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Arnold Roth's speech to the
Second International Congress of Terror
Victims, Bogota, Colombia – February 2005
[This speech was accompanied by
a Powerpoint slideshow - click
here to
view]
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
I had the privilege of addressing the
first Congress of Terror
Victims in Madrid last year. For me, and I think for many
people who participated in that event, it was an extraordinary
experience, one we will not forget.
We meet today at a time when my country, Israel, is
going through a period of careful optimism. It’s a time when many
Israelis believe we face the possibility of better future - an
opportunity we have not had in a very long time. Certain aspects of
the political environment have changed; certain individuals have
disappeared from the political scene; certain opportunities have
begun to open up in front of us. But while we are optimistic, we
remain watchful and very careful - because we must.
 For people living far from my country, events there
sometimes seem simpler and calmer than they are. To give you a sense
of the daily reality affecting us Israelis, and especially those of
us who are parents, I will tell you that I made a phone call to
Jerusalem earlier today. I wanted to enquire about how many terror
warnings are currently in effect. I don’t mean this in some general
sense. I mean actual terror warnings about actual terrorists,
current, today, Wednesday. The answer I got was “more than 50”. To
translate: at this moment, Israeli soldiers and Israeli police are
on the track of no fewer than 50 individuals; terrorists, known to
be on their way into the towns and cities and settlements of Israel
in order to carry out the next acts of barbarism.
Against this background, we Israelis feel more
optimistic than we did a few months ago.
I lived an entirely private life with my wife and
children until the murder of my daughter in August 2001. Before that
day, I would not have stood up as I am doing today in front of an
international gathering to share my views in public. The death of
Malki at the age of fifteen years changed all of that for me
permanently. The actions of terrorists ended her life and stole her
beautiful future. But her fifteen years were enough time for us to
learn what a special person she was.
Malki loved
music. She was a talented musician who
had performed with the Jerusalem Youth Orchestra. She loved to work
with disabled children, helping them. Malki’s youngest sister, our
youngest child, is profoundly disabled and blind and suffers from
severe health problems. Malki, though she was very young when her
sister became ill, accepted the challenge of her sister’s severe
disabilities. She found practical and kind ways to help her sister
and her mother. Eventually the things she learned from working with
disabled children became concrete and positive actions for the
benefit of other people and especially for benefit of other families
coping with the challenge of a profoundly disabled child.
Death came to Malki on a summer vacation day in
August 2001. 14 other innocent people died with her, and l30 more
were injured. Hundreds more have been killed and thousands injured
by terrorists in the three and a half years since then. For my wife,
my children and me, our lives, like the lives of so many people
sitting in this hall today, underwent a deep, extreme and permanent
change.
As we sat together during the seven days which Jewish
tradition prescribes for the first stage of mourning, we – my family
and I - asked ourselves some far-reaching questions. The Jewish way
of observing grief and bereavement provides that we do not leave the
home during those first seven days. Our homes are filled with
visitors who bring us their support as we pass through the
unthinkable transition of mourning. We asked ourselves: What do we
do now? And one of several answers that we arrived at was: “We will
not be passive. We will do something practical. We will not
surrender to hatred.”
One of the things I promised to myself at that time
was that I will do everything I can so that Malki’s life, Malki’s
name, will not be forgotten. We decided to speak out, to take every
possible opportunity, in front of every person, every audience
willing to listen to us – to shout about the dangers of terrorism,
about the cancer that it represents to civilized societies. My wife
and I now write and speak publicly whenever we can.
In the past four years, my country has experienced an
intense war waged against us by the forces of terror. Israel is a
small society, a state of six million people. In a place where there
are so many victims of terror and such a small population, everyone
knows a victim.
If the same numerical proportions were to be applied
to other countries, the total number of deaths would be
inconceivably large. We can compare, for instance, what might have
happened to the United States if the same rate of terror as we have
experienced in Israel had happened there. If the proportion which
the number of our victims of the last four years of terror war bears
to Israel’s population had been translated into the United States
with its far larger population, we would have counted 42,700 dead.
