My daughter was victim of barbarians' baseless hatred, says Australian father

By Lee Hockstader in Jerusalem

There is little in this city to suggest hope these days. The aftershock of the suicide bombing on August 9 that killed 15 in a pizzeria has left Jerusalem bitter and on edge.

A rare consensus has formed among Israelis that the Palestinians have slipped the bonds of reason and embraced the way of blood.

Among the pizzeria victims was 15-year-old Malki Roth. Her Australian-born father, Arnold, and his American-born wife, Frimet, came to Israel from Melbourne in 1988.

Roth, a 49-year-old lawyer who manages a pharmaceutical technology company, discussed the tragedy.

Do you see any historical precedent for what is happening in Israel today?

It's the endless nature of baseless hatred. I think there are very few Jews who don't feel what I'm about to say. That is, that the profound hatred that we encounter doesn't really have any basis to it. It's something that's really, from our perspective, an imponderable. Baseless hatred was at the root of the Holocaust, and baseless hatred is what you have to be possessed of in order to walk into a restaurant full of teenagers [and blow it up].

When you say baseless hatred, it's not necessarily baseless from the Palestinians' point of view.

I don't want to relate to that at all. What happened in that restaurant, I cannot see it as a political act. It has no connection to politics. It's an act of barbarism. There are some things that are so far outside the pale, they can't be discussed without giving them a degree of legitimacy. I'm not willing to do that.

One has to continue living, but life can become quite circumscribed in a place so dangerous that restaurants can blow up.

That's the answer. You can't live like that. And in a certain way that's conceding the field to the barbarians.

But how can you lead a non-circumscribed life when you think of some of the neighbours as "barbarians"?

There's a duality of thinking here, and I think most Jews in Israel feel this way. On one side we certainly see a plague of barbarians around us. But at another level of our consciousness we know there are people here with real interests, with lives, with needs that are very similar to the needs that we have. What we see is a colossal, catastrophic failure of leadership on the part of our neighbours, and something which must change because it's inconceivable that it would continue for another minute. Of course, it is continuing, but it must change. No leadership can lead its people to such a historical catastrophe for long without the system rising up and reacting. But ... there's no dialogue with barbarians.

When you think back on your decision to come to Israel did it give you pause to come to a place so conflicted?

It was an imperative - to be where Jewish life and Jewish destiny have always been determined, the natural place for Jews. I'm conscious that makes me sound like some kind of dinosaur, but that really is what compels both Frimet and me - a strong sense of the rightness of being here, the naturalness of being here.

Has Malki's death dented that conviction?

My father was the youngest of 17. He was born in Poland before the war and went through Auschwitz, then came to Australia. He had one older brother, 20 years older, who had the insight to come to Palestine in the early 1930s, before the war. And his brother - my uncle here in Palestine - also survived, and as a result I have a cousin who is a woman in her 60s. She went back to Poland a couple of years ago and went to Cracow.

While there, she managed to find in a museum a series of pages which gave me the first-ever look at my father as he looked before the war. This was a photograph on a German census form in the Cracow ghetto just prior to its liquidation by the Germans.

There were two other pages there that were tremendously significant: pictures of two of his sisters who were also living in the ghetto. And one of them, Feiga, is the twin of Malki.

Malki and I both went out of our minds when we saw that picture because there was a sense of the continuity of Jewish history, of Jewish existence. Malki saw herself and I saw her as being the continuation of this Feiga, who died in the war, as the continuation of that generation which was cut off.

So when we talk about Jewish life and personal life after a tragedy like this, at one level it has to be understood as something more than a personal tragedy. It's part of Jewish life. Jewish life has had lots of tragedies and lots of achievements. Personally, I can't relate to what's happened without trying to put it into some kind of context of the family and of the people.