A woman dressed in funeral black, stands over the actors bodies and performs Billie Holiday's mournful eulogy, Strange Fruit.

Instead, Defense Minister Ehud Barak explained the thinking behind the recent hostilities in Gaza in typically existential terms. He fell back on a defining speech in Israeli history, General Moshe Dayan s eulogy for Roi Rothberg, a young soldier riddled by bullets from the Gaza Strip in 1956.