Imagine.
Looking at a map, we get a sense of how very small
Israel is. Yet my country is in the news every day. From here in
Colombia, one may have the impression that Israel occupies a much
larger space. Israel’s total size is far smaller than that of
Argentina, California, Spain, Ecuador.
A chart of cold numbers shows the statistics of this
terror war. Numbers can only convey a pale impression of human pain,
but they can also point to some hidden information. When we look at
the number of attacks carried against Israeli society over the past
four and a half years – more than 22,000 of them - and then at the
number of terror attacks which were actually stopped by the
authorities, we can observe something interesting. Between 2000 and
2002, we see the curve of attacks rising. Then it turns downwards
and intersects with another curve that rises and overtakes it. This
other curve is the number of terror attacks actually intercepted and
blocked by our soldiers and our police. The point where the lines
intersect is the point in time when Israel’s security barrier began
to be constructed. As an Israeli parent, I understand very well the
positive effects of walls.
I spoke about this interesting set of curves and
numbers only one week ago in Jerusalem with a man I had not
previously met. He is an official occupying a responsible position
in the United Nations. His role is to report once or twice each year
to the General Assembly of the United Nations on the suffering and
the infractions of the human rights of the Palestinian Arabs. His
reports are widely reported and are the basis of many other people’s
reports. I have no desire to enter here, today, into an analysis of
political issues or to develop a theory about the conflict between
Israel and the Arabs. But for me, it was simply extraordinary to
hear this public figure, this distinguished gentleman who prepares
serious, influential analysis for governments and official agencies
– to hear him quietly say to me that until he and I sat together in
my office last week, he had never met an Israeli victim of Arab
terror. It does not form part of his responsibilities.
How difficult it must be, I thought to myself, to
report objectively and helpfully to international leaders on the
suffering of people in a region when you look only in one direction
and ignore the other totally. Every death, every loss of an innocent
human life, is tragic, and it is plainly true that more deaths and
injuries have happened on their side of the fence than on ours. The
numbers are clear. But this important gentleman from the United
Nations had failed to understand the significance of the gap between
the number of Israelis killed and injured and the number of Arabs
killed and injured. It is because of the energetic and determined
defensive actions of the army and the police of my country. I
explained this to him, though it was clear to me that I was not
successful. The number of Israeli children, like my daughter, killed
and maimed would have been far larger if it were up to the
terrorists. It is not for a lack of effort by them.
There should never be any doubt that when terrorists
set out to do their barbarous work, they have to be stopped by every
possible means. In civilized and democratic societies, we are
obliged to do everything to defend our families, our lives, our
society, our civilization.
Someone in Spain a year ago showed me
a newspaper page
- the front page of the prominent Spanish newspaper La Razon.
It was the newspaper which was issued the morning after my daughter was
murdered on 9th August 2001. Malki is not in the picture which appears
on that front page, a photograph of the destroyed restaurant, but
she is there among the unseen dead. The headline of that La Razon
newspaper screams: “Bush is alarmed: Sharon is preparing a war of
annihilation on the Palestinian people”.
It is horrifying and
depressing to me that the one thing the readers of this important
newspaper knew about the massacre at the Sbarro restaurant in
Jerusalem in the center of Jerusalem, a massacre on a summer
school-holiday afternoon in a place filled with women, children,
babies, was that genocide was being planned by the political leader
of Israel.
The fact that this is a complete lie, lacking even
the flimsiest of foundations, is of little importance to me. What
disturbs me much more is that the humanity, the specialness of the
victims of this attack, including my daughter, were ignored and
negated by La Razon and its editors. This is a disgrace. But not a
disgrace that is unique to La Razon or to Spain or to newspapers.
