Our girl was killed by a suicide bomber..
but it is the terror of Israel’s occupation that’s to blame for her death
By Alexandra Williams in Jerusalem
From the London Mirror
June 25, 2002
A BIG red “Free Palestine” sticker has a prominent place on the Elhanan family’s front door.
But this is not a Palestinian house in the occupied territories.
Remarkably, this home is in an affluent Jewish area in Jerusalem and belongs to a couple whose daughter Smadar, 14, was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber.
Rather than being motivated by revenge and hatred, Nurit Elhanan and her husband Rami, both 52, are fighting for peace.
They are campaigning for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, calling it a cancer that is feeding terror.
Nurit, a doctor of language at Israel’s Hebrew University, said: “No real mother would ever think of consoling herself with the killing of another mother’s child.
“Israel is becoming a graveyard of children. The Holy Land is being turned into a wasteland.”
Graphic designer Rami agrees: “If an Israeli child is killed and the next day a Palestinian child is killed, it’s no solution.
“Our daughter was killed because of the terror of Israeli occupation. Every innocent victim from both sides is a victim of the occupation. The occupation is the cancer feeding Palestinian terror.”
Last week, following two suicide bombs and a shooting which killed 30 Israelis, Israel hardened its military tactics. This resulted in the deaths of innocent Palestinians—five children on Friday alone.
Rami said: “I was devastated when the Palestinian children were killed in Jenin, like I was the day before when a suicide bomber killed Israelis. Palestinians grieve and cry exactly the same way as Israelis do. We all have the same blood.”
Some brand the couple apologists for suicide bombers. At a peace rally, an Israeli called them “Leftie traitors” and said, “Pity you weren’t blown up with your daughter.”
Smadar was killed in a double Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem in September 1997.
It was 3pm and the first day back at school. She was buying books with two of her closest friends.
As terrified shoppers tried to escape the first bomb, they fled into the path of the second terrorist, who unleashed his lethal device.
S madar was killed instantly with one of her friends. The other was in a coma for six months. Five years on, the pain is still too intense for the family to talk about it.
Rami, whose father survived Auschwitz and whose grandparents, aunts and uncles died in the Holocaust, said: “The pain of losing our beautiful daughter is unbearable, but our house is not a house of hate.
“You can sink in your misery and just wait for death or you can try to do something meaningful.
“We started to look for contact with people like us from the other side. We now have many Palestinian friends, parents who have lost children too.
“We are in a position of power. We couldn’t stay silent. We have to tell the world. This power was brought to us by our disaster.” Some argue that ending the occupation would fail to halt the suicide bombers. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have vowed to continue the campaign until Jews are expelled from Israel.
But Rami and Nurit said terror organisations drew their strength from a persecuted people.
Nurit said: “Hamas take power from anger. If you restored people’s dignity, honour and prosperity by ending occupation, Hamas would lose power.”
Rami added: “If a man who has cancer in his leg goes to the doctor and asks if it is amputated will he be well, no doctor in the world would say, yes, you’ll be fine, but no doctor would say don’t amputate.
“Getting out of Gaza and the West Bank will serve the good of both Israelis and Palestinians.” The couple have three sons—Elik, 25, Guy, 23, and Yigal, 10. Elik and Guy, who now study in Paris, were conscripts in the Israeli army. They fought in the troubles on the Lebanese border.
Nurit and Rami believe that if their sons were called up today, they would not serve in the Palestinian territories.
Rami, a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, said: “The refuseniks are the heroes.”
The anger of Rami and his wife is vented on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and America, rather than the bomber who killed their daughter.
Nurit said: “The war is not between the Israeli people and Palestinian people, but these life-destroying men who call themselves leaders.
“The US is reluctant and bored with the situation. The rest of the world is going on as if blood has never been shed.”
The couple founded the Bereaved Family Forum with Palestinian Izzat Ghazzawi, whose son Ramy, 16, was killed by Israeli troops. Last December, Nurit and Izzat were given the European Parliament’s freedom of speech award, The Sakharov Prize.
Nurit said: “I have been asked many times if I feel any need to avenge the murder of my little girl, who was killed just because she was born Israeli, by a young man who felt hopeless to the point of murder and suicide, just because he was born Palestinian.
“I always quote the Hebrew poet Bialik, who said, ‘Satan has not yet created a vengeance for the blood of a small child’.”
An Israeli-born artist at the centre of a row between Israel and Sweden over an art exhibit has hit back at the Israeli government, accusing it of trying to silence critics of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
In an article published in the Swedish daily Expressen on Friday, artist Dror Feiler defended his controversial installation at Stockholm's Museum of National Antiquities, claiming that people calling it anti-Semitic were attempting to silence criticism of Israeli policy in the occupied territories.
"When critics are threatened with being branded anti-Semites many are frightened into silence," he wrote. The installation, which was vandalised in a fit of rage last Friday by Israel's ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, features a tiny sailboat floating on a pool of red water.
Attached to the boat is a smiling photograph of the bomber, Hanadi Jaradat, who blew herself up at a restaurant in northern Israel in October killing 21 Israelis and herself.
'Anti-Semitic'
Mazel, with the support of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,
claimed that the installation, dubbed "Snow White and the Madness of Truth", was anti-Semitic and glorified "suicide bombers".
Earlier this week, Mazel also chastised the Swedish media and
the country's Social Democratic government, claiming that they too were largely anti-Israeli.
"The Social Democracy in this country is pro-Arab," he said in
an interview with AFP. "There are many voices which are pro-Islamic and anti-Israeli. We have got a problem."
As for the media, Mazel said, "everything Israel does is bad.
When you read the press in Sweden, Israel is always the bad guy. The press in Sweden is completely anti-Israeli."
'Football hooligan'
In his article Friday, Feiler, who is also a well-known musician, lashed back at Mazel, insisting that it was "unbelievable and unacceptable that an official representative for a state that calls itself a democracy can act like a football hooligan."
Feiler, who created the piece with his Swedish wife Gunilla Skoeld Feiler, has repeatedly claimed that the installation was in no way meant to glorify suicide bombers, and certainly was not anti-Semitic.
Such charges, he wrote on Friday, amounted to a desecration of his relatives who died in the Holocaust.
"When (critics) accuse me of anti-Semitism, they desecrate the memory of all of my relatives who were exterminated by real anti-Semites during the Second World War, and of my comrades who died serving in the Israeli army," he wrote.
Stockholm conference
Feiler, who has lived in Sweden since 1973, pointed out that he was not only born Israeli, and served three years in the country's army parachute division, but that both of his parents were Holocaust survivors.
The controversial display is part of an exhibition shown in preparation of the "Stockholm International Forum - Preventing Genocide" conference, which is to open on Monday with representatives from around 50 countries.
It will be the first major inter-governmental conference on the issue since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.
Israel threatened to boycott the conference if Feiler's installation was not removed, but has since agreed to participate, albeit with a lower level representative than President Moshe Katzav, who was initially expected to attend.
