Partners in 'Project
Amnesia'
By Frimet Roth
With Memorial Day
over, the Jerusalem Municipality must have breathed a sigh of
relief. We, the victims of terror attacks on the home front -
attacks our leaders failed to thwart - have Memorial Day throughout
the year. But City Hall, it seems, would prefer for the memories of
our loved ones to fade.
Reminders of the hundreds who have been murdered by terrorists in
this city poison the ambience. Negative ambience equals unhappy
tourists, and unhappy tourists deplete the city's coffers - so goes
the logic. This, at least, was the off-the-record explanation given
to me last month by the unnamed staffer who answers the phone in the
office of Jerusalem's spokesman, Gidi Schmerling. She was responding
to my inquiry as to why, seven years after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa
Intifada, there is still no central memorial to this city's terror
victims.
The municipality was actually the first to raise the idea. In 2002
it made a promise to victims' families that a memorial park would be
erected in Jerusalem. The city's official policy for years has been
to place a plaque wherever a terrorist murder happened. The reality
is that only a few such memorial plaques have gone up. There is one
on the outside wall of the building that was formerly the Sbarro
restaurant. The plaque, about 50 cm x 80 cm, lists the names of the
15 men, women and children massacred there. One is
my daughter, Malki.
The plaque is up only
because of many months of
unrelenting pressure by my husband and me.
My questions to
Jerusalem's official representatives this year about what happened
to the plan for a central memorial have been met with a resounding
silence. Despite several months of calls and e-mails to the
spokesman's office and other officials, some of them elected, no
formal response has ever been forthcoming. My approaches were
ignored or referred elsewhere, or I was given empty assurances that
they would be dealt with in the near future. They never were.
Nobody deserves such disgraceful treatment from a municipality,
least of all those of us who have paid the supreme price for this
city to keep flourishing. The municipality has a partner in its de
facto "Project Amnesia": The government of Israel has seemed no less
keen to banish reminders of our terror victims. Shortly after the
election of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen),
our prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, laying the groundwork
for the disengagement, told Israelis that "we must forget our pain."
Evidently our current prime minister shares that view. In his public
addresses, Ehud Olmert routinely avoids mentioning the more than
1,100 Israeli civilians murdered in the Al-Aqsa Intifada - and with
good reason. Dredging up those casualties would hamper his efforts
to pass Fatah off as a moderate "partner for peace." Concessions to
Abbas - prisoner releases, new weapons, closing roadblocks - would
go down much less smoothly with the Israeli public if the enormity
of our recent losses were highlighted.
There is a third partner eager to distract the public from the
wounds inflicted by terrorism: our own news media. In a recent
television discussion, two veteran Israeli newscasters, Ben Caspit
and Yigal Ravid, bemoaned the inordinate amount of time and ink that
Israel's media have devoted to covering terror attacks during the
last intifada.
According to this view, now that the tsunami of tragedy has passed,
memorials are unwelcome. But apparently that rule carries a proviso:
If the victims are non-Israelis and if the attacks took place
outside Israel, then commemorating them is fine.
How else can one explain the decision of the Interior Ministry's
Urban Planning and Construction Committee in Februrary to approve
the construction of a monument to the memory of the victims of the
9/11 terror attacks? That memorial will be erected by none other
than the Jerusalem Municipality - in a city park in the Arazim
Valley, on Jerusalem's northern side. The choice of site will ensure
its exposure to the traveling public; a bridge for the new
light-rail train is slated to pass right alongside it. Somehow,
concerns about depressing our tourists with such a monument were not
an issue here.
This will not be the first 9/11 memorial in Israel. Nine have
already been erected. As a bereaved mother, I feel a bond with
victims everywhere, including non-Israelis, over the loss of loved
ones murdered by terrorists. And as someone who grew up in New York,
that bond is particularly strong toward my compatriots.
Nevertheless, it is unconscionable for Israel to accord foreign
victims, even those of our most loyal ally, the United States,
preferential treatment over our own victims.
Six years ago, in a private meeting requested by my husband and me,
Oved Yehezkel, the personal assistant to then-mayor Ehud Olmert,
confirmed for us that Jerusalem had allocated an existing but
rarely-frequented park as the location of a memorial to Jerusalem's
victims of terror. That site, at the Allenby Compound, is a safe
15-minute drive from the city's center. It was thus unlikely to
feature on many tourists' routes. The idea of such a park was
initiated by the municipality, not by the victims; we were simply
urging its planners to respect our sentiments in its execution.
Yehezkel, now cabinet secretary, assured my husband and me that we
would be consulted frequently during the process of its erection.
The bone that was tossed to us (a park that is not close to the city
center, in a place rarely visited) remains an unfulfilled promise.
Not even the tiniest steps have been taken at the site and we've
received no requests for our input. Municipal officials know they
need not lose sleep worrying about a backlash from the victims'
families. We are a sector that can be counted on to swallow its
anger and suffer humiliation in silence. Grief tends to have that
effect on us.
But it is not only the offense toward the hundreds of victims that
is disturbing. As Israel conducts serious cease-fire negotiations
with Hamas, recalling that group's commitment to bloodshed is
crucial. It would inject the caution and wariness that often seem
absent from our leaders' mindset. And as for the city's precious
ambience and the feared drop in tourism? Somehow we can find a way
to survive the diversion of a few prospective tourists to Greece or
Turkey. But we cannot survive the consequences of forgetting our
terror victims.
Frimet Roth is a
freelance writer in Jerusalem. She and her husband founded the Malki
Foundation (www.kerenmalki.org) in their daughter's memory, which
provides support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home
for a special-needs child. |
Malki's
Parents Write
The
Events of 9th August 2001
Background:
On 23rd September 2003, after prolonged efforts by the Roth family and others, the Jerusalem municipality
finally arranged a formal unveiling
and dedication of a plaque on the outside wall of the Sbarro restaurant
in the heart of Jerusalem. The plaque (pictures
here) commemorates the massacre carried
out on the premises of the restaurant by Palestinian Arab terrorists a
little more than two years earlier.
No explanation was ever offered as to why
the process of arranging for a plaque to be created and affixed was so prolonged and so painful.
From various individuals on the staff of the
municipality, the Roth's heard suggestions
that there had been obstruction by the owner of the building and a
general lack of co-operation by all concerned with the obtaining of the
necessary permissions. But in the end, the staff of the municipality's
Commemorations Dept. were helpful and supportive and the plaque was
finally created and mounted.
(Sbarro subsequently moved its local
restaurant operations to a different
address on Jerusalem's Jaffa Road in the summer of 2004, long after this
ceremony.)
The modest
unveiling and commemoration took place at the Jaffa Road/King George Ave
corner on the afternoon of Tuesday 23rd September 2003.
Frimet
Roth, Malki's mother, spoke briefly in Hebrew about the importance
of remembering. Her words, rendered into English, are
here.
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