A photograph published prominently by the New York
Times at about the same time shows an Israeli soldier shouting and
threatening an unarmed and bleeding Palestinian youth while waving
his gun. But
what was really happening is different from what it
seems to be. The youth in the photograph happens to be a yeshiva
student from the United States, a Jewish boy who recently became
engaged to be married to the daughter of a family who live next to
us in Jerusalem. The picture shows this young man covered
in blood and seriously injured because moments earlier he had been
dragged out of a car on the streets of Jerusalem while on his way to
pray at the Western Wall. Arabs beat him viciously and would
certainly have murdered him but for the intervention of the Israeli
soldier in the picture who is standing over him and protecting him
from the mob.
The media have a tremendous responsibility to report
accurately. In my experience, this does not always happen. Time and
time again, the news media do not tell things as they are, but
rather as they ought to be according to one theory or another.
To give another example, a weekly news magazine in
the United States, published photographs of two pretty women on its
cover. One was a murderer and the other her victim. By trying to
establish a bogus comparison, a false symmetry, between the
perpetrator of the evil and the innocent victim of that evil, the
people responsible for the publishing of that magazine contribute to
confusion about the facts and about moral consequences. Even more
than this, they contribute to a process of dehumanization of terror
victims.
When my family and I were still in the first seven
days of mourning, a telephone call came to me from a media
organization which broadcasts by radio and television throughout the
world from its home in London. The name of this network is not
important. A journalist, speaking in a voice that conveyed precise
British sympathy, said “I understand that you are English speaker,
and I know that your daughter was murdered. I have arranged to
interview the father of the suicide bomber tomorrow. Will you join
us on my program too? I’m very sure my listeners will want to hear
the two of you carry on a dialogue with one another.”
I did not know how to react to a request of this
kind, and it took me some seconds to gather my thoughts. Eventually
I told the journalist I could not take part in a discussion of the
kind she proposed. But when I hung up the phone, I sat there for
quite some time, thinking about how strange her idea was. What could
they have been thinking? I asked myself. A week later, I received
another call from a journalist working for another international
network based in a different part of the world, no less prestigious
and no less intelligent than the first. He put the same proposal to
me, with the same justification: “It would be very interesting for
our audience to hear you and the father of the suicide bomber
discuss matters. In this way, they will get two sides of story, two
sides of the cycle of violence”. After the second time, I understand
better that in the media there are many people who have simply lost
their moral compass. They are remote and disconnected from the
experience that we, sitting here in this congress, have gone through
with our families.
A photograph taken in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of
Abu Dis, close to where I live, was published all over the world. An
elderly woman is shown, standing and crying in front of an enormous
cement wall. The image is false and dishonest. The truth that it
aims to convey is a lie. The site where the woman is standing was
not divided by a wall when the picture was taken. All she had to do
was walk a few meters and then she would be on the other side of the
wall. The wall is and was under construction and incomplete, but you
would never know this from looking at the picture. There are things
to known about that wall but the photograph did not help anyone
understand those things.
There are photographs of Palestinian gunmen with
their weapons firing at the Israelis… and all around them,
Palestinian children playing and running around. Is it surprising
that in the heat of battle, these children are injured or killed?
Who bears the real responsibility for this?
Today, in Israel, there are more than a thousand
families like mine who have experienced the death by murder of a
husband, a wife, a mother, a son, a daughter - or of multiple
members of their family.
The response of the people is interesting. In my
society, we have seen the establishment of many organizations that
provide support to terror victims – to help the victim families cope
with life after their loss and their trauma.
I am not the only person in this hall who has had to
face up to the task of the unthinkable – of burying a child and then
trying to go on living a normal life. All of us have reacted in our
own unique ways. One thing is clear to me from this experience: few
people understand the difficulty, the challenge, better than other
people who have faced the same challenge, lived the same experience.
The response of my wife and me was to decide that we
could not allow hatred to tale control of our lives. Yes, our anger
is very great - against the people who murdered our daughter;
against the people who support the murderers directly and
indirectly. But hatred – that’s a different matter. It is not hatred
which motivates us, but rather a complex of feelings that accompany
us through every day of our new lives.
