and from there to the West Bank) is taken up with Pacific Council business - meetings with politicians, military and intelligence people and civil society leaders which I will cover in a separate blog. But we do have time to wonder around the Old City which given the vast number of tourists who flock to its numerous religious sites, surprisingly still has a reasonably large resident population, particularly in the Arab quarter.

We'd last visited the Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem 40 years ago, but some 13 years ago a much larger memorial was constructed. The new Memorial is very well laid out taking visitors on a downward sloping trail through the history of the Holocaust from the end of World War 1 through the rise of Nazism, World War II, the attempted Final Solution with all of its associated horrors and atrocities, to Germany's defeat and the founding of the State of Israel. Quite deliberately, there's only one way in to the Memorial itself and only one way out. Yad Vashem is both impressive and emotionally draining but our visit was particularly poignant for two reasons.

Our guide during our visit to Yad Vashem is an Australian born migrant to Israel who's mother and aunt were Auschwitz survivors and who's photos taken in 1945 can be seen at the Memorial. Our guide tells us that her mother died in her early 90's only a few weeks before our visit and so she was able to relate experiences she had heard directly from a survivor of the Holocaust. On leaving the Memorial building itself, visitors are led through the Garden of the Righteous Among Nations. This Garden is a memorial to those non-Jews who, mostly in countries occupied by the Nazis, risked everything to hide Jewish members of their communities or helped Jews escape all together. Some stories are well-known - Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg for instance. In total though, some 27,000 people have been officially recognized according to carefully defined criteria. For instance assistance has to be repeated or substantial and assistance has to be given without any financial gain expected in return. We were all stunned to learn, as was our guide, that the grandparents of one person in our group, Will Mesdag are among the "Righteous". Living in Holland through the Nazi occupation, they had rescued and sheltered 80 Jewish children. With some emotion, Will was able to relate some of the story as we stood next to the plaque in the Garden where his grandparents' names are inscribed