JERUSALEM
There is little in this city to suggest hope these days. The emotional
aftershock of the terror attack Aug. 9, in which a Palestinian suicide
bomber killed himself and 15 others in a Sbarro pizzeria, has left
Jerusalem bitter and on edge. Fear of what might explode next has thinned
out traffic and emptied stores and malls. Cafes and restaurants are
posting security guards at the doors to deter the next bomber.
Almost no one expects peace or even believes it possible in the
foreseeable future. A newspaper headline a few days ago said the army
expects the violence to continue until 2006 and is planning accordingly.
Whether it is well grounded or not, a rare consensus has formed among
Israelis of almost every political stripe that the Palestinians have
slipped the bonds of reason, spurned negotiations and embraced the way of
blood.
When I interviewed Arnold Roth the other day, his modest apartment in
northern Jerusalem was teeming withgrieving visitors: Roth's teenage
daughter Malki was among the victims of the pizzeria bombing. Roth is a
49-year-old lawyer who manages a pharmaceutical technology company, a
thoughtful man whose dignity was as evident as his despair.
During the course of a 90-minute conversation, excerpts from which
appear below, Roth discussed the tragedy not only in personal terms, but
in the context of Jewish life and history.His wife, Frimet, who was in
tears when I arrived, did not join us.
Do you see any historical precedent for what's 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.
How about yourselves? 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 neighbors 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 neighbors, 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.
Now it's out of our control entirely. There's nothing we can do, I
don't think. I'm not focused on the barbarians and I'm not focused on
their leaders and I'm not focused on their needs. I really don't care how
they resolve their problems. Of course I know that, ultimately, their
problem is our problem and we'll need to come to terms with them. I'm
quite convinced that there's no lack of will on our side to do that. [But]
there's no dialogue with barbarians.
Roth's daughter Malki was 15 years old, tall and willowy, a gifted
classical flutist and youth group leader blessed with a sunny disposition
and dozens of friends. Her best friend and neighbor, Michal Raziel, went
downtown with her for lunch at Sbarro that day. Now they are buried
together, side by side.
When Malki's parents recovered her cell phone from the police, they
were struck by two things: A nail from the bomb had shredded the
leatherette case and, in small handwriting, Malki had written a reminder
to herself by the mouthpiece -- "Speak no ill of others."
During the week-long shiva, or period of mourning, Roth was reluctant
to discuss politics. He preferred to focus on Malki, her music and her
deep involvement with disabled children that sprang from caring for her
handicapped little sister, Haya, who is blind and severely brain-damaged.
But Malki's life, and death, led him to broader topics, and I nudged him,
too.
Tell me about Malki.
Malki had the sunniest disposition you'd ever meet in a child. She was
amazingly optimistic and positive; it was very striking. Malki was a very
outgoing, people-oriented person. She had a huge circle of friends.
She was an okay student; she was too busy to be a brilliant student --
busy with everything else outside of school. First of all, her music made
tremendous demands on her. She was a very talented flutist and then taught
herself piano and guitar and was extremely good at both of those. But it
was her flute -- she could reduce me to tears any time just by playing the
flute, and she did, she was wonderful.
There were two [other] major demands on her time. One was helping
Frimet with the baby. The other was youth group activities. Malki had a
group of girls that she led. If you go to her bedroom you'll see a
mountain of little notes and tchotchkes that she prepared for her kids.
What she was really doing was constantly giving expression to feelings of
love. This girl radiated love, it's the most striking thing about her, you
can see in pictures of her this girl had a face that shone with love. That
was the essence of Malki.
You have a second son going into the army. In the context of this
conflict, are you concerned that the experience of the army these days can
be brutalizing, just as any war is brutalizing?
You're absolutely right. Pinhas, our oldest boy, was chastised by one
of his commanders for smiling repeatedly -- serial smiling -- at Arabs who
were passing through a roadblock he was manning three years ago. There's a
certain degree of humanity that we all have, and some people manage to
camouflage it better than others. No doubt that the army and the entire
experience of dealing with a hostile presence in the neighborhood is a
brutalizing one. But it doesn't necessarily lead to brutalization, I don't
think, inside our family nor among most of our friends.
The issue here is, where are your priorities? Our goal is definitely to
be focused on the constructive. No one was more constructive than this
beautiful girl [Malki]. Her life was an act of beauty -- all but the last
few seconds of it.
Israel is a country of immigrants. Roth, who is Australian by birth,
and his American-born wife, Frimet, 47, came to Israel from Melbourne in
1988, when Malki was 2. They were driven by the Zionist conviction that
Jews should settle the biblical land of Israel. Now, in their grief, they
are grappling with the implications of that decision, with the nature of
the lethal conflict between Arabs and Jews and the resulting perils of
daily life -- shopping, going to lunch, buying the groceries.
When you think back on your decision to come to Israel -- and you came
during the first intifada -- did it give you pause to come to a place so
conflicted?
It wasn't a career move and it wasn't a personal safety move. It was an
imperative, wanting to be where Jewish life and Jewish destiny have always
been determined, the natural place for Jews. Now 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.
You've been here 13 years. Do you ever think about leaving?
Anyone who tells you they've never thought of cutting and running isn't
being honest. At some level you think about running and hiding under the
pillow in your bedroom. But it's [like] the feeling when you walk into a
department store -- "I'd love to grab everything that I see and run out of
the store without having to pay for it." But we have a lot at stake here.
We have deep roots, we're raising children who absolutely love the land
and love being here and never see themselves in any other framework.
Has Malki's death dented that conviction?
Please remember we are just grieving over a very, very open and fresh
injury which is almost beyond bearing. Let me put my comments into a
context that might surprise you.
My father was the youngest of 17 [children]. He was born in Poland
before the war and ultimately was the only one of the family who stayed in
Europe and survived -- 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 sixties. She went back to Poland a couple of years ago and
went to Krakow.
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 Krakow 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's 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.
Lee Hockstader is The Post's Jerusalem bureau chief.
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