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My
nine year old daughter, Pesi, has taken to placing her fingers at both edges of
my mouth and stretching it wide into a forced smile. It’s not that I can’t
smile on my own. I can even laugh now and then at a really good joke or a TV
sit-com. But when I’m not intensely engrossed in something, I can only think
of my fifteen year old daughter, Malki. Since her murder a year ago in a
Palestinian Arab terror bombing, a relentless sadness has possessed me. It’s
that sadness Pesi sees and tries to banish gently with her fingers.
Last
month, my oldest son attended the funeral of a colleague at the Hebrew
University. An American convert to Judaism living in Israel for more than a
decade, Dina Carter too was murdered by Palestinian Arab terror on the campus of
a university that for generations has taken pride in the achievements of its
Jewish, Christian and Moslem students and graduates. Dina Carter was a quiet
woman, unmarried, a sculptor in her private time. Few people knew her. The
funeral was small.
Two
weeks later, my second son attended the wedding of his close friend and
classmate. This was a large affair, but a bitter-sweet one because half a year
ago the groom’s nineteen year old brother was machine-gunned to death in
another Palestinian Arab terror attack. He was one of five boys murdered while
sitting and learning at their desks in the study hall of a yeshiva. Soon
afterwards, his parents, both of them doctors in Jerusalem hospitals, returned
to work, giving equal and high-quality care to their Jewish and Palestinian Arab
patients.
Last
Friday, my husband and my youngest son attended a funeral hastily arranged only
two hours before the start of the Succoth holiday. A nineteen year old classmate
from my son’s yeshiva had been critically wounded in the bombing of a public
bus in the center of Tel-Aviv the day before. The boy’s family had flown in
from Scotland that night and agreed to disconnect life-support to his brain-dead
body and donate his organs. A kidney was immediately implanted in a five-year
old Palestinian Arab girl who had been kept alive since her birth in an Israeli
hospital by dialysis while awaiting a donor. The operation succeeded and her
life was not only saved but immeasurably improved. The family of Yoni, the dead
student, noted the painful irony in the fact that he, who had planned on
studying medicine, had saved several lives in his death. “It does not matter
to us”, his 21 year old brother said, ”whether the lives he saved were
Jewish or Arab.”
I
should not have been shocked, I suppose, when I overheard my Pesi one evening
this week describing to her brothers a movie she had watched on TV. She had
enjoyed it but they were dismissing it as second rate. “It was very
realistic”, she insisted. “Someone even died.”
For
her, a long and happy life belongs to the realm of fantasy. Death is the reality
she knows. I fear that my own sadness will never leave, but I pray that Pesi and
her friends will soon encounter a brighter reality, before their hearts grow to
resemble mine.
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Malki's Parents Write
Chronicle of a Barbaric Massacre
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