My first official duty as Israel’s ambassador-designate became an encounter between memory and diplomacy

In Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, I learned that the Iranian ambassador was walking through the same rooms, only meters away.

I had landed in Japan barely a day earlier. There was no gradual transition: the next morning, I left Tokyo for my first official duty.

Almost overnight, I had gone from private citizen to Israel’s representative under unusually heavy protection. The Iranian ambassador’s presence made that transformation tangible: representatives of two hostile states were walking through rooms devoted to the price of war. The tensions outside had followed me into a museum dedicated to peace.

The irony went deeper. At a press conference in Hiroshima, the Iranian ambassador had placed side by side a photograph of children killed in the atomic bombing and one of 168 Iranian schoolchildren whom he said had been killed by two American missiles in 2026. He thereby turned Hiroshima’s memory into an indictment of the American and Israeli campaign against Iran.

Every child’s death........

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