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“We can break this endless cycle of revenge, retaliation
and punishment; the only way to do it is to listen to the pain of the other,”
said Rami Elhanan, an
Israeli Jew whose fourteen-year-old daughter was killed in a suicide attack
in Jerusalem.
He and a Palestinian who had lost a brother in the conflict were speaking on
behalf of the Bereaved Families Forum to 120 participants in the Middle East
Peace Initiative in Jerusalem
April 10-16, 2007.
A graphic designer whose family has roots in Jerusalem dating back seven generations, Rami described the day his daughter Smadir
died, September 4, 1997. When he heard the news of a suicide bombing near
where his daughter and her friends were shopping on Ben-Yehuda Street
in Jerusalem,
he went running in the streets and then from hospital to hospital looking for
her. Finally he found her body at the morgue. “It was a sight and time I will
never ever be able to forget, and it changed my life completely,” he said.
He had been a young soldier during the Yom Kippur War in a company that had
eleven tanks at the start of the war and only three at its close. He lost
good friends and ended the war with the determination to look out after
himself. He got married, and he and his wife had four children. After Smadir’s death, their house was filled for seven days and
seven nights with thousands and thousands of people coming to pay
condolences, during the Jewish period of mourning. On the eighth day he found
himself alone facing the decision of what to do with the sea of anger within
himself.
“I’m a Jew. I’m an Israeli. Before anything else, I am a human being,” Rami said. “There are only two options. The first is the
obvious one: when someone kills your child you want to get angry. Most people
choose the way of hatred and retaliation. But we are people, not animals; we
can think. You ask yourself if killing anyone will bring her back, if causing
pain to anyone will ease your pain.”
At first he thought he could go back to his normal life and pretend that
nothing had happened. But life was not normal any more. Then he met Yitzhak Frankenthal, who co-founded the gatherings of bereaved
families in 1995, after his son Arik was kidnapped
and murdered.
Yitzhak invited Rami to come to a meeting, where he
saw people he had long admired, such as Yaacov Guterman, a Holocaust survivor who lost his son Raz during the war in Lebanon. For the first time in
his life he saw Palestinian bereaved families, and they shook his hand and
cried with him. An old Arab lady had a picture of her six-year-old kid on her
chest.
“I’m not a very religious person,” Rami reflected.
“I cannot explain what happened to me that minute nine years ago. I know
this: from that moment on I devote my life to go anywhere to speak to anyone,
those who listen and those who do not want to listen, to convey one simple
truth: we are not doomed. It is not our destiny to keep murdering. If I am
listening to the pain of my brother here, whom I really love like my own
brother, I can expect him to listen to my own pain. We can go on the long and
difficult journey and together we can go to peace. We put cracks of hope in
the wall of hatred and fear. We say that our blood is the same color. Our
pain is the same pain. We paid the highest price possible. If we can talk to
one another, anyone can.”
Rami is
the son of a Holocaust survivor. As his grandparents were taken to the ovens
in Europe, the free and civilized nations
never lifted a finger. He expressed appreciation for people with open hearts
who come to the Holy Land to listen, learn
and work for peace.
The Bereaved Families Forum sends pairs of Jews and Palestinians to speak in
high schools. In Israeli schools, they ask how many students in their
audience had met a Palestinian before, and most of them never had. In
Palestinian schools, the young people tell them they had never met an Israeli
other than a soldier. Through the Bereaved Families Forum, young people have
a new type of encounter. In 2006, they held meetings in more than 1,000
schools. Students tell them: “You opened a new way of thinking for us,” and “This
changed my life.” The organization hosts a call-in radio program in Arabic
and Hebrew on All for Peace Radio and a telephone hotline that gives Jews and
Palestinians an opportunity to talk to each other. In four years, more than
four million phone calls were placed. They also run summer camps for Israeli
and Palestinian teens who have lost family members
to violence.
Aziz Abu Sarah came with Rami to tell his family’s story. A fourth-generation
resident of Jerusalem,
Aziz is the Palestinian chairman of the Bereaved
Families Forum.
“When people come here and spend a few days touring the Holy
Land, they start feeling hopeless,” Aziz
began. They see how people are living and don’t know any way to make a
difference.
“I grew up in Bethany,”
he explained. “It was a normal childhood, in a sense, but nothing is normal
here. By the time I was seven I had been shot at. I saw a neighbor killed. If
it’s not near your home, it’s not so close. When I was nine, soldiers came
into our house looking for something and didn’t find it, so they took my
older brother. We finally figured out that he was suspected of throwing
stones. He was beaten during interrogation. They released him, but already
his liver and spleen were damaged. We took him to the hospital where he had
surgery. But a few days later he died.”
It was the brother closest in age to him, and they were very close. Aziz became very angry and very bitter. “I believed it
was my duty to avenge my brother. I got involved very early in politics. I
was an editor of a [Fatah] youth publication in Jerusalem by age
sixteen. My writing was very much like the media you listen to today. It
wasn’t anything good. I wanted to leave the country. All the anger and
bitterness makes you empty within.”
At age eighteen, he was living in Jerusalem
and didn’t speak a word of Hebrew because it was the language of his enemy.
He had run away from every class in Hebrew for two years but finally decided
to learn Hebrew, because he realized that if he wanted to succeed in life he
realized he had to communicate in Hebrew. He went to the school where
immigrants study Hebrew.
Previously, Aziz’s only encounter with the other
side was with soldiers or settlers. In that class, he got to meet the other
side. “In this conflict,” he explained, “people demonize the other side. If
you demonize the other, you don’t feel bad when they are killed. That’s how a
lot of people grow up. In the class the teacher was nice to me. The students
were nice to me. They looked the same as me; they wanted to be my friends,
and it made no sense of me. If you are sure of something all your life, it’s
very unsettling. It was very redeeming and very refreshing to see that we are
all human beings.”
He learned that he has the power of choice in his life. “Just because someone
chose to kill my brother and act in a way that was very inhumane, I didn’t
have to choose that. I grew up believing that I didn’t have a choice. So many
people here don’t believe they have a choice.”
When he makes presentations in classrooms Aziz challenges
the young people. They think that if someone bombs them, they have to bomb
back. They don’t understand the alternatives they have. One side wants to
kill all the Arabs. One side wants to throw all the Jews into the sea.
“Israelis want security, but the only way you can get what you want is to
help others get what they want. We do a lot of dialogue work. We say we lost
those who are close to us. We put our hatred and anger behind us. Rami is
one of my closest friends. I think it is kind of ironic that a Palestinian
can say an Israeli is one of my closest friends. If I’m in trouble, this is
the one I call, and he has to help me out. We show people it is possible. If Rami and I can call each other brothers, anybody can.”
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