Israelis had increasingly seen themselves as a nation of victims, especially since the 1963 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem had pulled the Holocaust from the shadows. Now the Sabras, many of whom were children of Holocaust survivors, found themselves confronting an occupied civilian population: mothers pleading with soldiers for the release of their sons; wives, for their husbands; old men bent over sticks, looking with confusion at a battalion passing by and yelling in a language they couldn't understand.