We established a foundation, called the Malki
Foundation, in memory of our daughter. Since it began to operate in
January 2003, it has provided medical equipment and specialized
therapies to families like mine, who have a child with serious
disabilities. There are thousands of such families in Israel. We
are proud to be able to say that we have already reached hundreds of
them. From the very first day of its operations, the Malki
Foundation has provided practical support to people based on one
criterion: their need to do everything possible to provide their
disabled child with the best possible care at home. We make this
support available to our Moslem, Druze, Jewish and Christian
neighbours. It is not a political action but a humanitarian one, and
the political, social and religious connections of the families are
not our interest. This is how our daughter, who was fifteen, would
have done it. She knew very little about politics or politicians and
she cared about them even less.
Many things have become clearer to my wife and me as
we get to know other families who have been affected in a personal
way, as we have, by the actions of terrorists. Based on the things
we have learned, I want to share with you seven principles about
being a terror victim, plus one corollary and one axiom. These, I
believe, are not only applicable in Jerusalem where I live, but also
in Bogota, Madrid, Jakarta, in Balí, in New York and in all the
other places that have discovered that the terrorism does not
respect borders.
First the axiom:
terrorism can never be negotiated with. Terrorism can never be
appeased. While terrorism seems like a local problem, the response
to terrorism must be a global and courageous response.
1. Not all of friends are true friends. We
discovered this once we became terror victims. Many people whom we
called friends until that moment in our lives, were somehow unable
to visit us, could not call us - for reasons which they themselves
are unable to explain. As a result, we have lost many friendships.
2. People who may seem to be the enemy are not
always the enemy. Given the nature of Israeli society with its
openness and robust democracy, I meet Arabs every day. I work among
them, I travel by public transport with them, I encounter them when
I go to the hospital – a place I visit frequently because of the
needs of my youngest child. For some people it will be surprising to
know that in the pediatric wards of Israeli hospitals where I have
been with my child, about half of the patients and of the families
visiting are Jewish and about half are Arabs. This you will rarely
learn from your newspapers or your televisions. I have formed
friendships with Arab families whose children have been murdered by
Arab terrorists. We have much in common.
3. The first, the last and the main goal of
terrorism is the negation of the specialness, the uniqueness, of
their innocent victims. Terrorists by their nature make arrogant
decisions about their victims - decisions which are filled with
hatred. They deny the fundamental humanity of all of us.
4. We suffer from an excess of understanding.
In western democratic societies where most of us live, there is an
urgent desire to analyze what motivates terrorism. There is a
multiplicity of views about what those causes and motivations are.
But some things, like terrorism, should not be understood. They
should be recognized and identified and they must receive a
response.
5. Our voices, those of us seated here in this
hall, are not less important, are not less true, are not less
important and not less legitimate than the voices of the terrorists
and of those who support the terrorists in the media and among
politicians. We must ensure our voices are heard.
The corollary of the fifth principle is that silence
can kill.
6. We victims of terrorism have a great deal
of strength to give to another and to give others in our own unique
ways. We have experienced the death or injury of the people who are
closest to us and we have gone on living our lives, somehow. This
changes us forever.
7. There is no single right way to react to
death and to mourning. There is no right way, there is no wrong way,
to mourn our losses. No one should ever presume to tell us we grieve
too much or too little. We are individuals and it is proper that we
respond in our individual ways – and no one can or should prescribe
to us what those ways are.
As a person who has a religious faith, I am helped by
the wisdom of the people who came before us. In some measure, this
helps me to remain sensitive and aware of the profound difference
between civilized society and the society of the terrorists. You
have no need to share my faith in order to accept a fundamental
truth that is expressed in the holy scripture of the Bible. There we
read the word of Gd: “Behold… I have set before you life and death,
the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your
children may live.”
Therefore choose life!
Thank you.
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